Post 146 - August 4, 2020

Day 146…

For the first time in nearly five months, Michael and I went to the movies yesterday.

The Wellfleet Drive-In was playing the movie Jaws which couldn’t have been more perfect. Every other space was blocked off so that there was at least the width of one car between each vehicle. Masks were required at the concession stand but not around your car.

The last time I remember going to a drive-in movie was in 1971 when I was 9 years old. We were living in New Jersey in an orderly little development built in the 1950’s. My friend Solomon Yang lived about six or seven houses just up the street from us.

He and his family had moved into the neighborhood from Taiwan. It cannot have been easy for them. Solomon and his brother and sister were fairly fluent in English despite having strong accents, but his parents were less so. Solomon’s dad was an architectural engineer who was working on what would at that time become the tallest building in the world - the World Trade Center.

One weekend, Solomon and I were allowed to go into New York with his Dad and see the building. While I vividly remember this trip, I didn’t realize until now just how young we really were at the time.

While his Dad was working, Solomon took me into Chinatown for lunch. I had never been there before. We went to different places and had all of Solomon’s favorite foods. I wish I could remember where some of those places were and what we actually ate because it was one of the most incredible afternoons of eating, I have ever experienced. Solomon spoke Chinese with far greater ease than he spoke English and I was completely jealous of him.

We went back to the World Trade Center and Mr. Yang took us both up to the top. It was still under construction, so it wasn’t finished yet. Each of the floors radiated out from the central elevator banks. We got up to one of the top floors and when the elevator doors opened, we looked out across the plain cement floors to nothing - just open sky.  

There were no outer walls in place at all yet.

It was windy. Really windy.

Solomon and his Dad walked over far closer to the edge than I was willing to. I pretty much stayed resolutely next to the elevator bank holding on for dear life. According to Solomon, the view was amazing. I took his word for it. I wouldn’t see that view for myself until years later when the building was finished.

One night, Mrs. Yang took Solomon and I along with his brother and sister to see The Omega Man at a drive-in movie theatre.

The Omega Man was a movie starring Charlton Heston as a virologist named Dr. Robert Neville. Because of a vaccine he developed, he is the sole human survivor of an apocalyptic bio-chemical war. In its aftermath, the war has also left a few hundred hugely deformed albino homicidal maniacs. They only come out at night and they view Dr. Neville as the last symbol of the science that destroyed the world and left them in the state that they are in. During the night, they come out and try and kill him, but during the day, he has New York City completely to himself.

I used to fantasize about what I would do if I was the only person in New York. I don’t remember a lot about the movie as a whole, but I think I remember that he had taken a Van Gogh from a museum to put on the wall of his apartment. How I would decorate my apartment if I had everything in New York to choose from has taken up more of my daydreaming life than I should probably admit.

I thought about that movie all the time back in March and April during the height of the stay-at-home order. Standing in the middle of Times Square completely by myself was, in a way, an actual fulfillment of that apocalyptic fantasy.

I looked up the plot of this movie this morning as I am writing this, and I realize that there was a lot I’d forgotten. I am shocked at how many parallels there are with what we are all experiencing now.

Spoiler alert: There is another group of survivors. They are young and are not as susceptible to the virus as the older people.  They are not, however, immune and they will eventually contract the virus and either die or become homicidal albino mutants as well. Fancy a virus that kids can get but is far more lethal to older people.

There’s a character named Lisa played by Rosalind Cash that isn’t in the book that the movie was based on. The screenwriters added her in to the movie in an attempt to speak to the current events of the time. When the movie was made, the Black Power movement was in full force.

The Black Power movement had started out as a response to segregation.  It was a push to open black-owned businesses like bookstores, food cooperatives, schools, media companies and clinics. As time went on, however, impatience grew around how slowly the non-violent forms of protest championed by the Reverend Martin Luther King were in achieving an effect. Malcolm X and others demanded more immediate violent action to achieve their ends faster. When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, the movement exploded. It hit a peak in the early 1970’s at the same time The Omega Man was being made. Network, a movie made a couple of years later has a strong cynical Black Power subplot throughout its story as well.

The kiss between Charlton Heston and Rosalind Cash in The Omega Man was one of the first interracial kisses ever filmed in a mainstream movie.

By the 1980’s the Black Power movement had largely dissipated. A great deal of what those involved were trying to achieve remained undone. The current Black Lives Matter movement is a natural outgrowth of the Black Power movement a generation ago.

While some of The Omega Man has definitely stuck with me over the years, I will admit, though, that the most vivid memory I have of that night came afterwards. It was a double feature and that night the second movie was The Vanishing Point. It was kind of a drug-fueled road movie. Mrs. Yang was leery about letting us watch it, but we begged her, and she relented. It was rated R but I am not sure she was fully aware of what that meant. I remember nothing about it at all except that at some point a little way in there’s a scene where a woman is riding a motorcycle across the desert completely nude.

Poor Mrs. Yang couldn’t get us out of there fast enough.

There are a lot of contemporary echoes in Jaws as well. I can’t quite process the fact that that movie first came out 45 years ago.

Ex-New York cop moves to fictional Amity Island to become the local sheriff and live a quieter life. The movie was filmed on Martha’s Vineyard which is just off the coast of Cape Cod. It might as well have been filmed here in Provincetown.

A drunk young woman swims out at night and is killed by a shark. The sheriff wants to close the beaches, but the Mayor intervenes and says no. The July 4th weekend is approaching and it’s the island’s most lucrative time. Nobody KNOWS that she was killed by a shark, even though that’s what it looks like. The medical examiner says it was a shark, but the Mayor thinks it MIGHT have just been a boat’s propeller.

So, the beaches stay open. A boy on a raft is then bitten and killed in broad daylight in front of a crowded beach. A bounty is put on the shark and one is caught. Our heroes don’t think that it is big enough to be the same shark, but the Mayor insists that it is. He will not allow it to be opened up to see if the remains of the boy are inside it, insisting that it would be too grisly a spectacle. He stands firmly by his convictions that the problem is solved and he keeps the beaches open.

I’ll say no more, but it doesn’t end well.

There is no difference between what the fictional Mayor of Amity Island does and what the current real President of the United States is doing. In their drive to protect their economies, both flatly refuse to accept the scientific facts. In both cases, their communities suffer. Amity Island becomes the scene of many truly violent deaths and the United States has become an ever-expanding graveyard that threatens its long-term prosperity. In both of these scenarios, early decisive action would have hugely mitigated the severity to the disaster.

There is a new jaw-dropping interview with the President by Jonathan Swan of Axios that was filmed two days ago. In it, the President says so many things that are simply not true that it is hard to keep track of them all.

He claims that the US is handling the virus better than any other country.

He says that deaths are down.

He says we have it all under control.

He says that he didn’t go to Representative John Lewis’s funeral because John Lewis didn’t come to his inauguration. Did he admire the man? He says he didn’t know the man and repeats that Representative Lewis didn’t come to his inauguration.

I don’t see how anybody could watch this interview and not be deeply and sincerely concerned about how we are being led. Sadly, I do not think that any of his supporters will ever watch it. None of the events happening around him in the country seem to make an impression on him. Everything is fine and great.

Thinking about those two movies from close to a half a century ago with plots points that could be lifted right out of today’s headlines makes me wonder whether we are truly capable of change at all. The anger behind much of the Black Lives Matter movement is born out of that very frustration.

Why doesn’t anything ever change?

Why can’t people see the effects of the actions they are taking?

Why can’t the President see the facts that are laid out clearly right in front of him?

Before the movie of Jaws came out, I read the novel. I was about 13 or 14 years old. I liked young adult novels, but I also liked the fully adult ones. Around that same time, I remember writing a book report on Arthur Hailey’s air-disaster novel, Airport. I’m sure my teacher raised an eyebrow.

Peter Benchley’s novel of Jaws was terrifying.

We spent some of the summers that we weren’t in South Africa in Nag’s Head, North Carolina. The summer I read Jaws, that’s where we were. The water off the coast of North Carolina is always pretty rough. There is a lot of surf and the water gets so churned up that you can never see much of anything that is in it.

With some trepidation about sharks, I went out into the water with my Dad. We were bobbing along either ducking under waves or riding over their crests. I was on the lookout for sharks. As a joke, when I wasn’t looking, my Dad pinched my butt.

I never went in the water again that summer. In fact, I think that the next time I actually went in I was in my twenties. My poor Dad felt truly awful about scaring me so much. Neither of us ever forgot it.

Great White sharks are not nearly as uncommon off the coast of Cape Cod as they should be. We were on the beach yesterday and there are shark warning signs all over the place. There is even a “Severe Bleeding First Aid” kit posted to help deal with shark bites.

As we sat on the beach, there was a seal swimming out in the water not far from where we were. Seals are a favorite food of Great Whites, so we stayed happily up on the sand.

Maybe instead of Jaws last night, we should have waited until tomorrow and watched Shrek instead. Or better yet, just taken a walk on the beach under the clear full moon.

Still, it was great to watch a movie with a whole bunch of people and it was great to experience a drive-in again. We are likely to see more of them spring up around the country as this drags on. We had a great time so whatever lingering fear we may hold onto, it was worth it.

Is change really coming?

I hope so.

It’s long overdue.