• Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart

  • Jun 13 2024
  • Duración: 23 m
  • Podcast

Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart Por arte de portada

Tough Guys Are Boring Unless They're Being Taken Apart

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  • My kids, wife, and I spent a recent week in Philadelphia and New York City, seeing family, seeing friends, making new friends, walking on the High Line, going to a show, and doing gymnastics in Central Park. We did other things, too, and we had a great time. I was not the one who did the gymnastics.What I can I say about New York City that hasn’t already been said? Absolutely nothing. That’s what. But what is new is a short story that was published just the other day at Bull magazine. Beware: it is, like other things I’ve published recently, highly sexual. Why have I been writing so much about sex? The answer is that I haven’t. It was in 2020 and 2021 that I wrote a lot about sex, and I think it’s because thanks to COVID I wasn’t around other people anymore. Like, not at all. I was with my family, but everyone else was inaccessible, because I didn’t want to get sick or make others sick. For the longest time, like so many people did, I felt the absence of nearly everyone on planet Earth, and my isolation expressed itself in this unlikely, weird antieroticism. I wrote about sex and how awful it can be, even when everyone involved is at least having an okay time. I was not the only one. I recall another writer on social media wondering publicly why everything she wrote at that time had turned abruptly sexual. She blamed the pandemic. I think she was on to something, and I don’t think it was just the two of us. Anyway. It’s only now that my antierotic stories are getting published. That’s how it is when you’re a writer. You write something, and unless you want to publish it yourself you have to wait sometimes a long time for anyone to see it. It’s not my fault. I don’t make the rules. I don’t even know how to make lasagna.A Tale of Two Adaptations of the Novel The Hunter by Donald E. WestlakeI have not read The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, but I’ve recently watched its two film adaptations. Or, rather, I watched the whole of one of them, and the first half of the other, which I saw before, once, a long time ago.I watched these movies the way their creators intended: in increments of anywhere from thirty seconds to twenty minutes, over the course of seven to ten days, interrupted every time by the pressing need to go to bed so that obligations can be met the next day, or by a kid who wants to watch something else on the TV on which I have been viewing the film. I’m not complaining. It’s okay that I don’t get to watch whole things in one sitting. It’s a privilege to be one member of a household, to have demands placed on me by a whole in which I am one part. It can be vexing, but in this season of my life it’s where happiness comes from. The first of the two adaptations I watched was Point Blank, directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin.As the poster for the film indicates, Lee Marvin plays a human head that has lost its body but grown a hand and bought a gun, so that it can talk to people and shoot bullets at them. Lee Marvin’s head is out for revenge, and for two hours it rolls around the city of Los Angeles, screaming about how great it was to have a body and how much he misses his arms and legs.I’m just kidding, of course—haha!—but not about the revenge. The story of the film is this: Walker, a criminal, is convinced by a friend and fellow criminal to participate in a low-stakes heist. But it turns out the stakes are higher than he was led to believe, and he gets double-crossed by his partner in crime and his own wife, who has fallen for the partner in crime. They shoot him and leave him for dead—but you’d better believe he’s not dead. He returns to the city, having convalesced, with all of his arms and legs, plus his torso and stuff, and gets to work.Here is one of the weirder parts of the movie, in which Walker has returned from his supposed death and tracks down his wife, intending to murder the man who betrayed him, who he has reason to believe is living with her: If you don’t feel like committing the minute or so to watching it, the scene at first consists of Lee Marvin walking through a cavernous hallway as his footsteps echo. The footsteps persist as we see his wife going about her day, and we see him driving around the city in search of her. The footsteps continue unnervingly through this montage until at last his wife enters her apartment and he bursts in behind her. He storms into the bedroom, where he empties his pistol into one side of the bed, which has no one in it. We can assume that it’s the side of the bed where he would be sleeping, were they still together. And so is he blasting away at the absence of his rival, or at the absence of himself? Whose blood is he really thirsting for? I watched that scene and couldn’t believe it. It’s a bizarre series of images and sounds. It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel like it’s good to watch a movie from time to time. It’s not long after that scene that the film ...
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