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And I don't know what's good for me
Last night I taped My Fair Lady (1964) off TCM, and tonight my mother and I watched it for the first time in over ten years.* I am very fond of Shaw in almost any incarnation, but one of the points I particularly love about the musical (and not the play, although I have not yet been able to check the 1938 film version for a missing link) is the twist that the source material acquires, as the myth of Pygmalion doubles back on itself to bite Henry Higgins in the ass. He thinks he's sculpting a duchess out of a squashed cabbage leaf. What he doesn't realize is that the same process has started to chip him into a reasonable facsimile of a human being. I was serenely independent and content before we met! Surely I could always be that way again—and yet . . . And it is this aspect that interests me far more than whether we are meant to interpret the ending as a tentative romance. More on this, perhaps, when I am not so direly sleepy.
The fact that Peter S. Beagle has a Nebula really makes me happy.
*I own and regularly listen to the original Broadway cast recording, and on my shelf are a published libretto and several editions of Pygmalion, but it's been established that I cannot have seen the film any later than ninth grade and probably my mother introduced me to it a year or so earlier. Most of the movies I saw until late high school and early college followed this pattern: one or both of my parents would suddenly look up in the middle of a conversation and say, "You haven't seen—?" and about two days later, we'd rent it. I suspect I saw some very odd films that way at an impressionable age. (Like I would have turned out normal otherwise . . .)
The fact that Peter S. Beagle has a Nebula really makes me happy.
*I own and regularly listen to the original Broadway cast recording, and on my shelf are a published libretto and several editions of Pygmalion, but it's been established that I cannot have seen the film any later than ninth grade and probably my mother introduced me to it a year or so earlier. Most of the movies I saw until late high school and early college followed this pattern: one or both of my parents would suddenly look up in the middle of a conversation and say, "You haven't seen—?" and about two days later, we'd rent it. I suspect I saw some very odd films that way at an impressionable age. (Like I would have turned out normal otherwise . . .)
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"Murder you say? What a fascinating development. Watson call Mrs. Hudson, I shall need a new supply of tobacco and a hard boiled egg immediately!"
*snerk*
(You saw
My Fair Lady was the first movie in which I saw either Audrey Hepburn or Jeremy Brett, and it's only in retrospect that I've realized how weird that is.
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Yeah, and I want in on that Dorian Gray as well.
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If I happened to be in New Haven on Wednesday or Thursday, would you be interested in trying to find and watch it?