Hildegarde

Okay.

So here I am, almost done with this thing, which is good, because it turns out this is not going to be a truncated version of the old cold.  I’m just sick.

That said, I’m at a place where I know all my decisions are, so I’m not going to stop to take it easy.  The last thing I want is to forget how I finally decided this all fit together. 

In the meantime, I find myself in one of those dilemmas. 

I am very careful about what I read when I write and when I cut–there are some things that simply make it impossible for me to keep my mind on the project in hand.

These things are not necessarily bad.  Stephen King is one of them, and my guess is that the problem is not that he’s bad, but that he’s good.  He just has too strong a narrative voice for me to fight my way out of.

Very badly written books can go either way.  Sometimes they drive me so crazy, I can’t do anything.  Sometimes they actually affect me less than they would have if I wasn’t working. 

I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what any of this means.  I just know what works, and I go with that.

Every once in a while I have a problem that I’ve mentioned before and some of you think is just crazy–I finish a book, and I just can’t find another one that I can manage to read.

This happened yesterday, when I put down the last of the Perry Masons in the house that I hadn’t read yet and looked around for something else.

Now, here’s the thing–when I have actually finished a book, I need what I think of as a “transition” book, a book to transition into real life.

This almost always turns out to be something nonfiction and argumentative.   It also tends to be something I’ve read before, because that way I can be sure it’s the right kind of thing.

I actually have a book I would like to use as my transition book–in fact, I’ve got two.  One I don’t own yet.  The other I own two copies of but can’t find either.

So when I came out of the office yesterday, having cut as much Gregor as I could without falling over, I found myself not just with nothing to read, but with nothing I could make myself understand.

And that’s when I went for my default–the movies I watched when nothing else works right.

And that led me to think about–well, Danny Ocean.

I know I’ve talked about this before, but let me go back to the issue again, because it continues to bother me.

Caper stories–novels and movies–have cycles of popularity.  There was a positive fashion for them in the Sixties and early Seventies, with two very popular paperback series–one by Donald E. Westlake and one by Lawrence Block–getting not only decent sales but movie versions.  Hell, at one point, Dormunder, Westlake’s thief-character, got played by Robert Redford.

But any way you think about it, caper stories are an odd venture.  There are people out there who like to identify with the Dark Side and to fashion themselves as evil–consider Alastair Crowley–but most of us don’t, and even most of us who are engaged in objectively evil (or just objectively wrong) actions manage to reframe them as objectively good or neutral.

Theft is, I think, an objectively wrong action, except in those cases where there is something unusual that might excuse it–think Jean Valjean. 

Caper novels are almost never written about Jean Valjean characters, though.  They’re written about professional thieves, people who make their living stealing other people’s stuff.

Almost nobody who has ever had any of their stuff stolen sympathizes with thieves.  The first problem a caper story has, therefore, is to turn an unsympathetic character into a sympathetic one–to somehow take the mind of the audience off the thievery and onto the thieves’ personality.

Larry  Block’s series had an interesting way of doing this for a while.  His thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr (sp?), would start to rob an apartment or other venue and stumble over a body.  He would then have to solve the murder to avoid being charged with it himself.

And since murder is a lot worse than burglary, and since most people haven’t been burgled, this worked.

It worked well enough to keep the series in business for many years, and to produce at least one movie, Burglar, with Bernie Rhodenbarr transformed into the person of Whoopi Goldberg.

Sometimes a caper story works because the thief, although a professional, and the job, although a robbery, aren’t really that in this particular instance.

That’s the set up in The Italian Job, where the robbery is being executed against a man who stole what he has to begin with an in the process caused the gratuitous death of one of his partners.

With other caper stories, the issues aren’t all that clear cut–which is  how we get to my default movies, when I’m just too tired or too sick or too out of it to really want to think.

This is how we get to Danny Ocean.

Now, let me explain something about what I like about these movies.

First, I like the Eleven and the Thirteen movies more than I like the Twelve, and that is because Twelve is set in Europe, and the other two are set in Las Vegas.

And I like them because the Las Vegas of these movies is bright and shiny and–I don’t know what.

You have to understand, from off, that I do not like casinos in real life.  In real life, casinos seem to me to be sad and desperate places, with few if any of the people in them having a “good time.”

I do understand that people can gamble as a pastime without becoming habituated to it.  I have a good girlfriend from college who goes to Vegas or Atlantic City every year, takes along exactly how much money she’s willing to lose, and stops when she’s lost that.

Even so, these places always seem unhappy to me, and more than a little sordid.  I did an event at Mohegan Sun once and had to walk across the slot machine area to get to dinner.  There is just something wrong with people who sit hunched up like that for hour after hour.

Nobody sits hunched up like that in the world of Ocean’s Las Vegas.  Everybody is beautifully dressed all the time and drinking as if they’ve got somebody else to drive them home.  There is a right way and a wrong way to gamble, and everybody knows it.

But my fondness for these movies is even odder if you consider what’s actually going on in them.

In numbers Twelve and Thirteen, Ocean and the boys are ripping off either somebody who is already ripping them off and will kill them if they don’t succeed in a counterstrategy, or somebody who is himself dishonest and brutal in a way the Ocean crew is not.

In Ocean’s Eleven, however, the target is a casino owner who is admittedly a thug–but a thug in the way Lorenzo di Medici was a thug. 

What’s more, it’s clear that his success is due not to his thuggery but to his other accomplishments, which are considerable.  He works his butt off, as the saying goes. He speaks several languages and is learning more, so that he can talk to high rollers from places like Germany and Japan in their own tongue. 

I’ll admit that, as with diMedici, it’s hard to like Terry Benedict.  He certainly commits a big no-no by valuing his casino empire over his girlfriend.

But he has still earned what he’s got, not cheated it out of other people, and on several levels it’s difficult not to admire him. 

That leaves me, of course, with the question of why it doesn’t bother me when Ocean and the boys get away with $160,000,000 of his money. 

Some of it may simply be the amount of time that is spent explaining that the man is insured and will be made whole no matter what. 

I don’t usually fall for that kind of line, because I know that insurance payoffs hurt everybody in the long run.  The insurance companies will make that money back by raising premiums and doing other things to otherwise innocent parties.

And yet it just doesn’t bother me. 

What I seem to want out of these movies is a shiny world where nothing is quite real–not in the way that science fiction landscapes aren’t real, but in the way dreams are. 

The very premise of these things is just so–ridiculous is the word I think I want here.  Even the money isn’t real.

And maybe that’s what I really want from these things.

A world where the money isn’t real.