The setting is West Texas in the 1950s. The movie, which came out in 1971, is based on Larry McMurtry's book of the same name, and it was filmed in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, about which I've written already. I can't remember if I saw the movie before I first visited Archer City, or if it happened the other way around, but I know that when I first saw it I felt very strongly that it had captured the place exactly. For Archer City is about an hour and a half south of Elgin, Oklahoma, where my father grew up and where Joey and I spent a substantial portion of our childhoods visiting grandparents and other relatives. Although they're in different states, the two towns are part of the same small world of oil fields, greasy cafes, and dusty, deserted main streets, and I remember feeling two things that first time: a) surprise, and a little pride, that someone had made a movie about this very small and otherwise unknown patch of country that I knew so well, and b) a thrill upon realizing that this was very nearly the exact place at the exact time of my father's childhood, and, although he would have been a little younger than the movie's main characters, I felt that it added a bit of color (even though the movie itself is black and white) to an era that I only knew from overheard stories and my own conjectures. (My father has since confirmed that the movie captures the place pretty exactly, right down to the car and uniform of the state trooper who pulls over two of the characters after they run away to Oklahoma to get married - I didn't ask how my father came to know so much about the vehicles and attire of the local constabulary.) Although we never talked about it in these terms, I'm pretty certain Joey's feelings about the movie were the same as my own: it is a movie about a place to which we both have strong, primordial connections, and it displays the soul of that place in a true and deeply moving way.
The opening shot establishes the mood of arid desolation, and I can confidently report that Archer City looks (and sounds) much the same today:
It is not a flattering portrait. The story centers on three teenage characters - Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacy (Cybill Shepherd, in her debut) - and their relationships with one another and with the people of the town. It's a small place without much going on - the eponymous picture show is just about the only source of entertainment, apart from the pool hall and the usual small-town diversions of alcohol and weird, unsatisfying sex, and toward the end of the movie the theater does, indeed, shut its doors. The townspeople are, on the whole, cynical and small-minded. The one major exception is Sam, known as The Lion and played by Ben Johnson, who runs the movie theater and the pool hall, and who, with his wisdom and quiet integrity, reminds me of my grandfather. Like Sam, Jack Doyle was a local fixture in his town, a former oil field roughneck (Jeff Bridges' character is also a roughneck) who ran the local filling station and was well known to the old timers who congregated each morning at the post office and the cafe. Also like Sam, Jack Doyle was tough, and he expected other people to be as hard-working, responsible, and uncomplaining as he was. I often try to hold people to the same standards to which Grandpa would have held them, and I am often disappointed.
This clip of Sam - the only good one I could find - conveys a little of that attitude, but there are other scenes in the movie that are better at that:
When Joey and I were children we normally spent about a week each summer and a few days before Christmas with our Elgin grandparents. Grandma died in 1988 - when I was ten and Joey was six - but Grandpa lived a lot longer, until we were both adults, or just about. My principal memory of Grandma is her standing at the end of the kitchen counter, with her back to the kitchen and the lights off, looking out the small window in the back door, smoking cigarettes. She'd just stand there, one arm crossed in front of her and the other sticking up off the counter, flicking ashes into her billowy yellow ashtray, silent and (I assume) thinking. I think she was a person for whom solitude was important, or so it seems to me now that I know she was something of an intellectual, a reader and a well-loved English teacher, in a town that probably didn't have too much of that sort of thing. Grandpa lived until 1999, and so I knew him better and in many different contexts beyond Elgin, but my main memory from those days is of going into town with him (they lived just a few streets away from the main street, but driving over there was still called "going into town") to check the post office and hang out either there or at the filling station (which now belonged to a younger guy, about our dad's age, named Philip) while Grandpa visited with his friends. I don't remember what they visited about - I probably wasn't paying much attention - but I think, apart from the usual gossip and breeze-shooting, there were actually lots of long silences spent smoking, spitting tobacco (Philip always smelled of sweet chewing tobacco), and staring at the walls and the floor.* Everywhere we went with Grandpa people made some variation on the same comment: "Looks like you got a little help today, Jack." Which was something I never understood, until I realized that it was meant as a joke (I was a very earnest child), and then I still didn't fully understand. They would also ask if we'd come down from "the city," which I think was a way of explaining to themselves and to us why we didn't look or act like the other kids in town. For instance, we didn't have the slightest idea what we were supposed to do in a filling station.
Every one of these memories is - was - a shared memory. Joey is always just a few feet away from me in these scenes, at the post office or the filling station or wherever, and these moments shaped him just as much as they've shaped me.
Other memories:
Clambering over the rocks atop Mt Scott, the tallest mountain in the Wichita Mountains, the top of which you could drive to along a long, spiraling road. Grandma waiting in the car and smoking a cigarette, Grandpa slouching somewhere outside with his cigar, silently watching to make sure neither of us fell and cracked our skulls.
Bouncing around the back of our grandparents' gigantic Mercury, the hot sun making our backs and legs and foreheads sweat, smelling the dirty sweetness of Grandpa's cigar as we drove along the bottom of the mountains looking for buffalo (we went to the Wichitas, the nation's oldest wildlife refuge, at least once on every visit to Elgin - usually searching for buffalo or longhorns or prairie dogs, occasionally driving to the top of Mt Scott, sometimes stopping for a gigantic burger at the restaurant/town of Meers, sometimes fishing, sometimes walking across a dam. It was always, always the highlight of our visits.).
Staring, uncomprehending, at the missiles and tanks of the Ft Sill Military Museum, another regular stop on our Elgin itineraries. My favorite part was getting to see Geronimo's cell. I don't know if Joey had a favorite part.
Traveling back roads while Grandpa, in order to make conversation as much as anything, explained to us the history and ownership of each piece of property we passed. We never really knew what to say besides, "Huh."
Driving, much too rapidly, back to Elgin from the tiny Catholic church in the tiny (non-Catholic) town of Apache after a Lent mass, excitedly catching glimpses of Christmas lights on faraway farmhouses and anticipating the cookies and fudge we'd be eating once we got back to the house.
The opening song of M*A*S*H*, which came on after the news on Channel 5. We didn't watch Channel 5 at home - we watched Channel 4 - and so we never saw M*A*S*H* unless we were with our grandparents. Even today, when I hear that song, I remember sitting cross-legged with Joey on our grandparents' couch, wearing matching feet-pajamas, watching Channel 5.
When we weren't watching TV in them, we would scoot across the carpet in those pajamas, letting the static electricity of the dry southwest Oklahoma air build up for a long, long time, until one of us touched the other and gave both of us a brief, painful shock (the more painful the better).
The thing about these visits, and the reason The Last Picture Show evokes them so clearly, is that there really was very, very little going on in Elgin most of the time, and the movie captures very well what it must be to grow up in a town like that: to be young and energetic but with nowhere to put all of your energy; to know everybody in town and for everyone to know your business; to want more than you can see but to lack the ability to articulate what it is that you want. I wouldn't say we were bored on those visits - we were very good at entertaining ourselves, taking over our grandparents' basement and filling it with stuffed animals (we loved the basement, frequently sleeping down there with only a very loud and probably very dangerous space heater to keep us warm in the winter), playing in the creaky little park at the end of the street, flipping through the green-and-white set of World Books from the 1960s, playing with the same red cast-iron pickup and teddy bears that our father and his siblings had played with - but there was definitely, always, a sense that this world was very different from our suburban home, where we had video games and cable television and friends, and that we needed to work much harder there to make our own fun.
This is not an indictment, either of our grandparents (who were loving and kind and strove, sweetly, to keep us amused) or of the world they inhabited. Indeed, The Last Picture Show has been so important to us precisely because it manages to preserve that world and to deepen our understanding of it. And yet the message of the movie is, in part, this: You are glad you didn't grow up here. Look how petty and frustrated the people are. Look how all the hope and sweetness in them gets blown away in the relentless winds.
The scene that establishes this most clearly happens toward the end, when Billy, a mute younger boy whom Sam cares for and Sonny treats like a brother, gets hit by a truck. I won't embed the video here (it's hits a little close to home), but you can find it easily enough on YouTube. Billy is simple - we never quite know what's wrong with him, but it's clear that something is - but he is good-natured and innocent, and he frequently stands in the middle of the street with a broom, sweeping away while the dust and tumbleweeds blow around him. After he gets hit, several townsmen men stand around, callously discussing Billy's idiocy and assuring the driver that it wasn't his fault. The driver says, "I'd still like to know what he was doin' luggin' that broom around this time of day," and Sonny, the movie's central character who's had a hell of a time over the last few months, rushes at them and says, "He was sweeping, you sons of bitches!" and carries Billy's body off the street. That's the moment you know Sonny has had it with this place - with its cruelty and intolerance, its lack of imagination - and you can see that he will eventually turn his back on it all, or try to rise above it, or try, somehow, to escape.
In my limited experience of this world - mediated as it was by a kind and loving family - I know that there are other stories to be told about this place, and I understand that the film is essentially a reflection of (and payback for) the alienation McMurtry felt, as a sensitive and bookish kid, from the people amongst whom he grew up. And yet the stories it tells are convincing ones, and I wonder, if I had grown up there myself, if I would have ended up feeling like Sonny (and McMurtry) about the place. I suppose the thing to do is to ask my father about it.
Watching The Last Picture Show this last time, what I was most interested in was the relationship between Sonny and Billy, who are not actually brothers but act as if they are (the actors, in fact, are brothers). Sonny looks after Billy, he flips his hat around on his head (so that the bill is backward) to make him smile, he protects him (not always successfully) from the teasing of the other kids, and he gets angry and sad when Billy dies, carrying him out of the road and weeping over him on a porch. And before all this, of course, Billy's face just lights up whenever Sonny enters the room. What Sonny has found - what they have both found - is something gentle and warm in a place that is hard and cold and windy. But Sonny has also absorbed some of Sam's integrity, some of his dignity, and so, in the end, you know he'll be okay without Billy, because he has found something noble in this barren place, and it has made him noble himself.
That's something that Joey and I also found in that place, and it is something that I am still looking for in other, similar, places.
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*This is country reticence, and the old men in the movie who play checkers in the pool hall and silently watch (and, it appears, silently judge) the antics of the young folks capture that attitude perfectly.
I cried. Lonewolf, Oklahoma. Visiting Uncle Harry and Aunt Mae in Hobart (a veritable metropolis compared to my mother's shabby dusty worn-down-to-a nub homestead) and drinking the best lemonade ever. Wandering through her vegetable garden, marveling that anything could thrive in that place. And later, visiting Uncle Paul and my two cousins, Danny and Wyatt - older and able to drive the back roads shooting at Farm to Market signs, a cold beer handy. ALWAYS handy. I always knew why my mother left at 16 for early entry into OSU (A & M in those days). She was too smart for her own good and too vulnerable to withstand the cruelties of foster parents taking in children for the extra $35 a month that 'act of kindness' brought. Along with free slave labor as she toiled in the cotton fields, toting sacks bigger and heavier than she could reasonably manage. Thank you for these posts Mark. I know they must be difficult to write but they bring a richness to our lives that would otherwise go unfilled. Much love and light, Donna Lynn
ReplyDeleteI know I've talked to you about this, and I talked to Joey about it too, but it's funny that my mother-in-law, who grew up w/ McMurtry (1 year her senior) in Archer City, has no affinity for this movie whatsoever. I do, of course, along w/ Hud (based on a McMurtry novel) for many of the same reasons. But the authenticity of it all is just too, well, "authentic" for her not-so-precious memories .... nonetheless, she and a few other Archer City alum ladies return there annually to the Lonesome Dove Bed and Breakfast, obviously feeling eternally, deeply connected to it all ... love it or hate it ... or both. When Joey was campaigning for Brad Carson that summer in those little towns around SW Okla., I thought how well-trained he was for having somewhat "growed up around them parts" ... love it or hate it .. or both. In a twisted way, I'm sure you're both far better people for all you experienced (and endured) in that beautifully down-to-earth part of Americana. Here's to "contrast" ... and brotherhood !!!
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