Do-overs can’t wash Spaceys away
How awkward. You’ve directed a wacky movie about J. Paul Getty called All the Money in the World; it’s set to drop on Dec. 22 with all the attendant ho! ho! ho! but there’s one problem. It stars Kevin Spacey.
As we now know, plenty of Hollywood movies are made by and feature sex creeps and rapists, but audiences generally aren’t aware of that at the time. Poor Ridley Scott must be kicking himself for not having signed Christopher Plummer, 87, to the role as he is said to have originally planned, instead choosing Spacey, 58, for his greater star power.
Now Scott’s getting a do-over from the studio. He’s going to hastily remake the film starring Plummer, which means, I take it, that Plummer will plant himself in front of a green screen for 12 hours a day and pretend to be Spacey playing Getty. I mean, he’s played worse.
It’s the concept of the do-over that calls out to me, the erasing of the first catastrophe, if that were possible, which it is not. If only Adolf Hitler had been admitted to art school in 1908. If only President Barack Obama had not publicly mocked Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. In a case of the Butterfly Effect — where small events have huge consequences — the butterfly’s wings cannot be re-flapped. Still, one can dream.
I imagine Americans, including many Republicans, would like a 2016 election do-over. It would answer an urgent question: Are they really like this? Did they deserve Trump?
Brits would like another go at that Brexit referendum, this time demanding a crushing overwhelming Yes or No to the question “Are we grubby Little Englanders or can we beat the Germans once more at ruling Europe?” Yes, a loaded question, but a good one.
There are things everyone wants to do over. Your first marriage. Your university major (should have taken history along with English lit). Newspapers not taking the classified ads digital themselves. That one year you can’t remember because you were high. A wiser you would fill that lost year with such productivity, loads of learned lumber in your head. You will not be buying marijuana at the LCBO next year.
That time you ate heartily of a croquembouche (a pyramid of choux pastry balls strung with threads of caramel) that had been sitting out in the shop all day because the French don’t understand the concept of refrigeration. You exited the other side of Christmas all bony and dehydrated.
The Treaty of Versailles. Residential schools to get the “Indian” out of Indigenous Peoples. Wiping out the bison. The Alberta tarsands. Introducing rabbits to Australia. Failing to scrape zebra mussels off the hull as you entered the St. Lawrence Seaway from the Atlantic.
Destroying the cod stocks off Newfoundland so that I cannot eat bacalhau (like choux pastry but with fish) without worrying that I am eating David Attenborough’s last fish out of a stupid passion for nursery food.
I would reach over and put a seatbelt on Princess Diana. I wouldn’t overreact to terrorism. Best do over the day U.S. president George W. Bush ignored a warning of an imminent attack on American soil. Do over that wrong turn taken by Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur in Sarajevo that morning in 1914.
Brutalism is a crime. I’d brick over every grimy stained cement hulk that passed for a fashionable building in 1969 and then served as an appropriate backdrop for public hangings in TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 2017. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is actually preserving a chunk of a horrible Tower Hamlets housing block on the assumption that all brutalist buildings will eventually be bulldozed, which isn’t soon enough for me. If the Gardiner Expressway had been built in neo-Gothic red brick and coloured stone, railway-style, we wouldn’t mind it quite so much.
The coffee pod: John Sylvan regrets inventing it. “It’s like a cigarette for coffee,” he says, “a singleserve delivery mechanism for an addictive substance.”
I only included that to prepare you for the worst invention of the past century, which is plastic. I pour laundry detergent from thick plastic jugs that will remain intact long after the human race expires. Like pods, they are single-use. What is wrong with us?
Plastic defined the last century by combining its worst characteristics — artificiality, disposability and synthesis — all rolled into one, writes Stephen Fenichell, plastic’s popular historian.
Most things, including us, “chip, wear, abrade, erode, distress and die,” he mourns. “Whether they burnish, tarnish, rust, mellow or patina, soften or fade, most things grow graceful with age.”
Plastic does not. It just cracks, and lives forever. Plastic is intrinsically bad, a life-detractor, a bad technological bargain. And we can’t do it over.
I would go on about do-overs but they’re beginning to overlap as in a Venn diagram. Who first drilled for oil? In retrospect, would they have sealed the cut and quietly gone home?
I won’t see All the Money in the World anyway. Plummer’s do-over won’t eliminate the ghost of the monster. Spacey is like plastic. He will crack eventually but he’ll be around forever, and so will his type of man. hmallick@thestar.ca