Today we get to go to the movies! The passage begins with an interruption: "Just one moment. A pinch in time of the ideal, musketeers!" This "pinch in time" has us taking a break from the tale of the Cad's encounter with HCE and brings us in a (seemingly) totally different direction. Joyce's book predated The Mickey Mouse Club, but I feel like he might have foresaw the musketeer-mouseketeer connection. Anyway, sometimes when I'm reading this book, I feel like Annette Funicello. (Whatever that means.)
The first paragraph of this relatively straightforward passage continues with the seating of the moviegoers and the film's opening fanfare. The narrator tells us that the leg of "ordinary man" (both the moviegoers and us) is "getting musclebound from being too pulled." We've been getting bamboozled, but, the narrator tells us, the actor Noah Beery was able to burn fat fast, so why not us?
We may be balding old men, but there's still ways to keep up appearances. A prime example of someone who's able to thrive in his old age is the hero of the film, a grandfather with an eye for young women. He "calls on his skirt" and makes elaborate vows of love to her. But this skirt is pretty slick. She wants cash from the old man so she can buy a nice, new wardrobe and run off with another man. She thinks the old man's a bit crazy, but he's actually pretty slick himself. He's secretly got another affair in waiting, and while he's got the hots for woman #1, he's perfectly fine with canoodling with woman #2. The story ends with a vision of all three finding their happiness, "afloat in a dreamlifeboat, hugging two by two." I read this as Noah's Ark turned into The Love Boat, with the old man happy with his second flame and the first flame happy with the younger man she wooed with the old man's money. The film ends: "Finny."
The final paragraph of today's passage provides what Campbell and Robinson refer to A Skeleton Key as the moral of the story: There's no use in really talking about these crazy love affairs because this type of stuff is happening all the time all over the world. The narrator also points to a parallel between the film's characters and HCE ("the fender") and the Cad ("the bottle at the gate"). HCE's the old man lusting after two women, and the Cad's the interloper.
Before we leave the theater, we get two final messages on the screen. The first alerts us to an eventual sequel to the film: "To be continued." The second gives us the name of the studio that produced the film: "Federals' Uniteds' Transports' Unions' for Exultations' of Triumphants' Ecstasies." In his Annotations, McHugh explains that the studio's initials form an acrostic for a certain colorful Latin word: F-U-T-U-E-T-E." For those of you who (like me) didn't get this far in your Latin, Joyce is gleefully ending this section on a "high" note. "Futuete" is Latin for "fuck." So think of this as a high art foreshadowing of the Britney Spears song "If You Seek Amy."
And I'll end this post on a "high" note of my own. I particularly enjoyed the rhythm of the last paragraph in this passage, so here's a video of me reading (read: flailing through) the paragraph. Enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment