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Cast of Characters

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June 22, 2004

10:21 a.m.

Help Me, Christopher!

I can't watch distressing movies. Haven't been able to for years. "Oh, you'll love it," a friend will say. "It's heartbreaking but beautiful." No; it already broke, the superglue ain't dry yet, and I won't love it. Gimme a gutbusting comedy or something really romantic and spooky like Truly Madly Deeply, and I'll laugh and cry over that.

So I tuned into this film partway through, which was inexplicably called "House of Mirth," a novel adaptation, with Gillian whatshername from X Files. I'd never seen her in anything else so I watched it. I loved the language (set in the 1920s) and she did a creditable job. But the more I got drawn in, the more depressing her lot became. In the end she died, broke, ostracized and addicted, and the one guy she loved, who'd avoided marrying her all these years, broke down at her bedside (where she had already expired) and finally confessed that he loved her. Oh, come on. If only I could have reached into the screen and throttled him, I'd have felt a lot better.

Ah, the magic of theatre.

I remember going to see my older brother in a school play (you didn't know I had a brother, did you? He's estranged from us, for a lot of good reasons) when he was a young teenager, which would have put me somewhere between 9 and 11 years old. It was a Shakespeare play in which he had a small part; the play might have been Macbeth, which I'm sure was way too ambitious a project for their age group. Apparently I'd never seen a play before, because I didn't realize that the actors weren't the same as their characters. When we went backstage to see my brother, here were all these guys just talking and fooling around, totally unlike the way they'd been onstage. I was fascinated, and that may have been the moment the bug bit me. Even though I'm not active in theatre any more, I still look forward to the suspension of disbelief when I go see a play or movie.

It's easy, therefore, for me to get drawn in to a movie, and take it too much to heart. So the rest of the evening was a little morose.

********

There isn't anything about loneliness that doesn't suck. I'm just not going to beat this dead horse right now (i.e. the topic of Will) but sometimes I think it's ridiculous to hope for intimate developments with someone who, at least at last report, really wants to be on his own for a while, lives pretty far away, and is often even busier than I am. I have my own arguments for and against these thoughts, but sometimes I think: Wouldn't it be better just to try letting go of the outcome? It's not that I don't have a life. But I repeat: There isn't anything about loneliness that doesn't suck.

I guess it's time for the big guns. Yes, you know what I mean: a Christopher Guest film.


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