Diana was in town last night and we went to the Rubin Museum of Art to check out the Himalayan pieces and to watch La Jetée. La Jetée is a French short from 1962 that inspired Twelve Monkeys. A survivor of a nuclear holocaust is obsessed with the image of a woman standing on a jetty. It’s a childhood memory, of a moment of calm just before a man is murdered, and the man returns to it in his mind over and over. The image is so strong the other survivors draft the man for a time-travel experiment, necessary to save humanity. The man meets the woman, they fall in love. In the end, offered the chance to travel forward to a peaceful, advanced future, he requests that he be sent back to the jetty, to that time before the war. After the screening Thomas Cahill spoke, and he said that as you get older you increasingly recognize this circularity in your own life, things that you thought you’d passed through forever unexpectedly coming back, and it was pretty funny to be sitting there with Diana and reliving it all.
(And what made it doubly funny is that we’d seen Deirdre and Harry in the galleries above—my first glimpse of Deirdre since Fire Island—although they slipped out before I had the chance to make my awkward hello.)
No comments:
Post a Comment