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08. 28.00
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| Left Target with a billion dollars worth of diapers and a desire to just . . . flee. Head east. Escape. Slip the surly bonds of the Southwest Metro Area. Let’s go see how things are in faraway South -South Central Metro Area. What will we find? What magic awaits? Well, actually I knew exactly where I was going, and why. I had an extra hour in the day, and decided to spend it taking pictures of the Thunderbird Hotel before they knock that one down, too. It’s Gobbleresque, this place - not in its architectural whimsy, but its bizarre whee-ha 60s exuberance. There are commonplace architectural motifs that you forget all about; then you see them again and you realize that these things aren’t common at all anymore. Floating staircases - cone-shaped door handles - lights hanging from strings - it’s the height of modernity, this place, except that every single inch of the public spaces are decorated with Native American-themed items. Paintings, peacepipes, elk heads, totem poles. It’s Twin Peaks meets Vegas, and I decided today that it needs a website of its very own. An appreciation. Someone will have to do it, some day . . . Unless I do it first. So. Sunday night. The weekend evaporated as it usually does, although it had few of the expected diversions. The Giant Swede’s in Vegas, so we didn’t do the Saturday fastfood / computer-store / coffeehouse / magazine store / grocery store circuit. I had a couple hours to myself, so I decided to run some errands, get some useful stuff done. Went to the computer store, then had a cup of coffee; picked up some magazines, read them while having a fast-food supper, then went to grocery store. The fast-food came before the grocery store! It’s always nice to try something different. Weekend movies included “On the Beach.” Having just seen the spectacularly unamusing “Mad Mad World” by Stanley Kramer, I wanted to see one of his Serious Works. This was the thoughtful post-A-bomb movie of its day, a Cautionary Tale. It concerns the last few months of life in Australia before an approaching cloud of radiation kills everyone. In the end, it kills everyone. The End! Thanks! Drive safely, and don’t forget to tip the babysitter! It’s a colossal depressant, this movie, and I think it’s better in recollection than it actually is. At least we know that Australians behave well at the end of the world; they literally lie down and take it, the “it” being poison. No riots. Society stays intact right up to the end. A comforting idea, in a way, but utterly unrealistic. I can believe that some men would behave the day before they knew the world ended; I can believe they would comport themselves with decency and decorum. But everyone? At its heart, however, it’s not just depressing - it’s wrong. It’s an argument against the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Bitter Drunken Scientist Character (played by Fred Astaire, of all people) goes on a tirade about the insanity of deterrence - why, imagine how stupid we are to think that we could dissuade the enemy from attacking by amassing forces capable of surviving the attack and striking back. Fools! The movie ends, literally, with the words IT IS NOT TOO LATE, i.e., contact your congressman today and demand unilateral disarmament. The movie, in retrospect, got it wrong. But art never has to issue a retraction. It’s not as if moviegoers had to sit through a correction after the USSR blew apart. "United Artists wishes to apologize for asserting that MAD will result in the destruction of human life. The opposite appears to have been the case. We regret the error." The existence of nukes upped the ante, of course, and reduced the complexities of geopolitical competition to a binary outcome: off or on. Given those options, people naturally choose On. But would the progressive artists have reacted the same if, say, the Nazis had fought the US to a standstill, then developed nukes? Would the movies of the 50s and 60s urged people to seek accommodation, rather than competition? Too bad about the Jews and the Gypsies and Poles and Blacks and everyone else, but the existance of nukes renders such concerns moot. Interesting idea. If the post-war new Cold-War enemy had been fascism, nukes would have been celebrated as a vital part of the Arsenal of Freedom; art would have resembled the pro-state propaganda common to dictatorships. Tim Robbins would have made movies about the directors of pro-nuke dramas. |
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