Wednesday, July 21, 2021

The Trouble With Harry (1955)


photo: Paul Maritz

A zebra doesn’t change its stripes and a Trotskyite Partisan Review intellectual of the 60s is not going to become addicted to Grand Theft Auto, unless they become one of those self-invented personalities. You may remember back in high school or college those classmates who went to France during their junior year abroad and came back looking and talking like Jean Moreau or Jean Gabin. Or there were the kids who were sent off to Sweden and came home playing chess with Death. The fact is, at the end of the day, “the chickens” whether they be wandering Jewish intellectuals or Kennedy clones with Boston accents and gray shingled compounds in places like Hyannis or if they’re Upper West Side psychoanalysts, Wellfleet, come home to roost. Oh let’s not forget the ones who went to Rome and returned with their Mastroianni and Monica Vitti fixations, waving their hands in the air as Italian sounding words burst forth from their mouths like machine gun fire. “Everyone has to conform,” one of your parents' silent generation 50s friends may have lectured you during the 60s when you were about to "turn on, tune in and drop out" a la Timothy Leary--and finally became a Dead Head. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose or as Yeats said, “turning and turning in the widening gyre. A zebra may not change it's stripes, but what about the elephant  or the corpse (a la the l955 Hitchcock film) in the room?

Read "Is Your Self-Invention a Success?" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.