Such A State

Last night I went to see David Mamet's new film State and Main. I walked over to the Riverfront theater, which has the most comfortable seating of any theater in town. The place was nearly deserted-- only about ten people came to see the film. I sat dead-center, had the whole row to myself... and lost myself for two hours in a vivid, continuous dream.

What a great movie. Rebecca Pidgeon rules my world. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who annoyed me in Boogie Nights and The Talented Mr. Ripley performed wonderfully. But really, good acting in this case is just lagniappe-- Mamet's writing (and direction) makes this movie. I don't love all Mamet's films equally, but I do love them all to some extent. So complex! He's the best practitioner of the art. His films restore my faith in film making. He makes me want to learn how to write screenplays, he really does. I left the theater last night happy, smiling, thinking. How often does a movie make me do that? Not often. How often does a movie make me want to go home and write? Almost never. This one did.

My faith in Mamet is such that I'm even excited about seeing the Hannibal movie, since he wrote the screenplay. I had mixed feelings about the novel (which is appropriate, since I think it's a pretty mixed-up book), but Mamet can make it into something that darkly sparkles. I hope.

*******

I don't have recurring dreams, nor do I have serial dreams, but sometimes locations and characters re-appear. I often dream of living in a two-story glass-and-timber house in the middle of a bustling, modern town. My bitter, caustic landladly lives downstairs. She looks a bit like Kathy Bates, smokes a lot, and sneers (this is not my actual landlady, understand; just the one who owns the dream-house).

Last night I dreamed this (and the dialogue is rendered as accurately as possible; I wrote it down as soon as I woke up):

We were having an argument, my landlady and I, and got to talking about words and poetry. I said words were transformative, that they can remake the world. She, a more nuts-and-bolts, bottom-line-oriented person, disagreed.

She looked at me and said "You don't really believe that shit, do you?"

I was so angry I trembled. "Of course I do."

"That's just stupid."

"If you think it's stupid, you're an idiot!" I shouted.

"It's inadvisable to call your landlord an idiot."

"It's inadvisable to tell a poet that the nature of his work is shit."

She considered that and nodded. "Point."

"I mean, look at this country. The nation began as an idea, and a few men with a few words made it something real."

"Oh, a nation is just an idea, really. Words can't create anything subtantive."

"This house, then. It began as an idea, nothing but a notion, and the architect made a blueprint--"

"Pictures aren't words," she said. "You poets have nothing to do with real things, with washing cars or riding bikes--"

"That's one of the things poets do best! A good poet can capture a moment, an experience, so fully that it can be understood and believed-in by someone who has never, perhaps can never, actually experience it!"

Then I woke up. I don't normally have dreams like that, with coherent dialogues. Not that anything really remarkable or philosophy-shaking was said, but still. I wonder what's going on under the floorboards of my mind, that this scene drifted up, so continuous and whole?

*******

I'm reading William Spencer's Zod Wallop. Oh, man. I'm only about a quarter of the way into it, and it's already ranking up there with The Talisman and Someplace to Be Flying and Galilee on my list of books I truly adore. What a great novel. And from all the raves I've heard about it, it holds up all the way through and doesn't shred apart. How lovely. I don't want it to end! And yet I want to do nothing but read it all day.

So much good art in my life lately. I'm going to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, tonight with D. and it's supposed to be fabulous, too. When will this streak of good media end?

Probably when I go see Dracula 2000 sometime next week. Hmm.

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