SOME THOUGHTS ON EMMA STONE, ALAN CUMMING, AND LAUREN BACALL

AND WHAT IT MEANS TO ACT YOUR AGE AS YOU KEEP GROWING OLDER

(Above: Emma Stone on the set between takes while filming Poor Things. Photo: Searchlight Pictures. “Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us — it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds.” - Alasdair Gray from his novel, Poor Things )

As my 68th birthday approaches at the end of March, I have been thinking a lot about how one ages gracefully - or if to be imbued by grace at this point in one’s life is about not surrendering to the construct itself of gracefully aging since to so many that means being rather sedentary, not propped-up exactly but certainly properly situated, less antic, a bit more antiseptic, better behaved, a little less anti-this or anti-that altogether except for all the money one might spend (which one might be saving) on the kicky anti-aging concoctions lined up like chorus boys and their chorine besties on some shelf on one’s way to some cash register. But what indeed is “proper” for someone like me now in my “old man” stage when my life has long been about prying propriety from its hinges where it holds us all in place along with itself? That’s more than sedentary; that’s stasis. It’s an oldster’s studied steadiness more than a sensual sense of balance where hinges aren’t made with humans in mind and bodies and emotions and, yes, our minds evolve instead of atrophy, a flowing forth of the still possible instead of the open-and-shutness of the should and the should not.

I frequently tell folks that I now believe that time is not linear but simultaneous, and maybe that is itself just a rationale for aging and I find an actual comfort in the theoretical comfort it offers me. But I do think it is an interesting construct with which to reexamine aging, this phase I refuse to be phased by, a refusal finding itself within such a theorem when so many of the edifying pieces of the temporal puzzle are snapping into place - even the one that has pointed me to the construct of simultaneity itself. The jigsawed vista is being seen anew the older I get. It’s no longer in the distance, but clearer, closer. Yet age is neither a winnowing nor a lessening; it is both a deepening well of experience and a widening of wonder that is not about the experiential which, at this point in life, is the source of its wonder. Experience alchemized with the allure of wonder wandering off into the misty wilds of mystery - no matter what Alasdair (who thus thinks me muddled, lonely) dares us to believe - is another kind of simultaneity, of sensuality, of balance. Don’t scrutinize its scrim. Don’t scream in terror. Sigh instead. Inhale. Take hold. Exhale. Let go. Survive. Surrender. Ditch definitions. Reconfigure. Newly conceived constructs are not strategies but the strengthening of one’s spiritual sinews because redefinition is a kind of divinity not demanding to be worshipped. Acknowledged, yes. Queried, of course - which is not however about cueing up an answer. I suggest we stop looking for The Answers which are, after all, only ancillary when not shopworn, sullied with the silliness of certainty. Search instead for The New Questions. And most of all, do go gentle into that night where neither good nor bad exists. Only kindness. Be the conduit for that. All else: details. That’s my pilgrimage now. The light is not dying, Dylan. It endures, as do we. Age is but a part of its enduring. Death is. Poetical rage is still rage even if launched within a villanelle. Leave it there. Live in the twentieth line that unwritten awaits.

Is this all a bit too … well … unhinged?

That’s a question - as are these musings about aging - that I pondered after seeing the new film Poor Things, adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. The film stars Emma Stone and is the Frankenstein fable hewn with some Henry Higgins and limned with some Eliza, a fantastical tale viewed venereally and philosophically and politically through the lens of its lead character, Stone’s Bella Baxter, who does find her source of wonder in the experiential once a mad yet oddly loving surgeon, portrayed by the rather jigsawed himself Willem Dafoe, reanimates her freshly drowned body with her own transplanted baby’s brain after she’s thrown her pregnant selves off a bridge. It is a fevered, fabulously art directed cinematic Bildungsroman filtered through the ur-female story of a woman fully in her body before she is fully in her brain. It is basically about the aging process and getting older within a different construct.

(Above: With Emma Stone in Alan Cumming’s dressing room when they appeared together in Cabaret on Broadway and he’d turned the space into Club Cumming after the show for those of us not ready to act our age.)

Poor Things is also a film about what is considered societally appropriate - something I often ponder too as I age - as much as it is about female agency and female desire and how the male members of society react to such agency and desire when they are presented to them with such a powerful lack of shame and thus self-shunning can neither be psychologically considered nor embedded. It is also a film about destroying the patriarchy which our stand-in Bella bests by refusing that imposition of the construct of shame. There is disbelief embedded in Bella’s initial befuddlements but there is not really belittlement - well, that is, when uncalled for. There is a sheepish bit of that at the end which is rather jarring in the jocular way the narrative can jolt us from our slavish participation in an ongoing societally imposed narrative no matter the century in which we find ourselves. There is also Bella’s bemusement - as she mentally and emotionally and psychologically ages - which is then reconfigured into a carefully considered cunning spun from empathy, cunnilingus, and the scientific knowledge that created her in the first place all sutured together into the sinew of what I consider a soul but which she seems satisfied to consider as another aspect of her scientific being enlightened only by the visceral ratcheting up of reason. Knowledge, not shame, is embedded in the body and she beds it in much the same way she beds all else about her.

Oh, and there’s this: she dresses any damn way she pleases and no one questions her singular choices because she finds no silliness in the certainty of her own tastes. I appreciated that as an older man who often is stumped regarding what is appropriate to wear - that last vestige of appropriateness in my own one-off life. Bella Baxter is my new style icon as I beaver about my closet determined not to arrive at a choice she'd find cloying in its overly safe appropriateness for she has not been put back together with the clay of the cloying.

Bella Baxter is fucking forthright and forthright in her fucking. Discovering her clitoris leads to all the other discoveries in her life. And yet that is where the incongruity of the putting her together in the story is in cultural opposition to the putting the story together cinematically. Stone is giving a brave and bravura performance as Bella - I’d be happy to see her win the Oscar for this role - and yet there is an objectification of the actress by the male director - and the character’s original creator as a male novelist - to which the character refuses to surrender in the same way in the narrative. That troubling incongruity was a way into another dilemma regarding aging and that is how to handle one’s sexuality, how to navigate one’s own objectification as no longer being desirable which is a reverse mirror of the movie’s unsettling one. Bella owns her sexual power because Stone, who has been cast as the character, is a deeply attractive person tasked with manifesting artistically such a characteristic. Conversely, as I age and still try to own my own sexual power, I am not the actor I would have cast physically in the role to manifest it. I alas dare to own my lack of feeling desirable just as Bella owns her surfeit of it and Stone, as a movie star, banks on hers in these prime years before she is shunted off to the corner of the screen where desire no longer resides when she, like me, is waiting around at 67 to be 68. I still do feel desire at times - but I do it with bewilderment and even a sense of sadness because I am having to construct a new vision of myself as desirable instead of fetishized, as some do, as an aged object to fondle if not fellate. I need a mirror that reverses what it sees. It’s the hardest part of aging for me. I rather like the feeling of longing that has replaced feeling horny. But I am haunted by my haunches being admired, objectified. My sexual memories - and my sex life is made up almost entirely of memories with some hope thrown in - are, poor things, about the objectification of objectification which could serve as a summing up of this film concocted by Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone from the Gray-ing narrative of Alasdair.

(Above: With Alan Cumming at a lunch I hosted for him in San Francisco. He suggested we trade eyeglasses before the photo was taken so for a brief moment I saw the world through his lens.)

Emma Stone starred as Sally Bowles in Cabaret on Broadway back in 1998 with Alan Cumming reviving his role as the Emcee. I saw Cumming’s one-man show this past week here in London before he took it on tour to Glasgow and Manchester. In March, he’ll be in Texas in Dallas and Houston and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Check out dates and venues here. It is titled Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age. I saw both performances at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. It was his opening number from Applause, “But Alive,” that inspired this column and my continuing contemplation of getting older. Applause was a 1970 musical based on both the film All About Eve and even more the short story on which the film was based, May Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve.” The book, updated to the 1970s, was by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The musical’s lyrics were by Lee Adams and its music by Charles Strouse. Directed and choreographed by Ron Field, it starred Lauren Bacall as Margo Channing, each an aging star too aware of her age. The song “But Alive” is sung by Bacall as Channing when she visits a gay bar with her best friend and hair stylist, Duane Fox, the musical’s reconfigured character construct for the film’s dresser, Birdie Coonan. Bacall as Channing sang Adams’s lyrics - as Cumming as “Cumming” rousingly did to open his show that was about inspiring all of us not to act our age:

“I feel groggy and weary and tragic
Punchy and bleary and fresh out of magic
But alive, but alive, but alive!

“I feel twitchy and bitchy and manic
Calm and collected and choking with panic
But alive, but alive, but alive!

“I’m a thousand different people
Every single one is real
I’ve a million different feelings
OK, but at least I feel!

“And I feel rotten, yet covered with roses
Younger than springtime and older than Moses …

“I feel half Tijuana, half Boston
Partly Jane Fonda and partly Jane Austen
But alive, that’s the thing! But alive!”

Cumming then asked us to consider who exactly are these people in their white clinician coats with their clipboards and clenched sphincters advising us about how appropriately to “act our age.” He talked about mortality and surrounding himself with the friendships of young cultural comrades and renegades and sexuality and singing a song from The Little Mermaid without the need for irony. He inspired me to live less ironically myself and more fully in the moment. Indeed, he closed his show before his encores with a conflation of Andrew Lippa’s anthem from The Wild Party, “How Did We Come to This,” and John Kander and Fred Ebb’s love plaint from Cabaret, “Maybe This Time.” It was a stunning closer which served as a beginning for this very column. How did I exactly come to this, the this of being a 67-year-old man living life as a pilgrim without the construct of what had earlier in my life meant home - an art collection, mid-century furniture, walk-in closets packed with clothes and shoes, hundreds and hundreds of books, pets who were not possessions but everything else the possessions that had come to possess me instead (or the need for them had). I now live in the constructs of “maybe” and “this time.” This. This. Then this . That this is all I really need in the youthful yearning of my reconfigured old age.

The photos of Lauren Bacall above are her living the constructs of her one long life, an anthemic plaintive conflation of movies and marriages and activism and fuck-it-all-and-you-too fabulousness and family and Bogie and Robards and rooms at The Dakota and reconfiguring and low-throated fun. The first photograph is the one she agreed to sit for when photographer Andrew Gotts was creating his “Behind the Mask” exhibition for Somerset House in London in 2013 and she shunned the construct of shame for the visage she had set out to earn. Bacall refused to be shunned herself for this version of herself she was then owning at the age of 88 the year before she died. The second is of the twenty-something movie star who created “The Look.” I see an otherworldly beauty in that second one but also someone not quite owning who she really is but being whom she’s told to be. There is another kind of beauty in the first: wizened, claiming her rightful place, the infancy of her final fuck-it, an ornery wondrous worldly refusal to be ornamental, the never backing down of finding a yet-again beginning. Youth and age: each the masking of the truer self. “I am not a has-been,” Bacall once told a reporter who asked her about getting older. “I’m a will-be.”

Onward …