The Movie Version

Perhaps it has always been thus. The mass audience which got through the Depression on the choreography of bar-room brawls and Busby Berkeley dancing their way out of the dark through the Dust Bowl and unemployment lines.

Didn’t everyone wear tuxedos and sing in the rain? Crooked politicians and con men were dead giveaways by their mustache alone or their corpulence or the fake watches up their sleeves.

If I told you that a scene in the Grapes of Wrath was filmed at the intersection of Sawtelle and National Boulevards or that Atlanta was burned down in Gone with the Wind on the NW corner of Culver and Overland, you wouldn’t want to know. We love our illusions.

It’s not a bad thing. Movies were our letters of transit. Our imaginations got fed and prepared us for the narrative poem we were to live. Our epic lives have made room for many stanzas. Somehow, most of us figured out what was actual from what was just satisfactually part of the myth. Dorothy knew she was not in Kansas anymore.

We lived through our Iliad called Vietnam. Ulysses came marching home and ten years later was homeless with a hole in his arm where all the money goes. (John Prine song, Sam Stone). The working class had the best songs but lost their way down Mean Streets to the slogans of the movie star in the Oval and the red tie with the bogus hair in the tent playing Elmer Gantry.

We left Atticus Finch behind for Tony Soprano and Vito Corleone’s Godfather made Gary Copper's sheriff in High Noon an offer he couldn't refuse. Power is the operative word. Where is Frank Capra to grab the MAGA minions by the collar and remind them why we fought WWII?