You sometimes sad and sweet and crazy girl.

FooBaRoo requested that I rerun this post from way back. I know it's a copout for those three or four of you wanting new LL&CB content, but hey - I just got a REQUEST. Who knows when that'll happen again?

Anyway. Happy Belated Valentine's Day.




Dear B:

They used to talk around sex in old movies. They used to dance and spin and call up to heaven and down to hell for a good go around without ever saying so. See Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind:

“You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how.”

It’s got little to do with kissing. Even if you didn’t know from the get go that, before everything burnt to the ground, Scarlett could’ve used a weekend in Hilton Head with a barrel fulla daquiris and Rhett handcuffed to the headboard - you’d’ve known it had very little to do with kissing.

The Hays code - that sphincter-tightening, long-standing Hollywood institution of social mores is no longer with us, but before it fell under the bootheel of the sexual revolution, it gave us beautiful, brilliant, sexy dialogue, dialogue I miss, like the stuff from North by Northwest, while Roger and Eve sped through the night, alone, together, in a dining car on the Northern Limited from Manhattan to Chicago:

Roger Thornhill: The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her.
Eve Kendall: What makes you think you have to conceal it?
Roger Thornhill: She might find the idea objectionable.
Eve Kendall: Then again, she might not.

And then:

Eve Kendall: It’s going to be a long night.
Roger Thornhill: True.
Eve Kendall: And I don’t particularly like the book I’ve started.

I may sound like a fuddy-duddy mourning the passing of lines like these - I may sound like a fuddy-duddy using the term fuddy-duddy - but I wish I could’ve lived through a time when sex wasn’t trafficked, but discovered, hinted at, and slinkily descended into - or, at least, lived through a time when there was a little more grace to the whole endeavor, as opposed to now, where directors just cut to the chase and hope that the audience, already numbed into apathy by internet porn and “Wild On,” will find something more than mechanical in what’s going on, will imbue their writhing cinematic proxies with their hopes and wants, as if that excuses the end of mystery, the death, really, of articulate lust, and the beginning of an America occasionally titillated and humored by, but ultimately, bored by sex.

Sometimes I look at you, and see, sometimes, something of Eve Kendall, a little bit of the well-intentioned mischief in your voice, a little bit held back, a little bit offered, but always, a bit wild.

And sometimes, these days, I get the movies and the here and now confused, and hope I’ll find an empty seat next to you in a dining car, in the evening, on a train barreling past Pennsylvania farm houses filled with sleeping innocents – and even the unworldly farmhands would know, would, even in their dream-state, affirm the notion, empty Martini glasses littering our tabletop, my leaning in, and my whisper, they’d understand – they’d see your eyes and your smile and hear the sly smirk in every word you speak and wish the same, for me, and for you, you sometimes sad and sweet and crazy girl:

“You should be kissed and often and by someone who knows how.”