I went to see “Contagion,” the new Steven Soderbergh movie tonight, and thought of you. I always think of you, always, but images bring certain feelings to mind more quickly than others. Images are notorious memory triggers. I earn some of my living watching people pretend to be something other than who they are “ordinarily,” and then I talk about the truth or the falseness of their imagination, the strange business of being called a name not one’s own. The only way one can repair oneself after this hard work–that is, telling the “truth” about certain falsehoods–is to avoid dinner parties and movies: both places where people gather to pretend. But after taking in one theatre piece for the second time this afternoon, I went to the movies; I didn’t want to hear actors shouting (Godard has said he loathes the theatre because actors seem to be screaming) and it was raining and the streets of the town looked so small and curved, like a hunchback laying on his side, I would have sought comfort in the memory of your arms, your hands, running over what you used to call my “beautiful woolen things,” and other times when we were as you called it pal-ing around, not talking, just walking, and the world came through our eyes, but I didn’t want those memories jus then, somehow. What I wanted was to go to the movies with you so we could not talk some more, and I thought you’d meet me in the little town where “Contagion,” was playing, you get the tickets, I’ll get the popcorn (your side dish of salt wrapped in a paper napkin). I thought “Contagion,” was definitely something you would want to see, medical issues in films always did it for you, you loved movies like “Safe,” and I can’t remember others, but women trying to live in a challenged atmosphere appealed to you for obvious reasons: in your world, no woman was safe. You would have loved my response to the film’s first five minutes: relief that Gwyneth Paltrow dies from a mysterious virus nearly straightaway. Soderbergh links her death to the AIDS epidemic (without naming it) because, even though she’s married to Matt Dillion, who’s excellent in the film, GP’s having an affair with a man we never see. We know that but Matt doesn’t. And then the coroners scalp her and look inside her brain and they can’t believe what they find there. At this point i would have turned to you and said: “Nothing. They found nothing in her brain,” because Paltrow is a contraption, not an actress–certainly she’s no Blythe Danner. You would have loved Kate Winslet of course, you always fell in love with optimistic women, and she’s certainly that in this film, right up until the moment she’s about to die and she hands her parka to a man shivering next to her death cot. But the woman you would have fallen in love with completely is played by Jennifer Ehle, a scientist in search of a cure who wears stockings with bad patterns who eventually shoots herself up with her own medicine, she shoots up in a bit of her thigh that’s just above her black stocking, the white flesh of heath that might become ill in a moment if her vaccine is all wrong but she’s not afraid, she’s sort of thrilled to inoculate herself with a cure that might be wrong because she has a boy-like interest in risk, throwing her chips up in the air and seeing where they might land. Clearly Ehle’s character was a girl who liked woods driving, just like you, and who adores her (dying) father, just like you. In one scene, after she shoots up, Ehle visits her father with the look of an accomplice who will survive her father’s death but not the death of their shared time. It is an extraordinary cinema moment, beyond words, and in that moment Ehle seemed to be the possessor of certain memories about you, too, my own memories, in fact, it felt as though she was manifesting you, and even though she couldn’t see me, she gave me you, which made the moment that much more precious to me: she couldn’t see me, but I saw you again in her rolled down stocking, the healthy part of her thigh, her father’s eyes, in her hope that had everything to do with the facts.
Here is Wallace Stevens listing another set of facts about you. “So and So Reclining on Her Couch.” He can’t see us, either:
Leave a Reply