Famous Anecdotes

There is a vestigial aspect to the 1977 Julia which makes it an interesting study, and fleshes out Lillian Hellman's play a little more. The Children's Hour always confused me, at least as an attack on innuendo, but thrown against the titanic clashes of 20th century Europe perhaps one can wear Lillian's lenses, even about absence-- for absence of presence is something I understand. Of all my name dropping on this account, one thing ties into my waggling: Lack of intimacy. I do not know Jerry all that well, nor Linda, my favorite spastic sociopath. I do know my ex fiance with an exposed familiarity of the uncouth, and thus understand Hellman's inability to let go of the impression made to her heart, but as a bio epic the film doesn't work, and is more reminiscent of overdrawn aristocrats writing each other love notes for lack of any other relief from their body lice. 

Julia was one of the few Jane Fonda vehicles which ever intrigued me. I thought Redgrave might do something interesting against the life long movie star chameleon whose frantic undercurrents drive me up the wall. Jane tries very hard here to use herself as an icon to play a theatrical icon, one who is now basically a footnote-- but it doesn't work, and Vanessa has little to do with the title character except to make her a blue blood willing to sacrifice body parts and personal security for radical egalitarianism-- the very thing I'm now using my pen to fight.

I loved my best friend Susan the way Hellman expresses her love for her early Nazi casualty, not my supervisor. I identified with Linda. If I had to be a woman with spastic cerebral palsy I wanted to make myself over in the image of a prevaricating Jewish fuck who reclines back into herself, a mortally wounded ferret-- but my depressive episode brought about by her betrayal wasn't gay panic. I believed for a long time that this was the case. I did not want to sleep with her then, and don't now, these many years past her divorce--but I did let her cause me a tremendous amount of suffering in my branded, platonic attachments, and this is one of Hellman's motifs-- personal and platonic investments beneath restraint, not so much forcibly repressed, but expected.

At one time, I loved Sue, my ambulatory best friend who had her own ambivalence about her sexual freedom. I kissed her hand too like a devoted litter whelp, when she came back from Alaska with Steve, but there was no sexual arousal involved in my attachment. I contrast this with my present state of being. My only interpersonal intimacy is with my second worst enemy: a broken female physician transvestite who can barely remember its own name while I wait to dance on its grave. Erik lacks the mental capacity to understand that I believe his extermination would be beneficial for the species, and that discussing the hostile environment Linda created for me 13 years ago is no panacea.