Four o’clock on Super Bowl Sunday finds me at my favorite coffeehouse, a few blocks from where I live. It’s full; this isn’t really the football crowd.
**
I guess I could have braved Sonny’s Super Bowl party, to which I was issued a Facebook invitation — along with 200 of his closest friends — but I feared I’d be sharing him with more than just the Steelers and the Cardinals. I didn’t want to take the risk of seeing him, for instance, lounging on the couch with an arm draped around the diffident NYU art student. I wrote a fine piece on jealousy a few posts back, but the truth is that I know this sensation too well: that ice-cold thunderbolt that strikes the innermost bowels, followed by an instantaneous flush of scalding shame that reaches all the way to the tips of the ears. That feeling that one has no right to even exist, much less to want what one wants so badly. To ask for anything at all would be unthinkable, now. No, no, the only thing to do is to flee and to hide — to hide one’s shameful, unwanted self from the real or imaginary judges of one’s embarrassing inadequacy.
Those who are either blissfully free or unaware of this feeling in themselves always look at me in disbelief when I express my fears — what’s the big deal about going to a fricking party? I don’t think they’d be too understanding if I told them that Sonny actually called me the week before last, and that I was too paralyzed to pick up the phone. It’s real time, you hear me, real time! an inner voice was screaming at me as the phone rang, like Angela Bassett in one of my favorite movies trying to get the leading man to live in the present. But I’ll say more about that shortly. My own writing could be seen as analogous to that film’s fictional invention, “playback” — a safe way to experience life in the past tense, a once-removed refuge from scary real-time reality. I won’t deal with this now; I’ll write about it later! Margaret Atwood put this preference for art over life in perspective with the brilliant lines
Please die I said
so I can write about it
But for me the retreat from “real time” always comes down to fear. (In my defense, I did call Sonny back after a while, and got his voice mail.) I’m like a dog that expects a vicious kick at every turn. This lead-heaviness that lives in my chest, the vast dimensions of the raw-edged pain I seem to lug along with every step…I have never been quite able to totally pinpoint how familial misunderstandings, peer rejections, and disappointed love alone could create such extensive and persistent trauma — wreckage you might only expect to see if you could take emotional X-rays of the hearts of war refugees. Am I really that much more sensitive than other people? Or did I come in with this?
**
“Fall into your heart,” my coach friend instructed me, to take my focus out of my endlessly ruminating brain, to try to get me to let go of what he says are limiting beliefs.
It’s always hard to move my awareness into a place that hurts so damn much most of the time — the request itself seems cruel — but I did. He asked me to imagine what it would feel like to receive everything I ever wanted. Such as: ample compensation for work I love to do…freedom from debt and want…enough of everything…plenty of money…plenty, perhaps, of Sonny.
My upper ribs feeling almost unbearably sore, I started to think about how that might entail feelings of joy and contentment…right? But there I was thinking again — not feeling. I was thinking in terms of “shoulds,” trying to conjure up the right emotion. I couldn’t feel anything, frankly, but that obstinate, accursed, age-old weight crushing my lungs, constricting my breath, making me ache.
I knew the answer, the feeling — I just didn’t know I knew it.
It came to me later that evening. It was right there in “Demolishing History,” the feeling I got watching Obama on Election Night:
…the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight…the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone.
I remembered, because I had actually felt this on a couple of occasions before.
**
Once was when, unemployed and in a panic over money, I received a notification in the mail that I had just won $45,000 in a sweepstakes, and I believed it. I sat down and sobbed for twenty minutes out of pure relief, thinking that a lifetime of poverty and struggle and debt might finally be coming to an end. (Only when I called the number and heard about the money transfer I’d be required to make did I realize I was being scammed.)
Another time was when I was awaiting the reply to a veritable dissertation of an email I had sent to our football-loving friend. As I’ve done so many times in my life, I had poured out my heart to him in writing, out of whatever foolhardy personal necessity compels me to fly in the face of all common sense. When his response finally showed up, bold black in my inbox, I was unable to open it for nearly an hour — instead washing all the dishes in my sink with trembling hands, sitting and chanting a comforting mantra on my bed, rocking, nearly crying, terrified of the killing words of men that can land like atom bombs in your soft center. I had heard so many variations of “I don’t know what you want from me (but you’re not going to get it)” and “I never asked for any of this” and “I’m sorry, but…” that I didn’t know if I could survive even one more of the same. (Icy thunderbolt, flash burn.)
I opened it. I love the email, it said. He promised to write more soon.
I started to laugh. I started to cry. I shook. I lay down on the bed and laugh-cried hysterically for over half an hour, as if thirty-eight years of unbearable tightness and tension, the constant bracing for more merciless blows, were being shaken loose from my heart and my body in thirty-eight minutes of unprecedented release. It was like a reprieve from execution. More than that, he loved what I had to say. I almost couldn’t handle that much grace.
And you wonder why Sonny is so dear to me.
**
“Fall into your heart” got “Fall in the Light” going through my head — what was probably my favorite track on one of my favorite movie soundtracks from one of my favorite big-budget Hollywood movies. I dug out the CD again the other day to listen, and then decided to rent the movie again. The song, as it so happens, coincides with a moment not too different from the one I’m describing.
Strange Days is, in my opinion, the best thing James Cameron (Mr. Terminator and Titanic) ever did, but it was also, unfortunately, one of his biggest box-office flops. It was one of those stories that seized me with the compelling potency of personally relevant mythology…a tarnished hero’s journey that contains within it a complementary heroine’s journey, and also addresses a much larger challenge at the heart of our collective existence. It’s dark, and far more violent than I usually like, but sometimes I’ll stomach scenes I’d otherwise avoid (like the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute) when the overall project is worthwhile.
The 1995 film, which boasted top actors like Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Vincent D’Onofrio, as well as inveterate character actors like Tom Sizemore and William Fichtner (not to mention a typecast Juliette Lewis), is set in a dystopian Los Angeles not unlike the lawless, chaotic, polluted L.A. of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, on the eve of the year 2000. Fiennes plays our flawed hero Lenny Nero (doing his best to downplay his scruffy, unwashed beauty in sleazy pimp shirts and leather pants), who fiddles while L.A. burns. A former vice cop, Lenny now makes a living selling “playback” clips on the black market, addictive slices of virtual reality that allow the “wired” person to experience someone else’s pre-recorded experiences within their own brains, as if firsthand, but without the attendant risk. He is himself addicted to clips from his own past, clips featuring his cherished ex-girlfriend Faith.
As the ironically named Faith, Juliette Lewis is poledancer-perfect as the kind of weak, fickle, hopelessly lost white-trash princess with bee-stung lips that well-meaning men have been trying to rescue from time immemorial. And Lenny is, at heart, a well-meaning man, a “goofball romantic” swimming around in the big toilet bowl of the underworld, as his good friend Lornette “Mace” Mason puts it. Angela Bassett plays Mace, a limouisine driver and bodyguard as hardworking and honest as her surname and as tough as her nickname. She’s the film’s moral center, a literal mother (she has a young son), the mature feminine archetype. It becomes apparent over time that she loves Lenny, despite his criminal status as a playback dealer and his obsession with Faith — but throughout the movie she has to play the role of the desexualized Sidekick, what Hollywood typically makes of African-Americans in movies with predominantly white leads. “You look good in that dress,” says Lenny at one point, adding, jokingly, “I mean, better than I would.” At least initially, it is she who comes to his rescue, metaphorically slaying the dragons who want him injured or dead.
Mythically speaking, if Lenny is a sort of Orpheus, wending his way through a Hades of burned-out cars and warehouse fetish clubs guarded by violent thugs to retrieve a sullen and resistant Eurydice, Mace may be Ariadne, holding out to his Theseus a thread to help him find his way out of an increasingly dangerous labyrinth — and being set up for abandonment. (I’m afraid I know that myth all too well.)
**
But here I must point out that the mainstream film industry is still pretty cowardly about interracial romance onscreen (Spike Lee and other relative outsiders notwithstanding). And no, I don’t count as some kind of landmark the success of that outrageous Halle Berry exploitation fantasy known as Monster’s Ball, which was unanimously praised by white male film reviewers everywhere, and universally despised by every African-American I know. (Way to not get it, Hollywood.)
Yet this movie does seem to be trying to tackle racial tension head-on. The plot pivots upon the execution-style murder of a prominent rapper and social activist known as Jericho One, which investigators blame (too easily) on gang violence. The film particularly distinguishes itself in its incidental details, like convincing fragments of the slain artist’s music videos caught on background TVs — fragments that possess authentic force and power. Cameron gives the character aggressive words and images that are unflinching in their Farrakhan-esque assault on the status quo. The soundtrack, too, atypically represents unapologetic black rage, with fictional band Strange Fruit magnificently howling “No white clouds in my blue sky!” and Me Phi Me (featuring Jericho One) accusing “Did you steal the land that you’re on?/And is my red brother nearly gone?/Took my ancestors from their homes!/Built your fucking nation on their bones!”
It really is a great soundtrack. The Deep Forest and Lords of Acid tracks sound a little dated now, but Skunk Anansie’s ferocious punk-metal numbers still blow the roof off (their badass lead singer was a bald black Englishwoman wearing tribal face paint), and even Juliette Lewis’s off-key caterwauling on a great P.J. Harvey song has its charm. Tricky is still trippy, and Kate Gibson glides honey-voiced through Leonard Cohen on accordion accompaniment.
But as I mentioned, “Fall in the Light” is my favorite. Graeme Revell, master of the atmospheric movie soundtrack (he scored “Until the End of the World,” among other things), uses Lori Carson‘s ethereal vocals over a dreamy shuffle to create a hypnotic sonic experience of transcendence. I used to get tears in my eyes at the bridge, where she sings
sweet, how it falls into place
sun through the haze
doesn’t it feel a little like grace?
There, as the music swells gently, just before the final verse, ascendant synthesized strings enter from below to embrace and lift you up on a wave of sound; you can feel the rising, as if some mysterious force were spreading your long-hidden, secret wings in spite of yourself. And you rise, rise, rise…
The first thirty times or so, I got goosebumps; sometimes I still do.
**
But to return to the film…during the last remaining minutes of 1999, in downtown L.A. amid wall-to-wall people and police in riot gear, the perpetrators are exposed, Lenny sees Faith for what she is, false friends literally fall away, and perplexing plot elements are solved — but not before a near race riot (reminiscent of Rodney King) and some bloody fights-to-the-death. There are at least three false endings (I love it when filmmakers keep you guessing), including the last one, where an exhausted and battered Lenny and Mace go their separate ways — she headed directly for the police station for questioning, and he headed in an ambulance for the hospital.
It seems only natural, in a typical Hollywood action film, for the black Sidekick to get in one vehicle and the white Protagonist to head for another, as the celebratory New Year’s crowds cheer and hug and kiss and confetti swirls around them. The striking of midnight is a beautiful, unexpectedly peaceful moment; the world doesn’t end, the confetti falls gently like snow, the background noise goes quiet, and we see a woman in a tiara embracing a National Guardsman, his gun lowered. But Mace’s face looks weary and resigned, watching Lenny walk away with a medic, and as she gets into the back of the squad car, I feel for her aloneness and her unreturned affections; this is the way my stories always end, too.
But wait (huge spoiler alert)! As the car slowly rolls through the exultant throng, the viewer’s eye is suddenly drawn to a figure, left of center, that seems to come out of nowhere, groping its way along the slow-moving chain of police cars. It’s Lenny, bloody and limping, palm thumping against the squad car window.
He pulls Mace decisively out of the back seat with his good arm, and they stand facing each other without speaking. Fortunately, these are some of the best actors around, so they don’t need words — Fiennes’ Lenny bleeds tenderness from his lovely eyes, and Bassett’s expression melts from confusion to one of a proud, almost regal sensuality. Mace always knew she was the real woman, even if he didn’t. It’s in this moment/hold on/when everything has come apart… Lori Carson’s voice lilts gently. It’s in this moment/right now/when it can come together…
**
The first time I saw their passionate, film-ending kiss was one of the most gratifying moments in my long history of moviegoing. Suddenly the Sidekick becomes the Leading Lady, as she always should have been. This long-suffering, loyal, strong, beautiful, incredible woman is finally seen by the man she loves. Identifying with the overlooked and underappreciated Mace, I felt my tightly bound heart loosening, expanding, with that painfully sweet relief.
But it was so much bigger than me, at the same time: it was a moment of hope that hinted at what we as Americans might be able to achieve together (perhaps in only another decade). Because after all of the preceding story’s racial strife and violence and darkness and brutality and chaos and trauma, we, the audience, find ourselves standing there with Mace and Lenny, on the cusp of a new millennium, man and woman, black and white, friends and equals, in a moment of love requited at long last. Tears streamed down my cheeks with an intimation of that feeling I would have one day, Election Day.
**
Here the camera begins to lift above Lenny and Mace, losing them in the happy, seething crowd, the crescendo of “Fall in the Light” lifting us with it into the streamer-laced sky, and as the music begins to ebb away we hear Carson’s angelic murmurs…Hold on…hold on…
Her last line before the fadeout is a whisper: you catch me.
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