“The drama in my plays, I think, is nearly always people trying to reach each other . . . It’s true they’re confined inside their own skins, or their own cubicles, but they must try to get out as much as — they must try to find a common
ground on which they can meet . . . ”—Tennessee Williams
The man who made the movie was drunk. When I say drunk I mean he could barely stand up and hold a camera. He had children. And he had a girlfriend, who blew a lot of kisses at him as he shot the film. I don’t know what happened to his wife, the mother of the children. The girlfriend was pretty, but the children were beautiful.
Everyone else was hideous. Aging men, dentists and veterinarians with comb-overs and polyester suits. Women, old before their time, who had their hair done at the beauty parlor and nothing else to get excited about but they kept on going, kept on going. Big cars taking the sting out of it all.
And then the young men with beards and long hair just back from Vietnam. One of them was a burglar or a con man or a murderer. He had yellow teeth and a snake coiled up in his pants between his front pockets. And a gun, always the gun.
This movie was made a long time ago, so the old people in the movie are dead.
And the young people are old.
The children are grownups.
I went to the movie by the drunk man and I sat too close to the screen.
Someone bit the head off a chicken, I believe. My eyes were closed so I wouldn’t vomit.
Elvis made an appearance.
Someone stuck a bottle up his own . . .
Why do people want to put the lights out?
Blacken the scene. Wipe themselves clean.
Is it so very painful to just be alive and awake?
God yes god yes god yes.
Especially in Memphis.
(Thoughts on Stranded in Canton dir. by William Eggleston & Robert Gordon)