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THE WINTERS OF OUR DISCONTENT: R.I.P. SHELLY

Mary Q., a woman with whom I used to be good friends (and who, sadly, was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and, much more sadly, later took her own life), once wrote a long article about Shelly Winters that she intended to have published in the Village Voice. The paper looked at the fact that in virtually every film she was in, Shelly Winters’ character met a gruesome death and it concluded that far from being a contingent or random development, this repeated murdering off of Ms. Winters satisfied some ineluctable narrative logic of gender, personality and desire. The name of the paper was “Shelly Winters Must Die” and, to the best of my knowledge, it was never published by the Village Voice or any other publication. I was reminded of it the other day, when I read of Ms. Winters’ passing. It seemed an appropriate tribute to both my deceased and long suffering friend and to the deceased and long suffering actress to note, in passing, that if this thesis was indeed true, then Ms. Winters, in her real existence, had finally (if less gruesomely) complied with the dictates of her filmic destiny. R.I.P. Mary and Shelly.

MEDIA AND METAPHYSICAL OBSERVATION OF THE DAY:

All over the subways and billboards of the city, I see ads for Heather Graham’s show,
Emily’s Reasons Why Not.—a show that was recently cancelled after its first episode. The ads boast: Emily’s Reason’s Why Not. (The possibilities are endless.) By simply crossing out the “Why” and changing the tense of the verb from present to past, the civic-minded graffiti practitioner can restore the ads to accuracy and relevance:

Emily’s Reasons Not! (The possibilities were endless).

This spectacle of print media persisting well past its point of relevance and signifying in an unintended and ironic fashion, brought to mind another less comedic (indeed haunting) instance of the phenomenon. In 1994, I was traveling with a friend around Mexico in the months prior to the presidential elections. Huge billboards urging citizens to vote for a candidate named COLOSIO (Luis Donaldo Colosio) were virtually ubiquitous. While I was there, the candidate was assassinated. What was striking was not so much the assassination of a presidential candidate—particularly in the notoriously vicious and corrupt world of Mexican politics--as the way those huge billboards were transformed by the event--persisting no longer as calls to action but rather as inadvertent memorials. It was truly haunting to see a name emptied of all content and turned into a tomb. To have absence itself advertised.

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Posted on 1/24/2006 ( Permanent Link )
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