Roddy’s Film Companion

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I want to talk very briefly about this project by Elizabet Elliott. I really do. It’s like, it’s this thing, where she sleeps with people. It isn’t sex, though, I mean she sleeps in their bed or they sleep in hers. And then, in the night, Bet gets up and takes their picture, and she writes about it, about the sleep and about the dreams they both have. It is then archived here.

I am very enamoured of this piece. I am often moved (or at least interested) by Elliott’s work, but this one, I feel, deserves a special mention. But while I could spend hours on the implications of Sleep With Me in terms of intimacy, privacy, personal space in modern culture and et cetera (most of which Elliott is comfortable and competent to discuss), what thrills me is the fact that I feel that the piece has a potent politics in its engagement with those things. That it functions, and it communicates. Which is not an easy thing for a piece to have or do in a postmodern world. I could go on, and I could give other examples of things that achieve this end, but what I will do instead is end briefly with the following: I like Sleep With Me very much because I feel that while it engages with tropes of breaking down the barrier between artist and arted upon, it doesn’t do so in a way that is safe and easy, or in some ways even particularly pleasant. Rather, it negotiates a space that is soft and sharp at the same time.

In fact, when Frederic Jameson wrote, in Postmoderism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, about what artists should do – should try to do – to make a statement in a world where statements had become both unremarkable and ideologically suspect: to engage politics by soft peddling the “politics,” to learn to think of oneself as both individual and representative of a collective, drawing maps on the space around them, I feel like he was writing about Elliott.

I don’t have any time to write more, but I really want you to go there and look at it. Really.

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I never blog any more. It’s because I write like a spazz. Not generally, but when it comes blogging time, I get worked up about some shit, and then I write these little bits of spazzy writing and I never finish them (because they’re spazzy,) and so I never blog.

I also have several enduring and really excellent “pen pal” relationships with people I know. So I write to them. That’s mostly what I do. And they don’t mind the spazz because they’re nice. And I write essays, of course, because I have to. But I never blog. I really should. It’s a great forum. Lately, I just watched the end of Battlestar Galactica and it made me angry and sad (mostly because it was kind of racist and sexist. Oh, come on, it was. You know that scene where Lt. Hoshi and Doc Cottle and Col. Tigh and Adama and Dr. Baltar – but NOT any of the women or black characters, who by and large are dead - are all sitting in a line, perving on the natives and deciding what can be done about them? G for Gross, my friends. G for frakking gross. It’s also strikingly classist for something out of the U.S.,  where they usually love their working class heroes,* But anyway,) and I’m writing about that, and I’m going to blog that, but it’s not done yet. I keep thinking and thinking about the things I want to say and re-writing them, and on and on in this continuous loop. And I never blog. Which is the sentence I opened with, of course. Nothing’s changed, inside this paragraph or outside of it.  I never blog.

So what? Well, it’s kind of a lie of omission, my not blogging. Because I am, like, this super-charged politics person, and as much as my comic is about Gay Issues, I’ve been a bit remiss in busting out the politics on the RFC site. It’s not all about the aesthetics for me (though given the quality of my drawing, this should be kinda obvious), and I feel like a cheater for not saying it. So I’m going to say it now. I believe in the following things:

1) That, as Kurt Vonnegut Jnr. would say, ‘goddamit, you’ve got to be kind.’

That’s pretty much it. It means I tend to dislike capitalism, which really doesn’t care for kindness either way (hey, it’s your consumer choice!) And, you know, the usual things liberals don’t like, like racism and sexism and hitting children and wars the labeling of all attempts to be decent to each other as “politically correct.” I don’t like those things. I do like have long arguments about these things, though (sometimes,) so it’s not all suck. I actually do want to write about these things, too, especially capitalism, because that one I don’t like arguing about. It makes me too sad. You know that scene, in ‘Angel’, where Angel is having a sulk about Wolfram and Hart and he’s all “it’s there world and their rules and I can’t win and (sulk, sulk, sulk,)” and that’s how I feel, Angel!! About capitalism!!  (Angel is such a liberal. I like his politics a lot more than fascist Buffy’s.) But it’s like I can never say it right.  Actually, I could say the same thing about lots of the things I mentioned. I don’t really like arguing. I just like knowing that I’m doing something.

It’s like right now. See, what I was doing just now is reading Feministing.com, and I found (because my friend & college Claire had left it open for me) a review of this guy Dennis Prager’s series of columns on… um… why your husband has the god given right to get sex from you whenever he wants, and that marriage is an exchange economy between two inhabitants of traditional gender roles. But, not paid employment +/or housework and childcare. No, women pay their rent with sex. It is really creepy. Really creepy. I don’t want to argue with this guy, I just want him to stop thinking that what he’s espousing is ok. I want to talk over some common ground and find a place where we can talk about our shared anxieties and… make sure that we’re both cool with the fact that the real reason that a wife is entitled to say no to a husband about sex is because HER BODY BELONGS TO HER. Not because post-sixties ideologies are all about “me! me! me!”. We could talk about that, Dennis. We could. Philosophically, too. But marriage is not a contract which includes emotional rape as one of the clauses. So I have to argue. This is why I don’t blog. Because I am busy getting angry and then trying to write well, and I never can, so it never works.

Seriously, though! Feministing, and others, have already critiqued this guy right down to the ground, but I just have to put one quote:

“Many contemporary women have an almost exclusively romantic notion of sex: It should always be mutually desired and equally satisfying or one should not engage in it.”

Yes, Dennis. That is the definition of sex that MOST ADULT HUMANS HAVE. Because sex is really nice when you both want it! It’s a fun, awesome, and, primarily, SEXY thing to do when you and another desire each other. I don’t know about the kind of sex Prager dreams about, but I sure know I don’t want to ever have sex like it.

But what I hate the most like the best is the following comment, below the column.

Commenter: “Prager describes the nature of men and women perfectly. Anyone who cannot see this is perceiving reality through some prism: likely political.”

You mean it’s my POLITICS that makes me think that a description of men as beasts who can’t control their constant sexual arousal and women are frigid, non sexual beings who make whoopie out of duty is a crock of shit? Phew! I thought it was REALITY! I guess I can stop fighting the status quo and being so tired and weepy and irritable all the time. I’ll just give up my POLITICS!!! Oh… wait…

And that’s why I don’t blog, friends. Because I’m too angry, and when I’m angry I write like a spazz.

Best,

R.E.K.

*Forgive me for saying so, but last I heard, there were more requirements for holding the office of President than patriotism, but I suppose if your Daddy is the Admiral…. hey, it must be Lee’s breeding that makes him so altruistic! Somebody, quick, give him more land rights! Maybe a factory! Myth of the Tsar? What Myth of the Tsar? Lee Adama is actually RELATED to God!

Also, Get Back to your Class, Farmboy Baltar! You see how trying to get out of it made an apoclypse happen? Yeah, you do. You’ll never try to eat from the tree of knowledge again, will you? That’s right. Have a little cry. Good boy.

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Today’s title is awesome, isn’t it? I promise you I’ll explain it. I will, honest. You’ll just have to sit through a little rant first. Just a little rant. It’s only wafer thin. In the mean time, you can just bask in the awesomeness, while you scroll on down to the end.

Today’s rant is about New Zealand, the country I live in. If you live in New Zealand too, you might have got this thing your mail box lately. I got one today. It’s this thing with the funny orange blobby man on it and a question that I am supposed to answer. The TV tells me it’s a referendum. One question, New Zealand (says TV): “should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offense in New Zealand?”

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Boy, I love democracy. It may function more or less always as a political coke vs. pepsi fight for supremacy but I fuckin’ love it and I can’t WAIT to participate in it. Oh, I love having my voice listened to! I’m gonna say exactly the right thing! I’m gonna fill in this form! Well, I was going to, but then I got little bit confused! I have a few supplemental questions that just burn to be answered. Given the above question, what is a smack? and just what is “good” parental correction? Oh jeez, I think I just answered myself If a “smack”, whatever that is, is part of “good parental correction”, it must be good, then, huh? And you can’t punish people for being good! I guess we have our answer! Boy, that was easy! Ain’t democracy fun?

Ok, obviously I’ve got my sarcasm freak on, but this really is a little hard to take. Doubtless, you’ve been aware of the controversy surrounding Substituted Section 59 in the Crimes Amendment Bill. Really, unless you ignore media in its entirety (and if you do, can I come live with you? I’m messy, but I’m real easy going) you’ve heard all about it. Trust me. Though you might not have known you had, because in the New Zealand media, Section 59 is never referred to as such. Rather, its moniker is snappier and far more media friendly (read: polarizing): we call it the “anti-smacking bill.” Just so you won’t be confused. And this is what the referendum is about. It is not a question from nowhere. It is a question which the government is obligated to ask you, the people, because enough signatures went on a petition that calls the NZ government to address the “anti-smacking bill” and all it stands for.

Sounds very important. So, what is this bill? Section 59, to use its actual, I don’t know, NAME, is, as far as I can tell, an attempt to close an extremely problematic loophole in NZ law. According to Parliament, “the purpose of this Bill is to stop force, and associated violence, being inflicted on children in the context of correction and discipline,” or, to  say that nothing “justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.” I’ll summarize that for you, in case you were wondering. It is no longer legally acceptable to beat your children for punishment. You may still remove them physically from a situation that is about to hurt them, or someone else, but, as Finlay MacDonald writes, “if you belt your kids just to teach them a lesson, rather than to prevent some clear and present danger or disruption, the law is not necessarily on your side.” It’s not about parenting so much as it is about violence, or, as Te Kahui Mana Ririki (anti-violence spokesperson for Maori youth) puts it, “You cannot smack another adult without being brought before the law, so why should adults be given the right to smack little children?”

Agreed, Te Kahui. Assault is assault, and I have to say that that old child-beating adage “this hurts me more than it hurts you” probably doesn’t even need the oxy in front of its moronic. However, according to some critics, the bill is not quite that simple. There are many oppositions to it. There are, in fact, about 30,000, the number of signatures on the aforementioned petition, which means we’re obligated to pay at least a little bit of attention. Some criticisms I even find relevant – that the bill is confusingly written and not terribly clear, that it doesn’t address the fact that real and serious violence against children is still going unpunished, because the problem is with our culture and not with our law. These are good things to be talking about, because the problem IS with our culture. However I, along with Barnardos, and Women’s Refuge, among others, believe that the bill contributes to a change in attitudes towards a culture where violence towards children is not OK. I have a friend who likes to remain nameless, a former teacher, who, one night after many whiskeys said to me in a sad voice “the most dangerous things a child in New Zealand can do are shit its nappies or cry.” He was quoting a breadth of very real, and very horrible statistics, and he was right.

Then there are other criticisms of the bill, which, while they indicate to me very real and serious anxieties about change and value differences amongst New Zealanders, really do scare the be-freakin’-jesus outta me when it looks like they might end up having an influence on law in New Zealand. Family First, an christian lobby group, for example, has been fighting the bill positing examples of “good parents” who have been unfairly punished by the bill. I bring this up because Family First are really the biggest and most influential group in getting this referendum together, and I find that Family First and I really, really disagree about a good parent is. When their examples include a father pushing his teenage son over (three times!) because he refused to play rugby without his full uniform on, I find I want to call that kind of behaviour a) mean and b) quite bad parenting, really. Different worlds, I suppose. But this rant isn’t really about that.

I, personally, am opposed to hitting children, in general, and pretty much always. Don’t hit kids, okay? Don’t hit anyone! Just count to ten, and have a beer instead (no, wait! statistically you’re much more likely to hit your child if you start drinking in NZ – just count to ten!!). But my opinion on this matter is neither here nor there. Even if I thought that hitting children was the sweetest thing since Skynard’s ‘Freebird’, I would still find the referendum question misleading, because it is. It does not take a media scholar to figure out that the connection between smacking and good parenting has been made rhetorically, and that the question basically begs an answer to whether or not one likes “good parenting”, not whether or not one thinks Section 59 should be repealed. It doesn’t address the legislation under scrutiny and it doesn’t address the issue at hand, and this is possibly why Prime Minister John Key plans to ignore it. I think this is the only time I have ever agreed with the John Key about anything.

Yes, it’s a big frakking deal. I’m prepared to publicly agree with The Smiling Assassin over it, for fuck’s sake! Jesus! The referendum question being what it is, regardless of whether or not it effects the law, speaks volumes about this country, its attitudes, and the kinds of violence we find acceptable. It also talks to us about our media, and the continuous way in which we as viewers are called upon to view things as simple, as polarised, and as “normal” or “strange” and not as complex. I think I’d gone a full year of media interaction with Section 59 without ever having heard its real name. I had to look it up on google. And, when I did, it was immediately obvious that it is not a bill about smacking. It is a bill about assault. It also became scarily obvious that the largest outcries against the bill have come from people who want the kind of assault they do to be legal, as seems to be the case with Family First. The whole thing reminds me of a quote from Cynthia Heimel: “you don’t want to be accused of acquaintance rape? Well, how do you think it feels to be acquaintance raped?”

There’s nothing I can do about it except laugh, really (or cry, but I’ve just got through having a week long sulk about Dick Cheney, so I thought it was time for some positive action, if only to spare my husband the pain of more impotent watery whining from me.) Let’s embrace the power of humour instead!  Let’s all go and hang out at this sexy new Facebook group I was invited to today. It’s the group where I found this wonderful image by a fellow called Fraser Moss:

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I also found the awesome, awesome title of this “blog” there (I told you I would explain it!) I have to say, I find both to be very accurate critiques of the biased phrasing of our brand spanking referendum. They made me happy anyway. Well, happier.

But you can play too! Your challenge is to come up with a referendum question that is equally as clear and precise and not at all misleading as the real one. Are you up to the task? I think you are! They provide a blank template so you can even make one that looks like the real thing. I really think you should join. Think up as many as you can.  Go forth! If nothing else, it will give you something to do that is more useful than reading Roddy’s Film Companion.

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1. That ‘Werewolf’ magazine exists, with lots of sweet journalistic goodness from Gordon Campbell, who used to kick ass all over the now sucks ‘Listener.’ Butt Hat Snot All! Brannavan Gnanalingam and Tim Bollinger also write there. And others! (Plus Bollinger plugged me, so I love it even more.)
2. That when I download a David Rovics song, the genre of the song on itunes is automatically listed as “leftist cheerleader.”
3. This story (thanks to Claire Harris for this one.)


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Normally, I would go back over this blog and reword it all pleasantly and rationally in order to invite discussion and demonstrate openness to all views, but not today. I am good and solidly fucked off. I am too fucked off to pretend not to be fucked off. Why? I’ll tell you.

WTF is with the proposed ACC cuts? Seriously. WTF? The upshot is, the government would like it very much if survivors of sexual abuse would, after a period of a month or so, be psychiatrically assessed to determine whether or not they qualified as having a mental illness. If yes, they receive counselling treatment on ACC. If no, they receive nothing. There are so many things wrong with this. I shall now itemise them for you.

a)  After a month or so is too fucking long, in some cases. Treatment needs to begin at the discression of the claimant, because they are the only person who knows what they need, after such an intense breach of their personal self. Not to mention the fact that in some cases, survivors of sexual abuse will not be able to address what has happened to them until many years after the event. Those people do not need to wait a month. They have already been waiting long enough.

b) Not everyone at the receiving end of sexual abuse winds up with an official mental illness. The same way that not everyone who breaks their leg winds up Crippled 4 Life. But, and here’s the thing, YOU’D STILL PUT A CAST ON THE FUCKING BROKEN LEG WHEN IT WAS BROKEN, WOULDN’T YOU? Yes, you would!! Because, even if you don’t wind up with clinical depression, or whatevs, as a result of your experience, IT WILL STILL AFFECT YOU and THAT’S NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS! THAT IS A NORMAL, HUMAN REACTION TO TRAUMATIC EVENTS, and in many cases that process will require counselling assistance. These cuts are like a big fuck you to anyone brave enough to face what’s happened to them. Essentially, they will either be told ”you’re sick now” or “get hard, why don’t you, and go back to work.”

c) This is the real kicker. Under the proposed changes, IF you were lucky enough to receive an official mental illness sticker, you would have to declare it to potential employers. That’s right. Yes, you would actually have to say, at a job interview, or whatever, that you were officially sick.

I want you to imagine this, if you haven’t already. I want you to do a little visual exercise with me. Imagine, if you will, that you have been raped. That you have had your power and your safety and yourself ripped away from you, and you are struggling to rebuild that. Imagine then, that you work yourself up to the point that you are strong enough to admit it and ask for the help you need, from your community. Imagine then having to jump through a shitload of diagnostic hoops to prove that you are, in fact “sick” as a result of what has happened to you. What will you decide? To give up and decide not to fight for that help? Or accept that you have an illness and that you will be treated until you are “better”? Imagine then, after having decided, and received treatment, that you apply for your dream job, and then you have to tell a complete stranger what you have been going through. Imagine that. Imagine it. I don’t care how. Even if you don’t imagine you. Imagine your sister. Or your daughter. Or even your son. Does it make you, as it made me, feel like taking every single member of the incumbent NZ government over your knee and giving them a severe spanking in full and deliberate violation of section 59(a) of the crimes amendment bill?

This is not to say that some survivors of sexual abuse do not develop mental illnesses. They do. Traumatic events CAN cause or trigger mental illness, PTSD being a prime example. But these are two completely separate issues! A survivor of sexual abuse who develops a mental illness as a result would need BOTH things – counselling for the trauma, and treatment for the illness. Because, the thing is, just what is the definition for “better” here? Is it when you feel strong again? Is it when you feel ready to enter a relationship? Is it when you’re no longer afraid to walk down the street? Or is it… as I suspect it is, when you are able to return to work and not cause capitalism any trouble?

All I can think is that these proposed cuts are an example of the extension of the worst logic on the planet. Firstly, because counselling for survivors of sexual abuse is not a place we should be “tightening our belts”, secondly, because the whole thing stinks of privatization, and thirdly, and I think most importantly, the need to cleave the population into “sick” (unproductive capitalists) and “well” (productive capitalists), and the suggestion that emotional reaction to traumatic events is not something that our society needs to be concerned about is just fucking fucked. As if all that matters is that you’re a functional worker, or you’re not, and so our STATE HEALTH CARE would direct itself towards either making you into a functional worker after figuring out exactly why you were not, or simply insisting that you be one, regardless of the real reality of human experience. I hate this! It’s like it’s all geared up to help the people with the money and the power, already, at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people in the country (even more so in rural areas, as Rape Crisis points out.) People who are being told, again, that the problem is with THEM, not with what has happened. Yes, this really does have the faint aroma of blaming the victim (“faint” my Irish Catholic ass. It stinks to high heaven of it. I could smell it under water.) It also has the stench of roaring gender disparity, but I’ll leave that discussion to my far more competent pals over at The Hand Mirror.

The point is this: these people do not need to be blamed any more. Trust me on this. I know plenty of victims of sexual abuse and THEY ARE ALREADY BLAMING THEMSELVES.

Just two final words: anyone who even starts to talk to me about the need to cut funding to cut out malingerers can fuck right off. I don’t even want to entertain that conversation, and there are two reasons for that. Firstly, I do not care. I do not care if ten thousand fakers receive ACC money if one person who needs it gets it. I just do not fucking care. That person, and their needs, are so important to me that I balk at anything that may make them hesitate in their decision to come forward. The second reason is this: so what? Okay? So what? We work to live, okay? Not live to work. People are so, so much more important than money. And if you don’t already know that then you have bigger problems than this legislation.

And, any sympathetic right-winger who wants to moan about the ACT tail wagging the National dog stands to be reminded that assessing ACC and attempting to reduce its spending was a National Party campaign promise.

To do something about it (even I went to the march on Parliament and everybody knows how Robyn E. Kenealy infinitely prefers to stay home and grumble) head here.

Lily Linton, a Wellington artist I know, is doing this thing that I think is awesome. She said, (though I can’t remember if it was on facebook or in person) that she had been inspired to start investigating this crazy urban field around us after the Wellington City Council saw fit to paint over the venerable Ian Curtis graffitti on Wallace Street. That piece of work, ‘Ian Curtis – Walk In Silence’ had been there as long as I could remember, and then it was gone, for reasons known only to the Prendegast government. It’s back now, thanks to some dutiful citizens, but it has returned with a friend – Lily’s blog, which you can visit here.

‘I am interested all aspects of public space: active edges and private/public boundaries, urban design and land use planning, transport networks, public services, shared resources, pedestrian perceptions,’ Lily writes, ‘cities are what we happily give each other.’  This is her project – to examine and inspire and basically respond on every level to the physical urban world that we are so frequently taught is impersonal. Urban Field Studies, to me, raises the fundamental sociological question: is human society more than or equal to the sum of its human parts? This is topical, in light of the *ahem* postmodern condition, in that the separation, or, as my pal Jameson puts it, ‘diffusion’ of our cultures that inevitably arises from globalization and free market ideals, requiring us to map our own cultures atop them. It’s also topical in light of such legislations as the ‘zero tolerance’ ban on graffitti, in tandem with the rise of Phantom Billstickers and their total dominance of public postering space, causing me to wonder what room, if any, is left for genuine public art.  

Enter Urban Field Studies, which is, apparently, ‘a place to engage in critique of art in public spaces, and to encourage more creative use of public space. (Ideally leading to an increase the sense of ownership and belonging that can come from community involvement, and reduce alienation in our cities.)’ Well, allow me to add my two cents to that: I say now, as I said at the begining, that’s awesome. Urban Field Studies is awesome. Enjoy it today!

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Some “Clift-notes” for the intro for the issue I’m currently working on. This text forms the introduction to Roddy’s Film Companion Issue 5 (as yet, unreleased).

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Hello, Fuckface! A Sort of Introduction (Part 1)

Robyn Kenealy Interviews Roddy McDowall

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I never know how to introduce these things. What I’m usually aiming for, you see, is the “dissemination of the godlike text” or words to that effect. It’s all like I’m looking to confuse authorship (or something) but then I just end up writing some bullshit like this. Oh fuck, you know what I mean, folks: obviously I couldn’t interview Roddy McDowall because he’s dead. Sometimes it feels like he’s alive because I’m used to his character, but he’s not. He’s actually pretty damn dead.

Also in the Pretty Damn Dead Club is Montgomery Clift, who feautures in the following issue (Issue 5, unpublished – ed.). It’s another one of those things were I’d like to give you the skinny on the man before we head in – trust me, it’ll help. So I thought I’d just, you know, ask Roddy. Even though he’s dead. Yup. Wooooo. (That’s a ghost noise. Scary, huh?)

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ROBYN E. KENEALY: So, tell me about Montgomery Clift.

RODDY MCDOWALL: The thing you have to know, that you have to really understand is that he was simply a terrific actor. Really. He was just splendid. He started that trend for tough but sensitive young men – James Dean et al. It all started with Monty. He could look so… hurt. And yet so… oh, he was wonderful, really wonderful.

REK: Yeah, I’ve seen some of his movies. I don’t know if I’d praise him as ecstatically as you would, but I was pretty impressed, especially by ‘A Place in the Sun’. That seemed like a really complex role. And he was pretty Method, but he didn’t jar against the other actors the way James Dean did in, like, ‘Giant.’ He was kind of… half way between the old style and The Method, which I gather was just coming in.

RMD: It was. But Monty – well, he was trained. In his early days, in the theatre, where he’d got to half from modelling, which he’d done when he was quite young and half just through his mother who was… well, like most of our mothers, as I’m sure you understand. Anyway, he was picked up and got a great deal of training from the Lunts, who, of course, were pretty well known.

REK: Sure. They were sort of theatre royalty, is that right?

RMD: Yes indeed, and they put a lot of effort into Monty, mostly because he was so bloody talented, right from the begining. Or so I’m told. I didn’t actually meet him until I moved to New York in ’52.

REK: I take it you met him through Elizabeth?

RMD: That’s right. And by then he was working with Mira Rostrova, who was, believe it or not, an actual member of the Moscow Art Theatre – where Constatin Stanislavski had written ‘An Actor Prepares’, if you can imagine. She was wonderful. Half soft-spoken flower, and half artsy dragon lady.

REK: And she took you on?

RMD: Eventually. I was a little bit full of myself when I first got there – well, it was faux bravado, really. But I remember saying that I’d come from Hollywood and didn’t need any lessons, and Monty said, and I quote, “that’s fucking rubbish. You’ve got to learn to act.” He was like that, you see. He thought of it as a craft, and that’s eventually what I learned.

REK: He has quite a small filmography though, really. All things considered. Monty, I mean.

RMD: He was very picky. He turned down a lot. But… now, let’s see… there was ‘Red River,’ which was quite wonderful and ‘Wild River’, with Lee Remick. And… of course you’d know ‘From Here to Eternity’?

REK: Oh, yeah. Where he plays the bugle.

RMD: That’s right, though of course he didn’t really play it. Oh, and, at some point he played opposite Olivia deHavilland, in ‘The Heiress’ and then there was ‘The Young Lions’ with Marlon Brando – oh dear, Brando took such a shine to Monty which I think Monty really liked, although he went through his usual squiffishness.

REK: His what?

RMD: What I mean is, he would always have this hoopla where it went ‘you like me, I don’t like you’ – he was often a little more comfortable when people didn’t like him so he had a chance to make them like him. When people did like him he’d go out of his way to wind them up. But anyway, Brando was younger and he looked up to Monty because Monty was such an actor, even though he, Marlon, was a bit more sorted out in himself, I think, back then. He had a good crack at getting Monty off the drink, I seem to recall, though it didn’t go very far and, poor Marlon…

REK: He gave up?

RMD: He was beaten. Monty couldn’t stand to be questioned, you know, beyond the… he liked it when one cared for him but not when one did so openly. You had to fool him. And Marlon… back then he was quite straightforward. He couldn’t understand how Monty could… Marlon told me, eventually, that when he told Monty he would go to the AA with him Monty simply said “I see” and just kept drinking shot after shot to make a point. That was the sort of thing he would do.

REK: What point?

RMD: “You can’t tell me what to do.” “I am my own kind of fucked up.” He was always like that… he wanted to be in control of not being in control, if you understand me. He was a person of contradiction. It was half awful and half hilarious to go anywhere in public with him. He’d do all sorts of terrible stuff – play with his food, throw things around, greet waiters with “Hello, fuckface.”

REK: Because he was a drunk?

RMD: He had a drinking problem, if that’s what you mean.

REK: That’s what I mean. And pills.

RMD: Yes. He was an alcoholic and a junkie, I guess you’d call it, for pharmaceuticals, mostly downers. But it’s worth understanding that everybody took pills back then. Everybody. Though in varying degrees, of course. It was just the culture of the time, which meant that it was sometimes difficult to recognise an “addict” – I never really noticed it in Monty until he started to get really sick.

REK: In the late fifties?

RMD: Or thereabouts.

REK: Was that because something had changed, or did it just… become obvious?

RMD: Well, partly it was that in ’56 he was in a fairly serious car accident. This was during the filming of ‘Raintree County’, which he and Elizabeth were both in.

REK: He had an accident on the set?

RMD: No…. Elizabeth and Michael Wilding having a great deal of trouble, though of course I was living a lot of that on the telephone, since I was really only working on Broadway and not in L.A…. but anyway, what had happened was that Monty, who, of course, had been one of Elizabeth’s dearest friends ever since they’d been in ‘A Place in the Sun’ which I think was… ’51? Also, he got on reasonably well with Michael, and for that reason he often ended up being a sort of foil between them, and he had been having dinner with them, foiling, as it were, and with Kevin McCarthy who often did a similar sort of thing, and Rock Hudson. I wasn’t there, of course, but I understand he crashed his car on the way home.

REK: They let him drive?

RMD: Kevin said he wasn’t drunk. Kevin didn’t even think he’d taken pills, or not too many. At worst, he told me, it could have been a bad reaction to something he had taken – he had colitis, you see, and occasionally he would have some fairly impressive reactions when he mixed his recreational drugs with his genuine medication – but it wasn’t excess, and possibly – this is what Kevin thought – for the most part, it could have been pure exhaustion. According to Kevin. Then again, Rock told me that Kevin told him that Monty had been weaving all over the road.

REK: What do you think?

RMD: Well… Elizabeth and Michael lived up in the canyon, and the roads are terrible late at night, being as they’re almost entirely uphill or downhill, depending on whether you’re coming or going. It’s possible it was just terrible luck.

REK: Did you ask Elizabeth?

RMD: Yes, immediately, since she telephoned me that night. Poor girl, she was horrified, she couldn’t answer a question like that. How I wish I could have been there – it was a terrible wreck, and he could have died, Monty. I immediately wanted to go out there.

REK: Why didn’t you?

RMD: Because I was working. And because eventually I found out he was going to survive and it seemed… I don’t know. His jaw was broken in eight places. It was frightful, and it was never really the same, although Monty worried about it much more than anybody else did, in terms of his looks. But, of course, the press somehow figured it out before the ambulance did – I’ve heard that some of them had police radios, if you can imagine – and they tried to take pictures of it all, but Elizabeth – she’s wonderful – she had managed to crawl into the car, which was absolutely mangled, and lift him a little, which probably kept him from drowning in his own blood. Actually, I have no doubt that’s what it did. He would have died if she hadn’t done that. And when the press came, she gave them a piece of her mind.

REK: She yelled at them?

RMD: And how! “You’ll never work in this town again!” and other, equally impressive clichés. At any rate, nobody took any pictures, except some of the car after they were already gone.

REK: So, then he finished ‘Raintree County’?

RMD: Once he was more or less functional. He was given a whole lot of prescription painkillers, and he had his colitis drugs, and, of course, he kept right on drinking, and it was pretty much downhill from there.

REK: So, you’d say that’s when he became “an addict”, in the true sense of the word? Or is that just when the fact that he was already addicted became really visible?

RMD: My feeling is that it’s a little of both.

REK: What I’m curious about is… you know, he doesn’t really look that bad. If you compare the photographs from before the accident and after it. I mean, his face is sort of… rounder, I guess, the shape of his jaw is really different, but he still looks good. Though I read that he felt like he’d “lost his looks.”

RMD: He thought he had. He was such a classic beauty, in his youth. I always feel Tom Cruise resembles him quite a lot, resembles the way he used to look. And to be perfectly honest, I think Monty was used to trading on the way he looked, and then after the accident he thought he couldn’t do that anymore. It depressed him.

REK: But he was already depressed?

RMD: He was always a bit depressed, as long as I’d known him, anyway.

REK: So there was the accident, and the drink and drugs, and… I read about the dinner parties, which is the late fifties, right?

RMD: His “family”? Oh yes. Yes, indeed. That was a “you really had to be there” time in his life.

REK: Can you explain?

RMD: The dinner parties? Well, they were dinner parties. There was drink and talk and… dinner. Usually.

REK: And drugs?

RMD: Well, of course. Monty was always sort of insistent about the parties but very ambivalent to them as well. He had started seeing Jean by then, and they were terrible for each other, they would race each other when they were drinking, and Jean really didn’t like it when Monty was higher than he was, so he’d try to catch up. But… listen, that’s my own personal soapbox, you don’t need to write that down. The point is, he was seeing Jean by that point and they’d have parties, back in New York, where they were living.

REK: So who would go? The “family”, I’m going to go ahead and assume, is a group of his friends?

RMD: Yes – Libby Holman, The McCarthys, Nancy Wheeler, Maureen Stapleton sometimes, whom he had met during the filming of ‘Lonelyhearts’, which is based on that Nathaniel West novella… Truman Capote… Tennesse Williams occasionally. And lots of other people. Lots of people drifted through, on and off. Monty was pretty hard to take, though. You had to be fairly committed.

REK: To hitting the hard stuff?

RMD: No, to dealing with the fact that Monty would inevitably, and quite often deliberately, pass out on the floor in the middle of the evening. And he would be very, very unhappy if anyone interfered with him, so one would have to leave him there, and try and ignore him. Then, sometimes, he wouldn’t come out of his room in the first place. It was… one could end up doing a lot of ersatz hosting. But one couldn’t… I couldn’t leave him alone. It was… well.

REK: I’m sorry.

RMD: Thank you, dear. And, of course, Monty would only ever listen to either Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald, never any other records. I remember he took someone’s head off once over Billie Holiday, or possibly Nina Simone. He really wouldn’t listen to anything else. So one had to get used to hearing the same songs with some regularity. Lord knows how Jean put up with it.

REK: I like Frank Sinatra.

RMD: Do you? I never minded him – his work, anyway – but I think I had my fill back then. I do remember there was a very good version of ‘Mack the Knife’ which I really liked, though.

REK: No, I like him a lot. I kind of like how he didn’t really sing.

RMD: No, he didn’t, did he? I suppose that’s what’s meant by a “crooner.”

REK: I guess so. But this was all a late fifties thing?

RMD: It was a fifties thing, Monty’s “family”, and it was his default setting when he wasn’t filming. Right up through ‘The Misfits’, which screened in ’61, so it would have been shot… oh, 1960? Or ’59? The dates all merge together these days… but anyway, I recall Marilyn Monroe joined us for a little while. I knew her quite well because we’d tap danced together when we were very young, and, of course I knew her and Arthur through the Actor’s Studio – everybody knew everybody in those days. She was a charming girl, for all her troubles, and she really loved Monty. She used to say he was the only person she knew in worse shape than she was. She was wonderful with those lines of hers, was Marilyn. She was quite the comedienne, though I suppose that’s hardly news to you.

REK: Not really. Marilyn Monroe’s pretty iconic these days. But I was going to ask about the… you know, eventually there was the ‘Freud’ thing?

..

……………………………………………………………….To be continued next week…

..

If you, like me, are cranky about the schedule 4 proposal, you may wish to make a submission. For those not living in NZ, the proposal concerns changing the category of protected land, essentially to un-protect it, and to allow mining. There are some stories about it here and here. 

If you would like to make a submission to parliament, please take yourself to this link. Greenpeace has written a form letter, so if you like you can just fill in your name and hit send, or you can use it as something to riff off, which is what I did. Anything, guys. Please.

The above is drawing from one of my old field notebooks, and the following is the email I sent to the PM. I read over and I think I would have tweaked it slightly if I could now, but still. Here it is:

Dear John Key,
This email should be considered as my official submission on the Schedule 4 mining proposal.

I am completely opposed to the Government’s plans to remove Schedule 4 protection from New Zealand’s conservation estate to enable mining to take place. I wish my opposition to be counted by the Ministry of Economic Development’s consultation exercise into removing schedule 4 protection.

Some people will begin their submissions with an accusation of a violation of trust on your part, given what was proposed by the present government before the election and what is happening now. I support their right to say this, because essentially, a lie was told by your government, and the citizens it concerns deserve redress. However, I cannot honestly say I feel my own trust was violated, since I must admit that I expected you to lie about this, which is one reason among many that I did not vote for you. However, I am still a New Zealand citizen, and I still wish my opposition to the schedule 4 proposal to be noted.

There are others who will make submissions of this nature on the basis of the economic imperatives being unproven, or unstable, in relation to such issues as sustainability in business under threat of anthropogenic climate change, and potential damage to New Zealand’s tourism industry. I am in support of these arguments as I do believe that on purely economic terms, the costs of such mining allowed by changes to schedule 4 will outweigh the economic benefits and therefore the project is at best deeply flawed. 

There are also arguments that will be made on the basis of the land of this nation having a meaning that extends beyond the economic to the citizens of this nation. The land is valued historically, and aesthetically, and perhaps spiritually, and these values should be given equal consideration when decisions regarding the use of such land for economic purpose are being made. I am in support of these arguments too. It is a foolish person who holds fast to the notion that every thing or experience can be quantified on economic terms or within an economic framework. If you are such a person, I offer my sincere condolences and I hope you will not that my criticism here is note leveled at you personally, but at the rhetorical structure of the systems we occupy, and at the actions you plan to undertake. 

However, I trust that these arguments are being made. I wish this email to note that I consider that when they are made, they are also being made on my behalf. I wish to add my voice to both of the above choirs.

In addition, as a student of geology, I have learned over an over again about the impermanence of the present. As you have probably heard, if the history of the Earth was a calendar year, then humanity appeared at five minutes to midnight, on December 31st. Given this, I will ask you to consider the schedule 4 proposal in relation to our shared history and in relation to our time on this planet as living beings. 

As American writer Ian Frazier wrote, of strip mining in the Great Plains, such actions have the potential to reduce the story of our history in our landscape to one sentence: “chewed up, spit out.” For future archaeologists, he elaborates, our history becomes nothing but a story of unstoppable greed. This isn’t the truth about us, however it erases all others, and so becomes the truth. Through actions that allow industrial mining in MORE areas, and not LESS, through actions that allow us to extend what we are already doing rather than force us to find new solutions, you force this erasure, replacing every story in that land with a story about industry.

Furthermore, it should be considered that erasure of this nature limits future potentials of that land. Land treated in this manner can never be reclaimed – it can’t be as it was, it simply become Land That Has Been Mined and appears to have been fixed. It isn’t fixed, it is simply given an aesthetic makeover. It seems arrogant to me, it seems dangerous – and more than this it seems naive – to assume that the uses and values we can see for this land in our lifetimes are the limits of the uses and values it may have. 

In short, in addition to the arguments you are no doubt already considering on this matter, I would urge you to equally consider the propriety, or, actually, the ethical rightness of imposing the whim of this civilization on any that will be here in the future. In the face of the fact that whatever is done here will have effect well outside of our experience, I do not support you in writing your values upon a landscape than can in no manner be read as objectively belonging to you. WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE VALUE OF THIS LANDSCAPE IS. I am not prepared to participate, through citizenship, in legislature concerned with reducing the history of this land from “used to” and “used for” to simply “having been used”. 

I do not support the schedule 4 proposal in any way. I consider it a potential crime against future civilizations, and a great disservice to this one. I urge you to consider this fact in your decision. 

I thank you for your consideration on this matter, 

Regards, 
Robyn E. Kenealy

I really do. And today, I put some up. In fact, I’ve made a blog. 

This is is something I’ve been working on for a little while, as anyone who knows me personally can probably attest. It is, to quote myself, “part of the same investigation (as Roddy’s Film Companion. What it comes down to is that I never know whether this strange connection I feel, this obsessive need to investigate, is in the text, or in me. I never know. But I think that it is somewhere between the two. I am also certain that it is related to narrative, to what narratives are and how they are made.  In life, as in art, you know?”

So, um. Yeah. Have a look, if you like. 

Best, 

REK

It would trite to apologise for the lack of updates, wouldn’t it? All my legions of fans (I have millions, of course) are probably out there right now going “hey, where’s my Roddy!” and you’re thinking I’m just like all those other shitty no-update webcomics that are all like, I’m sorry, it will be different from now on and then it isn’t. Well, I’m not you’re right. The real truth of the situation is that someone else (actually, my loving husband) used to manage my updates for me and now he is way, way too busy and it’s my responsibility and I haven’t quite figured out how to do it. I have the comics, I promise. I’m up to, like, page four hundred or some shit. It’s just this stuff with the machines.  So I apologize. And I ask you to bear with me, until such time as I am able to put comics on the internets with ease and aplomb.

In the mean time, wow, UK election! Draaaamaaa!! Did you all see Gordon Brown just, like, resign? That was quite good of him, I thought. Clegg did say he was never going to coalition with Labour if Brown was in charge. I Have a friend who says – bearing in mind that Labour have been the brains behind a lot of creepy Big Brother measures that are bad and scary, plus Blair was all about fucking Bush* - that choosing between the Tories and lab. is like choosing between eating shit and drinking piss. Both awful, but one is a tiny bit better. The analogy is crude, but I’ve never had a huge problem with crude, and being on the redder-than-Fidel-Castro-with-diaper-rash end of the political spectrum, I tend to make insinuations like that about most mainstream governments anyway. I do agree with my friend’s shit and piss analogy, is what I’m trying to say. That would be the bullet point to take away from the previous sentences.

But democracy is not about Robyn, and John Pilger’s account of the Thatcher years indicates that tiny difference between those parties can be somewhat crucial (like it is here.) So I’m on tenterhooks. I haven’t read the Guardian website this much since I discovered the bite-sized makes-me-feel-like-the-world-ain’t-overwhelming Guardian Weekly. It’s almost distracting me from how angry I am about Arizona.

I’m quite angry about Arizona.**

Comics soon.

*”Fucking” used as intensifier, not… well, not verb.

** Other people justifiably a lot more angry.