Friday, July 22, 2011

JULY 2011

When I listened to Alec Baldwin make his pronouncement on her performance in John Huston’s The Misfits as ‘Bad Marilyn’, I knew I had to exonerate her.  Until this movie, we haven’t known who she is, now we have her apotheosis.
                Here we have a stone feminine interacting with three masculines, all cowboys.  This premise gives the movie a classic feel and serves to frame Monroe’s performance.  She, never surrendering her bedroom eyes, loves each in turn.  Her character’s remarkable ability to live in the moment brings a sense of the marvelous to each of the men who in turn find their own words to confess how moved they are by her capacity to respond to them.  Misfits, we learn at the end, is an appellation for the Mustangs hunted by the Gable character and the other men; but in time we come to understand that the misfits are really the characters we’ve been observing all along in Arthur Miller’s screenplay.
                What makes both Monroe and her character so appealing in this movie is her unselfconscious seamless movement from one man to another, loving each in turn without capitalizing on their affections.  Although she settles for Gay Langland, the Gable character, she can comfort Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift) on his broken childhood and his desperate participation in rodeos, as well as Guido’s regrets at having been a bomber pilot in the war.  All this, however, does not come without a price, and when the helpless horses are rounded up at the end, we have a breathtaking moment where this actress throws aside the “jello on springs” trope that first made her famous in exchange for a physically contorted expression of despair.  Running away from the truck where the tire anchors and other trapping paraphernalia are kept, we see her against the background of the barren desert in a desperate effort to express the betrayal she feels:  what exactly is it there is to love in the callous enterprise of trapping animals intended for slaughter?
                The ending, of course, with Gable reconciled to Monroe in his pick up and driving towards the moon that signals the location of the highway, is a much touted ending to a film that is the last for both of them.  Gay Langland thereby agrees to the responsibilities involved in accepting Roslyn Taber’s love, for the horses have now been set free.
            Now for what originally intended to elaborate upon in last month’s post:  the importance of the bisexual community.
                The pressures we all experience in a polarized society to be one thing or another expose all of us to a kind of sad, akmost inevitable mismanagement of our lives.  Back and forth we go, and back and forth I’ve gone in wanting to belong in one world or another so terribly separated from one another.  But perhaps the truth lies in recognizing the fluid, gray areas that lie between.
                Last night I rocked out in maybe the first rollicking good time I’ve had this year at a blues performance, but before long I’ll be back at The Loft, seeking support for the personal autonomy I insist on.  As a proud bisexual woman, I am committed to the search for a feminine response to my own masculinity.  To do this, I need to move freely between gay and straight.  The concept of what I call Interpersonality comes into play in the Bi community in a way it does not in conventional culture, liberating a spectrum of possibilities all involving developmental growth and an exploration of the nature of sexuality, play, intimacy and the right we have to contract for our own relationships.
                I sent out an email this morning, excited at the idea that’s been floated recently of secession into a Bi Nation independent of the LBGTQ sandwich that poses relentless, ongoing problems in recognition. There are extraordinary possibilities inherent in our insistence on risk and exploration, on the need for skin to touch skin, on the fact that, as I once heard it framed “bodies matter”.  We have the capacity to find the masculine and feminine in each other free of the elaborations of cultural norms.  We are free, we are fluid, we are bisexual.