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 . . .)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}