Dr Doran
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And yet another thread, not to be too threadhappy here: how about movies and books dealing with a character who lives in the modern world but insists on dressing and/or acting "Golden Age"? I could not stand "The Singing Detective" myself (no offense if you loved it). I thought "Man of the Century" was a lot of fun, and it even began as though it was going to ape an old movie (see my last thread). Have any/all of you seen that? The character is named "Johnny Twennies" and writes a human interest column for the newspaper. He dresses scrupulously 20s. His photographer is the blonde photographer in RENT playing essentially the exact same role, which is amusing: a jaded hipster artiste New York photographer. A lot of the gags are a little predictable (WARNING: SPOILERS: he insists on meat at each meal; the RENT character has a salad and herbal tea for lunch and Johnny Twennies is horrified; he can't get past first base with his girlfriend because he is too polite, but since mores have changed, she fears he is gay, etc.) but very cute. In the movie, Johnny honestly does not know that he is an anachronism: that is the film's conceit.
Bookwise on this theme there is a very strange and interesting novel called The Secret History by Donna Tartt which concerns a clique of classics students in a university in the 1980s who cannot bear the modern world and only wear suits, ties, cufflinks, wingtips; one of them does not even know that man has reached the Moon (a conscious homage to Sherlock Holmes). They do this partly to express their horror at the hippies and punkers at the school and in fact at the growth of informality; unlike Johnny Twennies, they are fully aware of what they are doing. They get involved in two murders and things spiral from there.
I am not only interested in this theme because it can produce good work, but also because these works are warnings to those of us who can get carried away, myself included, with period correctness ... one doesn't want to end up like a vintage version of Tom Hanks' role at the end of the made for TV cheeseball classic "Mazes and Monsters," in which a Dungeons and Dragons player ends up completely disappearing into his character, Sardu, and losing all touch with the normal world ...
Bookwise on this theme there is a very strange and interesting novel called The Secret History by Donna Tartt which concerns a clique of classics students in a university in the 1980s who cannot bear the modern world and only wear suits, ties, cufflinks, wingtips; one of them does not even know that man has reached the Moon (a conscious homage to Sherlock Holmes). They do this partly to express their horror at the hippies and punkers at the school and in fact at the growth of informality; unlike Johnny Twennies, they are fully aware of what they are doing. They get involved in two murders and things spiral from there.
I am not only interested in this theme because it can produce good work, but also because these works are warnings to those of us who can get carried away, myself included, with period correctness ... one doesn't want to end up like a vintage version of Tom Hanks' role at the end of the made for TV cheeseball classic "Mazes and Monsters," in which a Dungeons and Dragons player ends up completely disappearing into his character, Sardu, and losing all touch with the normal world ...
