when we kiss it feels like a flying saucer landing
P. and I tend to watch movies from Netflix in themed series-- we've done a vampire series, a zombie series, a Woody Allen series, a 60s psychedelia series, etc. Recently we've been doing a Ziegfeld's Follies series, which has introduced us to the floppy tapdance stylings of Ray Bolger, best known as the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. So now we're doing a Wizard of Oz series. The other night, we watched a bunch of silent-film adaptations of the books-- not just the first one-- from the early, early days of filmmaking. They were occasionally hilarious, occasionally terrifying, frequently incomprehensible, but ultimately kind of boring. I don't remember any of their particular names, but you should never, ever attempt to watch the one that is actually directed by L. Frank Baum. It's like an hour long (whereas the others were all shorts) and makes NO SENSE, and not in that good way. But if you're into dudes in horse suits, those are the films for you.
I mention all this because last night we watched The Wiz, which was amazing and I highly recommend it. It's the all-black 1970s adaptation of the Wizard of Oz story, with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. In addition to having incredible trippy visual effects and great soul song-and-dance numbers, it actually has a much better, more coherent plot than the Judy Garland version. It also has really interesting and sophisticated interrogations of race, especially given the time period. One of the more interesting things about the way it's filmed, though, is that there are a whole lot of really wide-angle shots where the characters appear very small against the large, urban backdrops. Most of it is filmed on-location in New York-- by my calculations, Munchkin Land was in Queens, and Dorothy picked up the Scarecrow in Brooklyn and the Tin Man at Coney Island. Then they follow the yellow brick road over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Emerald City is the Twin Towers. We hadn't yet watched the featurette that confirmed that it was filmed on location, so when there was a huge, impressive dance number at the feet of the towers P. and I had a debate about whether it was really the towers or just a sound stage. "No," I insisted, "the proportions are too spot-on; those are really the towers and that is really the fountain that was between them."
I was, of course, correct. But seeing all those eye-level shots from the feet of the towers must have triggered something serious in me, because I went on to have a terrible, terrible 9/11 nightmare in which after the towers fell, there were other strikes in other cities and the country was entirely overrun by terrorists. (In fact I think they were Nazis and not Middle-Eastern people; it's interesting that even my unconscious is stridently politically correct.) It was weird-- I mean, I grew up in a place where you could see the New York skyline from every tall hill, but P. and I are also watching our way through News Radio, whose title sequence features the towers, and that's never had the same effect on me. It must be that the Emerald City sequence made me remember what it was like to actually be at World Trade Plaza, which I passed through pretty frequently as a teenager, and triggered the vertigo of realizing that I was never going to be there again. It was the same vertigo that I felt on that Tuesday morning at the idea of something so famously massive being destroyed by a few little airplanes. Buddhism teaches us that everything is impermanent-- but it's so, so difficult to understand what that really means.
I mention all this because last night we watched The Wiz, which was amazing and I highly recommend it. It's the all-black 1970s adaptation of the Wizard of Oz story, with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. In addition to having incredible trippy visual effects and great soul song-and-dance numbers, it actually has a much better, more coherent plot than the Judy Garland version. It also has really interesting and sophisticated interrogations of race, especially given the time period. One of the more interesting things about the way it's filmed, though, is that there are a whole lot of really wide-angle shots where the characters appear very small against the large, urban backdrops. Most of it is filmed on-location in New York-- by my calculations, Munchkin Land was in Queens, and Dorothy picked up the Scarecrow in Brooklyn and the Tin Man at Coney Island. Then they follow the yellow brick road over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Emerald City is the Twin Towers. We hadn't yet watched the featurette that confirmed that it was filmed on location, so when there was a huge, impressive dance number at the feet of the towers P. and I had a debate about whether it was really the towers or just a sound stage. "No," I insisted, "the proportions are too spot-on; those are really the towers and that is really the fountain that was between them."
I was, of course, correct. But seeing all those eye-level shots from the feet of the towers must have triggered something serious in me, because I went on to have a terrible, terrible 9/11 nightmare in which after the towers fell, there were other strikes in other cities and the country was entirely overrun by terrorists. (In fact I think they were Nazis and not Middle-Eastern people; it's interesting that even my unconscious is stridently politically correct.) It was weird-- I mean, I grew up in a place where you could see the New York skyline from every tall hill, but P. and I are also watching our way through News Radio, whose title sequence features the towers, and that's never had the same effect on me. It must be that the Emerald City sequence made me remember what it was like to actually be at World Trade Plaza, which I passed through pretty frequently as a teenager, and triggered the vertigo of realizing that I was never going to be there again. It was the same vertigo that I felt on that Tuesday morning at the idea of something so famously massive being destroyed by a few little airplanes. Buddhism teaches us that everything is impermanent-- but it's so, so difficult to understand what that really means.