Entries in the Category "the age of innocence"
Golden Globes Recap
This will be shorter and less detailed than my usual next-day awards show extravaganza. I had family visiting this weekend, and both my mom and aunt joined me for the Globes viewing, so we were able to crack jokes and comment on the clothes in real time, which sort of took away some of the excitement of doing it here. What can I say? SO SORRY INTERNET. We still have the Oscars.
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Movie Reviews: The Boxer as Everyman
See my previous entry on Hoop Dreams, about how sports narratives, despite their inherent strength, are virtually lost on me, and this entry will all make a lot more sense.
It fascinates me, honestly, that two extremely iconic American movies are centered around boxing, which seems to me to be such a marginalized sport. You don’t see it on TV that often. You don’t see celebrities made of boxers the way you see celebrities made of football players, baseball players and basketball players. (With some exceptions, i.e., boxers I have heard of: Mike Tyson, Muhammed Ali, and the guy Russell Crowe played in Cinderella Man. That is all.)
Watching two boxing movies because the AFI made me was an interesting experience, then. As I watched and mused on how gross boxing is, I questioned why people (men mostly, probably) find the story of the boxer so universal. Part of it is primal, I’m sure: the urge to blot out the competition of another male of the species by pummeling him, injuring him, shaming him. Rocky in particular positioned the sport as being uniquely blue collar, a sport for working class schlubs, which seems appropriate for the 70s, which I always imagine was a very scrappy decade. Scorsese, with Raging Bull, seemed to find something very poetic about De Niro destroying himself in the ring while he unraveled outside of it. Hit him with a metaphorical punch in the street and then drive it home with a literal punch in the ring, basically. Again, narratively effective.
But I won’t explore that too much. For my own part, I find it hard to remove my own feminine experience from movie watching. That’s why you’ll never hear me say that Rocky or Raging Bull (or Saving Private Ryan, or Platoon) is my favorite movie; I’m going to name a movie with some incredible actress like Katharine Hepburn in it, that has themes that I can relate to intimately. That’s what makes a movie a favorite, as opposed to great. All critics agree on this, incidentally; the best movie in the world is not necessarily one’s favorite.
Raging Bull had, to put it bluntly, nothing to offer a woman. The culture of this movie was patriarchal Italian life, where women were for making sons, or to be hit when they said something disagreeable. Where when something important had to be discussed, it was demanded that they left the room. I respect Martin Scorsese as a director—and not just because he made the incredibly woman-friendly The Age of Innocence, but also for Goodfellas and The Departed, both of which I loved—but the environment that was so vividly portrayed in Raging Bull was rather offensive to me. There’s really no other way to put it. I’m glad that people and critics have connected with the movie as much as they have, that they find something universal in its message. It was utterly lost on me, I’m afraid.
On the other hand, I didn’t mind the experience of watching Rocky at all. The underdog story kind of got to me—the first time I saw him try to run up those steps, and he didn’t make it, I thought, “Oh, you’ll do it eventually! I’ve seen that.” Rocky’s fumbly little romance with plain Jane Adrian was really quite sweet.
The thing I did not like about the movie was that Stallone sold himself out to such an extent later. There’s a moment in Rocky, where Burgess Meredith the old trainer offers to coach Rocky since Rocky has been challenged by Apollo and suddenly has earning potential. Rocky shouts that the guy should have coached him when he was younger and could have made something of himself because now he’s all broken down. He’s approaching 30 and he’s not in top shape for the game anymore. It’s a poignant moment.
Until the sequels. Then he wins. He wins all the time. And by the fourth movie he’s pulling a damn bobsled and felling ancient trees. And then it’s thirty years later and he’s still fighting! Too bad Stallone didn’t have the guts to let the first Rocky speak for itself; he might’ve had a very different career if he’d made a different choice. But whatever, he didn’t consult me about it.
My favorite kind of boxer:
Every semester, like clockwork
For me, the academic semester is a continual cycle of motivation and energy, and despairing burnout. The problem seems to be nothing more than that 16 weeks is a long time to sustain the workload (to say nothing of the engagement required to sustain the workload) of grad school. (Or, I have some kind of severe mood disorder. Also quite possible.)
The most severe stage of burnout usually happens between weeks 10 and 12. This is not unrelated to the fact that most grad classes assign 2-3 major assignments (large-scale research projects, papers) over the course of the semester and midterm is usually when the first major project is due. When these projects are turned in, I rebound. My life becomes manageable again. Just a couple weeks ago, I was flying high. I created schedules meant to streamline the production of my final papers. Preparations were being made for summer—a change of houses, a summer job—and, a few snowy days notwithstanding, it’s been feeling like spring outside. The weeks of school were waning.
Yet, as of this weekend, I have reached the second wave of my despondency. Basically, I have no procrastination time left; my final papers must be begun. But they’re big projects; they involve tons of research and writing and idea-making. They’re hard. And the majority of the work is on the other side, the “not done yet” side.
In this mood, in the past, I’ve frequently blown off my academic work in favor of a TV marathon, or even a novel unrelated to my studies. In fact, I can reproduce the titles of a number of those Distraction Novels. Sophomore year, spring semester, there was The Age of Innocence during final exam week. Senior year, spring semester, I read The Nanny Diaries the same week I defended my senior thesis. Fall semester of last year, I put off final projects for a whole day to read The Catcher in the Rye. (That one…does not take very long to read.) This novel reading is a sort of deflection. I want to avoid thinking about the work I have left to do, and yet, I feel the need to accomplish something, like finishing a book.
The potential for distraction expands beyond my completion of necessary tasks. I’m also having trouble lately committing to (even the idea of) a field of study. It’s been a year since I’ve been allowed to study American lit (not counting some brief encounters with Faulkner last semester) and I keep having these basically laughable impulses to drastically change course and study weird things. I’ve been putting ridiculous suggestions on my summer to-be-read list all month, like Balzac, and “something about the Wars of the Roses.”
It’s times like this when I begin to question why I’m in school, and if I wouldn’t be better off just learning at my own pace, under my own direction. This is a legitimate question, and one it doesn’t hurt me to ask myself every now and then.
My usual answer to myself is this: “You had four years off from school. What did you accomplish then?” Point taken.