One the
treats of long Vegas trip is taking advantage of the $4 movie special at the
Orleans on senior day right after a fine half priced buffet or the $3 senior
movie at Sam’s Town. Back home I go less
and less to the movies because we have all these fine movies right in our
living room using Netflix streamed through our Roku without commercial
interruption. And the Spectrum theater,
the place for our sort of films is farther from home than it was when we lived
in Delmar.
The
experience is not equivalent to at the movies, however. At home the phone rings, or we walk stop the
film to use the bathroom or make popcorn.
In the movies we are just gone, absorbed into the world of the movie.
In none of
the hotels I stayed in this trip was there the Turner Classic Movie station
where a movie might be watched without commercial interruption.
So the
Orleans or Sam’s Town theaters are just delightful.
Wild Bill
and I have totally different interests in films, but I always insist that he
picks what he likes, and I get to see something that I normally would not
see. However, this time 42 was up at the
Orleans and it was a movie that fit easily into both our tastes for film. I love such stories and Wild Bill is absorbed
with baseball.
He loves the
game and he knows plenty about it, spending a good part of his time as a fan
following the players and the strategies and a good part of his retirement as a
Little League or girl’s softball coach. He knows a good bit of the history as well.
I am warming
to some interest in the sport after spending most of my life not paying much
attention to it, in spite of having a father who was a professional baseball
player long before I was born.
My father
played ball long before Jackie Robinson, but he was personally familiar with
how racial prejudice blocked the best players from playing in the major
leagues. When he played with the House
of David, the team barnstormed with the Kansas City Monarchs playing some of
the first night baseball in America in every state in the union and every
province in Canada. So he played with
Satchel Paige and Bullet Joe Rogan and many other players who he said were the
best in baseball and should have been allowed to play in the majors.
In fact,
dad’s photo with the Monarch team is in the Black baseball section of the
Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Pretty ironic
that he doesn’t make it into the majors but he gets in the Hall of Fame anyway.
Dad was only
five foot three and he was told by a scout that he played well enough for the
majors, but they just did not want to take anyone so short, a “tiny” catcher as
we recently found him called in a newspaper interview.
So he knew
about exclusion, seeing it in the baseball around him and feeling a small part
of it himself.
Dad stopped
playing in 1934. He did not talk much
about anything. Luckily I asked him some questions, and so I have some stories
about Grover Cleveland Alexander (who resented Black players) and Babe Didrikson
who toured with the House of David as a novelty woman pitcher.
But I did
not ask enough. Dad was not really a
baseball fan like Wild Bill either. It
had been more a job to him than a passion.
And he discouraged me from sports and encouraged me to get an education. I don’t think he understood that both are
possible.
I wish I
could have Wild Bill interview him. Bill
has both a passion for baseball and education.
The previews
of coming films were nothing like the film 42.
All of them looked like Star Wars
done again only at a faster pace and with more of the glory of war and the joy
of winning by killing the demonized enemy.
We humans do
love war.
We love
killing our enemies or sending in troops and cheering them on to victory.
In one film
clip a father and son form a team to go to war and end up fighting on Earth
with creatures in future time who had evolved to kill humans. As well as a
celebration in war, it is a celebration in dominating nature.
In another some warrior pilot manages to
squeeze his airship into a tiny space between mountains.
In others
there were huge explosions and people flying everywhere and somehow living, I
guess, with all their limbs intact. None
of them looked like the bombing victims looked in Boston.
I am sick of
all of it.
But even the
baseball is a modified version of war, a refined way in which humans can
compete against one another. However,
I’ll take 42 over all these violent movies.
In baseball the competition we love in war is played out in a much more
pleasant manner. And all the rest of the
movie celebrates non violence, peace, and the courage not to seek, “good old
fashioned revenge” as I also saw glorified in a preview clip.
And in
Boston as well, the contrast was there.
There was the marathon itself, competition that satisfies the human need
to be winning against others in a more civilized fashion. There was even the more advanced idea of
everyone winning in the sense that anyone finishing the Marathon was seen as a
winner and not just those first few to cross the line.
And then
there was the other human need I see in these movie clips, the need to have
some ideological reason to identify and blow up a demonized enemy.
I was
surprised in the movie 42 that there was very little gratuitous violence even
from racists. There is enough to reflect
some of the history, but the movie does not focus on the horror of racist
violence as much as the possibility for appealing to other human attributes
more praise worthy. This was a human
movie where the human character is complex and not just about killing.
Playing
video poker (another metaphorical reduction of the competitive human need to
win) in the D I heard the music of the
60’s and thought about how far we had come from the Age of Aquarius and the
hopes in my youth that we might finally evolve into a people who knew how to
cooperate, celebrate beauty, and love each other.
“Come on
people and smile on your brother.
Everybody get together now and love one another. Right Now!!”
Seems pretty
ancient philosophy in an era of drones and guns and jehad.
And “Come
senators, congressmen, please hear the call…don’t stand in the doorway, don’t
block up the hall seems totally out of date.” What really happens to “he who
has stalled” in modern America is that he gets reelected.
But this
movie, set back well before those Age of Aquarius times of my youth, develops
the idea of change through peaceful methods.
Gandhi would have approved this film.
I want to
ask my father this. In April of 1946 Jackie integrated baseball and in
October I was born, a surprise child to an old man and his late in life third
wife. It must have been some year. Tell
me about that, dad. Well, dad is long
gone. In November he would have turned
116 if there were not so many limitations on human life.
Mud was a
different sort of story. It was from a
kid’s point of view and reminded me of Twain and the characters in Huck
Finn. I liked it very much. There is
violence, but it is kept to a minimum.
The relationships and the movie commentary on them were rich and
complicated.
I bought a
large popcorn at the Sam’s Town movie and afterward had a refill for the room
that lasted a few days.
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