From the P&PC Archive: Assassins & Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry

A few weeks ago, P&PC featured the poetry of Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine which co-stars John Cusack as one of three adult losers who get magically transported back to their high school days of 1986 and thus get an existential do-over. There's a great scene in the middle of the movie when Cusack is caught doing bong hits and mushrooms and held accountable for writing teenage angst poetry to the famous Guns N' Roses tune "Sweet Child O' Mine."

While the P&PC Office was aware of at least one more Cusack film that incorporates poetry, we didn't remember (not until Brian Spears pointed it out to us) all of the verse in the the other famous Cusack back-to-high-school flick, 1998's Grosse Pointe Blank, which was directed by George Armitage and co-stars Minnie Driver. In the film, Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a hired assassin who goes back to Michigan for his tenth high school reunion and falls in love with high school sweetheart Debi Newberry (Driver) all over again. There's kissing. There's lots of gunplay. And Martin and Debi reunite.

Well, Spears called our attention to a scene near the end of the movie when, while taking a break from the reunion and after making out with Debi in the nurse's office, Martin runs into an inebriated former high school bully and current Grosse Pointe automobile dealership owner named Bob. Here's that exchange:

Martin: Hi Bob.

Bob: Debi Newberry, eh? You gonna hit that shit again?

Martin: Fine, Bob! How are you?

Bob: Real smart. C’mon, let’s see how smart you are with my foot up your ass.

Martin: Do you really believe that there is some stored up conflict that exists between us? There is no "us." "We" don’t exist. So who do you want to hit, man? It’s not me. [Martin adjusts Bob’s sport coat.] Now what do you want to do here, man?

[Bob shows him a crumpled piece of paper he's pulled out of his pocket]

Martin: I don’t know what that is.

Bob [slurring]: These are my words.

Martin: It’s a poem?

[Bob nods]

Martin: See, that’s the prop. Express yourself, Bob. Go for it.

Bob [reading]: When I feel quiet, / When I feel blue…."

Martin: You know, I think that is terrific, what you have right there. Really, I like that a lot. I wouldn’t sell the dealership or anything, but I’m telling you, it’s intense.

Bob: There’s more.

Martin: Okay. Would you mind—just skip to the end?

Bob: The very end…[reading] "... For a while."

Martin: Whoa. That’s good, man.

Bob: "For a while."

Martin: That’s excellent.

Bob: Wanna do some blow?

Martin: No. I don’t.

[They hug.]

Martin: There you go.

Bob: I missed you.

Martin: Okay, I missed you too. Okay.

It's a hilarious scene made even more hilarious by the next in which Martin literally wields the power of the pen, not poetry, to kill a fellow assassin in an adjacent hallway.

What Spears neglected to mention to P&PC, however, is that there are two other, less obvious poems in Grosse Pointe Blank. And we find them very interesting as well. The first comes when Martin is driving into town. He turns on the radio and listens to Debi, the local d.j., recount her recent playlist and comment on the upcoming reunion. She ends her little soliloquy with a riddle in the form of a poem:

Hi I’m Debi Newberry. This is WGPM FM Grosse Pointe, "Window on the Pointe." You heard from Massive Attack, Public Enemy, Morphine (my personal favorite), and Dwayne Eddie’s twangy guitar. Good to hear Toots and the Maytells, huh? And as you know, this weekend is Pointe High Class of '86 reunion. So in honor of this momentous event, I’m making this an all-80s, all vinyl weekend. Stay tuned to "Window on the Pointe" and I’ll keep you posted on all this reunion-related nonsense. Hey, I know everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone. Kick back and relax and ponder this:

Where are all the good men dead? In the heart or in the head?

So here’s “Another Cold Cup of Coffee” from The Clash.

The second, perhaps even more obscure poem in the film comes when Martin discovers that his childhood home has been turned into an Ultimart and that his mom, suffering from dementia and on Lithium, now lives in a nursing home. At the end of their meeting, as she is being wheeled away by a nurse, Mrs. Blank looks back over her shoulder and, in an apparent non-sequitor, misquotes Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Ladies." "The Colonel’s Lady, like Judy O’Grady / are twins under the skin,” she calls back. (Kipling's version, btw, reads "For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady / Are sisters under their skins!)

While Bob's poem is used by the movie to clarify his character—it reveals without a doubt that he's not a self-confident cocky businessman and bully but a an emotionally lame cokehead—the other two verses are used (as Debi suggests) to obscure. They are riddles, mysteries, or gnomic sound bites that come from a different source than Bob's "words" do. Neither is original to the speaker—that is, we're not hearing from authors, but from users, reciters or readers—and they bespeak confusion or nonsense. How do we answer Debi's rhyme? What do we do with the misquoted Kipling? These rhymes are opaque or obscure—perhaps as opaque or obscure as Modernist poetry is if we follow one of the arguments that Daniel Tiffany makes in his awesomely cool new study of criminal slang and street-talk, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. "By its very nature," Tiffany writes, "the problematic of lyric obscurity requires that one isolate the moment of exchange or enactment, focusing not so much on a poem's composition or construction ... as on its reception by the reader, on poetic readership, and on the social configuration of poetry" (7). The poems in Grosse Pointe Blank are really good illustrations of this point. Bob's poem is so not obscure (even though most of it is missing) that Martin doesn't even need to hear most of it in order to understand it; Debi's riddle and the Kipling (mis)quotation, on the other hand, are befuddling, in part because they happen in contexts that don't have any call for the obscurity of poetic language and no clues for how to interpert them. In fact, there's a certain way in which something like T.S. Eliot's citation of Shakespeare in The Waste Land ("Those are pearls that were his eyes.") comes from the same place, and has the same effect, as Ma Blank reciting Kipling to her son—or to the nurse, or to the rest of the home's residents. (That it's hard to say for sure is part of the point.)

All of this got the P&PC Office thinking about obscurity, poetry, memory, and youth, and so we started flying (among close friends and family) the idea that perhaps, as often as not, we remember poetry because we don't understand it, not because we do understand it. That is, maybe what makes a poem memorable is the fact that it's to some extent indecipherable. Like the Sphinx's riddle, like Eliot's quotation of Shakespeare, like gnomic sound bites from Kipling or radio hosts, perhaps we remember poetry because it gives us something to chew on and think about, not because it answers our questions and solves our riddles.

As evidence of this possibility, we'll close with a scene from another movie about youth and growing up—Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film and adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders. You remember it, right? Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) are hiding out in an abandoned church because Johnny knifed a guy in a late-night fight. In the church, separated from their lives that lead to violence and pain, they can be most fully themselves, and they spend their time reading Gone with the Wind to each other as they wait for Dallas (Matt Dillon) to show up and say the coast is clear. One morning, blond-haired and poetically-inclined Ponyboy gets up early to watch the sun rise through the mist. He is joined by Johnny, and they have the following conversation about (what else?) poetry:

Johnny: Golly that was sure pretty, huh?

Ponyboy: Yeah.

Johnny: It’s like the mist is what’s pretty, you know? All gold and silver.

Ponyboy: Um-hum.

Johnny: Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time.

Ponyboy: Nothing gold can stay

Johnny: Huh?

Ponyboy:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Johnny: Where’d you learn that? That’s what I meant!

Ponyboy: Robert Frost wrote it. I always remembered it because I never quite knew what he meant by it.

Johnny: Mmm. You know, I never noticed colors and clouds and stuff til you kept reminding me about it. It’s kinda like it was never there before.

Ponyboy: Yeah. I don’t think I could ever tell Steve [Tom Cruise] or Two-Bit [Emilio Estevez] or even Dally [Matt Dillon] about the clouds, the sunset. Just you and Sodapop [Rob Lowe]. Maybe Cherry Valance [Diane Lane].

Johnny: Guess we’re different, huh?

Ponyboy: Shoot, kid. Maybe they are.

Johnny: You’re right.

Johnny—who gets fatally burned while saving a group of children from the church as it burns down and then spends the rest of the movie in the hospital—chews on the Frost verse for the rest of the film, trying to figure it out. It's almost as if the mystery itself has the power to keep him alive, since he lives longer than anyone expects. And, when he dies, his last words (in a letter he's written to Ponyboy and placed inside a copy of Gone with the Wind) are about that poem. Here's that letter:

Pony Boy,

I asked the nurse to give you this book so you could finish it. It was worth saving those little kids. Their lives are worth more than mine. They have more to live for. Tell Dally I think it’s worth it. I’m gonna miss you guys. I been thinking about it. In that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid. Like green. When you’re a kid, everything’s new. Dawn. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony, that’s gold. Keep it that way—it’s a good way to be. I want you to ask Dally to look at one. I don’t think he’s ever seen a sunset. There’s still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don’t think he knows.

Your buddy,

Johnny.

P&PC recommends you check out The Outsiders if you haven't seen it lately. Where else can you find Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Robert Frost's poetry all in the same movie? It's—what else?—a mystery how it ever happened.

Assassins & Outsiders: The Obscurity of Popular Poetry

A few weeks ago, P&PC featured the poetry of Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine which co-stars John Cusack as one of three adult losers who get magically transported back to their high school days of 1986 and thus get an existential do-over. There's a great scene in the middle of the movie when Cusack is caught doing bong hits and mushrooms and held accountable for writing teenage angst poetry to the famous Guns N' Roses tune "Sweet Child O' Mine."

While the P&PC Office was aware of at least one more Cusack film that incorporates poetry, we didn't remember (not until Brian Spears pointed it out to us) all of the verse in the the other famous Cusack back-to-high-school flick, 1998's Grosse Pointe Blank, which was directed by George Armitage and co-stars Minnie Driver. In the film, Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a hired assassin who goes back to Michigan for his tenth high school reunion and falls in love with high school sweetheart Debi Newberry (Driver) all over again. There's kissing. There's lots of gunplay. And Martin and Debi reunite.

Well, Spears called our attention to a scene near the end of the movie when, while taking a break from the reunion and after making out with Debi in the nurse's office, Martin runs into an inebriated former high school bully and current Grosse Pointe automobile dealership owner named Bob. Here's that exchange:

Martin: Hi Bob.

Bob: Debi Newberry, eh? You gonna hit that shit again?

Martin: Fine, Bob! How are you?

Bob: Real smart. C’mon, let’s see how smart you are with my foot up your ass.

Martin: Do you really believe that there is some stored up conflict that exists between us? There is no "us." "We" don’t exist. So who do you want to hit, man? It’s not me. [Martin adjusts Bob’s sport coat.] Now what do you want to do here, man?

[Bob shows him a crumpled piece of paper he's pulled out of his pocket]

Martin: I don’t know what that is.

Bob [slurring]: These are my words.

Martin: It’s a poem?

[Bob nods]

Martin: See, that’s the prop. Express yourself, Bob. Go for it.

Bob [reading]: When I feel quiet, / When I feel blue…."

Martin: You know, I think that is terrific, what you have right there. Really, I like that a lot. I wouldn’t sell the dealership or anything, but I’m telling you, it’s intense.

Bob: There’s more.

Martin: Okay. Would you mind—just skip to the end?

Bob: The very end…[reading] "... For a while."

Martin: Whoa. That’s good, man.

Bob: "For a while."

Martin: That’s excellent.

Bob: Wanna do some blow?

Martin: No. I don’t.

[They hug.]

Martin: There you go.

Bob: I missed you.

Martin: Okay, I missed you too. Okay.

It's a hilarious scene made even more hilarious by the next in which Martin literally wields the power of the pen, not poetry, to kill a fellow assassin in an adjacent hallway.

What Spears neglected to mention to P&PC, however, is that there are two other, less obvious poems in Grosse Pointe Blank. And we find them very interesting as well. The first comes when Martin is driving into town. He turns on the radio and listens to Debi, the local d.j., recount her recent playlist and comment on the upcoming reunion. She ends her little soliloquy with a riddle in the form of a poem:

Hi I’m Debi Newberry. This is WGPM FM Grosse Pointe, "Window on the Pointe." You heard from Massive Attack, Public Enemy, Morphine (my personal favorite), and Dwayne Eddie’s twangy guitar. Good to hear Toots and the Maytells, huh? And as you know, this weekend is Pointe High Class of '86 reunion. So in honor of this momentous event, I’m making this an all-80s, all vinyl weekend. Stay tuned to "Window on the Pointe" and I’ll keep you posted on all this reunion-related nonsense. Hey, I know everybody’s coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone. Kick back and relax and ponder this:

Where are all the good men dead? In the heart or in the head?

So here’s “Another Cold Cup of Coffee” from The Clash.

The second, perhaps even more obscure poem in the film comes when Martin discovers that his childhood home has been turned into an Ultimart and that his mom, suffering from dementia and on Lithium, now lives in a nursing home. At the end of their meeting, as she is being wheeled away by a nurse, Mrs. Blank looks back over her shoulder and, in an apparent non-sequitor, misquotes Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Ladies." "The Colonel’s Lady, like Judy O’Grady / are twins under the skin,” she calls back. (Kipling's version, btw, reads "For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady / Are sisters under their skins!)

While Bob's poem is used by the movie to clarify his character—it reveals without a doubt that he's not a self-confident cocky businessman and bully but a an emotionally lame cokehead—the other two verses are used (as Debi suggests) to obscure. They are riddles, mysteries, or gnomic sound bites that come from a different source than Bob's "words" do. Neither is original to the speaker—that is, we're not hearing from authors, but from users, reciters or readers—and they bespeak confusion or nonsense. How do we answer Debi's rhyme? What do we do with the misquoted Kipling? These rhymes are opaque or obscure—perhaps as opaque or obscure as Modernist poetry is if we follow one of the arguments that Daniel Tiffany makes in his awesomely cool new study of criminal slang and street-talk, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. "By its very nature," Tiffany writes, "the problematic of lyric obscurity requires that one isolate the moment of exchange or enactment, focusing not so much on a poem's composition or construction ... as on its reception by the reader, on poetic readership, and on the social configuration of poetry" (7). The poems in Grosse Pointe Blank are really good illustrations of this point. Bob's poem is so not obscure (even though most of it is missing) that Martin doesn't even need to hear most of it in order to understand it; Debi's riddle and the Kipling (mis)quotation, on the other hand, are befuddling, in part because they happen in contexts that don't have any call for the obscurity of poetic language and no clues for how to interpert them. In fact, there's a certain way in which something like T.S. Eliot's citation of Shakespeare in The Waste Land ("Those are pearls that were his eyes.") comes from the same place, and has the same effect, as Ma Blank reciting Kipling to her son—or to the nurse, or to the rest of the home's residents. (That it's hard to say for sure is part of the point.)

All of this got the P&PC Office thinking about obscurity, poetry, memory, and youth, and so we started flying (among close friends and family) the idea that perhaps, as often as not, we remember poetry because we don't understand it, not because we do understand it. That is, maybe what makes a poem memorable is the fact that it's to some extent indecipherable. Like the Sphinx's riddle, like Eliot's quotation of Shakespeare, like gnomic sound bites from Kipling or radio hosts, perhaps we remember poetry because it gives us something to chew on and think about, not because it answers our questions and solves our riddles.

As evidence of this possibility, we'll close with a scene from another movie about youth and growing up—Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film and adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel The Outsiders. You remember it, right? Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) are hiding out in an abandoned church because Johnny knifed a guy in a late-night fight. In the church, separated from their lives that lead to violence and pain, they can be most fully themselves, and they spend their time reading Gone with the Wind to each other as they wait for Dallas (Matt Dillon) to show up and say the coast is clear. One morning, blond-haired and poetically-inclined Ponyboy gets up early to watch the sun rise through the mist. He is joined by Johnny, and they have the following conversation about (what else?) poetry:

Johnny: Golly that was sure pretty, huh?

Ponyboy: Yeah.

Johnny: It’s like the mist is what’s pretty, you know? All gold and silver.

Ponyboy: Um-hum.

Johnny: Too bad it can’t stay like that all the time.

Ponyboy: Nothing gold can stay

Johnny: Huh?

Ponyboy:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Johnny: Where’d you learn that? That’s what I meant!

Ponyboy: Robert Frost wrote it. I always remembered it because I never quite knew what he meant by it.

Johnny: Mmm. You know, I never noticed colors and clouds and stuff til you kept reminding me about it. It’s kinda like it was never there before.

Ponyboy: Yeah. I don’t think I could ever tell Steve [Tom Cruise] or Two-Bit [Emilio Estevez] or even Dally [Matt Dillon] about the clouds, the sunset. Just you and Sodapop [Rob Lowe]. Maybe Cherry Valance [Diane Lane].

Johnny: Guess we’re different, huh?

Ponyboy: Shoot, kid. Maybe they are.

Johnny: You’re right.

Johnny—who gets fatally burned while saving a group of children from the church as it burns down and then spends the rest of the movie in the hospital—chews on the Frost verse for the rest of the film, trying to figure it out. It's almost as if the mystery itself has the power to keep him alive, since he lives longer than anyone expects. And, when he dies, his last words (in a letter he's written to Ponyboy and placed inside a copy of Gone with the Wind) are about that poem. Here's that letter:

Pony Boy,

I asked the nurse to give you this book so you could finish it. It was worth saving those little kids. Their lives are worth more than mine. They have more to live for. Tell Dally I think it’s worth it. I’m gonna miss you guys. I been thinking about it. In that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid. Like green. When you’re a kid, everything’s new. Dawn. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony, that’s gold. Keep it that way—it’s a good way to be. I want you to ask Dally to look at one. I don’t think he’s ever seen a sunset. There’s still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don’t think he knows.

Your buddy,

Johnny.

P&PC recommends you check out The Outsiders if you haven't seen it lately. Where else can you find Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and Robert Frost's poetry all in the same movie? It's—what else?—a mystery how it ever happened.

Poetry & the Movies: The Hot Tub Rhyme Machine

Regular P&PC readers might have surmised by now that someone in the P&PC office has an abiding interest in Hollywood's ongoing relationship with poetry. Not only are there lots of movies explicitly about poets and poetry, but film after film—ranging from Citizen Kane to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Long Hot Summer, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club (just to name a few)—makes use of poetry as a plot device, as shorthand for one type of character development or another, or (seemingly) as an almost entirely gratuitous detail.

Think back to Woody Allen's 1977 masterpiece Annie Hall, for example. Alvy Singer (Allen) and Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) have just met while playing tennis. She gives him a harrowing ride home, weaving in and out of traffic on New York's narrow streets, and ultimately invites him to her place for a glass of wine. There—on what is more or less their first date—Alvy peruses Annie's bookshelves and pulls out a copy of Sylvia Plath's Ariel. Here's that exchange:

Alvy: Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie: Oh yeah. Right. Well, I don’t know. I mean, some of her poems seem neat.

Alvy: Neat?

Annie: Neat, yeah.

Alvy: I hate to tell you, this is 1975, you know? Neat went out, I would say, at the turn of the century.

Predictable? Maybe in Annie Hall. But what about Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine in which three unhappy friends—Adam (John Cusack), Lou (Rob Corddry), and Nick (Craig Robinson)—are transported, along with Adam's teenage nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), back to "Winterfest '86" which was a pivotal weekend in all of their lives. Caught between the need to recreate the past exactly (so that the future is unaffected and Jacob still gets born) and an understandable desire to change the events that led to their current unhappiness, the three are forced in hilarious fashion to re-live and/or revise some of their most humiliating moments: Lou gets abandoned by his friends and beaten up by the psychotic head of the ski patrol; Nick gets a second chance to rock the house at what was an otherwise uninspiring concert the first time around; and Adam gets a second shot at finding the woman of his dreams.

Part of Adam's respon- sibility in this process is to recreate his break up with his high school girlfriend Jennie, who stabbed him in the eye for splitting with her the first time around. This time, however, Adam is fraught by second thoughts and delays the break, giving Jennie time to beat him to the punch. (She gives Adam a break-up note but still ends up stabbing him in the eye.) Devastated to have things turn out even worse than they did the first time around (or so he thinks), Adam retreats to his hotel room and gets stoned out of his mind. This is where Jacob finds him: in darkness, wallowing in self-pity while listening to The Cutting Crew's song "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight," and—what else?—writing poetry. Here's that scene:

Jacob: Adam, hey. Thank God you’re back. Awesome. What’s going on here? Where are the guys?

[Cusack hands him the breakup note.]

What’s this?

[Jacob reads] "Dear Adam, you are a super terrific guy, and I love you, which is why this is so hard for me. I cherish our friendship…”

[Jacob laughs]

She broke up with you? And you still fucking got stabbed in the eye?

Adam [while writing]: Leave me alone. Get out of here.

Jacob: What are you doing here? Are you writing poetry?

Adam: Just leave me alone and get out of here. No.

Jacob: You’re writing fucking break-up poetry.

Adam: Alright, I’m writing break-up poetry, ok? … Because my heart hurts.

Jacob [looking around at all the drugs]: What is this shit? You’re wasted!

Adam: I’ve had like two wine kills, Captain Buzzcooler. God!

Jacob: You’re fucked up.

[Jacob picks up Adam's poem and reads]

"Jennie’s eyes,
like a gypsy’s lies,
cut right through the night.
Now those eyes
are another guy’s,
and I’m alone with my pain."

Adam: That was clean!

Jacob: Are you shitting me with this, Adam!?

Adam: Look, you can recite it straight or to the tune of "Sweet Child O’ Mine." It doesn’t matter.

Jacob: Are these mushrooms? Did you eat these mushrooms, Adam?

Adam: I like to eat 'em, you know. A couple of 'em.

Jacob: Holy fuck, man, you gotta stay straight. You’ve got to help me get the guys back.

Adam: You know, it’s not always about my emotional journey. It can be about yours.

Jacob: Put the coke down!

It's a funny, riotous scene in which the grown-up Adam revisits the genre of teenage poetry, and the ridiculousness of the entire endeavor (aside from the Guns N Roses homage, of course) serves to illustrate in miniature why the three adult men can't be entirely held hostage by the past. No matter how much poetry may express longing for a time it can't recover (as in pastoral poetry), or despite poetry's attempt to escape time altogether (as in many conceptions of the lyric), time must move forward and the guys must re-enter and make history. As if suggesting this very thing, the movie interrupts the argument between Adam and Jacob with the arrival of Chevy Chase who plays "the mystical time travel guide guy" come to remind them—as the thunder and lightning of a Romantic poem storm in the background—that the hot tub time portal will be closing soon. To get things done (or to make things happen, as Auden might put it), one needs more than the self-indulgence or reflection that poetry as a genre offers; one needs a plan or a plot to move forward in time (and/or through the pain of a breakup)—the exact thing, or so the movie's logic goes, that Hollywood provides that poetry cannot.

What all these movies have in common— Hot Tub Time Machine, Annie Hall, Citizen Kane, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Groundhog Day, and Fight Club—is their substantial focus on moving through time in one way or another. In Steve Pink's comedy, that movement is backwards and forwards; in Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is stuck repeating the same day over and over; in Fight Club and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, characters completely lose sense of time when they change into their alter egos. And Annie Hall and Citizen Kane are about sorting through the past, reflecting on what is now unattainable and what might have been. Thus, at some level, all these films must confront the fact that they are treading on poetry's traditional and culturally-sanctioned terrain, and they solve the resulting rivalry in different ways, all of which end up—no surprise here—privileging the technology of film and leaving P&PC, like Adam in Hot Tub Time Machine, alone with our pain.

When the Cat's Away, the Mice Read Poetry: The Case of The Long Hot Summer

In the 2006 Bruce Beresford flick The Contract, Ray Keene (played by John Cusack) is an unsuc-cessful father who, out on a camping trip with his son, encounters escaped hit man Frank Carden (played by Morgan Freeman) and tries to win his son's admiration by bringing Carden back to civilization and justice. Carden tries to warn Keene against playing the hero, and during the hike back, Keene and son are pursued by Carden's paramilitary team, shot at, attacked via helicopter, and subjected to Carden's psychological assaults. They run, they talk, they scale cliffs, they sweat. There are attempted escapes and explosions and moments of unanticipated bonding, and Carden does everything he can to slow the group's progress—including quoting poetry. P&PC can't remember the exact poem he tries to recite before Keene shuts him up, but we think it was part of "The Road Not Taken." Not entirely sure. For our purposes here, though, the specific poem doesn't matter as much as the fact that the movie seems to identify poetry in general as a force that impedes forward progress and threatens efficiency—something that slows our hikers and runs counter to the endgame Keene has in mind. Aligned with the African-American killer Carden and set up as contrary to the forces of fatherhood, whiteness, law, and justice, poetry is thus—in the world of The Contract at least—a criminal undertaking.

This isn't exactly the case in The Long Hot Summer—Martin Ritt's extremely entertaining 1958 film which is based on a couple of Faulkner stories—but it's not that far off. The film features Orson Welles as rich, Mississippi plantation owner Daddy Varner, Joanne Woodward as Varner's unmarried schoolteacher daughter, Clara, and Paul Newman as the Machiavellian, bootstrapping, six-packed stranger whom Varner picks out as a perfect mate for Clara. Daddy sorely wants grandchildren. He wants a virile family. Especially now that his health is growing suspect, he doesn't want Clara to dilly dally with her mama's-boy of a suitor; he wants a quick, efficient, direct way to manufacture descendants. Most of the movie, as such, has to do with how Clara learns to appreciate and accept the crass Ben Quick (played by Newman). But The Long Hot Summer is also a love story between Daddy Varner and Quick, as Varner manages his attraction to the younger man via his daughter's bedroom instead of his own.

As with The Contract, The Long Hot Summer identifies poetry as a force impeding the efficient execution of patriarchal and legal powers. In The Long Hot Summer, however, that force is wielded not by an African-American male criminal postponing his submission to the criminal justice system, but by a white woman postponing her submission to the patriarchal sex-gender system of marriage and pregnancy. Check out the following passage from early in the movie when Daddy Varner returns from an out-of-town operation and ruthlessly belittles everyone—especially his only son Jody—for not doing enough in his absence. After he thoroughly lays into Jody, this is the exchange between Daddy Varner and Clara that follows:

Daddy Varner: I'm my old self again. Them doctors down in Jefferson, they gutted me, and they took away just about every organ they thought I could spare, but they didn't pare my spirit down none. Thank you, Jody, for your kindly inquiry as to my health. [Jody didn't ask.]

Clara: Next!

Daddy: All right, sister. You're on.

Clara: What do you want to know, Papa?

Daddy: You still fixin' to get yourself known as the best-looking, richest old maid in the county, or have you seen any young people lately? Any young people seen you? At any parties, any picnics, any barbeques, any church bazaars? Have you mingled? Have you mixed? Or you kept yourself up in that room all this time reading them poetry books? Huh?

Clara: I hope this doesn't come as a shock to your nervous system, Papa, but when you're away, I do what I please.

Daddy: Well, I'm back!

Clara: Welcome home.

This passage is brilliantly done, in part for how it reverses the expec- tations of conven- tional story lines; when the cat's away in The Long Hot Summer, the mice don't play—they read poetry. And that's exactly what infuriates Daddy Varner, as he associates poetry with, and thus conflates, a combination of things including female independence, sterility, solitude, onanism, and (most likely) rhyme. Unlike the stereotypical over-protective father, he wants his daughter to go mix and mingle, but she does what she pleases while she's alone in her bedroom; for her (and for her father), poetry is a form of birth control. That Clara's aware of the threat her poetry reading poses to the dominant sex-gender system Daddy Varner represents is clear, as her reference to his personal "nervous system" no doubt implicates the larger systemic forces she feels bearing down on her as well.

Of course, The Long Hot Summer falls on the side of order, justice, law, fatherhood, patriarchy, etc., as Clara eventually partners up with Quick. For some reason, we don't remember the end of The Contract, but we suspect the same is true there as well—that Carden is caught or killed, that poetry is equally domesticated or disciplined, and that Hollywood perpetuates its strange, low-level, but ongoing smear campaign against poetry. Nevertheless, these two films remain intriguing to P&PC because they don't suggest that some poetry is oppositional and some is not (as many people claim), but that, in the American cultural imagination, at least, all poetry—in the woods, or between the sheets—is somehow associated with forces that challenge dominant orders. Carden and Clara are both criminals for reading it. Who knows if maybe you are too?