One of my favorite movies is one that very few people saw. It might have been in the theatres for a very short time and then went to VHS. Yes, that is how old the film is; it was made during the time of VHS. In the 1980s. To hear the plotline, one might think I was crazy to love this film. But, aside from having as its star, my long time favorite (see earlier blog entries on that subject) Peter O'Toole, there was something not only profound about the tale, but downright misty eyed producing. It's about a professor of the sciences at an unnamed bucolic campus who "hires" a graduate student, played by the then very young and very hunky Vincent Spano to be his research assistant as he grows his long dead wife in a test tube in a shack behind his house. No, really, I mean it, get it, watch it, and you will see that somehow it is a cohesive romantically philosophical and spiritually satisfying film, even if a tad complicated. It is complicated because the graduate student meets a girl and the professor meets a girl (Mariel Hemingway, who in her autobiography writes that the making of the film was a pleasure). Spano's girl nearly dies, but doesn't. O'Toole's girl is, way too young for him in years, but is the voice of reason and wisdom regarding the foolishness of trying to bring back the past, in the form of a regenerated wife. She is convinced that if only Dr. Wolper (the character O'Toole plays and the name she calls him even once she has fallen in love with him) lets go of his obsession in favor of the "big picture" of life and love that he otherwise espouses, he will find the happiness he has been trying to re-create. Says the Hemingway character, "You are not creating life here, you are creating death."
There is a scene in which the emotionally strained Spano asks O'Toole, demands of O'Toole, in the face of the possible loss of his new love (played by an also young, Virginia Madsen), "I'll take my big picture now.". He wants to know what the big picture is for him. For any of them.
The Big Picture. Birth to death? All that stuff in between? Speaking of the 80s, I was listening to a bunch of 1980s radio songs as I left the nursing residence where my elderly friend now resides. You know, One song I had never heard, or just didn't remember, came on, by Laura Branigan, called "How Can I Help You Say Goodbye." All the songs before put me in mind of my early days in California, when all I could think about was getting my life started, not merely preparing to get it started. I saw a long road ahead of me. The songs of the 80s were the songs of my young present. And as I heard them in my present of 2015, I was amazed at how short the road had become. But here is the thing about the day. Even as I sat with my friend amid the resident with their various levels of decrepitude of body eating their dinners in the activity room of the home, I realized that I had still felt enormous possibility. In a way I could not articulate but could only feel viscerally such that tears of recognition fell on the drive home, I was seeing the "Big Picture." A week or so ago I noticed a man sitting at the head of a table polishing off dinner, more capable physically than most of the residents, and given to a parade of Bob Hope like jokes he never repeats, get up, and say goodbye to the staff. They asked if he were going home. Home? "This must be home," I thought. But it turned out that this man's late wife had been a resident until she died last year. He continues to the home every day for dinner, breezing in via his SUV. He is 92. Yesterday, he brought in photos of his wife, and him, from around World War Two. He was a sailor. The same face, except then, with thick curly hair, and a youthful swagger and the beaming smile of love. And she, dark haired with the perfect eyebrows and fresh face. They were married 68 years. He is still in love. And I shared his past in his present. His past had become my present. And this present was alive.
I entertained my friend by interacting with the three cockatiels of the home, one of whom is clearly responsive to me. My past, my present, my friend's past, which I am seeing as I clean up her apartment and peek into a life before I knew her (simply in seeing photographs some I have brought to her), the past of A, once a ballerina, and W, who now can only clamor for food, and Fr. J, who was once the pastor of a parish, all of it was life affirming. It wasn't stuck in the past. It was part of something forward looking. Despite the pain. Despite the suffering. Or maybe in some odd way growing out of both of these.
There is the spiritual stuff that I think about more and more, too. All of it a quick glimpse of "The Big Picture." I was sad. I was happy. I was both at the same time. And it was all good. Even if at the end there is a goodbye. For now.
Or another way to look at it, as Laura Branigan wrote, and before her a bevy of philosophers, "Life's about changing; nothing ever stays the same."
Oh, and if you care to, watch "Creator".
http://www.amazon.com/Creator-Peter-OToole/dp/B000NPQ0II
