WORLD TOUR Day 11 - Southeast Kansas
BEFORE: Natalie Wood carries over from "Inside Daisy Clover", but the setting moves due east, nearly halfway across the U.S. This is the biggest jump in mileage so far in the tour - if you look out the left window of the plane, you can see Brokeback Mountain, which almost made the tour (but then I would have lost the Natalie Wood connection...)
THE PLOT: A fragile Kansas girl's unrequited and forbidden love for a handsome young man from the town's most powerful family drives her to heartbreak and madness.
AFTER: I'm fascinated by how the English language has changed over time - and yet at the same time, I often hate to hear it corrupted. The origins of words and phrases also interest me - take the word "lounge". My personal theory is that it came from the name of the chaise lounge, which is what we Americans call a deck chair, but is really a corruption of the French name "chaise longue", which just means "long chair". People spent time relaxing, or lounging, on these chairs, and eventually the rooms that contained them came to be called lounges. But if you ask 5 linguists where the word "lounge" comes from, you might get 5 different answers.
Same thing with "butt naked", which makes me cringe, since I know the real phrase used to be "buck naked", as naked as a deer, I suppose - but you hear the corrupted phrase just as often these days, so when I correct someone, they're liable to tell me that I'm the one saying it wrong. Someone in tonight's film said the correct phrase "You've got another think coming," as in "If you think I'm going to spend another year in Kansas, you've got another think coming." Bear in mind, this film was released in 1961, well before that damn rock band Judas Priest released their 1982 song titled "You've Got Another THING Coming". Which might be more grammatically correct, but THINK came first. Yes, I realize it should have probably been "another THOUGHT coming", and then it never would have been misheard by someone, but that's what passed for wordplay back in the 1920's or whenever.
Anyway, tonight's film features a set of high-school sweethearts who had the misfortune to live in Kansas in the 1920's, when pre-marital sex was frowned upon - the worst thing that could happen to a high-school girl would be if she went "too far" and ended up "in the family way" and had to have an "operation". So your average high-school girl might find herself in a bit of a dilemma - she's been told that she needs to get married someday, but how's she supposed to land herself a fella if she plays hard to get?
According to this film, there were two types of girls back then, the type boys fooled around with, and the type they settled down with. (Though after settling down, let's face it, there was probably still some fooling around with the other type of girl...) This was an unenlightened age, the feminist movement was in its infancy, and it seems no one realized that a woman is a complex creature, capable of many emotions and facets. Nope, it was black and white - a girl was either a virgin or a slut, Madonna or a whore. Of course, we know now a woman can be both nice and naughty...sorry, sexually empowered.
Really, what we're talking about here is bad parenting. Or at least ignorant parenting - Bud's father tells him to "blow off some steam" with some random slutty girl so he doesn't corrupt the girl he eventually wants to marry. Huh? What if the tables were turned, would it be OK for HER to have a fling and still somehow save herself for marriage? Of course not, word would spread and she'd probably have her reputation ruined. But sure, it was acceptable for a boy to sleep around.
Deenie's mother admits that she probably made some mistakes in raising her - but that she did the best she could, in the same way that her mother raised her. Ah, there's the problem. People who think their parents were perfect and assume they did everything the right way end up thinking there's only one way to raise THEIR kids, so nothing improves, and each generation becomes as screwed up as the last one. This is why my mother (and I) do things like saving used plastic bags for re-use, just because my grandparents lived through the Great Depression.
At least I'm aware that my parents weren't perfect, and made mistakes raising their kids - so if I had a kid, I'd try not to make the same mistakes. But I'd probably make original ones.
NITPICK POINT: I get the five-year plan, I really do. You want to go to college, then think about starting a family. But why not clue your girlfriend in on the plan? Instead you send out mixed signals, and it's enough to drive a girl crazy, I do declare!
Unlike the last two films, at least this one's ABOUT something, other then chasing fame or getting lost in a bottle. Powerful attraction, unrequited affection, heartbreak in the uptight Heartland of America. It's downright Shakespearean by comparison, almost. But Natalie Wood seems like the female James Dean - so overcome with emotion that she often literally crumples into a ball. Teen girls are moody sometimes, I suppose. And parents just don't understand. Or listen.
And Natalie was 23 when this film was released, with her playing a 17-year old character (perhaps age 20 at the end of the film). It's worth noting that 4 years LATER, she played a 15-year old in "Inside Daisy Clover". And that was SO believable...
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 1,281 miles / 2,063 km (Hollywood, CA to Independence, Kansas - an exact town is not mentioned, so I picked one that would also be ironically symbolic)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 1,814 miles / 2,925 km
Also starring Warren Beatty (last seen in "Bulworth back in jeez, 2009), Pat Hingle (last seen in "The Quick and the Dead"), Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, with cameos from Sandy Dennis (last seen in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"), Phyllis Diller.
RATING: 5 out of 10 glasses of milk
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