This one’s a little bit of a journey so bear with me.  There was a window in my twenties when I lived with my dad and his girlfriend and her two kids.  I don’t remember if this was before my brother went into the army and left the state, or after he got back to finish his last tour here, but he was around.  Hang on, was I twenty yet?  Whatever.  Throw in Bad-Moustache-Having Guy and My Tech Support Guy to round out the picture.  That lady -the girlfriend aforementioned- had a species of BPD that allowed her to run a very clean household – the kind of clean that facilitated parties.

So we arranged a movie night with big snacks and a lot of DVDs in the queue.  Or were they VHS?  Shit, I think they were VHS tapes.  Way back.  In the most memorable moment of the evening, some guy was being burned alive in Braveheart and two of the attendees said in unison, “and it stays crunchy, even in milk!”  How did they think of the same rude application of pop culture reference for that image?  We partook of all the same media, so not impossible, but it was unlikely enough to amuse.

The most consequential moment of the night came later.  I had the most staying power and after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, I feel like it was after two AM?, I popped in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.  I felt big feelings, beginning to end.  I’m mostly incapable of crying, but I cried a little.  I recognize now that you should not trust how you felt about a movie if you were watching it before dawn, but the damage was done.  I got a tattoo of the movie’s logo on my wrist.  At least it wasn’t Sister Act 2.

I still have that tattoo, but it’s gone through a few changes over the years.  First up, it was originally laid down in red ink, over the warnings of the tattoo artist.  Red is very prone to fading and fade it did.  Probably didn’t help that the heavy-handed ex-con put a lot of scar tissue into the cut, and some pigment came off with scabs.  But the symbol, where it appeared in the movie, was usually spattered and smeary.  Illegibility suited it, but years of fading later, an art school acquaintance of my husband was apprenticed to be a tattoo artist and needed victims for practice, so it seemed like time to get it touched up.

This was the friend who valiantly defended my husband and others from an art school clown attack, and she used to wear a t-shirt with JESUS IS A CUNT in giant lettering, so genial to us.  However, I cannot trust her taste in music since that occasion, because her mix at the tattoo parlor included post-Danzig Misfits – that is to say, christian Misfits, and they genuinely did sound christian.  I might be nearly tone deaf, but I can tell the difference between Creed and Nickelback.  They both suck, but the christianity of the former has a certain quality to it, better identifiable to musicians, but detectable to a discerning lay person, and I detected the shit out of it.

Anyway, the work was a little dubious and the tattoo is still a mess.  But the important thing, to my husband’s reckoning, is that it doesn’t look like a stamp from the club that I’d neglected to wash off the next day.

The important thing about all that is to say that 12 Monkeys had a sad ending and may have been the first sad ending I was ever able to appreciate.  I don’t think that speaks well to Terry Gilliam’s talents, because I was the kind of basic bitch that was not at all ready for genuinely sad endings.  He communicated this sense that Cole’s life in a time loop was a kind of immortality.  He had struggles and died young, but in the course of that life, he experienced love – and that somehow vindicated -or at least mitigated- the tragedy.  Basically, it was a fake sad ending.

Flash forward to the earliest days of going out with my husband, when he introduced me to the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa – particularly the movies Cure and Sakebi.  Those movies show horrible events ending horribly, but still work as art, because they’re the sad mask in that ancient symbol of drama.  Tragedy is a legitimate art form that I never appreciated.  Even when first introduced to Kurosawa, I wasn’t ready for it.  I told him as much – “I recognize the artistic power of this work, but it feels like it isn’t for me.”  I wanted to see stories about heroes overcoming hardship, lovers getting to love.  Happy Endings, basically.  One of those drama masks was The Grim and Grimy One, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But the movies stayed with me, in my mind.  I couldn’t forget them because they had that power, and from the memories of them alone, I came to appreciate tragedy in a way that I never had before.  The culmination of this came a few years ago, the first time that I ever wrote a tragic ending.  Did it work?  Was it as good as the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Surely not, but it made more sense for the piece than a happy ending would have.  I served the story at the expense of the happiness of my little babies.  That’s artistic growth, and I owe it to my husband, which makes this another instance of Brainjackin’™.  Thanks man!

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