Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

At thirteen, lurid, guilty pleasure The Other Side of Midnight 28revealed to me the amazing fact that, unlike the static illustrations in How Babies Are Made , sexual intercourse is more than mere insertion of Penis A into Vagina B; it actually includes movement ! Thrusting, rubbing, pumping. Coming Home introduced me to the intriguing concept of oral sex; the scene of Jon Voight going down on Jane Fonda was educational for both the explicitness of its spatial relations and the expressive intimacy between the two characters. 29(However, I saw this movie with my mother, when I was fourteen, and I do not recommend that experience.) Don’t Look Now was also illuminating due to its candid and legendary “Are Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland really doing it ?” scene of a grieving couple attempting to lose themselves in emotionally and physically naked gymnastics. 30 Looking for Mr. Goodbar taught me a woman can both be on top and be taken from behind; All That Jazz showed me how to make a guy come in his pants; sweaty William Hurt opening sweaty Kathleen Turner’s legs in Body Heat didn’t really teach me anything I didn’t already know, but wow, the look on his face. . 31And, of course, The Last Tango in Paris ’s famous lesson on butter and anal sex. 32(i.e., how not to have anal sex.)

Yes, I have paid rapt attention to and taken notes on all of it; I have the mechanics down, thank you, my imagination has been both inspired and enflamed. So, can I please just get laid , already? I am dying to put theory into practice, to seek out sex for the sheer sake of sex, for absolute real, to find and have and make that experience happen. I am old enough to sign my own permission slip.

There is a guy in my college Shakespeare course whose witty insights and wire-rimmed glasses I have appreciated; we run into each other one Saturday morning at the Nuart’s Shakespeare Film Festival, and we formally begin dating. He is funny as hell and smarter than I am (which I have come to appreciate as an aphrodisiac), and after three weeks of dinners and foreign films and Trivial Pursuit (I always lose), I inform him one evening over sake and tempura that I have purchased contraceptives that afternoon, and if he’s up for it — which he is — I’m ready to Do It , which we do.

It is no quivering, enflaming thing, we are not breathless and exquisite teenagers overwhelmed by heat, there is no fusion of souls. It’s clumsy and definitely a bit mechanical — not quite the paper cutouts of that children’s book, more like a series of IKEA instructional pictographs, now. And despite the extraordinary patience and tenderness of this lovely guy, it is incredibly painful. But I am referencing only the physical pain. In the aftermath, there is no stunned, stricken silence, no sad emotional reckoning; if anything, I am surprised by the sweet comedy of it all, how there is a new laughing and joking between us that is very dear. I am not feeling a transcendental intimacy, but neither am I feeling emptiness or loneliness or regret. I have lost nothing; I have found an extraordinary new thing to value. Sex, for me, will never be just sex , nor do I want it to be. I want my Shakespeare and my porn, illumination and obliteration, transcendence and raw sweat, connection and escape. With each new lover, I will become a weird virgin all over again, because the experience of sex with a new body and heart and soul will always be different, be re-created anew — it will always, or can always be, the First Time.

24 Romeo and Juliet (Paramount Pictures, 1968): screenplay by Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico, and Franco Zeffirelli, based on the play by William Shakespeare; directed by Franco Zeffirelli; with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey

25 Little Darlings (Paramount Pictures, 1980): written by Kimi Peck and Dalene Young; directed by Ronald F. Maxwell; with Kristy McNichol, Tatum O’Neal, Armand Assante, and Matt Dillon

26 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Universal Studios, 1982): screenplay by Cameron Crowe, based on his book; directed by Amy Heckerling; with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates

27“Somebody’s Baby,” by Jackson Browne and Danny Kortchmar

28 The Other Side of Midnight (20th Century Fox, 1977): written by Herman Raucher, based on the novel by Sidney Sheldon; directed by Charles Jarrott; with Marie-France Pisier

29 Coming Home (United Artists, 1978): written by Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones; directed by Hal Ashby; with Jane Fonda and Jon Voight

30 Don’t Look Now (British Lion Films, 1973): screenplay by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant, based on the story by Daphne Du Maurier; directed by Nicolas Roeg; with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland

31 Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Paramount Pictures, 1977): screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the novel by Judith Rossner; directed by Richard Brooks; with Diane Keaton; All That Jazz (20th Century Fox/Columbia Pictures, 1979): written by Robert Alan Aurthur and Bob Fosse; directed by Bob Fosse; Body Heat (Warner Bros., 1981): written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan; with William Hurt and Kathleen Turner

32 Last Tango in Paris (United Artists, 1972): written by Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Arcalli; directed by Bernardo Bertolucci; with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider

THE LOG BOOK OF A DISTINCTIVE ALCOHOLIC

Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic

The Lost Weekend

Arthur

Days of Wine and Roses

When a Man Loves a Woman

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Valley of the Dolls

The Morning After

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Opening Night

Bridget Jones’s Diary

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Leaving Las Vegas

Flight

I love alcohol. I love to drink alcohol. I love the grapefruity redolence of Sauvignon Blancs from New Zealand and the juniper berry kiss of gin. I love the flirty burn of tequila liberally citrus’d with fresh lime. I love the velvet tongue of Merlot, the apricot honey of an ice-cold IPA beer. I love the celebratory Kir Royale, Champagne turned ruby with just a touch of crème de cassis, and I love the low-maintenance flexibility of that frosted bottle of vodka in the freezer, just so happy to go along with anything in the pantry or fridge: OJ, a few mashed raspberries, the juice from a can of lychee nuts. Sometimes I honor the vodka by drinking it straight up, all ice-and-diamond clean.

I love the sound FX of drinking, the mimetic hum: The chuckle of a liberated cork, the shaking shaker of crushed ice, the gasp and fizz of a cracked-open mixer, the trickle-and-splash sound of cola hitting the waiting rum.

I love the mise-en-scène of drinking, the aesthetics of all that crystal and glass: The fat breast of a brandy snifter, the hieroglyphic martini glass, the elegant phallic flute. I gaze at these glasses posed just so in my hand and marvel at my sophistication. I see lovely Romy Schneider in Le Vieux Fusil , lifting the nose veil on her 1930s cocktail hat to sip her coupe de Champagne ; youngish Melanie Griffith in Working Girl , flirt-shooting tequila with Harrison Ford and delicately swiping lime pulp from her preplumped lips; Barbra Streisand seductively stroking her breast with a glass of sherry in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever ; Meryl Streep’s Sophie in Sophie’s Choice , being brought back to life and love by a single sip of a red wine so exquisite it is what, if you have lived the life of a saint, the angels will serve you to drink in Paradise.