Sunday, November 24, 2013

Desire

A Student in Expressions
I've been watching Vivien Leigh movies to get a full appreciation of her talents and to assuage my overwhelming loneliness. As a result, I have slightly changed my opinion on her rumored mental illness. I'm starting to think she actually sacrificed her life and reputation to delve into the character and relationships and drama of men and women...in real life...in order to have more experience to draw from when her character called for certain depth. I'm painfully aware of the costs to take ones art to another level. Most artists are content with pretending to act...drawing a line between their work and their life in order to maintain some kind of normalcy. A Hollywood mantra I heard more than once is, "The best acting isn't acting." Leigh seemed to decide that in order to really bring something new to the stage and screen she would need to dig deeper than usual into the heart of people and in order to do that she would have to break some rules. Eventually the lines became blurred and she couldn't or didn't want to return to normalcy. Such is the price of the intrepid explorer. Of course I will leave room in my theory for the possibility that she really was bat shit crazy and I'm merely being a foolish romantic...defending my lady's honor even after she is dead. Her acting mannerisms were developed on the stage, which explains her annunciation and professionalism, but her personality was definitely developed on her own time and at the cost of many broken hearts.* How else does one refine that kind of charm and dynamic charisma than by playing the field? I recall a woman cut from the same cloth as Scarlett O'Hara showing off my ring on her finger and lying to some lustful men in a Mexican cantina, "See? We're married."
"Married?" They asked.
"Of course," I replied. "Can't you tell by how miserable I am?"
And no one laughed.

Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.