Who Am I This Time/Stop Making Sense

What moves me to romantic tears? I admit: the tears produced by most of the films on this list veer at times too close to the reptilian sardonic. Love, it’s clear, is a silly state; it’s far more cinematically fun—more spiritually honest, too; but perhaps easier—to see it fail than to witness it errantly and irrationally triumph, as we see in the Lubitsch/Wilder canon. Yet there are times that demand tendresse. Which is supplied by the films of Jonathan Demme, but he adds a crucial adjective: kooky tendresse. Demme understood that life is nothing without kook, getting off on it in films like Citizens Band (1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980), attracted to the David Byrne-y kook bolstered by a Tina Weymouth-Jerry Harrison-Chris Frantz ensemble in Stop Making Sense (1984; of which, the less said, the better — just listen to the film!) … but nowhere more so than in an hour-long American Playhouse episode he made for public television in 1982: Who Am I This Time? A haunting, beautiful question, since the drama enacted here by the two top-of-their-form stars is no less than their own individual hang-ups as actors. I do not see Helene Shaw, I see Susan Sarandon. I do not see Harry Nash, I see Christopher Walken. I see, in other words, not a fiction with characters but a living drama that spills into my world. I am moved—terribly.

Who is the actor? Who am I, who are we, when we put on those age-old roles: lover, artist, dreamer, public figure? To what gestures and to which memories am I, in the end, reduced? Demme drew his profound points from a master of US kook, Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote the short story “Who Am I This Time?” in 1961 and whose sense of the pointless, anguished fragility of life and love is kept in check by his rampant thirst for the absurd. Sarandon plays a traveling phone-company lady who intends to stay in the small town where the film is set for only eight weeks. But her low-key movie-star aura—don’t we all possess it secretly?—is attractive to the town locals, who rope her in to their amateur community-theater production of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire. She plays Stella opposite the Stanley of a painfully withdrawn hardware-store clerk: Walken. His is the sort of performance that would be “masterful” only by the standards of a public high school in Pasadena.

And lo! Sarandon finds herself drawn to Walken, drawn into his boorish, leering, drawling Stanley, a parody of a bad Marlon Brando parody. Yet Walken is so parodic that he emerges as sincere, original, true. We get why she’s into him. He plays it as a bit without meaning it as a bit. That’s hot. The townsfolk warn Sarandon: Don’t get too attached—he’s like that with every performance. Yes: as soon as a rehearsal or a show’s run is over, he goes back to being his normal, schlubby, gormless self.

What I love is that the story is told with limited settings (a store, a storefront, a fake New Orleans storefront, and a library), no flash, and is acted with the sense that this wildly mediocre, overacted production of Williams’s melodrama is a matter of life and death. Because it is. And you know what? I prefer it to the Elia Kazan film! Yes! So does Sarandon’s Helene, who prefers Walken’s Stanley over “the real thing,” Brando. That is love.

Should Sarandon go back to her regular job? Or does this weird performative relationship, so transitory and wonky, hold the key to her life? Ultimately she feels like she needs to stay on in the town in order to understand Walken’s complex, to try to see why he’s so painfully shy and withdrawn and can only be “himself” in roles that bear no relation to who he actually is. Every minute counts. The seconds tick away. Rehearsal—then opening night—then two more matinees—then closing night—then: strike the set and go back to your silly little humdrum lives. Hardly any time to stoke love. So Demme, Vonnegut, Sarandon, and Walken make you feel, in commercial-free miniature, that anxiety of waiting for a beloved to emerge. They make me see: to encounter a shy one’s face is just about the most mysterious, cataclysmic event that we can ever hope to experience.

Wow, did Demme love people! It shines, even at his most frightening: Silence of the Lambs. Enjoy this double-header of films by him, films that (to my knowledge) have never been programmed on a double-bill before tonight, but which have an awful lot to say about what it means to capture the meeting between two people on screen. A miraculous capture.