Wasted

[kdotdammit]

WASTED
pencil, pen, india ink on paper
What a fucking mess. I would call this a clustercuss of a drawing, created in completed depletion and exhaustion but fucking necessary for my survival. Yes I repeated the word “fucking” twice and three times if you include this mention in the opening two sentence of the free fall clustercuss of writing which will follow.

Basically for exactly four weeks, or maybe approximately exactly, my life in so many arenas has been turned on its head. Not just one area of my life, but like at least four significant areas have been thrown into complete chaos, not including emergency overnight evac out of Pima Canyon. So excuse me for being an unavailable and for being an unavailable social media-ite. It’s not that I’m not already, and have been for quite some time now, suffering from extreme internet surveillance paranoia, but in all honesty, I’m just wiped the fuck out. There’s that word again. Let’s say it one more time together . . . FUCK!

What pulled me through this past week was watching the complete 1956 GIANT in one night. I had never seen the whole thing. I can’t believe it.

I fucking love it. Texas melodrama packed to the gills with Sirk-Level explorations of class and race in the Lone Star State, which is like is own third country in the US. There’s the North. The South. And then Texas.

Go ahead trash the film for being cheesy and for what you think are bad aging make-up jobs on Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor, but 1) Maybe I’m really exhausted, but I thought the make-up was pretty good!; 2) How can you go wrong with a film with those three PLUS the added bonus of a very young Dennis Hopper; 3) The movie takes Texas, its oil and its borderland racism to task through the power of the biggest celebrities of the time. That’s all good!

Let me get back to Texas. I’m wiped. This drawing is called Wasted. It’s a very bad interpretation of poor Jet Rink (James Dean) who we so desperately want to be our hero early on in the film. He gives us so many reasons to want him to rise and shine rather than crash in a drunken haze through his own ludicrously narcissistic celebration of himself where he ends up lying in a heap on the floor cast in the dark haze of his own racism. I mean, he should have been a good guy! He was fucked over by the rich ranchers and had his chance to give them their comeuppance by inheriting a small piece of land from Rock Hudson’s odd dyke sister with whom Jet/Dean had an ambiguous relationship (of course). We want Dean/Jet to be a rise of the underdog over the privileged elite story. Damn we even want him to win over the rich rancher’s East Coast beauty of a wife - Liz Taylor. But, we just can’t sustain Jet as the film’s hero. The bad dog always needs to find a badder, or to be grammatically correct, more bad dog to beat up because that’s just how humanity generally works except for those who are enlightened to do better than beat down the dog more under than their own. Anyhow, Jet doesn’t rise in grace. He becomes obsessed with greed, power and vengeance, and displaces the unjust discrimination he experienced when he was young by, well, hating on Mexicans. So, even though he’s James Dean and we want so badly to cheer for him, he’s just an ugly wasted wreck by the end of the movie, an emblem of that filthy stinking Texan oil and how it makes everything it touches sticky, stinky, and repulsive and how the state of Texas oozes as much racial hatred as it does black goo. So boo hoo.

On the other hand, the film’s final message, which I would think was radical for 1956 is: Fuck oil! Let’s be ranchers! And also let’s have interracial marriages and fist fight for interracial rights! Well hell yeah. Now go fuck your Mexican wife and make some brown babies to bring into our rich white ranching family, dammit.

Go ahead, call the movie simplistic, but because it was such a star-studded block buster film packaged in the accessible form of the melodrama at the time of its release, it delivered its message of anti-oil racial tolerance all across America, and most importantly across Texas. It is my understanding that Texans in general weren’t particularly fond of the film in 1956.

Now let’s move to the future where:

1. We confirm James Dean was gay, bi, other, experimenting, anything but heteronormative. And he dies making the movie. So while we can hate on Jet, we can mourn on Dean at the same time.
2. Rock Hudson eventually came out of the closet and died of AIDS, a ravished shadow of the blustering cowboy of 1956.
3. Liz Taylor became champion of everyone gay, everyone dying of AIDS, everyone oddly other (e.g. Michael Jackson), and she was not shy about being honest about substance abuse. She managed to be both beautiful and a wreck and compassionate all in one! Go Liz!
4. Dennis Hopper turned into one of the biggest cult oddball pervert weirdo artists of the 20th century, and delivered one of the most tender love relationships with an inflatable doll in David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET long before LARS AND THE REAL GIRL was even conceived.
5. And all these amazing cinematic icons made this film together! Hurrah!

It’s interesting how relevant the subject matter remains today, even though our collective understanding of the main players has changed with history. Oh, and GIANT was filmed in the town of Marfa which would become a center for artists and freaks of all variety. Go figure.

So see, I drew a clustercuss drawing and gave you a clustercuss take on GIANT, but in doing so, I feel worlds better. I hope you do too.

Goodnight.