In the book's introduction, Hardy claims to have had an "awakening" of sorts after seeing River's Edge(!): "There was a scene in which a boy brings his friends into the woods to see the body of a girl he had killed. They hardly reacted. There was no emotion, no remorse, nothing. I realized then that I, too, felt nothing. I cried all the way home. I could not stop. I realized then that I am a part of the world and of other human beings. That I do care. By caring, I can make a difference."
It's not clear what Hardy was attempting to achieve, what change she meant to initiate through this series of interviews with staggeringly hubristic young Method actors (I can tell they're Method disciples because they all try to turn Answering a Question into a sense memory exercise. If you're fortunate enough to have been spared an education in acting theory, "sense memory" is when you remember the smell of your dead mom's perfume or the feel of your dead mom's favorite sweater and get all smug about how you have a dead mom and are so much more observant and nuanced than your fellow actors. Basically, that's what it is). Luckily, her intent means nothing to me and I'm able to enjoy this book for what it truly is: talk-y, swear-y conversations with famous people who were never taught Feelings of Shame!
I've transcribed some of the Greatest (S)hits for your amusement:
Q; What spiritual things are important to you?
A: "To continue to find my center. In martial arts you call it finding your ki. I've found in martial arts a wonderful release. When you've truly found your ki, it's amazing."
(Oh, is that what you were doing in my second favorite scene from Roadhouse? Finding your center?)
"The terrible part is, when you're fighting, trying to achieve this level of finding your center, once you've hit it, everything will go into slow motion. Fighting one, two, three guys becomes child's play. It is beautiful, this incredible feeling, but then you look at the results, the effect of what you've done--the reality that you've destroyed someone's face."
(Oh, you mean like in my first favorite scene from Roadhouse, where you rip out a man's throat with your bare hands after he says he "used to fuck guys like you in prison"?)
(Keanu Reeves and Corey Haim are in a dead heat for Best in Show, in my estimation.)
Q: What do you look for in a script?
A: "I want to be enlightened, dude. I don't know, just interesting stories, interesting people, character development, ideas being posed, clash/conflicts, hate, love, war, death, success, fame, failure, redemption, salvation, death, hell, sin, good food, bad food, nice smells, colors and big tits."
Q: What is the biggest misconception about you?
A: "That I'm clean."
Q: Do you ever get recognized?
A: "It's happened about 12 times. I feel like a young pubic hair. You know, I keep getting checked out and played with sometimes."
Q: If you could star in an onscreen biography of anyone, who would it be and why?
A: "The young part of me would love to play Rimbaud. That sort of appeals to my self-destructive, artistic, cool kind of deep side."
Q: What is your biggest fear?
A: "That my underwear would have a shit stain on it when I'm with a woman that I've never slept with before. That's a major fear. That would be a drag."
(I sort of can't stand Patrick Dempsey. He strikes me as oppressively smarmy, and the faces he makes in Can't Buy Me Love when he touches a breast for the first time do nothing to dissuade me of this belief.)
Q: If I were to ask one of your friends from high school what you were like, what would they say and how would they describe you?
A: "They thought I was weird because I was into juggling and riding my unicycle."
I KNEW IT!! I must commemorate this revelation posthaste.
(Sorry, Pat. We'll always have "You shit on my house!", right?)
Q: How old are you?
A: "I don't tell anyone my age; I won't even tell you off the record. I like to be very mysterious."
Q: What do you look for in a script?
A: "I won't do anything where I have to take off my clothes or where I would have to use the F word. I want my image, no matter what, to be clean. No one will ever be able to say 'Look at Corey Feldman. He's sitting there smoking and doing drugs in that movie.' That's just not me."
(Is it still called schadenfreude if you delight in another's PENDING (as of 1988) misfortune?)
Q: What is the biggest misconception about you?
A: "There are a lot of misconceptions, and some of it has to do with the black. A lot of people think black is bad and that I'm morbid because I wear it, which is completely the opposite of my feelings. "
Q: Why do you wear black?
A: "My reasons for wearing black is that black is always conceived of as being bad and morbid and dark and evil. I want people to know black is not a bad thing. People always take white as good and black as bad, whereas white is really the absence of all color and black is all colors combined. I wore black everyday in 1987 as a symbol of anti-racism."
Q: What do you look for in a script?
A: "Entertainment. Pure nonstop entertainment."
Q: Is being cool important to you?
A: "Being cool is the most important thing. If you lose your cool, you lose everything."
Q: Is cool something outside of you or is it on the inside?
A: "Both. You have to go inside to bring it out. If you're cool inside, and you know you're cool inside, then you can kind of be that without looking egotistical. You can do it in a way that people will say 'Oh, he's cool, but he just doesn't like showing it.'"
Q: Is crying not cool?
A: "Crying is very cool. Crying is actually one of the coolest things you can do."
Q: What spiritual things are important to you?
A: "Crystals. I'm very into crystals. They mean a lot. Instead of saying 'knock on wood', why not say 'knock on crystal'? There's so much more talk about crystals than wood."
Q: Who is the ideal leading lady you could be cast opposite?
A: "Her name is La La; she's my girlfriend right now. One night me and her were at this hotel called Paradise. We watched ourselves kiss in the mirror. It looked perfect."
Q: How do you fit into the context of the New Breed?
A: "I have a rawness about myself. I hope I make it, but if I don't, I'll just get back to life as it was in Toronto. I'm not really worried about it, and besides, I'm cool."
(This is what I get when I do a Google image search for "vast chasm of desperation and loneliness.")
Posts
6 comments:
I'm surprised that Corey Haim didn't take one of his crystals and prove to Corey Feldman that White is actually where all colors are present. Maybe he tried, but when seeing the refracted rainbow, Feldman wrote it off on the grounds that "Magic doesn't count."
i'm sad. when i google searched "vast chasm of desperation and loneliness," all i found was your blog post.
zomg It's TRUE, I googled it and it's TRUE
Were you Googling this from 'puters in The 4th Dimension? That can be pretty tricky. You might need rabbit ears and some tin foil.
Omg soo true yet so sad! Rip Corey !!
I googles it on the picture search and omg!!! It's the first pic dat chums up!!
Post a Comment