Sharp Words

It had to happen sooner or later–my darling hubby, who is both an electronics geek and a frugal buyer, finally found an HDTV that met his exacting tech standards and skinflint budgeting requirements. I was happy for him, but I didn’t think having a brand new 52″ HDTV would change my life much. Boy, was I wrong.

HDTV is the biggest boost my self-esteem has had since that summer when I was 19 and I got approached by three casting scouts in the same week (a week later, I found that two just wanted to pick up on me, but until then, I was floating.) .

Here’s the thing: Everyone looks bad in HD. Everyone.

Well, not bad, per se, but real. Average. Not so different from you or me. Brad Pitt has a rough road map of little lines on his face–not the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, but definitely a small city with a complex transportation infrastructure and a pothole problem. Cate Blanchette has freckles and little lines (that only make me love her more). And the cast of Lost? They really do look like they’ve been trapped on a desert island with no sunblock. Or, at the very least, they look their ages.

Thanks to HD, I have seen wrinkles, freckles, under-eye bags, stray hairs, secret moles, scars, thick make-up and camouflaged break-outs on people who previously looked flawless. Now, when I look in the mirror, I don’t feel so bad about the little lines I notice starting in my forehead and around my eyes, the fading scars from the “teenage” acne I didn’t outgrow until after college, or the smattering of stationary moles/freckles across my cheeks. People who are professionally good-looking have all those flaws and more.

Modern technology has well and truly revealed the Hollywood glamor machine for the fragile facade it is. Thanks, HD!

There is something graceful about the silver curl of smoke across a black and white screen. Marlene Deitrich’s leisurely exhale wreathed her beautiful face in a haze of smoke and mystery. Bogart and Bacall’s side-by-side cigarettes at the end of The Big Sleep hinted at what happened when the screen faded to black.

Hollywood spent years glamorizing cigarettes, and even after they stopped, the images cigarette companies paid to produce live on in some of our most cherished films. Parents ranted and railed about Joe Camel when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a poorly animated spokes-dromedary that prompted me to pick up a smoke when I “grew up” and left for college. It was Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Lauren Bacall and a hundred other golden-age actors (most of whom died of lung cancer).

Yes, classic films made me smoke.

About fifty percent of college students who take up smoking quit, and I was fortunate enough to be one of them. I had a brief relapse a year after graduating when I fell in with chain-smoking Europeans (my French friend’s secret to keeping her perfect size 6? “Eat less, smoke more.”). But smoking is lethal, expensive, and stinky. And I hated the idea of being an addict.

Smartass and I have been watching Mad Men, AMC’s new show about advertising executives in 1960. I’m still not sure whether I like it, but one thing I think is genius is the way the show makes smoking look disgusting by constantly depicting smoking. Instead of the silver-screen glamor of Hollywood, Mad Men shows the way ordinary people smoked. Characters smoke while driving, while eating, while pregnant. Doctors smoke during exams, office workers smoke at their desks. It’s positively awful. And, I’m told, completely accurate.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking, and my experience as a smoker versus the glamorous image I still have in my head. In my writing, I often use smoking to indicate a character’s self-destructive tendencies. When I’m writing urban fantasy or paranormals, many of my immortal characters smoke. And they look good doing it.

I have my doubts as to whether or not this is OK. When Buffy and Angel didn’t use protection on Buffy the Vampire Slayer angry parents lambasted the creator, Joss Whedon. Whedon’s response was, the show is fiction. Angel was undead, for goodness sake! People know the difference between fiction and reality.

But that was sex, and this is smoking. Given the power that glamorous images have in our society, is it ethical for a writer to glamorize smoking, even in impossible, clearly fictitious circumstances?

Yesterday I linked to David Denby’s piece on modern romantic comedy films in general, and Knocked Up in particular. While discussing older romantic comedies, Denby casually lumps The Lady Eve in with the “Screwball Comedies”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I adore those screwball comedies. But the thing about them is that the heroines are almost always daft, dizzy debutantes. In The Lady Eve, the heroine is a conwoman and a card shark. There’s nothing daft or dizzy or innocent about her. The hero is a more conventional stock character, the wide-eyed academic, so engrossed in his studies that he hasn’t a clue about love (Denby mentioned Ball of Fire and Bringing Up Baby as two examples of this hero type. If you haven’t seen them, do. They’re both loads of fun.).

Denby says, “The screwball comedies were not devoted to sex, exactly—you could hardly describe any of the characters as sensualists.” And this is why he was wrong to lump Eve in with her contemporaries. The Lady Eve is hot. Not scorching, but definitely damned sexy for a movie in which no sex actually occurs.

Working at the height of the Hayes code, writer/director Preston Sturges was a master of suggestion. (He wrote a movie about an girl who gets knocked-up with septuplets by a soldier she can’t remember during WW2 without ever saying the word “pregnant” or showing a pregnant belly. The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek). Sturge’s screenplay for The Lady Eve is sexy and suggestive when it shows Barbara Stanwyck’s Jeanne seducing Henry Fonda’s Charlie. It casts Charlie’s high-falutin ideals about love against Jean’s earthy sensuality, and Jean wins every time. In one of my favorite scenes, the two are standing on the deck of the boat at midnight discussing their romantic ideals:

CHARLIE: I shouldn't think that kind of ideal was so difficult to find.

JEAN: Oh, he isn't.  That's why he's my idealWhat's the sense of having one if you can't ever find him? Mine is a practical ideal...you can find two or three ofin every barber shop getting the works.



CHARLIE: Why don't you marry one of them?

JEAN: Why should I marry anybody that looked like that?
When I marry, it’s going to be somebody I’ve never seen before.
I won’t know what he looks like or where he’ll come from or what he’ll be.
I want him to sort of take me by surprise.
CHARLIE: Like a burglar.
JEAN: That’s right.
And the night will be heavy with perfume,
and I’ll hear a step behind me…and somebody breathing heavily.
And then…
CHARLIE: Oh!
JEAN: Ohhh! You better go to bed, Hopsie. I think I can sleep peacefully now.
CHARLIE: I wish I could say the same.
JEAN: Why, Hopsie!

If you haven’t seen The Lady Eve, put it at the top of your Netflix list. It’s funny, it’s witty, it’s romantic, it’s a little bit sexy. And in my humuble opinion, it’s The Best Romantic Comedy Ever Made.