Gotham Note:
I Can Tell
23 February 2015

How nice it is, to wake up without any shards of cold-syrup hangover lodged lingeringly in my brain. I judged, before going to bed, that I should be able to breathe through the night without the aid of turquoise tonic, and, for the first night in four, I fell back on the regular pill. I was asleep soon enough — relative to the time of swallowing it, that is. It was nonetheless awfully late.

People don’t believe us when we say that we don’t watch television — except for the Academy Awards, but it’s true. (Although I do mean to watch more TV5 in future, surely that won’t count as watching television until my fluency in French is complete?) It was terribly true in this year’s case. I had gone nowhere near the new cable setup since it was installed one night in November. As a good housekeeper, I should have made sure that I knew how to work it before the Oscars rolled around, preferably a visit from Tech God JM. But there were always plenty of other things to worry about, and, besides, I didn’t think I was interested in seeing this year’s show. I hadn’t been going to the movies very often, and there wasn’t anybody that I was keen to see win. (Or so I thought.) So I waited until five o’clock, yesterday afternoon, to see what would happen when I turned things on.

At first, not much. No signal, said the screen. After a bit of scrambling, I learned the the “Input” is not what it was upstairs, because our signal has been upgraded to HD. Having got a picture, however, I couldn’t get sound. Eventually, I turned the screen around to check its inputs. They seemed to be fine. As I was putting the screen back in place, it slipped out of my hands and dropped onto its supports, shutting off in the process. Great, I thought; now I’ve broken it. But when I turned it back on, the sound came on with it. You tell me.

I found WABC, adjusted the volume, and wondered what to do next. I didn’t dare shut anything off, now that I had it just the way I wanted it. So I muted the sound. Every now and then, during the next three hours, I would drift into the living room to undo the mute, and be relieved when sound came up to match the picture. Then I would mute it again. Shortly after ten, in the middle of the Academy Awards presentations, a warning appeared on the screen: the cable box would go into power save mode in one minute, if I did not “press any button.” I found the remote, which of course my failure to touch in the past five hours had triggered this warning, and pressed a button. The box disappeared.

So we watched the Oscars after all. I was thrilled when Alexandre Desplat won, for The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Two of his scores were nominated.) Desplat is one of the great film score writers, and I’ve been noticing him ever since De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005). He writes powerfully synesthetic music, capturing now the nervously ironic grandeur of The Queen, now the reasonable, headachy paranoia of The Ghost Writer. Not since the late, great Jerry Goldsmith has there been such a consistent producer of knockout scores.

When Scarlett Johansson showed up and began chirping about The Sound of Music, I could sort of tell what was going to happen. She looked much too pleased, too excited merely to be announcing a musical number. And, when this number began, I somehow knew that Lady Gaga was not going to inject transgression of any kind into her medley of airs from The Sound of Music. (And that this would be the transgression.) I knew, in short, that Julie Andrews was going to show up. Fifty years ago, said Scarlett, said Julie. Sixty — said I. And in fact it’s Sixty-One: The Broadway production of The Boy Friend opened in September, 1954, starring the then-unknown Miss Andrews. That’s how long Julie Andrews has been working.

No, I wasn’t there. But I could have been at the premiere, in March, 1965, of the film version of The Sound of Music.

I was supposed to go. My father, who had just joined the board of directors of Twentieth Century Fox, was given four tickets to this gala, reserved-seating event. If my mother wasn’t beside herself with excitement, she was close. My sister, I seem to remember, was wearing the kind of party dress that she might have liked at the age of twelve, and I remember it this way not because I paid a lot of attention to my sister’s outfits but because it tipped me off that something infantilizing was going on. That wouldn’t have been my word at the time, of course. The word would have been wholesome, for that in fact was the word that people used in the Sixties when they wanted to coax youngsters into infantilizing positions. I had seen The Sound of Music on Broadway, and quite liked some of the songs, but there was no denying the musical’s overall wholesomeness. I put my foot down and refused to go.

Quel tohu-bohu! The uproar couldn’t have lasted very long, though, because my parents had to bundle my sister into the car and drive into the city and get to the Rivoli Theater on time. And off they went, no doubt relieved not to be carting me along with them. I don’t know why I was at home at the time, actually, because this would have been in the middle of my last semester at Blair. Except that we had trimesters at Blair, and this might have been the break between the second and the third. My parents were no doubt congratulating themselves — as I was correspondingly grateful — for having shipped me off to boarding school. As they took their seats in the movie palace, were they afraid that I would burn the house down or blow the house up? Probably not. For I had found myself at Blair. I am sure that my refusal to go to the premiere was accompanied by an articulate, if tedious, dismissal of The Sound of Music as wholesome dreck — although dreck would not have been in my vocabulary at the time, either.

To this day, I have never seen that movie. I can’t say that it has been a matter of principle. My revolt at the premiere was just an early instance of my ability to avoid experiences that I won’t like to have. People say, how can you tell you won’t like something if you haven’t given it a try? I can’t explain, but I can certainly tell. The clips from The Sound of Music that were shown last night made me gasp, the film was so awful. No wonder audiences deal with it by treating it like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The show ended at some time past midnight. This meant, of course, that I wouldn’t wind down enough to be ready for bed until some time after two; and it was twenty past that hour when I remembered to take my pill. As usual, it did what it was supposed to do without my feeling its onset. But I did catch out what I had long suspected and now knew to be one of its ancillary effects: I was aware that it was calming my bladder. And that was more or less the last thing I was aware of.