Shakespeare, Socrates, Emerson, Kant – fuck ‘em. When it comes to understanding the very essence of existence, I still run first and most often to Kenny Rogers: “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” Regurgitate the word salad of your choosing, you’ll never top The Gambler’s elucidation of life as lived. Pithy, penetrating, and eternally wise. Timing is everything and never overstay your welcome. Especially the latter. If anything is axiomatic these days (and all days prior), it’s that self-awareness begins and ends when you know how and when to hang it up. Retire with dignity. Admit defeat and take a seat. Hard and fast, like a tattoo on the soul. Or so I thought. It seemed so clear, so obvious, but I hadn’t yet met Annette.
Let’s be clear: nothing about Annette’s time on this earth does a thing to contradict Kenny’s words of wisdom. He’s still correct. But Annette is the card I’d pull to offer a counterclaim. My last stab at extending the argument, if only for a little while. You see, Annette doesn’t believe in giving up. More to the point, she’s at that particular age where she knows she can’t. Holding fast to the blistering ineptitude of her sad, lonely life because to leave the stage is akin to suicide. Or worse, homelessness. Hasn’t a girl got a right to her moment in the sun? Must non-existence be the only choice left to us after the will, the desire, and the ability have all gone south? In just about every case, I’d argue in the affirmative. Something about Annette keeps my mind freshly open to the alternative. Just a crack, mind you, but open nonetheless.
Annette, as played by a wonderfully grizzled and leathery Jamie Lee Curtis, is everything you’d hope her to be – tits out, lips painted a ghastly shade – always dressing for an age that long ago left the building. She’s the epitome of a dying Vegas that refuses to close the coffin lid good and tight. Bad makeup, bad attire (even for a cocktail waitress), she’s been bringing drinks to degenerate gamblers so long she forgot the outside world even existed. A broke-ass blue hair screeches for a whiskey, Annette comes running, as if the interaction constituted the sum total of human relationships. Drinks, tips, and insincere flattery; day after day, year after year, until you half wish the goddamn casino would be set ablaze around you. And so what if every other pig stuffs a chip down your cleavage. If you believed in dignity, you’d have jumped off the Stratosphere by now. You have bills, and bills need to be paid.
Annette’s no fool: she freely admits she’ll likely die at her post. No 401k, no health benefits, and no reason to even consider a time of rest. So what if her uniform makes her look like a performing monkey. What’s a woman approaching seventy going to do with her time, anyway? Gamble? Well yes, there’s that, which is why she’s also reduced to sleeping in her car and begging friends to provide a couch now and again until things settle down. She’s the Dylan lyric made flesh: “When you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.” What she hasn’t lost is her pride. Or the delusion that it’s still intact. And when you’re someone like Annette (and these days, who the hell isn’t), there really isn’t much of a difference. She’s going to put up her dukes, even if the fight to come is very much rigged. Especially so.
Which brings us to the scene that changed my tune. There she stands, on the clock and ready for another unending evening of bad news. If I had to guess, we’re on Fremont Street, a boulevard of broken dreams that somehow appear even more broken than usual. So broken they had to turn the place into a nostalgia trip, as if you could simply splash a little more neon on a strip of sadness and call it an evening. No more drinks to bring, she decides instead to dance. Solo. Because what else is a person to do when faced with Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”. Pathetic? Sure. A last gasp at youth and beauty? Almost certainly. Ass-over-tits drunken attention whoring? I can see that. Defiant and heartbreaking, all in the right ways? Goddamn right.
If you laugh, you’re missing the point. Believe me, when I’m at my breaking point (and that could be any day now), I hope I have one last “fuck you” to deliver. One where no gets hurt, no police need to be called, and body bags aren’t part of the equation. Just a final chin-up, head-held-high, damn-the-haters flag planting that says, I was here. No, I didn’t matter (no sense in exaggerating anything at this point), and no, I certainly didn’t offer the world much by way of talent, insight, or beauty, but I did my best, even if my best mattered little to anyone. Thousands of drinks handed off, maybe a couple of patrons remembered my name. Maybe I strolled up right as someone reversed course and nailed a jackpot. Sure, stinking drunks copped way too many feels, but maybe my tits were the best tits they ever knew. A woman can hang her hat on that, can she not? At least they’re still grabbing.
In a movie that, like Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, accurately validates the idea that the best stories are not about the ascent, but rather the fall, the ultimate privilege is in the further realization that absent the broken, we’d have no real stories to tell. Happy endings? Anything that ends in death is inherently joy’s polar opposite, and yes, there’s always – always – going to be a final performance. The show will, at some point, close. Here, again, is where we nod our heads. Gia Coppola could have made a movie about a showgirl’s rise to fame and the thirty-odd years she made good.
Hell, we could have seen Annette in her salad days; young and wide-eyed, talking first homes, next steps, and maybe kids and a picket fence. All dull. All fantasy. No, we want the fade out. The quiet nights sans applause. The dark times when the world has finally announced its indifference. Despite calls to make trauma a competition, I refuse to grant that suffering is a show and tell of compare and contrast. We all have our pain; we all traffic in the silences. In the end, we’re all Annette, asking for one more bow.
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