Waiting on the ghost of Tom Joad

1. Last night was almost a complete strikeout on the sleep front, so the only good part was sometime after seven o'clock when in among the very banal nightmares (old friends turned abusive, not being able to find my books), I dreamed about attending a ballet whose staging included giant puppets. The puppeteer—onstage, as in bunraku—was masked in papier-mâché, so that from the audience it was difficult to tell at first whether he was one of his own characters or pulling their strings. Afterward, removing the mask, which I could see now was an oversized caricature of himself, he asked for my name; he had heard me telling stories at a festival and wanted to talk about a show. How's that for transparent wish-fulfillment? I'm almost certain it was inspired by an exchange with yhlee about Fool's Fire (1992), which is really sad.

2. Today the sky is clean-lit and hazily cool and full of birdsong, but yesterday I had to brave the second coming of the deluge to meet up with lesser_celery in Boston. Neither of us drowned, which was some kind of victory over the elements; I still wish I could find my Brandeis umbrella, which I never used until I moved to New Haven. It was prone to shredding at the ribs, but it was the size of the Principality of Seborga. I almost suspect it of sneaking off to found its own micronation.

3. I think it has now been empirically proven that I can watch The Seventh Seal (1957) an indefinite leading toward infinite number of times. With last night's viewing with Viking Zen and Rob, I may have lost track.

4. I don't know if the same will hold true for John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but it was a treat to watch on a big screen at the Harvard Film Archive on Sunday. I had seen it before, but not so as to appreciate (if nothing else) the dust and dry light in its rendering of the Depression; its cinematographer was the irreplaceable Gregg Toland, taking his cues from Dorothea Lange, and despite conceding some scenes that couldn't be filmed under the Production Code, what Ford does show us feels remarkably like Steinbeck's prose, at once documentary and iconic. Like Lincoln, Tom Joad walks off the screen into the limitless spaces of history, the ghost of someone who never was and of nameless thousands who were, to haunt Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen and the middle-American earth. Also, I had forgotten how much I love John Carradine. His character is Tom's first companion on the road, an ex-preacher named Casy who looks like a holy fool, but is developing a political conscience long before anyone else in the story, Tom himself included: he is rail-thin and ragged and speaks in Carradine's distinct owlish oboe tones, so that he sounds more than a little fey—especially when he demonstrates how he used to holler with the Holy Spirit in him, in the days before he realized he couldn't call himself a man of God and sleep with every girl who fell into his arms in an ecstasy of tongues; which he did, a lot—but what he says is practical and humanist and clear. "Maybe there ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain't so nice, and that's all any man's got a right to say." Asked to say a few words over a grave, he does so, but they are nothing about heaven or requiem aeternam: "I don't know whether he was good or bad and it don't matter much . . . I wouldn't pray just for an old man that's dead, 'cause he's all right. If I was to pray, I'd pray for folks that's alive and don't know which way to turn." And he gives himself up for the Joads and is briefly the leader of a workers' strike (or at least identified as one by the bosses, "'cause I talk so much") and dies in a shallow river and I'm sure he has some kind of symbolic function in the novel, Christ of the Dust Bowl, as Rose of Sharon is Madonna with Child and Pietà, but he's already interesting without it: his lost faith in God has been transmuted into a passionate responsibility for humanity, all embodied by a man who looks as though a slap on the back would bring him down like a lightning-broken tree. I note, too, that the film is firmly on the side of his conversion. Casy is a better person as a kind of itinerant Zen union organizer than he ever was with a Bible in his hand. I don't want to say they don't make 'em like they used to, because of course they also made 'em like McCarthy and Martin Dies, but I think it's the most socialist movie I've seen from a Hollywood studio.

5. R.I.P., Peter Graves. Mission: Impossible was not a major piece of my childhood, but I'll watch The Night of the Hunter (1955) again anytime. And I think I have hans_the_bold to thank—I mean, blame—for Airplane! (1980)