Loving Julie Christie

I bought the old black and white RCA television from a garage sale for one dollar. For this thirteen year old, the purchase was a secret defiance of the no television after, or no television before rule in the house; and surprisingly, once it was installed into the basement rec room, the second screen in the house, was met with very little parental disapproval. The indifference was perhaps a nod to my bargain-hunting skills; more likely it was the fact that the television produced a beautiful pattern of electronic snow, and little else.

After a couple of days of initial disappointment, I decided to take the back off the unit and see what could be done about saving it from the trash (I had already offered it to a neighborhood kid for 50% off my purchase price, but to no avail). Staring at a bunch of plugs, wires and one big cathode ray tube, I soon realized I was not one of those boy tinkerers who disassembled watches for the heck of it.

Blowing out years of accumulated dust, I replaced the back of the television and turned it on. A little white dot appeared in the center of the screen. And then I heard a voice: “Now Sam, you promised…” Suddenly, there was Elizabeth Montgomery twinkling her nose. Dick York looked horrified. I pumped my fist in the air. Yes!

Courtesy of Minneapolis’ own KTCA public television station, the RCA became my black and white mirror to another world. It was a time-travel machine that brought me to distant lands with strange languages and subtitles.

Most of the journey was a mystery: What I could not hear (for fear of late-night parental reprisal); what I could not see (an aluminum foil antenna only goes so far); and what I could not understand (“Persona”?)… only fueled my imagination.

There was Monica Vitti. Her hand on the back of Sandro’s head, as she resigned herself to a life of probable deceit in “L’avventura;” and then again, her missed appointment with Alain Delon, witnessed only by vagrant buildings bordering desolate streets, blanketed by the blackness of the sun’s eclipse in, “L’eclisse.”

But nothing would effect me as much as that cold winter day when Omar Sharif’s heart finally caved in to the weight of love and revolution.

It was mid-February in Minnesota. Our 1950’s era ranch house groaned as the temperature plummeted well below zero. It was past midnight, and I was wrapped up in a blanket helping Zhivago find his way back to Yuriatan… and Lara.

I was not prepared though, for his decision to let that woman go. That woman! For the love of land and country? No. I couldn’t accept it.

The next day at recess, I stood alone in the snow and gazed deeply into her blue eyes. It would be the same, everyday, for the next week. There in the bitter cold, as my comrades killed the carrier, I mourned the loss of the poet and his muse. I too had fallen in love with Lara. “Ah… Then it’s a gift.” Alec Guinness repeated the mantra in my head. It didn’t help. I had fallen hard for her. For that woman. For Julie Christie.

She was the first cinematic woman incarnate I had met. I did the math in seventh grade math class: She would be… Oh, far too old. Still, through her, I dove into the dream. Again and again, just past midnight, the black and white RCA mirror would conjure another muse.

Julie would appear every once in awhile – In between Liv Ullmann, Jean Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. She became Bathsheba, in “Far From The Madding Crowd;” and Lady Trimingham, in “The Go-Between.”These romantic epics of lost love were salt in my Yuriatan wound.

It took Warren Beatty to show me though, that Julie was more than just Lara. Mrs. Miller was an enigma. All that we men (boys) thought we knew: The paradigm of cinematic womanhood – had changed.McCabe played his role, correctly. He loved. He left. He dreamed. He even had a gun. But ultimately, he was lost to the past; and she (that woman!) entered the seventies, where once again Warren loved, left and dreamed. This time, opium took the form of a bad haircut and too much shampoo. My RCA died, soon after.

I left Julie, for Anna Karina, when I entered college. My black and white mirror was first resurrected among the scratched prints and sticky floors of the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis; and then later, during The Bleeker Street Cinema’s last decade in New York.

Loving Anna Karina, with her etched eyeliner and swaths of mascara, was more like loving the ideaof Anna Karina. Godard’s carefully constructed muse seemed to be an amalgam of Louise Brooks and Musidora a/k/a, Irma Vep. But, I understood. She was his Lulu. Even leftist-intellectual-new wave-reactionaries get hard-ons.

I did meet up with past incarnations of Julie a few times at The Bleeker: When she was Dirk Bogarde’s, Darling; George C. Scott’s, Petulia; and Billy Liar’s, Liz. By then though, I had long since left Boris Pasternak’s Russia, for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, where the few women who trekked across his canvas, were either martyred mothers or holy fools. Things had not really changed, after all.

As the 20^th century came to a close and Cate Blanchett’s perfection hit eleven (not ten, but eleven); all seemed lost. Who was there to love, leave and dream of? Us boys (men) desperately needed to be saved.

Trinity was her name.

Loving Carrie-Anne Moss was scary. She seemed to embody all that we man-children desired in a deeply prehistoric way. Plus, she looked great in black lycra. But, she left. That is not how it works. I felt like calling her manager up and complaining.

I never thought to tell Julie, about Carrie-Anne. It happened so fast that now, I’m not sure if there was anything ever to it. All that time and before, Julie had been quietly working and steadily receding, into the background. This was a choice. At will, she could re-appear as Hamlet’s, Gertrude or embody the screen once more as in, “Afterglow.” She seemed content with what was, is and would be.

That was never more apparent than in, “Away From Her.”Julie, along with her co-star, Gordon Pinsent, inhabited this quiet little Canadian film with such ego-less performances, that I was sure I was up on screen playing the man who had grown old with her – And was about to lose her to, Alzheimer’s disease.

I watched her detach herself from me. Reminded of my past transgressions with the likes of Catherine, Jeanne, Liv, Monica, Anna and Carrie-Anne (I’m sure that Julie, like the rest of the world, was also in love with Cate), I endured the pain… And huddled, once again, in front of the old black and white mirror and was reminded of the dream.

I became Warren in the snow and Omar in the ice. I rushed up Varykino’s frozen steps, desperate to catch a last glimpse of Lara before she disappeared with Komarovsky… Before Julie as Fiona, disappeared into senility.

I am on the trolley. It is my first day at a new job. I see a woman walking along the sidewalk. She carries herself with ease and purpose. I’m about to call out to her, when I hear a voice. No, it isn’t Alec Guinness’ mantra. It’s my mother. I’ve just missed the bus to school.

Surely, Julie is enough of an excuse to miss homeroom?