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Me: Holy Mother of God, you are just stunning! You are insanely beautiful! Jesus!!
Marion: Thank you, that’s very sweet of you to say.
Me: Your voice is chocolate, French chocolate.
Marion: I see.
Me: I think I need my inhaler. Sorry. Jesus, this is embarrassing.
Marion: It’s all right.
Me: It’s just that you’re so beautiful. You’re luminous, like a cloud made of gold and light.
Marion: I’m just an actress who has agreed to talk to you about my new movie Rust and Bone that just opened in the United States.
Me: Yes, yes.
Marion: It is a wonderful film, very complex and beautiful.
Me: You train whales in this film, don’t you? You’re a beautiful marine biologist! I bet you look even better with your hair wet. It probably changes the way it smells. If I were a killer whale I would do whatever you told me to do!
Marion: Yes, well, the film is about a whale trainer who suffers a terrible accident where she loses her legs. She is both a physical and emotional amputee, and must let love back into her life. It was a very challenging role for me to play, but as an actor all you want to do is discover more about the human soul.
Me: You have such beautiful legs it would be a shame to lose them, even if it was just in a movie! But yeah, I think I know what you’re saying about the human soul. I get it. You were in Batman, too, weren’t you? I always thought you’d make a great Catwoman. Have you ever thought about being Catwoman? You’re more beautiful than Halle Berry times Michelle Pfeiffer times Anne Hathaway times Halle Berry again, plus all the old TV ones.
Marion: I think that they did marvelous jobs playing that role and I don’t think I’d want to repeat work that had been done so well. I like to always do something new, to always challenge myself.
Me: My wife thinks that I’m a real challenge.
Marion: I am sure that she does.
Me: What movie do you think you were most beautiful in?
Marion: It’s been a pleasure Mister Murray, but I am afraid I’m on a very tight schedule and I have an another appointment to keep now.
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Mary Webster, November 13, 2009
“I can no longer be near that man. He lost a tooth one night when we were dancing. It just fell out of his head, and all he did was put it in his pocket and jam some Kleenex in his mouth, which quickly became sodden and red. I had to run to the washroom and throw-up. It is impossible, and I mean physically impossible, for me to dance with him again.”
Claire Hepburn, December 12, 2009
“I will not dance with him again. He’s just too sweaty. At first you can see it on his upper lip, and then it’s all over his face. His hands are cold and slippery, like something that lives in the water, and one night I noticed that he was sweating through his pants, near his groin. He said he had an unusually effective lymphatic system. Gross.”
Julia Barylak, December 12, 2009
“He simply can’t dance. It’s like he’s trying not to dance and you’re fighting against some creature from a parallel universe who’s attempting to thwart your every move. It’s so frustrating that when I get home after class I drink a bottle of wine and watch game shows. I really hate him.”
Alex McLaren, February 28, 2010
“He always asks me to call him The Colonel, and I’m not going to do that.”
Jillian Dickens, September 02, 2010
“He gets tired very easily and then his nose begins to whistle. It’s demoralizing, as if some ghost or the specter of death is in the room with you.”
Rei Hokkaido, March 15, 2011
“I always feel like I’m one of those prank shows when I’m dancing with him. At first it was kind of fun and unpredictable, like a witty conversation with somebody begging for money, but then it quickly devolved into a display of mental and physical illness. I’m sorry, but dancing with him just makes me sad and I come here to be happy, my life is difficult enough, you know?
Alison Perry, October 12, 2011
“He wore a mesh top to one class and is always telling knock-knock jokes. That’s enough, isn’t it? But even more, his dancing skills and ability to learn new moves are so horrible that I feel I’m regressing whenever it’s my unfortunate turn to partner with him, and I cannot do that any more.”
Aurina Gupta, September 2, 2012
“I was there the day he wore the Batman costume to class on the opening night of The Dark Knight Rises. He really seemed to think that the cape was sexy and kept spinning around and around, or rather, stumbling around and around. He knocked over my water bottle and stepped on my iPod, breaking it. I cannot tell you how much that evening upset me. I was sure he was going to get on the subway and shoot people after that class. “
Debra O’Malley, December 11, 2012
“I can’t say why, but he just reminds me of the Ikea Monkey.”
I was unable to suspend my disbelief and enter the world– regardless of how artfully crafted it was– that was unfolding before me on the screen. All I could think about was the shooting rampage in Colorado.
Instead of serving as an escapist summer blockbuster where I got to expunge myself of any violent impulses that might be lurking in my soul, I felt a crushing, depressive realism. The shootings in Aurora were ever-present in my mind and I could not shake them free.
I watched the exit doors, imagining the shooter walking in from one. I tried to figure out at which point in the movie the shootings had started and how confused, surreal and terrifying that must have been. I thought about what I would do to protect Rachelle and myself if it happened here. I wondered what all the other people in the theatre around me were thinking. I was all over the map, quite frankly, and was barely watching the movie at all but more the darkness between the audience and what was taking place in front of us, if that makes any sense.
And when there was actual gun violence or horror on the screen, I found myself shirking away from it, which is something of a first. I’ve grown up in a culture of violent imagery from TV, movies and to some extent video games, and I am just as hardened to it, and appreciative of it, as the next person. There’s an obvious charisma to violence, and watching it manifest can be exhilarating, but now, suddenly, it was ugly and true, like hearing the sound of somebody getting punched in the face in a bar fight.
I imagine I’ll get past it, but I wonder if I’ve come to a kind of tipping point in my life where violence on the screen has stopped being make believe, no longer acting as a therapeutic safety valve for the rages and impulses we would never act on, but rather inspiring us toward them?
No matter, the crowd loved the film, and as we left I noticed that I might just have been the oldest person in the theater. Beside me as we all shuffled to the exit was a meathead kind of teenager. Built like a fridge, he had the dim, slightly sadistic look of any number of high school jocks and in his hands he had a football that he was spinning up in the air and catching. Again and again he did this, easy and superior, and I wondered if he imagined it a weapon, the sort of thing he could have pulled from his utility belt and thrown at a would-be gunman, saving the day just like Batman.
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