1. It being Independence Day, I was in the same frame of mind today that many people are who live with animals were. I know Christy hunkered down all day with Riley. I read enough posts online to know that many others dreaded this holiday of pops, thunder cracks, loud bangs, and whistles. This was my first Independence Day with Luna and Copper. I don't know them well enough to know how they would react. I thought back a couple of years ago to when Charly was still alive and the 4th of July that I spent three and half hours behind the closed bedroom door comforting her while she shook all over.
Soon after darkness fell the booms and crackles and reverberations commenced. Copper headed to the basement. He has a hiding place down there I haven't found yet. I went down to check on him and I don't know where he was. He loped back up to the main floor after a while, ate some wet food, and then sashayed to the top floor where he likes to hide under a futon on a frame.
He seemed all right and by the time the rockets' red glare and bombs bursting in air ceased after about, what??, ninety minutes, I guess, Copper wanted to go outside and he spent the night in one of his favorite spots in the back yard.
Luna stayed with me on the bed and as I had an unexpected and good talk with Debbie on the phone and as I looked at lists of Australian New Wave movies, Luna was at peace.
In short, neither cat trembled, seemed interested in running away, or, in any way, freaked out.
That was a relief.
2. I'd been looking at those lists of Australian movies because this afternoon I watched the lush and unsettling Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
I'm not a hundred per cent sure I trust this memory, but I'll write it down all the same. In my mind, Deborah A. and Sally M. came over to married student housing, where my first wife and I lived, to watch the election coverage of the 1980 race between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. To say the least, it was a disappointing night for all four of us. We decided to turn off the election coverage and, at the time, my wife and I were subscribers to Showtime.
I know now that it took a while for Picnic at Hanging Rock to gain much interest in the USA, but it had begun to be successfully shown in art houses (like Cinema 7 and the Bijou in Eugene) and was playing on Showtime.
I know that on Election Night in November of 1980, I was aware that a renaissance of movie making was well underway in Australia. I think I'd seen My Brilliant Career. I'd heard about The Last Wave, but I'm not sure I'd seen it yet. More Australian movies were still to come like Breaker Morant, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The Year of Living Dangerously, and others.
I also know this. We watched the lush impressionistic images of Picnic at Hanging Rock on our crummy black and white television.
And, yet, the movie stunned us, haunted us, rendered us speechless.
As you might know, Picnic at Hanging Rock, tells the story of small group of students at a private girls school who, along with one of their teachers, disappear while exploring Hanging Rock, a volcanic formation in central Victoria, Australia. So, the movie is a mystery story and the movie's director, Peter Weir, in tandem, especially with the director of photography, Russell Boyd, and with the support of a brilliant and unnerving music soundtrack (featuring, at times, the pan flute mastery of Zamfir), gives as much attention to the mood and atmosphere of the movie as he does to its story -- and this approach affected me today much as it did forty-one years ago. The images are gorgeous and unnerving, the impact is haunting, and the mystery of the movie is difficult to shake off. Even though I've now seen this movie multiple times, it gets inside me and spooks me.
One last thing: in structure, this movie, on the surface, appears, at first, to be a green world story -- it has the look, for a while of a pastoral comedy. The private school is a repressive, rule bound, suffocating place and on the day the story gets underway, February 14, 1900, the girls get a reprieve from the school and travel into the world of nature. The girls who hike the rock, and disappear, experience some of the freedom of the green world as they defy the orders they were given to stay off the rock and as they begin to remove some of their restrictive, constraining clothing. Some of the girls go barefoot. Others remove their stockings. But, this story doesn't explore Hanging Rock as a source of rejuvenation, but the world of nature is, instead, menacing, darkly mysterious, and dangerous.
3. There's a McDonald's right down the street and rarely eat there. Occasionally, I'll purchase a coffee on my way out of town, but, I don't remember the last time I ordered food there.
Around six o'clock or so, I thought that it would be fun to have a hamburger on Independence Day. I didn't have any ground beef on hand and I didn't feel like going to the store, so I buzzed down to McDonald's and ordered a bare quarter pounder (I forgot to ask them to hold the cheese), an order of fries, and a Coke. I brought it home, dressed it with mustard, catsup, and bread and butter pickles and enjoyed a kind of half-assed traditional Independence Day meal.
It was kind of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment