Places as faces

We talked about how the landscape in "Picnic at Hanging Rock" figured so largely in the film that it could almost be thought of as a character. Landscape was prominent in "The Last Picture Show," too (as a way of explaining character), and in "True Grit" (for character and sheer prettiness). In "Exotica," I think landscape was less important, but we still had the sweeping vistas where the search party roamed. Do you have any favorite movies where landscape played a memorable role? For me, "Out of Africa" and "Babette's Feast" and "Wuthering Heights" come to mind. (And, for Erin's sake, let's not forget "Alive").

Art?

One of my reasons for choosing this film was that it is so different than the other films we’ve discussed. Can a film like The Incredibles even be compared with a “serious” film like Sunset Boulevard or The Last Picture Show? It’s a totally different type of art, if it can be called art, but I think it is just as good at what it does as those films are at what they do.

Ruth

Though I initially sympathized with her character, I ultimately disliked Ruth and what she seemed to do to Sonny. First, there's her twisted viewpoint on fidelity: She's not the kind of woman to get divorced, she says, but she has no problems dumping her emotional baggage onto a high school lover. She's obviously invested more than physical intimacy into her affair with Sonny, asking him his favorite color to give her ideas of how she'll paint the room.

Though Jacy led to no good, I thought Sonny's relationship with her at least liberated him from an unhealthy relationship with Ruth. I thought Sonny's attempt to leave town toward the end was going to be his emancipation ... the way Jacy and Duane had found a way out, and Sam the Lion and Ralph also had escaped, in a way. Maybe that overwhelming sense of loss when Ralph died drove Sonny back into town to emotionally connect with anybody who was left, and that person was Ruth.

I read the last scene in Ruth's kitchen as more of a tragedy. Sonny reaches out for her forgiveness, for some kind of emotional connection, and she relents only after lashing out at him as though he were her peer (her make-believe husband?) and not just a boy. Then the burden of living is erased from her expression and transfers to his as their hands touch. The apathy on Sonny's face tells me that the trap of that claustrophobic town has closed around him for good.

Idiots and Mexicans

Whenever I hear racist stuff in movies I always wonder how the audience would have reacted and whether the same stuff could be said in quite the same way today. In "True Grit," there were comments/portrayals regarding Chinese men and American Indians. In LPS, the town whore makes a disparaging comment about "idiots and Mexicans" and Duane makes the comment that his "next piece of ass will be yellow." And no one in the world of the film bats an eye, because that's just how things were ... but the movie came out in the early 1970s, when there was a lot of race consciousness and the Vietnam War was going on. Do you think the audience winced a little then? I'm sure much worse things were being said in small-town Texas at the time, if Bogdanovich was going for verisimilitude.

The future?

Something I find REALLY intriguing about the movie — because I think it would be damn hard to convey in a work of art — is that it simultaneously offers a merciless critique of the era and the circumstances that produce it AND some undeniable nostalgia for same. I think we are supposed to glean that the generation that came before Sonny and Duane's was nobler somehow, more fun, more life-affirming, more morally distinguished, and yet it's the generation that gave rise to the current one. There's definitely a theme of youth being wasted on the young (the awkward, unsatisfying makeout sessions, the beautiful Keats ode about mortality that falls on deaf ears in the English class). And there's a sense that youth used to be more glamorous, isn't there? That a nobler age has passed with the last picture show? Do you think the film is forward-looking at the end (ready to embrace the coming sexual revolution and the implosion of "Leave it to Beaver" America) or that it's fundamentally a nostalgia piece clinging to a more romantic past?

Never you mind

The last scenes of the movie really impressed me: Sonny speeding out of town in his truck (the movie began with his creeping into town in the truck, trying to get it to run, and there was a night scene somewhere in the middle when he stops his truck in the road and gets out and looks back at the town). But right after he passes the city limit sign, he turns back and goes to see Ruth. What do you think made him turn back?

And what, exactly, do you think she meant — after her marvelous tirade — when she said, "Never you mind, honey, never you mind"? And why did the movie end with that sentiment? A message of compassion? Forgiveness? Something else?

Sonny, we hardly knew ye

Timothy Bottoms as the President in "That's My Bush!"

Son of a preacher man

Toward the end of the movie, I felt it was on the long side, but when I was trying to figure out what could be cut, the only thing that seemed plausible were the scenes with Joe Bob Blanton, the preacher's son. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought he added something to the film — at least something to ponder. Are we supposed to see him as an incipient child molester, a victim of a psychosexual disorder? Or as a predictably twisted product of the sexually repressed era, the bullied schoolboy for whom romance is out of reach and who finds other avenues of sexual expression? Presumably Sam left him $1,000 in his will because he felt sorry for him somehow (or is there another explanation?). Is the fact that he's the preacher's son meant to to be a message about religious hypocrisy? About character being built not on churchgoing but on having life experiences that nurture your humanity?

Favorite line from the movie

What was yours?

The Missing War?

Who has read McMurty’s book? Does Duane go off to fight in the Korean War? I was wondering if that scene was added since the timeframe of the movie seems to be a bit off. I wouldn’t have thought that TV would have taken that big a hit on movies by 1952. In particular, would a small poor town have so many sets that people had quit going to their local movie house?

Also, the adults of the town seem to have always been there. But if this is 1951, then many of the men, and some of the women, would have been away during WWII which ended just six years earlier. I didn’t catch a single reference to the War which strikes me as odd for the time. The movie seems like it really ought to have been five or six years later. Then Duane could have gone off in the Army, but not to war.

King Sam

Sam's death seemed almost King Lear-like to me. Just as Lear divided his kingdom among his three daughters, Sam divided his properties among Sonny, Genevieve and Miss Mosey. In "King Lear," the division spelled disaster, mainly because Lear's daughters could not get along, which is not the case with Sam's "children" in LPS. In LPS, we see Miss Mosey shut down the theater within a year of inheriting it, saying that if Sam had still been around it would have stayed open (Would it have?). Will the other two properties (the only entertainment in the town) follow suit? Is it Sam's death — and what he stood for — that is really the last picture show, or is the last picture show something more literal having to do, as many suggest, with the romantic demise of cinema and the pedestrian rise of television? (Roger Ebert's review of LPS talks about the role of the moviehouse in American life before TV competition came along, and I think it notes the fact that a TV show is playing in the background of the last scene where Ruth is reading Sonny the Riot Act).

Strike the band

If you get the movie on DVD, be sure to watch the documentary with the cast and director. It has a lot of interesting insights into the movie. One of the things Bogdanovich talked about was that he didn't want a soundtrack for the movie. He only wanted music of the era (or earlier) playing in the background on record players or juke boxes or radios (his own voice is one of the DJ's) because he wanted us to hear only what the characters themselves would hear. And I noticed that a couple of the Hank Williams songs played more than once, which added to the realism. And the relative silence also added to what Erin called the quiet desperation of their lives.

What I really liked about that decision is that it didn't rely on music as an emotional prod. It didn't artificially superimpose this layer of mood onto the film. We knew when to be happy or sad or apprehensive; we didn't need music to cue us. I don't know whether he was the first director to eschew music in that way, but I think it was brilliant. It got me thinking critically about how music works in other movies.

Women past the verge of a nervous breakdown

Another thing that really struck me about this movie, especially given when it was released (1971), is the director's treatment of the women's lives, which I thought was unusually sensitive. Each of the three older women had some cross to bear and did so with a certain dignity, even if that meant bucking the "morality" of the time. Each had been fully disillusioned. Each was extremely nurturing in her own way. And moreover, the director made sure that we knew that they all liked and respected one another (which impressed me as a sort of nod to the "sisterhood is powerful" sentiment of the women's movement of the early '70s).

Do you think Jacy was made in their mold, or is she fundamentally different? All three of them, including her own mother, badmouth her at various points ...

Bad sex

I found the sex in LPS pretty damn dreary. Every scene was a failure in some way, beginning with Sonny's listless makeout session in the truck. Then there are Jacy's various sexual manipulations throughout the movie; Billy's pitiful experience with the town whore; the mention of substituting a cow for a woman; the depressingly mechanical missionary scenes with Duane, Abilene and Sonny; Duane's failure to perform followed by his failure to please; the repressed coach whose sexuality works itself out in ass slaps and dirty pep talk; the preacher's pedophile son; the swinging teens in Wichita Falls for whom sex is a game of truth or dare.

The only good sex, apparently, is betwen Lois and Sam the Lion, who frolicked with glee at the fishing tank (compare their naked swimming in the great outdoors to that of the rich kids in the swanky indoor pool). And, although it's not shown, I think we are led to believe that Sonny and Ruth moved beyond the disappointment of their first encounter to something more fulfilling for both of them (I think in that one scene where she is brushing his hair and the bed is neatly made that we are supposed to assume that they had just made love wildly on the floor).

What did you make of the dreary sex? Was it a commentary on the small town? On all the ills of 1950s America: conservatism, false morality (Jacy tells her mom that premarital sex is a sin and her mom laughs in her face), sexism?

Character development

One feature of the film that really struck me is how most of the characters became disillusioned at some point pretty soon after beginning their adult lives and how they dealt with their discontent. Lois was already cheating on her husband in her early 20s, looking for the adventure she longed for that she already knew she wasn't going to get from her marriage. Genevieve and her husband ran around with Lois and her husband when they were young — they were all equals, but then by dumb luck Lois' husband struck it rich and Genevieve's husband didn't. They just became mired in debt and Genevieve had only a life of waitressing to look forward to. Ruth's dream of marrying the manly coach (partly because her mom hated him) turned rapidly into a nightmare. Sam's wife went crazy and the love of his life belonged to someone else. The coach was clearly a homosexual and stuck in a life that was completely wrong for him. The next generation, in the year during which the film takes place, rapidly began to see the disparities in how life after high school was vs. how they thought it would be: Jacy discovered the disappointments of love and sex, after having "saved" herself for so long — and, without the dramatic backdrop of high school, she discovered that she had to invent her own drama; Duane figured out that loving someone doesn't automatically make them love you back, the persistence of a broken heart, the limitations that social class would put on his life; Sonny figured out the lessons of responsibility and the obligations and rewards of love and how to cope with loss.

For a town where supposedly nothing ever happens, there sure is a lot going on. Did the depth and pacing of character development feel more or less natural to you, or did it seem contrived in ways?

Black and white

In a special feature on the DVD of "Last Picture Show," director Peter Bogdanovich says he made the movie in black and white at the suggestion of Orson Welles — mainly to get greater depth of field. As I was watching the movie, I found it almost impossible to imagine it in color, because of the time period and the setting, which Lois herself described to her daughter as being "so flat and empty."

And yet I've seen other movies involving bleak landscapes and content that were successful in color.

What did you think? Could color have worked? Would it really have changed the film in an important way?

("Sunset Boulevard" could have been shot in color, couldn't it have?)

Reminder

We'll start discussing LPS on Monday, Jan. 15. And the next person in line will pick a new movie the same day. The order right now is Noir Muse, SH, Ben, CL, Driftwood, Erin, George, then me again.

Kim's pick

I considered choosing this film before George chose "Sunset Boulevard," which I had never seen. Now that I've watched "Boulevard" — a film about the end of a way of life — this movie seems especially topical: