OUT IN THE STYX

My son, Noah, age five, insisted that he was SpongeBob. His friends referred to him as Sponge, and his kindergarten teacher may have done so, too.

That Halloween we asked him if he was going to “go” as SpongeBob, and he said, “Why would I go as myself?”

My home and office are covered in various memorabilia. We find Judaica, and tchotchkes (objets d’art) from aviation, hunting, and the movies.^I There is no theater memorabilia, which would be as viscerally abhorrent to me as would a caduceus tie clasp to a physician. Why, that is, would he want to “go” as himself?

Mr. Kipling reminds us, “We’ve only one virginity to lose, / And where we lost it there our hearts will be.”

Pauline Kael collected her film essays in I Lost It at the Movies. It was the Theater that got my cherry. It was my seducer-lover, the position of debaucher reserved for a subsequent encounter.

It’s said that the magic of young love is the ignorance that it can ever end; but perhaps, viewed differently, the magic continues, as the experience can be indelibly formative. The love, that is, can endure after the relationship has—necessarily—ended.

So there’s Me and The Theater. But what of Me and The Movies, and the criminal dolts who came of age, not even in the Movies, but in The Industry?

Their reactions, over twoscore years, to craft and art (my own, most importantly) are like mine to their Industry Duplicity and ignorance: I just don’t get it.^II

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Trolling YouTube for old films is instructive. I came across The Enforcer, 1951. Bogey plays a hard-hitting District Attorney. How could one have missed it? A viewing provides the answer, as it is a piece of garbage. The writers apparently had a cup of tea with a mob guy and learned that a “contract” meant a killing, and “the hit,” the victim. They mentioned it scads of times, as a plot substitute. Me: Why? Wouldn’t it have been more fun to tell a story? And my current genius line, from a forties noir: “I knew your parents before they died.”

I wish I could supply you with the film’s title. Apart from its magnificence the line is diagnostic. The writers thought they needed to establish that the addressee (supposed recipient of a bequest or some such thing) was newly orphaned. The line ranks with Jimmy Carter’s greeting to the Poles in Polish. His inept translator, asked to have him say “I embrace you,” has him up there proclaiming, “I want to fuck you.”

While we’re about it, a 2022 blockbuster wannabe has male stars playing cave divers, intent on rescuing some Thai boys trapped in a cave.

“Harry” shows up to round out the team. But how can they swim the boys out, through caves that daunt even our heroes? The kids could never make it. Think, think, think, and then someone says something like, “We could drug them! Harry’s an anesthesiologist!”

Shakespeare has Richard the Second asking, “Have I no friend?” My equivalent, of Hollywood, is, “Are none of you idiots paying attention…?”

Well, either they or I are marching to the beat of a Different Drummer.

In which event either one or many of us must be out of step.

1. I. A framed yellow cloth star, JUDE; a theater-made model of a Hawker Hurricane; the 1926 Photoplay Magazine Medal of Honor for Best Photoplay of the Year, Beau Geste—the award was superseded in ’28 by the Oscars.
2. II. We were shooting Heist, Rebecca Pidgeon, my wife, playing the Bad Girl and Ricky Jay, the Utility Man. When we wrapped, the Producer continued his irrepressible depredations by selling on eBay Ricky’s blue jeans and my wife’s underwear.