Remora

LI was walking up near the University yesterday when we heard our name. It was an old friend. We said, conventionally, how are you doing, and our friend said well, what did you think?
The news had depressed her utterly, she said.
We said, yeah, it sucked.
What are we going to do, she said? I want to move out of the country!
Well, we said, we don't feel that strongly about it. But we are pretty blue all the same. Damn blue.
How about the arctic wildlife refuge, she said.
Uh, we said, just because they are putting Winona in jail shouldn't effect Alaska in particular.
I'm talking about the elections! she said.
Oh, we said.

Yes, LI, with our inverted sense of historical events, was much more impressed by the railroading of Winona Ryder on a trumped up shoplifting charge than by changes in that other factory town, DC.

LI has never found Winona Ryder a fascinating femme de film. But her singling out for this ludicrous circus trial because she looked like she was going to steal items from Sachs Fifth Avenue -- this strikes us as an intolerable injustice. Or rather, it is justice with klieg lights, the justice that comes from lynching a name victim for political effect. And now she faces three years. What did Millikan serve, five? What is Ken Lay going to serve? What is Buddy Ebbers going to serve? Winona's mistake was not to have plundered systematically, with Sachs Fifth stock, rather than purloining a dress and a scarf.

The LA times gives an in-depth, and very industry perspective on the Ryder dust up:

"Actress Winona Ryder may be in for a white-knuckle ride over the next few months, but experts across Hollywood said Wednesday morning's conviction for grand theft and vandalism will not have a long-lasting impact on her career."

Here's the meat of the story:

"Alan Meyer of Sitrick & Co., one of the biggest crisis management firms in the country, said the "injury day" was emblematic of how poorly Ryder's ordeal has been handled from the beginning.

"She was only charged with shoplifting, not felony hit-and-run or child molestation. It should have been a 48-hour story, not a six-month story. Why this wasn't resolved very quickly, I don't understand," Meyer said, adding that the pair of convictions were "a real blow."

"The easiest way out of something like this is to acknowledge you did it and throw yourself on the public's mercy. Show remorse. Be contrite. People love that," he said."

People do love that. The contrition. The talk shows. Barbara. Jay. The recollection, in tranquility, of one's motives in that vague moment. The moment the cops caught one being sucked off in a car. The moment one was found with some crack rock. The moment one drove, drunkenly, in the wrong lane on the Sunset freeway for eleven miles. Those breakdowns, so helpfully glossed by the talk show host, the p.r. guy, the studio head, the compliant Vanity Fair interviewer. The return to grace.

But there are other people -- LI is one of them -- who want our Winona to be defiant. Remember Robert Mitchum. He did his time and implied, at every turn, screw the bastards. So screw Sachs! But W.R. 's Free Winona campaign, and her obvious disdain for the charges, is not going down well in the Industry. The honchos are speaking. The honchos want contrition. They want the image to be, depression, she was out of her mind, the transition between this wierd Beetlejuice girl, this vulnerable punk, the black clothes, and the woman, we've watched her grow up. That is the image. We've watched her, she's part of the family. And so she gets the kleptomania out when she is seventeen. Not thirty one. The honchos want the therapeutic talk ladled on. and this is what they are saying:

"Her publicist, Mara Buxbaum, insists business is booming, but the claim that Ryder was approached this year to star in at least one film could not be independently confirmed.

Buxbaum said Ryder will "definitely not be doing the talk show circuit" after the trial, although the actress probably will sit down at some point for the obligatory tell-all interview."

We were reminded of Zola's Au bonheur des dames, his novel about a Paris department store. If someone is smart -- if LI was smarter -- someone would do the op ed piece, or the column piece, this Sunday in the LA Times, with the potted story of kleptomania. Its origins in the 19th century, the discovery that this, like breast cancer, was a disease of upper class women, and the inference that it must be related to some vice, some decay. All the anger of which upper class women are the recipients from the great mass -- from me, from you -- and the way it forms a warp of unconscious energy, and like all energy sooner or later finds a form. In art, in the novel, in a D.A.'s brief, in a psychologist's treatise.

Au bonheur des dames -- which we can translate, approximately, as What the Ladies Like -- is Zola's novel about a department store. The manager of the store, the insufferable Mouret, has already featured as the boarding house stud in Pot-Bouille -- which outgrosses even contemporary novels. Zola saw that between matter and woman there was a suspicious relationship -- something like love. This has already been castigated in our good old Western tradition -- the horror that accrues to matter as matter was once called idolatry. The idea that a thing possesses a divinity -- the psychological roots of this anxiety aren't explored enough. We are palmed off with stories of human sacrifice, or demons, or whatever -- but didn't Jehovah himself appear in a flame? Actually, a flame, through its de-materializing power, is a brilliant vehicle for a God as schizophrenic about matter as the one in Genesis -- the world is good, but evidently, the genitals of two of his creatures, revealed in all their interesting possibilities by munching on a fruit, are another matter. There's a little pussy and dick in every thing we buy, you know.

So Zola scoped out the buying scene. His klepto is a very proper bourgeois with a name that should remind us of Madame Bovary: Madame de Boves. She has a cowlike presence, and discovering Au bonheur des dames, she is ravished -- raped -- by the material on display -- the silks, the lace, the sheets, the textures, the textiles.

Here's how Zola describes her:

Mme de Boves venait de d�passer la quarantaine. C'�tait une femme superbe, � encolure de d�esse, avec une grande face r�guli�re et de larges yeux dormants, que son mari, inspecteur g�n�ral des haras, avait �pous�e pour sa beaut�.

(Madame de Bove had just passed forty. This was a superb woman, with the mane of a goddess, a large face with regular features, and large sleepy eyes, whose husband, a general inspector of horse stables, had married her for her beauty.)

Zola was nothing if not a gross painter of signs. Boves is close to bovine. Her husband is an inspector of haras -- the stables in which horses are kept. The large sleepy eyes -- the eyes of a cow -- seal the deal: this is one of Zola's animal-people.

She can be aroused, of course. But unlike Nana, she is not a woman of mouth and ass, a woman who, superbly, leaves an odor. Rather, to come out of her animal entrancement, she needs things. It is the store that excites her. It is the department store that eventually leads to her doom. At the end of the book, she is shopping with her daughter. As a clerk goes to take apart a packet of lace, Mme de Boves's daughter turns to speak to her:


Mme de Boves ne r�pondait pas. Alors, la fille, en tournant sa face molle, vit sa m�re, les mains au milieu des dentelles, en train de faire dispara�tre, dans la manche de son manteau, des volants de point d'Alen�on. Elle ne parut pas surprise, elle s'avan�ait pour la cacher d'un mouvement instinctif, lorsque Jouve, brusquement, se dressa entre elles. Il se penchait, il murmurait � l'oreille de la comtesse, d'une voix polie:
- Madame, veuillez me suivre.

(Madame de Boves didn't reply. It was thus that her daughter, in turning her soft face, saw her mother, her hands in the middle of the laces, engaged in making them disappear into the sleave of her coat, this Alencon pattern. She didn't appear surprised, she went forward, instinctively, to hide her mother, when Jouve, brusquely, stood before them. He leaned forward and whispered politely in the ear of the countess: 'Madame, if you could please follow me.")

Those Jouves! Just doing their jobs. But there's something dirty in the whole Sachs deal. We hope, when W.R. does the "obligatory tell all interview," that she doesn't grovel. She was the victim of a put up job, and she should imply that at every turn. And damn the honchos.