I’ve been in a sort of Edward Albee-induced haze since this weekend. After The Goat, or Who is Silvia? and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I want only intensity and tragedy. That last scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf of Liz mourning the death of her son has haunted me all week, her fractured reality my own. You don’t really see abstractions of reality accompanied by such intense feelings and articulated cathartic emoting. This is the play for me. The next night or so D, Megan, and I watched Butterfield 8, her other Oscar winning performance, and I was surprised not by her acting but by the heterosexual rush that I experienced. She has a beauty that appeals to something below my gaydar, deep into something primal and formerly child-producing. In her earlier films, she’s so intensely gorgeous that she doesn’t seem real, sculptural, like Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, but in Butterfield 8 she’s filled out, plus that lovely big conch of a hairdo, and is somehow realer. Maybe it’s the tension between young girl and grown woman. Whatever, she is the Earth Mother and we are all flops.
Tonight I watched Divorce, Italian Style, with Marcello Mastroianni. It’s a really clever and witty look at an alternative to divorce in a country that doesn’t allow it–push your wife into an affair and then shoot her. No really, it’s very funny. Marcello’s charm is precisely that of a silent film star, much conveyed with little exertion. He has a sex appeal that has always astounded me, like finding a clown sexy.