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Leaving Las Vegas, Directed by Mike Figgis United Artists, October 27, 1995 (US) Screenplay: Mike Figgis, based on the novel by John O’Brien Starring: Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue Back to the dentist chair. No, not to get doped up on laughing gas to float down Leonard Cohen Lane (see Dear Heather). No, this time, it was something else. A different sensitivity to a different type of cold. “We’re turning into a Bubba society,” he said, surely poking an accusation in the direction of me, my paranoia, or maybe simply straight to the target: my ever-sensitive gums. “We frown upon anything remotely cultural.” We frown upon anything remotely similar to the pain in my nerve endings. Although I agreed with his sentiment, I wasn’t sure whether to take offense (or more to the point, just how much). He knew I wasn’t that keen on live theater (understatement). And this statement came after I said I do not tend to go to live theater. This had come up in previous discussions. I was especially hard on musicals, and not because of their stigma either. Hell, I had even liked a musical or two in my day. *Insert clip of me wide-eyed in a London theater, somehow captivated by one that so many others felt hit all the wrong notes: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love.) But in general? The experience of actors singing what they should be saying, and doing it live to the bizarre backdrop of some of the strangest choreography this side of West Side Story? Didn’t anyone else feel a bit awkward, here? *Insert clip of me in the audience at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s roller derby extravaganza, Starlight Express. Wait, was I some kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber groupie? I’m not sure that I ever explained to my dentist the exact source of my pain with live theater. Like my teeth and gums and cheeks and face, it was something broader, and far deeper than anything I could possibly pinpoint or explain in an instant. Furthermore, perhaps that no matter how justified I, Bubba Gump, felt in declaring my angst at sitting through the live theater experience, maybe I knew part of it was on me. Some social thing. Another demon exposed. Bottom line was I found it extremely difficult to get lost—really lost—in live theater like I could a film or book or even a TV show. *Insert clip of this ol’ Bubba on the couch, far gone in another episode of Lost. But with live theater? To ever feel the connection of being in a different world than the one beyond the audience (with their shifting and coughing and sneezing and even the silence) and what was happening on the stage itself with the actors (with their creaky floorboard sets that were somehow failing to transcend the buzz of anything more than just me and my thoughts). Depeche Mode was now in my head as I thought of myself sitting there in the Steppenwolf Theatre on a cold, January night. Let me show you the world in my eyes. My mind was everywhere but where it needed to be to make this work. Okay, maybe I was embarrassed by this affliction of mine. An aversion to anything cultural, if you must. So what. But I was not embarrassed about my passion for getting lost in other worlds of art. And yes, that even included live theater too, on rare occasions, real names’ll be proof (see The Iceman Cometh). But this new clip wasn’t coming from a live theater event. I’m thinking of a trip to Vegas where I met a real life Vegas whore and a stranger—a desperately lost soul—drinking himself to death, literally. How absurd it was to see a young man’s lights going out in a city where rivers of electricity flow on without end. But this trip changed me. Big ol’ me. The Bubba. There was something so sickeningly real in that snapshot of love. A chance meeting in the darkest of nights, the dingiest of intersections. It is amazing, just what can be buried in the shadow of a chance encounter. More than half the time, we can’t possibly even notice it. An encounter as fleeting as the reality of true love itself. Over in an instant. It felt so real—the light bulb moment I so rarely experienced with live theater. And this reality: that true love can only ever hope to be just that, over in an instant, was as nauseating as the morning after a bender. Sickening. A shock as sharp and deep as an attack of Trigeminal Neuralgia. Doc, you gotta do something for the pain. And that is the end. The rest is locked forever in my head. What happens in…. |
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