Another Star Gone Out

     Some films' plots hinge on strangers meeting.  The cliché, "Fate drew them together," holds for those who accept destiny as real, rather than something made up and believed in by those who think backwards.  Deconstructing the hows, wheres, whys, and whens of knowing someone can be an interesting thought exercise.  How did you meet your wife?  What led you to be where she was when you met her?  What led her to be there?  Did knowing a certain person lead you to go to a specific bar at a specific time, or do you do all your hooking up through the internet?  If the last mentioned is the case, you're still part of a generation created by older people who didn't have computers and mobile phones omnipresently in their lives.  How did your parents meet?  Did one of them grow up in Connecticut, but moved to Indiana where he met your mother "by chance," leading to you?
     I'm not sure I believe in fate, because it seems like just a substitute for believing in God, and I'm an agnostic; more accurately, I don't care if God exists or not.  You can make things happen in your life, things happen to you; some conditions, like the struggle humans have dealing with reality, never change.  Whatever's really happening on an ultimate level, what some think of as the business of the divine, one still has to live one's life, making it with or without transhuman guidance.  For me, chance is real.  Randomness something to embrace.
     Making the meeting of strangers a crucial plot element is a fairly easy way for a filmmaker to generate intrigue, since the strangers will get to know each other, their personalities blending and clashing, as in life.  The last three films I've watched, over the last two days, feature this motif of strangers meeting, followed by things happening because they've met.  Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning.  I happened to pick these films from a local library's DVD section, their commonality at the time of selection a simple desire to see them.  I'd seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea once before, been deeply impressed by it, so it was an easy choice.  Jean Renoir's Bondu, an early sound film, is a classic of French cinema; it's been on my unwritten must watch list for many years.  Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, directed by Mark L. Lester, struck me as worth watching because it stars Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in a 1970s TV series I watched at the time.  She's very beautiful and buxom, so for basic male heterosexual reasons I wanted to see the film.  What mostly surprised me about it was Lynda Carter's poor acting performance, something attributable, perhaps, to the director's seeming lack of interest in coaxing anything compelling, from a realistic human standpoint, from most of his characters, except for Marjoe Gortner, playing the eponymous Outlaw.  He has real charisma and screen presence, something imbued in him, maybe, from childhood, when he was a child preacher.
     The film consists of this: man steals car, man meets woman, man and woman go on crime spree joined by three others, they're pursued, four of them die from gunshots, woman lives and is arrested.
     In Medea, from the myth of the Golden Fleece, Jason goes to steal the Fleece, meets Medea, she helps him and travels with him back to his land, has children with him and a falling out, and then kills her children.
     In Bondu Saved From Drowning, a bookseller saves a bum from killing himself in the Seine.  The bum lives with the bookseller, seducing his wife and later marrying their maid, all the while misbehaving, a creature of pure id.
     All three films rely on combinations of people coming together by chance.  Even in modern times, there are those who see God's hand (or Hand) in every encounter in our lives.  Pat Robertson tried to blame 9/11 on Americans' sexual immorality.  His own immorality in his business dealings (Central African diamond mining) had everything to do with the corrupt mind and heart of Pat Robertson.
     Strangers meeting in movies, as in our lives, is a regular theme.  The idea, coupled with the currents of chance, has been one of my frequent topics of thought for decades, maybe three.  For me, fate makes the most sense as a real thing only if time runs backwards.  I had an idea once about the Big Crunch, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe will eventually stop expanding, leading to a crunch, or contraction.  Will time, then, go backwards all the way to the Big Bang?  Will it then restart?  Have we been undergoing existence, nonexistence, existence, ad infinitum, doing the same things repeatedly forwards and backwards forever?  Has it been going on so long that sentient beings have found ways of skirting boredom by accepting randomness into their lives; the chaos factor that at least makes things interesting, creating possibilities of growth through new experiences which are then put into the mix of Bang, Expansion, Crunch, Contraction?
     In not caring whether God exists or not, have I latched onto a religious approach revolving around chance?  The chance moments of my eyes seeing the titles, Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning, at the library, watching them, and seeing the strangers-meeting connection that probably exists in thousands upon thousands of movies?
     I don't know the answer, but Lynda Carter, if the theory is right, will be twenty-five again, Bondu will try again to end himself in the river, and Medea will meet Jason inside the temple housing the sacred Golden Fleece, everyone becoming embryonic again, leading to conceptions, fucks, and beyond that to, as Laurie Anderson put it in a song, "When I was just a candy bar/in my father's back pocket."

                                                                           Vic Neptune