|
|
12:16 pm - Thu 2/07/02 More embarrassing than any sexual fantasy, more embarrassing than any admission of personal frailty or moral weakness, is admitting that I still really wish I were...cool. Sexy. I still want to be a leading man. A hero. The other day, I got out my box of tapes, which I rarely play since I got a cd player, and popped in the soundtrack to "The Electric Horseman". It's not that good a movie, actually, but there's a scene in it that will tell you a lot, much to my embarrassment, about the world inside my head. If you haven't seen it, the movie stars Robert Redford as "Sonny Steele" a former rodeo champion who's seen better days. Far from his glory days as an eight-time national champ, he's now a corporate mascot/shill for a huge corporation's kiddie cereal, drinking himself into a stupor so he can forget what he used to be and dull the pain of what he's become. When the company he works for buys a former racehorse (ANOTHER corporate mascot), and Sonny sees how the horse is being confined, and doped up to make him more docile, it stirs something in him. At a big trade show where he and the horse--"Rising Star"--are supposed to appear, dressed up in neon lights and surrounded by dancing girls, Sonny rides off on the horse, with the intention of setting him free. Like I said before, the movie isn't really anything special--though it has a nice soundtrack, with a number of Willie Nelson songs--but the big chase scene in the movie really captured my imagination; At one point, to escape a roadblock--By now, Jane Fonda is along for the ride, as a reporter chasing the story--Sonny saddles up Rising Star, opens the trailer gate, and races off, with the cops giving chase. It's been over twenty years since I saw the movie in a theater, but I still remember how THRILLING that scene was to me. I wasn't as jaded a moviegoer as I might be now, so I wasn't sitting there saying, "Well, he HAS to get away, or else the movie's OVER...". I just responded to this image of a man doing something so RIGHT, in spite of all the forces marshalled against him. My stomach was churning, as I thought, "Oh my God, how can he get AWAY? But he HAS to get away...". And in my fantasies, I'm Sonny Steele. And I'm doing the right thing, in spite of all the forces marshalled against me. I'm on that horse, racing full out against a squad of cop cars. And I get away. I save the horse, and save myself in the process. I even get the girl. But there's no horse. No forces marshalled against me. No girl. That's not even the kind of thing I'm going to get to do in a movie.
0 comments so far 
|