Wednesday, February 23
Gidget vs. Gonzo
Well, now that all the boys have honoured us with their tedious tributes to Hunter S. Thompson, can you spare a moment to consider someone actually worth mourning?
Sanda Dee, the original brown-eyed blonde, died the same day as that icky old man, so perhaps you missed the news, what with the sound of a million aging hipsters beating their rickety chests and weeping into their Chivas.
Thompson's contemporary, Dee personified the "good" early 60s, not the crappy late ones full of dirty stoners.
Here cynical realists will object: wasn't Sandra Dee's persona an elaborate fib? Didn't the perfect ponytail and makeup (and they were SO perfect -- oh, to be able to pull off that eyeliner!) and pert profile and easy smile conceal the sordid truth: That Gidget was a drunk who'd been molested as a child (still think that Grease song is funny?), then married a bald, abusive lounge singer?
Quick: push "play" on that stock footage of 50s suburbia -- we'll all snicker on cue, and "tutt" knowingly about the cesspool of incest, murder and Wonderbread we just know (thank you John Cheever, thank you Atomic Cafe) is lurking beneath the plastic pastel surface...
Yawn.
Those who prize "realism" over "artifice" can be like Holden Caufield, picking away at the scab of "phoniness". May I remind you that Holden Caufield was a teenage boy in a mental institution?
For some, the attraction of Douglas Sirk melodramas like Imitation of Life (a Sandra Dee vehicle, by the way) is not their latter-day morph into mid-to-high gay camp, and/or our ability to "read" them as seering commentaries on the evil hypocrisy of American society, cleverly disguised as retina-burning confections of saturated colour.
No, some of us prize these movies, and, by extension, the era they represent, without a hint of (you knew this was coming) irony. 1950s/60s melodrama primarily concerns the call of duty -- who listens, and who runs screaming from the sound. These films instruct us in the habits of duty and sacrifice, hard, real-life lessons made more palatable thanks to all the candy coated imagery.
In any case... Colby Cosh assures us that Thompson could never have written so much and so well if he'd been as stoned as he pretended to be. And who the hell really uses a cigarette holder and wears a deer stalker cap indoors and habitually "forgets" to show up at his own readings and sets off dynamite in restaurants?
He supposedly killed himself because... he dreaded the indignities of growing old. He rode with the Hell's Angels but was scared of Depends?
The conclusion is obvious: Hunter S. Thompson was, shall we say, the real fake in this accidental duo. His "authenticity" was just a pose. Reporters, young and old, who compulsively imitate him are poseurs squared.
Dee, on the other hand, got help, kept up appearances, died of natural causes. The normal, boring stuff of real life.
In the wake of real suffering, one woman fixes her hair, touches up her lipstick and lands a Fantasy Island gig. Faced with the unbearable prospect of being an intelligent, able bodied white man in the United States of America in the middle of the 20th century, one man dedicates himself to masturbatory small scale violence and irrresponsibility.
Sanda Dee is Hunter S. Thompson's superior because her artifice was grounded in the real.
Sanda Dee, the original brown-eyed blonde, died the same day as that icky old man, so perhaps you missed the news, what with the sound of a million aging hipsters beating their rickety chests and weeping into their Chivas.
Thompson's contemporary, Dee personified the "good" early 60s, not the crappy late ones full of dirty stoners.
Here cynical realists will object: wasn't Sandra Dee's persona an elaborate fib? Didn't the perfect ponytail and makeup (and they were SO perfect -- oh, to be able to pull off that eyeliner!) and pert profile and easy smile conceal the sordid truth: That Gidget was a drunk who'd been molested as a child (still think that Grease song is funny?), then married a bald, abusive lounge singer?
Quick: push "play" on that stock footage of 50s suburbia -- we'll all snicker on cue, and "tutt" knowingly about the cesspool of incest, murder and Wonderbread we just know (thank you John Cheever, thank you Atomic Cafe) is lurking beneath the plastic pastel surface...
Yawn.
Those who prize "realism" over "artifice" can be like Holden Caufield, picking away at the scab of "phoniness". May I remind you that Holden Caufield was a teenage boy in a mental institution?
For some, the attraction of Douglas Sirk melodramas like Imitation of Life (a Sandra Dee vehicle, by the way) is not their latter-day morph into mid-to-high gay camp, and/or our ability to "read" them as seering commentaries on the evil hypocrisy of American society, cleverly disguised as retina-burning confections of saturated colour.
No, some of us prize these movies, and, by extension, the era they represent, without a hint of (you knew this was coming) irony. 1950s/60s melodrama primarily concerns the call of duty -- who listens, and who runs screaming from the sound. These films instruct us in the habits of duty and sacrifice, hard, real-life lessons made more palatable thanks to all the candy coated imagery.
In any case... Colby Cosh assures us that Thompson could never have written so much and so well if he'd been as stoned as he pretended to be. And who the hell really uses a cigarette holder and wears a deer stalker cap indoors and habitually "forgets" to show up at his own readings and sets off dynamite in restaurants?
He supposedly killed himself because... he dreaded the indignities of growing old. He rode with the Hell's Angels but was scared of Depends?
The conclusion is obvious: Hunter S. Thompson was, shall we say, the real fake in this accidental duo. His "authenticity" was just a pose. Reporters, young and old, who compulsively imitate him are poseurs squared.
Dee, on the other hand, got help, kept up appearances, died of natural causes. The normal, boring stuff of real life.
In the wake of real suffering, one woman fixes her hair, touches up her lipstick and lands a Fantasy Island gig. Faced with the unbearable prospect of being an intelligent, able bodied white man in the United States of America in the middle of the 20th century, one man dedicates himself to masturbatory small scale violence and irrresponsibility.
Sanda Dee is Hunter S. Thompson's superior because her artifice was grounded in the real.
