pretty is as pretty does

Pretty is eye-catching, pretty is charming; perfect teeth and full lips and slim hips and wide open eyes (or whatever your short list of pretty is, was, or will be) but beautiful is better. Beautiful is where the cracks are, where the light gets in (as Montreal homeboy Leonard Cohen says) and -- unlike pretty -- there’s no shelf life to beauty; it has no expiration date.

And that’s Audrey Hepburn: no expiration date.

As pretty as she is in the opening sequence of "Breakfast At Tiffany’s" (all delicate bones, hair piled high, wearing the most famous little black dress of all time, donut and coffee in elegantly gloved hands – and fully owning the real estate in front of Tiffany’s on a pristine, Manhattan morning in 1960, just by standing there) as perfect as all that is (and it wasn’t; Blake Edwards bitched at her for not getting the coffee sequence right, rattling her, unsettling her) as pretty as she is in every moment of that shot -- that scene, that movie, her whole career -- her beauty shines later in life. It shines when youth is gone and something more settles into every inch of her.

She starved as a child during WW2 & worked for the Dutch resistance, ferrying messages back and forth (stuck in a basement once for days, as a girl of ten) and never forgot the hunger and fear of those panicked, terrifying times: she spent the last years of her life working for endangered children everywhere. And when – almost fifteen years after her death -- Christie's auctioned off the original dress she wore in Breakfast for $807, 000 (one of the highest prices ever paid for a piece of movie memorabilia), the money went -- as if Audrey herself had somehow planned it, somehow reached from beyond the grave, with one perfectly gloved hand, to seal the deal -- all the money went to support the construction of a school for poor children in Calcutta.



And that's just not something pretty alone can do.

unforgettable

Impossible to describe accurately, disjointed and strange and compelling, and likely to itch at the brain for decades (how could I have missed this? Where the hell was I when this went down?) Ah, Karen: you're an under-appreciated actress, wonderful and detailed and expressive in "Five Easy Pieces", "Day of the Locust", "Nashville" and (of course!) "Trilogy of Terror" (the moment you become the fetish doll is a perfect little creepfest) but this...this Weimar Republic meets the Raquel Welch Wig Line? Unforgettable.

manic pixie dream girl

Years ago, the AV Club did a piece riffing on Nathan Rabin's phrase "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" (used "to describe that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that 'exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures'...the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.")

The article then went on to list sixteen movies that meet the MPD Girl standard; aside from the fact that any self-respecting woman over fourteen knows that only a Manic Pixie Dream Girl would use a phrase like "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" to describe herself, it's an interesting take on the often less-than-crucial roles women play in too many movies. There are a few misfits included on the list (arguably Annie Hall and Breakfast at Tiffany's) but for me, the most clear cut mistake is including "The Apartment".



The AV Club description of the movie reads as if ripped from the pages of A Movie Guide for Hipsters: "All Jack Lemmon wants to do is ascend the corporate ladder, even if that means loaning his bosses his terrific bachelor pad for their illicit trysts. Then one day he comes home to find that the peppy elevator operator he likes is lying comatose on his sofa, feeling suicidal after an affair gone wrong. He nurses her back to health and she turns his life upside down, talking a blue streak until she convinces him to adjust his values."

Aside from MacLaine not fitting the template -- her character is not secondary in status and compared to Lemmon at least, has few adorable quirks; she also possesses an inner life in which Lemmon figures little until the third act -- what's interesting about "The Apartment" is that Lemmon's character is not typical of an early 60's male hero. Wilder throws in just enough gender bending to keep everything just a little off center sexually; the chaste male character in pursuit of a woman having an affair with a married man

There's more than a touch of The Sixties Single Girl to C.C. Baxter (eating tv dinners alone in front of the tube & buying hats to celebrate a success) and if anything, he occupies the position of a dream guy himself -- a male character entering a troubled heroine's life and turning it all around, uplifting her via his inherent decency and open-hearted self, a guy with charming quirks (draining spaghetti on a tennis racket) and bedrock values (saving the heroine from suicide, hiding her office affair) with not a bitter bone in his body (still wishing her the best when it looks like she's marrying the boss Lemmon now hates)and just sexy enough in a clean-cut-but-still-charming way.

All of which could feel hokey and trite fifty years on, but since Wilder is a great filmmaker with a great cast & great script in hand, it still sings. He never ignores their broken bits -- the unbridled ambition to get ahead, marital infidelity, a suicide attempt -- or plays off that sadness as just-fer-laugh moments: even the woman Baxter picks up in the bar, longing for her locked-up jockey in Cuba, has a bit of dignity wrapped up in her big-bosomed blonde routine. These are two deeply flawed people -- corrupt in how they're going about getting what they want yet still decent at their core -- and Wilder makes them loveable (that most tired of words) by passing no judgment on them. He walks them to their happy ending without insulting them, or the audience; guess that's what a Magic Pixie Dream Director can do.

bien dans sa peau

From Dressaday.com:
"Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."

tubory

Tubory = a television memory which no one else remembers or cares about (leading you to wonder if it ever really existed) followed by finally finding a television clip of the same on You Tube (the link then triumphantly shared with everyone who still doesn't remember or give a damn).

Which brings us to Paulus the Wood Gnome & these haunting words:

She's out to get you,
Shes out to get you,
She's out to get you
Beware!



Paulus was one of my worst tubories. When I finally tracked it down, the relief was out of all proportion to the event (it's a brain worm, working away in the back of your mind..."She's out to get you, she's out to get you--argghghgh, what was that goddamn show called?")

After seeing it again, over thirty-five years later, I realize now what a little creepfest this show was: Paulus looks like he belongs on "To Catch A Predator", the animal puppets resemble fetish dolls made out of human skin and the witch is, well, a real witch. (All these years later, I have moved from fear to sympathy: she's not the patriarchal ideal of beautiful, so shit, yes, attitude will be had --between that, the blue skin and the ricket-like disease apparently overtaking her ankles--she has no choice but to turn to potions and spells for some sense of self. She's clearly just trying to survive in a gnome-puppet world--and maybe, just maybe, she knew Paulus was a child predator all along. And no one would listen.)

The other thing that struck me is how often the "ugly witch" shows up clad in non-white skin. The pretty witches are usually white, the rest are blue or yellow or orange or green. Misogyny and racism, in one handy little (supposedly child-friendly) package, with the same nasty message about women and power, whatever their skin color: she's out to get you, beware.