tonight’s dream
My wife and I work with an international espionage network of some sort. Agents of this network pass messages to each other coded within appraisals of Elvis Costello songs. Today it is incumbent upon me to write an analysis of “Veronica” whilst encoding whatever secret message I’m supposed to hide in said analysis.
(An aside: I have been thinking about writing an espionage thriller recently, but not about coding, although it certainly seems like my “message encoded in a song appraisal” sounds like a job for Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.)
As the dream begins I am finishing up my task when a detail about the song’s lyrics catches my attention, and I find myself writing a good deal more than I need to for purely “code” purposes, just because of the beauty and import of the song.
(For those of you unfamiliar with “Veronica,” it is a propulsive, energetic pop song [and one of Costello’s only true hits] about a silent, still, senile elderly woman in England who has a rich, full inner life of memories. She is in a nursing home surrounded by people who do not have a clue as to the colorful life she’s led — to them, she is opaque and lifeless.)
I call my wife into the room and play the song for her, pointing out the lyrical passage that has caught my attention. Listening to it again I am moved to tears. (Don’t go dashing for your copies of Spike to find the lyrics — upon awakening, I realize that the passage that I found so moving is one completely invented by me in dreamtime.)
It is time to deliver the message to our contact. We go to meet him at a large, crowded fruit market. While we are waiting for him, my wife remembers that we need grapes. I select some from a pile: they look accepable on top, but when I turn them over I find that the ones below are rotten.
Readers will note a number of differences between this dream and the others. Here, I have, indeed, contracted to a performance, but this is a private performance for my espionage network, not for a public audience. Also, there is no bizarre, surreal travel nightmare in this dream and the location is, in all respects, a normal fruit market.
Sudden Impact
left to right: Ronald Reagan, Sudden Impact, George W. Bush, Bring it On.
Please tell me I’m not the first person to notice this:
When Ronald Reagan wanted to talk tough, he lifted a line from a Clint Eastwood movie. When George W. Bush wanted to talk tough, he lifted the title of a cheerleading movie.
Makes perfect sense: Reagan (although an evil, lizard-faced moron) saw a kinship in Eastwood, a fellow conservative, cowboy and Last Good Man. And Bush was, literally, a cheerleader. I can actually imagine him watching Peyton Reed’s cheerleading drama (a wonderful movie in its own right) for the fifth time in the screening room at the White House, nodding his head sagely and thinking “Yes, this is how it really was.” And then, the light bulb goes off: this is the message he will bring to the terrorists. He sets his jaw, grits his teeth and speaks the words aloud: “Because I’m a cheerleader, dammit.”
UPDATE: It has come to my attention that there are people unfamiliar with the Reagan quote. When standing up to somebody or other (Gadaffi, the Russians, who knows) he invoked Sudden Impact‘s catchphrase, “Go ahead, make my day.” It was as obscene then as saying “bring it on” regarding international terrorism is now. Imho.
The script puts two protagonists on parallel tracks; unfortunately, we’re only interested in one of them, and the one we’re interested in isn’t Dirty Harry. Sondra Locke pursues and punishes the men who raped her and her sister while Harry beats up some people, causes an old man to have a heart attack, shoots some would-be robbers, gets shot at by some mobsters, retaliates, gets yelled at by his superiors, runs into some more bad guys, has to kill them, so on. Harry’s action is fulsome but without dramatic impact (sudden or otherwise). Fully half the movie passes before the two protagonists literally bump into each other (via the hoariest of cliches, the pet dog, no less) and it’s even longer before Harry has any idea who’s killing all the rapists. It’s strange to watch a Clint Eastwood movie and to keep thinking “yeah, yeah, Harry’s interesting, but where’s Sondra Locke?” but that’s what happens here; her character is given all the dramatic thrust in the picture. That shows both Eastwood’s generosity and weakness as a dramatist — his own character is given pointless busywork to do while his nominal antagonist runs off with the movie.