My Home Town, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

July 25, 2009 Martha Thomases 5 Comments

My father has a theory that the most interesting people come from small towns.  He bases this idea on his experience; astronauts and Walter Cronkite come from the Great Flyover areas.  Also, since he grew up in the Bronx, his idea of a small town is somewhat different than the average persons.  For example, Cronkite is from St. Joseph, MO, which contains at least tens of thousands of people. 

However, I think he’s on to something.  I think the most interesting people are those with whom you have the time to swap stories, and this is most likely to be in a small town, or a small city block, or a small bar, or a small living room.  If you have the time to have a conversation, and you’re genuinely curious about the person with whom you’re talking, then you have a good chance to get a great story. 

I didn’t always believe this.  In my pretentious youth, I thought the most interesting people were those who were clearly suffering existential angst, whose sensitive and tortured souls allowed them to experience life in painful and minute detail.  Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Holden Caulfield were my ideals, even though they were either dead or imaginary.  In fact, maybebecause they were dead or imaginary.  The absence of any actual possibility of physical contact meant I didn’t have to think about any gross mucus or sweat or odors. 

Living an actual life and meeting actual people changed my mind.  So did my work.  As a writer, I learned it was important to pay attention to actual people, not just legends of actual people, or fake people.  I learned this in a time-honored way – by imitating someone more famous and more skilled than myself.  For most of 1979, I worked for Norman Mailer on The Executioner’s Song.  I transcribed interviews with dozens of people, none of them famous. 

Every one was fascinating. 

And this was 30 years ago, when transcribing tapes involved a Rube Goldberg-type contraption with a bunch of wires, a pedal, and audiotape.  A ten-minute conversation would take me five hours to put on paper (and with a typewriter, not any kind of word-processing software). 

Let me say this again.  They were all fascinating.   

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of two recent movies (and one old one).  When the new version of The Taking of Pelham 123 was released, I was interested because not only do I enjoy watching Denzel Washington, John Tuturro, James Gandolfini and John Travolta, but I take the subway with some frequency.  WPIX ran the original before I had a chance to see the new one, and it was great.  Walter Matthau, Jerry Stiller, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam and lots of other great character actors showed how ordinary New Yorkers could do the most extraordinary things. 

The new version may have wanted to do that, but, for some reason, felt obligated to make the characters less ordinary.  They had to create a conflict for the Denzel Washington character, so he could be even more tormented.   

I found this offensive, both to New Yorkers and to Denzel.  The Matthau character had been mesmerizing.  You couldn’t take your eyes off him.  Denzel is better-looking.  He played an ordinary New York working stiff to great effect in Spike Lee’s Inside Man.  Why did a white filmmaker think they had to tart up his back story? 

This isn’t about race, not really.  I also went to see the extended cut of Watchmen, hoping I’d like it better.  Once again, they left out the best parts.  To me, part of the genius of Alan Moore in his (and Dave Gibbons’) book is the way he shows the effect of Dr. Manhattan and other superheroes on the lives of ordinary people. Whether he does this with scenes at the newsstand, or with Rorschach and the psychiatrist, or by making the reader infer the lives of the audience for The New Frontiersman and other media, Moore brings the dailyness of life to, well life. 

The movie completely ignores this.  When we see the people caught in the destruction at the end, there’s no reason to care about what happens to them. 

Life is too short and too potentially fun to ignore the importance of each person we get a chance to know.   More people might enjoy this if movie-makers could remember it, too. 

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, will try to remember this as she tries to wedge her way through the crowds at SDCC, It may keep her from using her knitting needles as weapons, but don’t count on it if you are wearing a backpack.