It's June which means it's Pride Month.
As what my son Dean calls "an honorary gay", I try to be a good ally and offer what support I can to the LGBTQ+ community.
In our current political and cultural climate, the support seems sadly lacking but it can be found in surprising places.
Donald Trump is planning a Gay Themed event for the White House during Pride Month.🌈
It's called the UFC Freedom 250 happening June 14th which is ostensilby an "Ultimate Fighting Championship".
It's a bunch of nearly naked, ripped, sweaty men grappling with each other to a throbbing club music beat and swirling pink and fuscia lighting. 🌈
So... Happy Pride Month, y'all!
That's a pretty awesome gay party you're tossing for yourself on your birthday, Li'l Donnie. 🌈
Me? All I got is this blog.
It's... Movie Time!
Today's movie is from 1982 and was directed by Robert Altman with a cast that includes Cher, Kathy Bates and Karen Black. Based on a play that debuted in 1976, this is Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
Whoa! That is a long title
The time: 1975, the last day of September. It's technically fall but it's still hotter 'n' hell. "It's 118 degrees in the shade".
The place: the interior of a Woolworth's five and dime store in McCarthy Texas. It's a dark, dingy place with outdated inventory covered in a fine layer of dust. Store owner Juanita, a stern and rigid elderly woman, opens up the store while gospel music blares over the radio.
Get use to this setting. We will not be leaving it for the duration of this movie. We will get in some time travel, though.
Today is a special occassion at the Woolworth's: the reunion of the Disciples of James Dean, an all female fan club that is gathering to honor the twentieth anniversary of the actor's death.
Time travel time! time! time! time!
Back to 1955. It's the same setting, perhaps slightly less dusty. It's a stormy night.
Sissy is sheltering in the store with employees Mona, Sydney, and Joe. (Joe is the only male character in the entire movie.)
To pass the time, the gang flips the radio from Juanita's beloved gospel music to a pop music station to sing along with a contemporary doo-wop song "Sincerely". There's a lot of goofing around as the young women and Joe play dress up and dance along with music in front of the mirrors behind the store's front counter.
Return to 1975, the Disciples slowly filter into the store. We see a group picture of the group made with James Dean and we go...
Back to 1955 where the Disciples are overjoyed to hear that Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean will be in Marfa, Texas, to film Giant—62 miles away from McCarthy.
There will be auditions for extra cast members carried out across the area. Joe drives Mona to Marfa so she can fulfill her lifelong dream of being in a movie with James Dean.
Return to 1975, Mona claims she had a sexual encouter with James Dean and he is the father of her son, Jimmy Dean. There are some statements made that Jimmy Dean is mentally deficient although this is questionable. We never see Jimmy Dean on screen and there is every reason to believe that the rather emotionally unstable Mona is just telling herself that to give her an excuse to keep her son close.
A Porsche sports car roars into town (so we're told as we never leave the interior of the store.) The driver enters the store and boy does she seem out of place in this decaying piece of rural Texas retail. She's smartly dressed in a fashionable skirt, jacket and heels with beautifully coiffed hair. Her name is Joanne and she seems to find the store to be very familiar and she knows who these women are even if they don't know who she is.
Well, they do.
It's Joe.
Flashback to 1955: Joe is in the store, back, bruised and bloodied, Mona and Sissy attending to Joe's injuries. Joe relates to them aboing going to the school dance in drag and was beaten and sexually assaulted while the good folks of McCarthy watched and cheered.
Once more to 1975: Joanne calmly tells the Disciples she is not a hermaphrodite,that she had a sex-change operation thirteen years ago.
In 1955: The Disciples are heartbroken to hear the radio announcer relay the news that 24-year-old Hollywood film star James Dean has been killed in an automobile accident.
In 1975: Mona still holds on to her narrative of her romantic tryst with James Dean and that Jimmy Dean is his son. But there are contradictions that unravel these claims and the truth is revealed: Joanne is the father of Mona's son.
Joanne is happy and content as a woman but she does voice one regret, that her journey to be who she really is kept her from being there to help Mona raise their son.
The 1975 reunion comes to an end and the Disciples including Joanne perform "Sincerely" in front of the store mirrors one last time as we move through time, back to 1955, to the present and forward beyond 1975 to a point where the store is now empty and abandoned, the dancing Disciples merely ghostly apparitions in the dull cracked mirror.
Whoa! That was a lot.
I grew up in a small town in the mid-1970's with five and dime stores and I had a visceral reaction to the setting in the Woolworth's store. Like the store in this movie, those five and dime stores were just hanging on in the face of growing obsolescence. Those stores are more than 40 years gone now, replaced by store front churches or sitting just plain empty, filled only with ghosts.
We're told it's hot in McCarthy TX and damn if I didn't feel the heat and sweat coming off this movie even if it never goes outside. Staging the entire proceedings, present, past and even future in one single location is a daring choice. Most movies based on plays usually use the medium of film to open up the story, to show us scenes a play limited to a single stage cannot.
But Robert Altman keeps everything inside that one store interior which creates this oppressive weight, not just from the overbearing heat wave but also from burdens of revisiting the past and unravelling the lies of the present to reveal truths that everyone is working really hard to avoid.
I'm probably not qualified to comment on the casting of a straight cis-gender actress to play Joanne but it was 1982 and I guess it's significant there's a transgender character at all.
Karen Black is very much a female woman of the opposite sex but as Joanne, she does project a certain ethereal quality, the disconnect of a person who knows this place, these people and their secrets but is also distinctly seperate from them.
Mona with her claims about James Dean being the father of her child is not the only one caught up in self delusion.
Played by Cher, Sissy will tell anyone who will listen her husband is working on oil wells in the Middle East and he's going to send for her when he makes enough money. The truth of the matter is he's left her for another woman in Kansas City and ain't never coming back.
Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is an intense and sometimes brutal examination of broken people who try to repair their fractures with lies they tell others and themselve and the price that must be paid to confront and accept the truth.
It is not an easy movie to watch but it is a very powerful experience.
____________________________________
🌈Don't forget!
Li'l Donnie Trump's Pride Event on June 14th! 🌈
No comments:
Post a Comment