Today’s Matinee

Dear diary,

I’ve never found anyone who agrees with me about this, but I dislike the genre of “horror movies”. I don’t know why I’m the only human who doesn’t enjoy being horrified. I also avoid roller-coasters and other scary rides at the amusement park. And I never visit the haunted house at carnivals: Why would I buy a ticket to feel fright, when I’m already scared naturally, generally, constantly? My own house in the suburbs is haunted enough. To this day, I refuse to look beneath my bed: I’m absolutely certain there’s something hideous under there. And I always sleep with the chandelier lit.

This pandemic has us all quarantined: it reminds me of one of those horror films where some villain captures a group of teens and locks them in a basement and announces: “Lo, I will quickly return and begin to torment you.” So then there are suspenseful moments that tick past slowly while you wait to see what awful stuff the bad guy shall do. — But our reality of pandemic-quarantine is like a really dull version of this same type of flick: Instead of one small group of unsuspecting teenagers, we have the whole global population at once imprisoned in their individual rooms; and we’re all waiting around in total boredom for some supposed armageddon, which never quite starts and never quite ends.

I myself am not bored tho. I’m always too anxious to be bored. I’m lucky to have many wonderful books at home with me. But I’m sad that our library system is shut down — this is the first time that’s ever happened; I’ve always been able to depend upon getting books and films either from our local branch or from interlibrary loans; so I never bothered to stock my own shelves truly and robustly. Thus the books and films that I own tend to fall into one of two categories:

1. either they’re hard to find; so I opted to by my own copy, instead of begging the state to acquire the title and keep it on hand;
2. or else they’re the type of books or films that I can watch over & over again, and they never get old — on the contrary, they keep getting better.

What I’m trying to say is that my own personal library is both small and strange; but, what it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality.

*

What a stuffy way to speak. Why do I talk like this? Why am I telling myself about the media that I own? Wouldn’t it be more fun to dream of wild adventures: Go dive into the sea and swim out to a remote island, find a kayak and take that into the rapids...

Now we meet a tribe of savage businessfolk whose airplane crash-landed in the jungle many decades ago, and they’ve been living here ever since: Their suits are torn in tatters... Yet mysteriously their secretaries all still have clean-shaven legs and armpits, while their hair looks recently washed and styled...

Forgive me for stumbling so often into this sexist view of the world — or maybe “sexist” is the wrong word: just mentally replace it with whatever’s the better term (I’m trying desperately to be perfect) — it’s not because I harbor any prejudices or nasty male-centric views: I’m only refracting the universe that I encounter in my favorite motion pictures, most of which were made around the time of the 40s and 50s. (I’m talking about the 1900s, not the 3000s when you’re reading this.) In those movies, all the executives are masculine males, and all their secretaries are feminine females. So when dreaming up my fantasy, I draw upon what I’ve seen in those black-&-white films: I populate my aircraft with tall, handsome, finely suited gentlemen smoking cigarettes, and their secretaries all wear sleeveless blouses with pleated skirts whose hemlines are just below the knee.

And the reason I made the plane crash is because planes always crash. Show me a plane that hasn’t, at some time or other, crash-landed in the jungle. That’s right; it’s impossible.

So the businessfolk teach me their language, and they inaugurate me into their cult and show me how to worship their god, who lives in a volcano on the far side of the planet. Then I awake one night to find the entire assembly has convened around my hammock for an impromptu meeting. You guessed it: they’re cannibals. And they’re also zombies, being controlled by the moon.

So they chase me thru a cornfield; but, after running in a zigzag pattern, I eventually lose them:

I exit the cornfield onto a street. It is a dirt road. I look right & left: the road extends infinitely in either direction. — This part is, of course, inspired by the famous scene from North by Northwest (1959); and I hope its screenwriter Ernest Lehman doesn’t mind if I steal his idea of having a bus come from one direction and an oil truck appear barrelling towards me from the opposite direction; and, just before these vehicles collide, I am chased by a crop-dusting aircraft that tries to spray me with poisonous smoke & also shoot me with a machinegun.

After escaping from this, I somehow end up in an apartment with a gorgeous leading lady. (Again, please don’t blame me for the inherent sexism of this aspect of our daydream — I’m only drawing upon what I know from my American education. Send all complaints to “Hollywood, U.S.A.”) So this lady cooks me a meal, which looks like it’ll be lovely when we see the dish before she puts it into the oven — it is duck à l’orange — but, after a dissolve shot, she pulls it out and it’s totally burnt. So me and my lady share a laugh & decide to relax & just order room-service. The waiter pulls a number of wheeled tables into the dining area. He serves us wine. Then a priest enters solemnly and delivers the marriage vows. After performing a soft-focus kiss in extreme closeup, we find we’re back on our farm in Kansas; and the film stock, which was full-color just a moment ago, has returned to monochrome. Oh well. We begin to tend the cows.

*

Now that our grand escapade has concluded, we must wait for the reviews to come in. So my lady and I join the rest of the crew at a restaurant. We chain-smoke cigarettes and order eggs on toast but only eat one or two bites...

Finally a newsboy bursts in thru the saloon doors and hollers that the whole world has gone to war again!!! — I place my cigarette between my lips while counting out a number of banknotes, which I hand to the lad in exchange for an armful of newspapers. I hand out the papers to the crew, and we all impatiently flip the thin pages until we reach the “Entertainment” section and locate the review for our production. I stand and read the review aloud:

My Supercool Daydream, the sixtieth picture from offbeat director Bryan Ray — who also stars in the lead role — is a smashing success. It has romance, adventure, and even a scene where the director himself gets eaten by a bear.

“Is that true?” I look up from the review. “I don’t remember that.” Then I look back down & continue reading:

The cinematography is top-rate. This film is so good, in fact, that I’m probably not gonna watch any other movie, ever again, period. Instead, I’m just gonna keep watching THIS film, over & over. This is my new favorite movie: it’s even better than Wrong Cops (2013).

“Ods fut!” I say. “He sez we beat Wrong Cops for ‘Best Picture Ever’! That’s a real honor. When I deliver my trophy-acceptance speech, I’m gonna thank EVERYONE other than the church and the state and my parents — cuz none of them ever did anything to encourage my genius; they only stood in my way as roadblocks.”

“Let them be damned!” the crew shouts as one.

Now we exit the cafe, or wherever we were, and multitudinous flocks of sheep follow us out of the double-doors. We all pour into the cobblestone street and begin to tear down the system:

We set fire to the set. We burn the whole thing down and wreck the equipment. We smash all the cameras. I shoot a fake prop-gun at the “Eye of Providence” floating over the tip of the pyramid: our editor adds an explosion noise on the soundtrack, and our visual-effects team causes the Eye to seem to splinter into a thousand pieces and scatter into the winds.

Then we all realize that we’re naked, and we die of starvation.