#cal it poignant but i GET it i think its funny and i think maybe you could argue theres something there about how arbitrarily willing human | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vagaries-and-caprices-blog · 7 years

Text

Notes on the Hugh Dancy oeuvre: “The Big C” (TV Series, 2011)

Part 2 of 3

(Part 1)

(Part 3)

Season 2: Episode 7, Goldilocks and the Bears

WARNING: PROCEED WITH CAUTION Evidence of an unreliable reviewer: Lee Fallon (Hugh Dancy) lifts his shirt to show Cathy Jamison (Laura Linney) his hip-level, cancer-treatment surgical scar. This reviewer was genuinely surprised, then disappointed, that the scar was not the same “smile” scar Hannibal Lecter gave Will Graham.

Representative dialogue:

Cathy: I’m sorry, my family is blunt, tense, and can’t relax for shit. [Word]

Acupuncturist [treating Cathy]: Your pulse slowed down when your husband came in the room. Cathy: [Laughing] We’re not married. Lee: No, she’s missing the one thing I look for in a husband. Acupuncturist: Well, regardless, there is something special going on between you two. There’s medical term for it: “anastomosis.” It’s when two streams that previously branched out, like blood vessels, reconnect. Or in your case, two people. Sometimes one person can actually affect the other’s breathing or heart rate. Symbiosis, soulmates.

A digression on “anastomosis”

I stayed up way too late watching Hugh Dancy pretend to die of cancer on “The Big C.” I was stupid happy to watch him drink wine, jog, cruise hot guys, and feel up Laura Linney. What a beautifully exhausting frisson (full review of Lee Fallon’s death coming up in Part 3).

Given that the writers of “The Big C” shoot out all manner of literary references—pew! pew! pew-pew!—I knew that typing “anastomosis” and “poetry” into the Internet would return something good. Sure enough, out popped Kenneth Rexroth’s “August 22, 1939.” An excerpt:

What is it all for, this poetry, This bundle of accomplishment Put together with so much pain? Twenty years at hard labor, Lessons learned from Li Po and Dante, Indian chants and gestalt psychology; What words can it spell, This alphabet of one sensibility? The pure pattern of the stars in orderly progression, The thin air of fourteen-thousand-foot summits, Their Pisgah views into what secrets of the personality, The fire of poppies in eroded fields, The sleep of lynxes in the noonday forest, The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought, Life streaming ungovernably away, And the deep hope of man. The centuries have changed little in this art, The subjects are still the same. “For Christ’s sake take off your clothes and get into bed, We are not going to live forever.”

Yum. I munched on that for quite a while…

Let’s Go to the Bear Bar!

Setting: At the bar, the whole scene—the tone of the actors’ performances and the portrayal of “Bears”—made me cringe. Cathy and Paul (Cathy’s husband) giggle at the fauna. There is much explaining of “bear” terms and everyone in the bar is super friendly, amused by Paul and Cathy’s wonderment, and not-at-all put out that they are an immersive zoo exhibit for the Hets.

Then: Lee/Hugh hunts a “panda bear” (Bobby Pestka). Hugh’s body language is ravishing: his slim body in slouchy affect, hands in jeans pockets, smooth grin on his face. [Magnificent gif via existingcharactersdiehorribly] Unsurprisingly, Panda Bear goes for it. Lee firmly grasps Panda Bear’s shoulders with both hands, pushes him forward, and parts the bead curtain to the back room. And—

—the camera swings back to Paul and Cathy. Wait, what?

Paul and Cathy blather on about how awesome they are to be in the bar observing Bears. Their passionate kiss says, “Aren’t we cuckoo tonight? We’re so turned on by our transgressiveness.” Of course, it is plausible that those two characters would feel and act that way, but I can’t help but think that the show producers set the overall non-threatening tone to make sure Middle America would come along for the ride.

I huff at the screen.

When Lee and Panda Bear emerge from the back room, neither actor shows the slightest indication of carnal pleasure having been had: They look like they have been discussing iPhone options at an Apple Genius Bar. True, Lee makes a big show of throwing away Panda Bear’s phone number, so maybe it just wasn’t that good. But I find it an unforgivable lapse that Hugh Dancy returns from that back room without being in any way perspired, flushed, or ruddy. Allow me to present the evidence: HBO/Channel 4 gave us Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I roughing up and reddening Hugh Dancy’s babyface. NBC gave us Will and Hannibal’s iconic gaspy-stabby moments to ensure blood pumpage. Hulu gave us the Great Cal Roberts BJ of 2016. Ipso facto Showtime sucks.

…

Where were we?

Ah, then we get Cathy in the bathtub talking to Lee on the phone.

Many of Cathy/Laura’s lines in the series are funny and poignant. However, I’d like to introduce the shorthand [Things Cathy Says] to indicate Cathy lines that, cumulatively, as I watched episode-after-episode, stopped being funny and started to exasperate me.

Lee: A bath is my favorite place to meditate. [Awarded the double entendre of the decade]

[Things Cathy Says]

Lee: Close your eyes […] breathe with me, all right just follow my breath, you inhale, you exhale, inhale, exhale, in, out, just listen to the sound of your breath and mine, in, out, in, out.

Cathy masturbates to the sound of Lee’s voice, which should have been compelling, but Laura Linney performs a disappointingly modest orgasm. She could have done much more with the material she was given. For fuck’s sake, this is Showtime! Showtime, known for its sleaze. What is happening to our civilization? Make America Sleaze Again!

Worth watching level: Yes, dammit.

#hugh dancy #acting!#the big c #notes on the oeuvre #laura linney #poetry #kenneth rexroth #bobby pestka #panda bear #lee fallon

37 notes · View notes

newnowknowhow · 6 years

Text

What I should have said to my little brother on his wedding day...

I don’t know when this first occurred, but I experience a palpable amount of distress and anxiety whenever my cell phone rings. Blame it on the day and age we live in. I’ve become accustomed to quick, informal communication coming in the form of a text messages. Scratch that. It’s more accurate to say that I’ve become accustomed to almost all remote communication to come in the form of text messaging (much to my parents’ chagrin). Consequently, I regard phone calls as harbingers of terrible news, things too terrible to be expressed electronically.

(Not sure why my mind immediately expects horrible “big news” and not just “big news,” positive or negative.)

So that explains my initial thought when my brother texted the following:

“Can I call?”

Fuck. This can’t be good.

Immediately equating a phone call to bad news is a nonsensical reaction to something that should excite and hearten me. I mean, it’s my brother, one of my favorite people on the planet, someone I think about and wish I could talk to just about every day.

But it’s my default response to phone-call stimuli.

That night, like with 99.9 percent of the phone calls I get, the communication wasn’t dire. I missed the phone call, but I later found out — via text message, thank you very much — that my brother was phoning me to ask me something very important.

“It’s not that serious,” my brother texted, perhaps intuiting his big brother’s neuroses following the request to actually have a person-to-person voice conversation with his sibling.

“That Best Man slot is yours,” he wrote. “But would you be up for being the officiant? You’d be doing it with Erica’s sister. You can totally say ‘no.’”

Of course I wasn’t going to say “no.” I could think of no greater honor than to do that for my brother and Erica, then my soon-to-be sister-in-law.

The request relieved me of the time-honored tradition at the post-wedding reception, the Best Man Toast, which is often part comedy roast, part heartfelt appreciation of the newly minted married man (and, by extension, his new wife). I wasn’t sure I could pull that off. I view that gig as one of the key cogs in the wedding wheel, a component that probably doesn’t make or break the day, but certainly something that can go a long way to making the day even more memorable for the couple and their guests.

Too much pressure.

Officiating the wedding though? Piece of cake. From the moment my brother asked me to do it, right up until when Rachel, Erica’s big sister, and I walked down the aisle to begin our officiant duties, I never experienced a single worry about speaking in front of the wedding guests or fumbling over any part of the ceremony. The sheer pride in being asked to participate in that way tamped down any chance nerves would get the better of me.

But in the day or two before the wedding, I did begin to feel uneasy. While I was spared the Best Man Toast, which my brother’s best friend, Jared, knocked out of the park, my brother and sister-in-law reserved a portion of the wedding ceremony for me and Rachel to address them directly. When I first learned they intended for this to be part of the ceremony, I still wasn’t worried. I looked at this task as something wholly different than the Best Man Toast, more sobering than silly, more poignant than punchlines. We were instructed that we could make these speeches to our respective siblings whatever we wanted them to be.

And it was that “freedom” that caused the first bit of anxiety.

There were literally 100 ways I could have approached what I was going to say. I was nearly 5 when my brother was born, but the reality is that I can’t remember life without him. We slept in the same room until he was about 16 or so. I know that guy better than I know anyone else in the world.

So how do you encapsulate all of that, all of the love and admiration and happiness that simply the thought of my brother conjures, into what might be a three-minute speech?

I did the best I could that day, and I got a lot of compliments on my remarks. But I wasn’t happy, largely because I fouled up the execution. I didn’t mind what I wrote, but I didn’t want to simply read from my notebook. So I tried my best to think less about every word I wrote down and more about the sentiments I wanted to express — basically, I made the choice to read as little of what I’d written as possible. I found out quickly this is a terrible idea when you finish writing a speech only 10 minutes before it’s to be delivered.

At some point I just felt like the whole thing got away from me, and I didn’t exactly say everything I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it.

So I’m going to do that now. A good portion of this comes from what I wrote to say that day. Other big chunks are taken from stabs at writing the speech in the days leading up to the ceremony. There’s a “Hamilton” reference, which I know my brother and his wife would have enjoyed since they love the show so much. But I felt silly using it the way I wanted to use it. I felt silly about a good deal of the initial thoughts on how to approach this. Hopefully, he and Erica won’t think this Wedding Address Redux is silly. I’m only doing it because I love them both dearly.

This is what I should have said:

"I have a really vivid recollection of when Mom told me she was pregnant with you. Two things from that night stand out in my memory. The first: I remember running to tell Dad the news because, well, I thought it was information he needed to know. At four years old, I had no clue that Dad probably got the news long before Mom shared it with me.

"The second thing I remember was being suddenly filled with a sense of purpose — as much as a four-year-old can be have a sense of purpose. I was going to be a 'big brother,' This was a big deal. No clue why I had this onset of accountability for someone I hadn’t met yet. Maybe I had friends who either had or were older siblings. Its genesis really doesn’t matter. I had four years of wisdom and experience to pass on. I planned to be your guru, your mentor, the No I.D. to your Kanye.

"It didn’t take long to figure out that Zahir McGhee needed no mentor. Or at least you didn’t want one. Four-and-a-half years of knowledge to pass on? 'Nah, I’m good, homey' is the phrase I would use to describe your feelings about the guiding hand of your big brother…or anyone for that matter. Reflecting back on our childhood, more than a few squabbles were rooted in one of the following: you not doing something the way I thought you should (this was definitely more of a 'me' issue), and/or you reveling in not behaving or thinking the way I thought you should through taunts and the ever-effective repetition of the same word or phrases over and over. And over.

"If I wanted to keep my sanity, the plan to be the wise, old-sage big brother went out the window. Fine. I had another job as your big brother, and that was to keep you safe. Certainly, I knew that meant helping ensure your physical safety. I’ve been in probably six physical confrontations in my life (with other people, not you), and three of them involved you in some way. That’s not a complaint or a dig at all. Comes with the territory of having a mouthy little brother.

"Beyond feeling obligated to protect your physical safety I also found myself being concerned about your emotional well-being. I love you. I never want you to be disappointed or discouraged. Because of that I harbored the hope that you would model one behavior of mine over all others: my uncanny ability to play it safe.. I have always been fairly risk-averse, not surprising for someone who lives by the watchword 'Expect the worst; hope for the best.' Think of me as Aaron Burr. You are Alexander Hamilton. Me, safe and keenly aware of risk in just about every moment of life. You, brilliant, brash, and unafraid to do what you feel is the right thing in life no matter the consequences. It’s sometimes made me uneasy seeing you make bold decisions and take chances. I remember trying to poo-poo your plans to try out for the basketball team at Camden Catholic. Not because I didn’t believe in your ability. I just didn’t want you to endure the disappointment of not making it.

"Of course, like nearly everything you try, you put your head down, went to work, and you made the team. I imagine that same mentality led you to tackle graduate school at the University of Miami. And you crushed that, so, what the heck, why not film school at Southern Cal so you could one day work in the very stable and predictable entertainment business? All the while, your big brother was watching your high-wire act from down below, ready to break your fall if you ever fell.

"That’s part of the reason I continue to harbor the fantasy of one day living next door to you, or at least living in the same city as you. I’d worry less if we got to see each other or talk more often than we do currently. It’s easier to have your back, physically or emotionally, when I’m more proximate to your location.

"While I still think that’s a lovely idea, I’ve thought less about rushing to the 'left coast' after Erica came into your life. Aside from being smart and funny and sweet and a rollicking good time no matter the situation, your soon-to-be wife has an ability to calm and comfort you. I see a peace in you, less chaos, less drama. It’s something I’ve always wanted for you, and something I hoped you got from our relationship. I certainly take a great deal of comfort in knowing you have a true ride-or-die chick. And I don’t mind giving up my seat as President of the Zahir McGhee Fan Club to someone as wonderful as Erica.

"Love both of you so much."

0 notes