American Past Lives
In a past life, I used to spend many leisure hours lolling with friends at our neighborhood bar or drifting from place to place in Bed-Stuy and Chinatown, frittering away weekends over beverages and deli sandwiches, Greek fries, garlicky sautéed morning glory and golden fried rice. The pandemic effectively halted all such activity last March—I still remember the last time we went out to eat together at our local Korean restaurant. Then I moved to another hemisphere. Though New York looks to be creeping back to normal, with a solid third of the population fully vaccinated, Tokyo’s trudging through yet another extended state of emergency. It will be many months or perhaps not until next year when non-elderly adults can finally get jabbed here. Bars shuttered, restaurants forbidden from serving alcohol, nightlife is but a distant memory at this point and a faint, almost imperceptible, wisp of hope on the horizon.
Throughout the pandemic, like most people, C. and I have been working our way through a load of streaming content. I’ve belatedly gotten into anime for the sake of language acquisition (wink)—mostly classic stuff, but finally finished Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba recently. We’ve kept up with shows and movies popping up on Netflix, all the space dramas, period dramas, mother-daughter dramas. For my academic project, I’ve been trying to branch out into the lesser known works of directors I’ve enjoyed or dip my toe into the water with unfamiliar names: early Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Barking Dogs Never Bite), Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cure), non-Tampopo Itami Jūzō (A Taxing Woman, Supermarket Woman), and so on.
Lately we’ve been on a kick of what might be called fin-de-siècle American cinema. It probably started when I shared pictures of our new apartment. “But Debbie,” quipped my friend back in New York. “Pastels?” (Hey, we needed curtains fast.) C. didn’t understand the reference, so of course I made him watch The Addams Family Values as soon as I could—a movie that I distinctly remember having videotaped from TV as a preteen, one that I still know almost completely by heart. Christina Ricci as Wednesday and Anjelica Huston as Morticia are just too perfectly on point.
Last weekend we watched Liar Liar, one of the few movies I saw in the theater as a kid. Jim Carrey was really at the height of his powers back in that decade, huh. Along with the incomparable Robin Williams (RIP) whose haggard cheer in Jumanji really clinches the movie—somehow Kirsten Dunst was also in this? I guess the movie didn’t make much of an impression on me; it just seemed like something that was always on in the background at after-school care or summer camp.
My first encounter with Mystic Pizza, that early Julia Roberts hit, turned out to be a surprise, with so much of the cultural narrative centered on the Portuguese community in Connecticut. Who knew? Young Matt Damon also makes a cameo as the brother of Julia’s aristocratic love interest. Similarly, I had no idea that Waiting to Exhale would be set against the backdrop of America’s southwest. Those desert landscapes lend a special frame to the story of four Black women in the ‘90s, while also allowing for some funky art direction and fabulous jewelry.
Whitney (RIP) and the rest of the cast look good, but heartbroken Angela Bassett is a goddamn vision. Those cheekbones, ugh. Fast forward a quarter-century and she absolutely hasn’t aged.
Anyway, it’s been interesting to remember, re-encounter, and reappraise these threads of Americana from afar, sipping beverages at home in Tokyo and snacking on senbei or Japanese ice cream. I guess there’s something comforting about the faces of these actors and their kaleidoscopic narratives, zany and earnest and emotional, as of yet untouched by darker days ahead. Unlike Japanese TV or movies, the America of the screen is one that I can comfortably claim for my own, these interwoven stories the very texture of my childhood. But this era, for better or worse, is long past. We’ve no choice but to barrel forward into a future unknown.