Pinned my button onto your blouse

[sovay]

I am having an appalling day, starting with sleep deprivation and centrally featuring a doctor's appointment I hauled myself dizzily and nauseatedly to only to discover that one of us wrote it down on the wrong day of the calendar. (I think it was them.) Have some links.

1. Courtesy of spatch: "the kaiju is also Jewish." I don't actually know John Baltisberger, but I hope Leo Rosten would have approved of this installment of Midnight Pals.

2. Courtesy of rushthatspeaks: "Hi my name is Lesbia Clodia Pulchra Metelli," featuring a surprisingly relatable punch line.

3. Courtesy of asakiyume: "Sci-fi publisher Clarkesworld halts pitches amid deluge of AI-generated stories." I am not feeling good about people these days and this sort of nonsense is definitely not helping.

I am trying to figure out if it is really true that I can have seen Rear Window (1954) for the first time in elementary school, following on Mathnet's "A View from the Rear Terrace" (1988). It's not unimaginable in that I was watching North by Northwest (1959) around the same time—it was my introduction to most of its cast, Cary Grant excepted—and according to my mother it would have been around the house on taped-off-the-television videocassette, like most of the older movies of my childhood. I am not usually wrong by decades about when I encountered books or movies, although sometimes I have no memory of first contact at all. What seems significant to me is the way that Rear Window still has the alien feel of something that registered on me with different colors and priorities from its adult language of cinema; I have not seen it so many times since that it has familiarized. Definitely saw Kate Monday laid up with a knee injury first, though.

Comments

[asakiyume]

The Clarkesworld story was on NPR yesterday :(

When you say different colors and priorities for Rear Window, what were the ones for child-you?

[sovay]

When you say different colors and priorities for Rear Window, what were the ones for child-you?

It never occurred to me as a child that James Stewart's Jeff could be wrong. He was the protagonist; if he said something was going on, something was going on. Rewatching as an adult, I can recognize that a major part of the fun and the tension of the film comes from the danger and ambiguity of whether Jeff really has detected a murderer across the courtyard of his two-room apartment in Greenwich Village or whether his boredom and imagination and a collision of personal and professional frustrations are working up an exciting story which is getting out of hand as more and more of the people in his life take it seriously and either way someone is going to get hurt because you can't have your girlfriend and your physical therapist start investigating a murder, real or invented, without repercussions. As a child, it was entirely about the terror and the unfairness of being disbelieved, especially about something as important and horrible as a murderer that happened where everyone could see, but no one—except one photojournalist, whose business was people-watching; the cinematic reflexivity of observing the lives of your neighbors like sitcoms through a telephoto lens also passed child-me by—was looking. Consequently my memory of the film is much higher-strung than the actual experience of rewatching it, where much of the point is how cheerfully and banally the life of the apartment courtyard is ticking along on this very hot summer in New York until all of a sudden a woman screams over her murdered dog like the myth of Kitty Genovese and all of Jeff's suspicions snap into dreadful plausibility where before they could be pushed off into the unknowable countries of the lives of the strangers next door. Hilariously in context of recent film interests, I had no distinct memories of the character played by Wendell Corey at all, even though he figures importantly in this plot: he's either the voice of reason or the voice of wrongheaded rationalizing, because he's the character—and he's a detective lieutenant of the NYPD, so his opinion means more than moral support—who holds out the longest on believing Jeff. As an adult, I can see what he contributes to the different layers of the story, the ways in which he shadows and foils for Jeff. As a child, I imagine he just looked to me like dumb authority not listening, all the more maddeningly because he's so friendly about it. I can see more about the lives of the neighbors, too, which to a child were more of the background color and from an adult perspective deliberately emphasize that Jeff's is just one of however many million stories in the naked city, just the one that we happen to be watching while all around him other people's stories go on far more completely than he can understand from his glimpses through their windows and vice versa. I had forgotten a lot of details, obviously, and not necessarily caught a lot of the humor or the sexual daring of Grace Kelly's Lisa, who strikes me now as an atypical, rather wonderful heroine for Hitchcock. I had remembered the disbelief. This time around, while I still wasn't able to share it, I could at least see where it had been fairly introduced.

[asakiyume]

This is wonderful and deserves to be seen by more people than will read through the comment thread. Maybe post as an entry? Because it's such a fair and respectful look at the difference between child-you as a viewer and adult-you: you're not disrespecting or scoffing at child-you's perceptions (of course you never would, but other people commenting on their childhood selves might), nor are you bemoaning your adult-you's perceptions for no longer being a child's (again: not something you do, but something other people do do). It's a beautiful laying out of how the movie can say different things to people at different ages.

[sovay]

It's a beautiful laying out of how the movie can say different things to people at different ages.

Thank you!

I will repost it.

[asakiyume]

💛💛💛