Sunrise With Schubert: March 3, 2018

Ever notice how your perspective on things changes as the years go by? Well trust me, it will, unless you are Keith Richardson. Age provides us different sets of eyes.

Take stage plays for example. When I was a teenager and read, then saw performed for the first time, Romeo and Juliet, I went along with the conventional wisdom that it was a love-based tragedy of almost cosmic proportions, a real weeper.

Decades later, after multiple readings and viewings, including a film version with some steamy sex scenes, my perspective has changed. I now go along with the opinion I once read that Shakespeare, himself unlucky in love, had something else in mind when he wrote the play. He apparently, to me at least, intended it as a dark, dark, comedy featuring the two stupidest teenagers ever to prance and bumble their way through the annals of dramatic history.

Read it again for yourself.

“Perspective paradigm,” as I call this phenomenon, is also true in the reading of novels, but more so in films. As I viewed The Big Chill over the years, I identified first with one, then another, of the former college roommates depicted. Now, though, I’m beginning to find more empathy with the husband who tagged along and was intended to portray a despicable character. Go figure, but he now seems to me to be the only admirable character in the film.

And of course, on first viewing The Graduate, I, like many of my generation, viewed the Dustin Hoffman character as cool beyond words, a sophisticated and cinematic version of Holden Caufield (with whom I once felt a strong affinity but now view as the character in American literature most likely to open fire on a crowd using an assault rifle).

On my last viewing of The Graduate, as I watched the iconic final scene, my thought was “That gal just ran off with the sorriest summbitch in California. She’s gonna rue this day like Custer rued chasing Crazy Horse.”

Lately though, I’ve had a film on my mind by a man who, although now fallen into disgrace for his personal habits, still produced some interesting work. I’m thinking of the film Bananas, by Woody, “I like ‘em young” Allen.

If you remember, the film features a neurotic spurned lover named Fielding Mellish who leaves Manhattan and involves himself in a revolution in a fictional Latin American country. When the revolution is successful, the Castro-style leader goes mad. Oh, I actually wouldn’t call it mad, more like bat-shit crazy. For example, one of his first orders is, “All citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now 16.”

Sound familiar? I’m not talking about the underwear, I’m talking about a national leader wielding almost unlimited power who, by any standard that might be applied, now gone "to live among the Little People.” And such a premise is getting un-funnier with every day that passes, at least from my perspective.

Even the children
are starting to notice.