The Devil's Avocado

Usually, if I cry at movies - basically, I just get a welling of tears and it doesn’t go much beyond that.  But it’s worth noting, at least, because I was certainly moved to the point of tears - where some others may have jumped fully into tears down the face, sniffling, snot dripping…all that fun stuff.

Now, this isn’t because I’m some macho man (if I were a real macho man, I probably wouldn’t experience even something close to tears; my stone hard heart would move me only to perhaps, say, cocking an eyebrow).  I’m no macho man.  I get the welling of tears a lot.  I’m a pussy.  The reason I don’t cry is because I really don’t want to…unless I have no other choice.  I want the tears to earn their presence, so I push back.

I tend to lose my strength in pushing back, though, when alcohol is involved.  Three times I cried for real during movies (CRIED cried - with the salty goo soaking into my cheeks, the deep but choppy anguished breaths) all involved alcohol:

• a) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - after a nice, drunken party at ISU the remaining revelers and I decided to watch this flick. Of course, I had seen it before many times…and that ended up being what did me in. So pleased was I with that beautiful little party sequence near the end of the thing (where McMurphy sneaks in the girls and the booze) that when I suddenly thought ahead to the awful happenings of the very near future in this story, I began to sob. Just THINKING about what was going to happen, well before it happened, made me sob. For twenty minutes, I sobbed. I sobbed Long Before the bad stuff, I continued sobbing Right Before - and then During and then After. It was a SobFest. I broke down. It felt good.
• b) Love Actually - I had been making fun of this movie for years, having seen bits and pieces of what I considered to be saccharine drool. Every girlfriend ever LOVED this movie, and I made fun of them ruthlessly for it. I got my comeuppance when, one night after a party I was the only remaining reveler, I put this movie in…drunk and alone at four in the morning. I cried like a little girl and I don’t know why. But that’s the only thing I remember from that movie. So there!
• c) Most recently, Milk…

I was deeply moved by Milk.  Deeply.  Ebert wrote this thing in his blog (his blog will win him the damn Nobel Prize some day, by the way, mark my words) about how he doesn’t really cry during sad moments in movies, but in moments about goodness.  He goes on to discuss the intense emotions you can feel from just watching people do good things.  He cites a whole bunch of stuff (like Oprah) in his essay, and now I’m citing him.  Because sometimes it’s great to have something you feel get put into words by someone else…

I am overwhelmed with emotion by watching people do good things.  And then, for some reason having to do with the weirdness of our bodies, a salty discharge wells in my eyes, causing my stupid sight to blur.

Harvey Milk at a later age in his life (around 40-ish) decided he wanted to do something good and big and grand before he died.  Basically, if you look at it simply, he just wanted to make life better for a group of people he thought weren’t getting what they deserved - a group he belonged to, incidentally.  He was brilliant at organizing said group - rallying, focusing, energizing…and always with intense positivity.

And he ended up doing something nobody had done before - he was the first gay man to be elected into public office.  It took some doing, and some failing, but he got there.  And when he got there, he went to work with the force of someone…I don’t know, of someone who maybe had an idea that their fate was right around the corner.  This dude WORKED.  You know?

Well, we all know because we’re alive now and we have his whole life for us to look at from beginning to end.  We do know that he was only in office for about a year before he was gunned down (along with the San Francisco fucking MAYOR, isn’t that crazy??) in his office, shot to death by a man who was his colleague, a fellow elected official, a troubled person who blamed his actions on Twinkies.

My own colleague Josh whittles down the performances in this movie of Sean Penn (as Milk) and Josh Brolin (as his assassin Dan White) to just “damn good impression(s)” - but that’s unfair.  Yes, there is some mimicry involved, some “monkey see, monkey do”, as far as voice and physicality work is concerned.  But that never takes away from the fact that these are real performances of fully-realized characters in a script.  Characters who have hopes or dreams or nightmares or despair.  Characters who desperately want to do something important in their lives.  And who can whisper these things to the people closest to them late late at night.  Or who can’t.

These performances are alive.

And when the end comes, when one man who has done so much good in such a short amount of time is murdered by another man who is profoundly disturbed by the things his victim has done, when thousands and thousands and thousands of people move through the streets with candles in sorrowful, prideful memoriam - I was deeply DEEPLY moved.  I cried.  A little.

It’s not a perfect movie, but a beautiful one.  Many biopics are hampered down by the stodgy formula supposed to be imposed.  But Gus Van Sant is far too interesting a director for that bullshit.  Yet I hear that the doc about Milk, The Times of Harvey Milk (which is actually cited with gratefulness near the top of this movie’s end credits), is supposed to be superior and utterly devastating.  I’ll watch that in a few months when I feel like crying again.

Now, okay, I’ve cried more times than for these three movies, I can assure you.  And times outside of movies, of course.  But these are the three I’ll mention here.  I don’t need to write you a fucking book, do I?

I think I may have cried a little during Titanic.