Sound and fury and hubbub
Hello, friends!
Felicia and I have been, like some of you, I think, watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. We have been delighted by Steve Martin this time around, mostly because everything he's doing seems very different from what he's done in previous seasons: A little less razor-sharp, a little more befuddled. I'm not accustomed to seeing Martin this way; even in his goofiest roles, he's always hard to see as anything but one of the smartest people in any room.
Every Thursday in our house is movie night. We take turns choosing the movie, and we don't complain about each others' choices. That often means a lot of horror movies; that's Felicia's default lane, and Squish has merged into that lane recently, too. I can get on board with horror here and there; last month I planned to choose my personal favorite scary movie, Guillermo del Toro's Spanish civil war film The Devil's Backbone...and then Felicia selected it the week before my turn came up. Most recently, Felicia had us all watch Ghost (you can make an argument that it's as much a horror movie as Die Hard is a Christmas film, don't you think? There are demons dragging people to hell, spirit mediums possessed by dead people, ghosts haunting subway cars, grisly deaths...), and Squish chose Devil.
I don't have that many horror movies in my pile of favorites, and the ones I do have are all tragically sad, so I went the other way: 1991's very strange L.A. Story, written and starring Steve Martin.
It is, hands-down, my favorite Steve Martin movie. Have you seen it? I don't think I've ever met anyone who has. Was it a flop when it came out? I didn't hear about it until years after the fact. But it's a wonderful movie, a romantic comedy with both a dark streak and a big, pure heart.
Here's the premise (and I'm absolutely going to spoil this movie, so if you haven't seen it and you want to, come back to this afterward): Martin is Harris K. Telemacher, a novelty meteorologist on an L.A. news show. One of the anchors notes, on-air, that she heard Harris has a Ph.D in arts and humanities; when Harris drops his wacky weatherman act and says, Oh, yes, I do, she says, Lot of good it did you. You see Harris's problem: He's a joke to everyone in his life, including his long-term girlfriend, who is sleeping with his agent behind his back. Harris is entirely bored with existence. He entertains himself by breaking the rules about roller skating in museums. He can't relate to the people around him. He narrates his life, slipping in faux Shakespeare quotes:
I was deeply unhappy, but I didn't know it, 'cause I was happy all the time. I have a favorite quote about L.A. by Shakespeare: 'This other Eden, demi-paradise, this precious stone set in the silver sea of this earth, this ground, this Los Angeles.'
Harris's world changes when, at a lunch party he has zero interest in attending, he meets Sara, a British journalist on assignment in L.A. Though they hardly speak at this lunch, he is captivated.
As far as I'm concerned, there are three mystical places in the world: The desert outside Santa Fe, the tree of life in the Arab emirates of Bahrain, and the restaurant at Sunset and Crescent, because that's where I first met her and touched her.
Sara interviews Harris about L.A. after seeing his weather shtick, and she tumbles into the Shakespearean river as well. They tour the city, wind up in a graveyard, where a gravedigger hands Harris the skull of a famous magician he's just unearthed.
Harris: I knew him. He was funny. He taught me magic.
Sara: A fellow of infinite jest...
Gravedigger: That's it.
Sara: He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.
Gravedigger: She knows, she's got it.
Sara: Where be your gibes now? Your merriment that would set the table on a roar?
Harris is stunned.
Harris: Ordinarily, I don't like to be around interesting people because it means I have to be interesting, too.
Sara: Are you saying I'm interesting?
All I'm saying is that when I'm around you I find myself showing off, which is the idiot's version of being interesting.
The movie is such a mashup of comedy styles. It's satire. It's slapstick. It's farce. It's intellectual. It's dumb. In the opening credits, a hot dog sails over the city. People fire guns on the freeways for sport. The rising sun has jet engine sound effects.
But it's also deeply romantic. Harris and Sara struggle to get together, until one night when, deep in conversation as they stroll around the city, they find themselves in some sort of surreal neon art exhibit. An Enya song plays as doves fly about. Harris and Sara are transformed into their child selves; the movie unabashedly buys into everything it's showing us about these two.
And then they fuck it all up. Sara talks about going back to England; Harris doesn't want her to do it.
Sara: And if I go?
Harris: All I know is, on the day your plane was to leave, if I had the power, I would turn the winds around. I would roll in the fog. I would bring in storms. I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn't work, so your plane couldn't take off.
Family movie night's only rule, really, is that whoever chooses the movie chooses the movie, and the rest of us are not jerks about the chosen movie. That said, Squish is still eleven, and while she laughed at quite a lot in this movie, she was mortified by the romantic themes. Lots of groaning and that sort of thing. But if you aren't eleven, I highly recommend giving this one a go (or a fresh watch, if you haven't seen it in thirty-two years).
Felicia turned to me during the movie and asked how old Martin was at the time it came out. I looked this info up. My age, I told her. He was forty-five. (Well, I'll be forty-five shortly.) Felicia then asked how old Sarah Jessica Parker was at the time (Parker plays Martin's temporary, incongruent love interest); I looked that up, too. Twenty-six.
Sara: Why didn't you tell me you had just broken up with someone?
Harris: How do you know I just broke up with someone?
Sara: Because when men just break up with someone, they always run around with someone much too young for them.
Harris: She's not so young. She'll be 27 in four years.
I just love this movie. Harris sums the whole thing up with this one bit of narration:
Sitting there at that moment I thought of something else Shakespeare said. He said, 'Hey, life is pretty stupid, with lots of hubbub to keep you busy but not really amounting to much.' Of course, I'm paraphrasing: 'Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'
Except I think he's wrong about all of it, and that's the point. Sure, he's an idiot; we all are. Sure, there's hubbub and stupidity; we've all got that, too. But somewhere in the midst of all that is some legitimate meaning. We're lucky if we find a glimmer of it; luckiest if we get to wallow in it.
Lately I'm wallowing like a dumb, happy pig, I guess is what I'm saying. Sound and fury and all that aside, there's something lovely about the way this year has opened the world up for me. I know I had something to do with how that played out, but instead I just feel kind of lucky. More than kind of. Touched by the gods, maybe.
And watching a movie like this one just wraps me up in that feeling.
So maybe give it a shot, yeah?
✏️Until next time,
Jg
Thanks for subscribing to Letters from Hill House! You're reading the free edition.
- The Edge of Sleep is out now! Get a copy here!
- If you'd like to also receive The Dark Age letters, here's how to do so
- If you're enjoying the newsletter and would like to buy me a coffee, here's how to do that
- My web site has more writing, and info about my books
- I'm back on Instagram, too
- If you just want to say hello, just click Reply, or email me
Note: This newsletter may contain affiliate links for which I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.