On the Importance of Being Silly

I fenced last night, (footwork only as I have some sort of shoulder muscle pull) and this morning I’m awake late and feeling scattered and silly.  For example, I’m imagining say that Archimedes had invented and marketed smart phones and some subsequent texts and conversations, say betwixt Hippolyta and Theseus or betwixt Bohemund I and Anna Comnena or betwixt John Wycliffe and John Hus (the great Christian religious reformers who preceded Luther).

As I said, silly.  So in the spirit of Python (Monte) take it further, imagine text conversations not bound by concurrency, such as Churchill texting with Marlborough, his hero and ancestor, during the battle of Britain, or between the modern architect Frank Gehry and Filippo Brunelleschi, the designer and builder of the impossible dome of Florence Cathedral.  Or George S. Patton in the Ardennes in December of 1944 texting with George S. Patton at Thermopylae in September 480 BC.

Silly, absurd, but potentially interesting.  Tuesday afternoon, on the way to another fencing lesson, I listened to Terry Gross interviewing the actor Edward Norton on her program Fresh Air.  He said that in his youth he and his friends had made amateur Kung Fu and Spaghetti Westerns with a VHS camera using just the pause and rewind buttons to cut between scenes or capture retakes.  Then there was a moment of perfect wisdom, he stated that one of the great challenges in creating a great film or finding a great filmic performance in spite of all the expensive toys, schedule constraints and bureaucracy, is finding that wild, silly spirit you that made you want to try anything with an old VHS camera.  Dylan Thomas and Dan Jones in their famous pub flights of fancy understood the same thing.

I’m particularly fond of two of Edward Norton’s characterizations:  the leper king Baldwin in “Kingdom of Heaven” in which in spite of his silver mask he manages to find the perfect balance of frailty and heroism to evoke a certain kind of medieval ideal.  The second is his performance as Eisenheim in “The Illusionist.”  When he and his childhood love played by Jessica Biel are finally reunited in a coach he delivers a simple line with perfect, understated, romantic force.  “Hello, Sophie.”  And, because it’s so minimal, so perfectly set up dramatically, it’s as good as Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid.”