It’s funny about sex appeal. Ever see this Italian actress Asia Argento? (Daughter of horror movie director Dario Argento…) She isn’t the most beautiful of actresses, but there’s something dynamite about her—the feeling she gives off that you don’t know what she’ll do next! And that’s sexy.
I’m not an expert on male sex appeal, but I suppose that young Marlon Brando in the 1950s must have exuded that feeling too. (Women, am I right?)
On the other hand, some actors are predictable. Like Tom Bosley, who played Richie’s father on the Garry Marshall sitcom Happy Days. He wasn’t a particularly bad actor, but you knew exactly how he’d act every time you saw him! And in the TV sausage factory that produces 23 episodes per year of every prime-time show, such consistency is what producers often want.
Of course, TV shows are often predictable. I was watching the World War II miniseries The Winds of War online just for Robert Mitchum. (He was too old for his role, but his performance grew on me.) There’s a scene in it where he’s playing chess with a German general. I said to myself, “The German will put Mitchum in check, but Mitchum will end up pulling off a checkmate,” which (spoiler) is exactly what happens!
I saw the first part of an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter once—like Happy Days, it’s one of those shows featuring high-school students played by actors who are obviously over 21. In this episode one of the Sweathogs got an after-school job in an antique shop handling precious Tiffany lamps. Though I only saw that first part, I somehow knew that some Tiffany lamps were going to get smashed! (The audience would be disappointed otherwise.) If anyone’s seen that episode, tell me if I was wrong…
Movies can be predictable too. I mentioned that Garry Marshall was the creative force behind Happy Days, and he went on to direct movie features. He started out making sitcoms, but he never really stopped. Consider his sequel to The Princess Diaries. Ann Hathaway’s mother is a queen who wants to marry her off because she’s concerned about a pretender to her throne, who happens to be young, handsome and single. I think we all know how the problem will be solved in the end…. It’s a case of the “idiot plot” where characters stumble around for the whole movie trying to figure out things that were perfectly obvious to the audience from the start. Otherwise, the plot’s central problem would get solved too soon for a feature-length film!
The Eagles song “Hotel California” has incredibly predictable rhymes:
How they dance in the courtyard
Sweet summer sweat
Some dance to remember
Some dance to…
…preset? …abet? …offset? …sublet? …beget? (That one almost makes sense.) …regret? …upset? …pirouette?
And people can be predictable, especially the young. When I was fourteen I joined a swim team. When I bicycled down to the swimming pool for practice, I’d pass by this group of boys, and the second they saw me they’d always stop what they were doing and jeer at me. (If it had just been one guy, he probably wouldn’t have bothered, but in a group together they felt empowered.) What bothered me was that they were so predictable: this didn’t happen most of the time but every single time! It was like running a gauntlet. There were guys like that in school—the moment they saw me that would remind them to start talking about me in a particularly unflattering way, as if I weren’t there! Of course, they were making a point of dissing me in my presence: status in school, like prison and the military, is often a zero-sum game where people can’t think of any way to raise theirs except at the expense of someone else’s. And they really seemed to be enjoying it.
All this did get to me. It bugs me when grownups say to kids, “Don’t let it bother you.” In my view, what they’re really saying is, “Your feelings are the weak link here. It would be so nice if you just didn’t care…” Even worse is “You’re too sensitive!” It’s true that in my youth I was unusually thin-skinned. But to me, that’s saying, “We can’t expect other things to be different, but we can expect you to force yourself to be less sensitive, or to keep your feelings to yourself!” But I’d better stop before I go an all day about it…
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