When I was a sophomore in high school, I watched Gone with the Wind three times in a row, and cried myself stupid. The first time I heard The Cure’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, the summer after 7th grade, it was all I listened to. Back in the days when you had to rewind over and over to hear a song on repeat. I read Calvin and Hobbes obsessively, forgave him for his maudlin lapses. Art was the way I understood my feelings.
Music allowed me to reset. I still use it that way. I play guitar when I’m freaking out, and trouble falls away. That’s the thing about art, you get carried away with it; your experience becomes reflective and objective and human. You share. And you hurt.
I stall at the end of books. Run my hands over the binding. Remind myself to breathe. I’m stricken. No matter how many times I read The Little Prince, or watch High Noon, or think about Graveyard of the Fireflies. I’m reminded that I’m alive — tenuously, thrillingly alive. We’re elemental. Our bodies, our stories, our seeking. That we stumble after beauty is how we are saved.
Oh, bravo.
High Noon, huh?
My mind kinda got stuck on Gone With the Wind. There is a passage at the start of the book that my brother and I love. It goes something like this: Land is the only thing that lasts, tis the only thing worth living for, worth dying for…twill come to you, this love of land. There’s no getting away from it, if you’re Irish.
That’s from memory, so it may not be exactly right, but the point is there, I think. It brings the last words of Scarlett into sharper focus. “Tomorrow’s another day, and I still have Tara.”
Okay, I’m through now.
High Noon gets me every time.
I loved Vivien Leigh. She was brash and unsympathetic and wrong much of the time. I kind of dug her characters too.
Supposedly, Grace Kelly couldn’t stand her own performance in High Noon. She wouldn’t watch it. But I think Cooper is marvelous, which is saying something.
I was obsessed with GWTW around seventh grade. It was kind of strange. I should probably re-read the book and see what all my fuss was about.
I am a strange Southerner, I think. I have read Gone with the Wind, of course. Sat in a movie theatre and watched on a big screen. But I have never been enamored of it, or with Tara, Scarlet, Rhett, the tragic/operatic/melodramatic lilt of it. It is a part of the American cultural psyche, like The Wizard of Oz. We all know it. But for me, it doesn’t feel particularly dear to the South, and the Southern heritage. I don’t know why.
Oh, I do get that. For me, quite a lot of the interest had to do with the workings of studio-contolled showbiz. This, along with the Wizard of Oz, was sort of the last gasp for old Hollywood. Which I was also enamoured with. It’s hard for me to distinguish between the book and the movie in this instance. So, no matter how many dull passages I remember choking down, I should re-read the thing.