My husband’s off work today and we want to see a movie but the only one we can agree to see is Barney’s Version, which is playing in town at AMC and only comes to the burbs tomorrow. So we’ll have to wait. We’ve already seen the King’s Speech – and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.
I remember watching The Apprenticeship Duddy Kravitz when it came out, and loving Richard Dreyfuss in it. And last night I started to watch A Serious Man on the TV and decided it was too good to watch alone, so I taped it. (A Serious Man’s portrayal of 1962 was as stylized as was A Single Man’s. Funny, both movie protagonists were college professors, yet one lived in a fantasy house in the woods and the other in a small bungalow in a sterile-looking treeless new development. Tract housing, I think they call it.)
My husband and I are not the only ones with this filmic dilemma this holiday season. A family I know, at their Christmas meal, was trying to decide on a movie, one that Gran, 92 and grand kids, in their twenties, would like.
They could not decide, as a group, so went to the Casino, although the 21 year old grandson went on and on about a certain scene in the Black Swan, which contains, in his words, “some serious m##f-diving”.
(He didn’t appear to have registered anything else about the movie.)
Grandma (who still drives) wanted to see King’s Speech, as she has her own stash of “Colin Firth porn” no doubt – or at least a well-worn VHS copy of P and P.
Whatever. On a more serious note: I’m going to talk about opium and morphine addiction. In the 1900′s.
I’ve dug out my copy of The Gentlewoman Magazine, out of New York, to take another look. It is falling apart.
This magazine should be re-named The Hypocondriac Gentlewoman’s Magazine, if the advertisements are any indication.
Cures for all that ails the lady with nothing to do, two of the cures for morphine and opium addiction.
That’s the point: pre-1903 it was these respectable well-heeled ladies who were addicted to the stuff, in their tonics and such. Once the stuff was made illegal, it became controlled by the under-class (peddled by Jews or Chinese to Blacks, so it was claimed in the press) and the menacing, out-of-control ‘ drug fiend’ was invented.
That’s why it is so interesting that the very proper George Falconer in A Single Man admits to taking drugs, including mescaline. Or that the prim and proper Meryl Streep character in It’s Complicated smokes marijuana and has the night of her middle-aged life.
Anyway, the fashion editorial in the Gentlewoman is especially intriguing. This is 1900 remember. A woman is calling for simpler less restrictive clothing, “like the Hindoos wear.”
This is interesting to me, because, as it happens I have a scene in Flo in the City where Flo is getting dressed with all her layers, on a hot summer day, and her mind wanders to something she read about Indian women, and, for a brief moment she envisages herself in a sarong or sari- and the thought disturbs her….
Her m##f-diving moment.
Here’s a snippet: Did any woman in a tea-gown, with plaits and fancy sleeves and much lace and ribbons ever look so well as the Hindoo in her softly folded draperies?…. It is possible to argue that they are an indolent people, that we could not do business or keep house in draperies.(sic) No, we could not conveniently. But the East has workers. I am not arguing only voluminious draperies or even draperies at all, but I am arguing for simpler patterns, and for their superior patterns.”
Yes, I will use this snippet in that chapter in my book.
As it happened, simpler patterns slowly came in over the next two decades… and this helped doom the custom-tailoring industry and promote the exponential growth of garment industry.
In 1900, they didn’t have films, they had VERISCOPES.
