Only Man At the Orgy

     Elvis Presley serenades a woman in the Arizona desert in the film, Tickle Me.  His voice resonating with reverb, no microphone or audio effects in sight, he causes the woman to melt against him.  In 1965, the year of the movie, the Pill had already become available, yet, at one point, Presley says, going into one of his many passionate embraces with the luscious actress Jocelyn Lane, "If this keeps up, we'll have to get married."  The film ends with Presley and Lane, married, driving to their honeymoon, entering the Kingdom of Squaresville, presumably, a pair of young attractive lovers who require the bond of marriage to fuck each other--in 1965, after the Pill, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, after the explosion of Beatlemania, after the explosion of John F. Kennedy's head.
     In Hollywood films, the motif of a female and male couple spending the movie flirting, arguing, making up, and finally getting together, is so frequent it amounts to a cultural policy.  The way to fucking is through marriage; that's the ideal.  Extramarital or premarital sex is not encouraged, and if these taboos are ever violated, the punishments are severe.  James Mason, in East Side West Side, a good 1949 drama with excellent performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin, plays a fellow who screws Ava Gardner's character, while Stanwyck, playing Mason's wife, has no idea what's really happening for most of the movie.  This is one of the few classic age Hollywood films I've seen that really delves into adultery, but in the end, Mason's character is ruined.  It would be interesting to see a film of that period that doesn't present the attitude of harsh judgment towards adulterers.  The adulterers have no problem with what they're doing; in the end, they're happy.  One of them got out of a bad marriage by screwing someone else.
     Barbara Stanwyck walks in on Ava Gardner straddling James Mason, who says, "Oh, hello dear.  We've just been rearranging the bed sheets."
     Stanwyck drives fast--tears--heavy orchestral swellings--big black 1940s car flies off a pier into the East River--Ava Gardner and James Mason fuck the crap out of each other, then eat poached eggs, toast, and grapefruit.
     The problem with depicting reality in a 1965 Elvis Presley film is related to the fact that "the Sixties" hadn't started yet.  A year later, Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane, they recorded Surrealistic Pillow, an album far removed from the candy fantasy world of Tickle Me.  In seeing documentary footage of the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, I'm struck by how weird young people of that time were, how very different they behaved and appeared compared to their parents' generation.  A young woman walking about in a big city wearing an oversized top hat, with a flower design painted on her cheek, was not an unusual sight in those days.  Hallucinogens were easily available.  People were out in public in droves, fucked up, mentally altered.  All this while the Johnson administration was killing thousands of people every month in Southeast Asia, a region heavy in the growth of opium.  Heroin became cash for the CIA.  The United States government, while it condemned the youth drug revolution, was simultaneously a major world drug trafficker and dealer.  What with Afghanistan and opium, how much has that situation changed?  Could it be that when a government lashes out at something (drugs, terrorism, etc.), it's actually covering it's own practices in these fields of activity?
     The young woman of the example above (top hat, flower painted on cheek) is only two or three years removed from the dozens of wholesome-looking young women, all properly coiffed, dressed, all freshly bathed, in Tickle Me.  Elvis in the movie doesn't smoke cigarettes or grass (the term of the day for marijuana), doesn't try Acid, eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, or inject himself with heroin.  Such activities would not have fit the film's tone.  Instead, he performs spontaneously, even while pitchforking hay for the horses, his golden voice drawing crowds of women who stare at him with an ache on their faces, all of them wet in their panties, sex itself an acceptable drug in 1965 Hollywood as long as it's not mentioned or discussed, after the Pill had become available, after Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, after the hydrogen bomb.
   
                                                                            Vic Neptune