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MASCULINE TOUCHSTONES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CINEMA By NEAL HAMMONS A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2018 © 2018 Neal Hammons To Jerry and Gabo ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank David Leavitt for the feedback he offered me in his role as my thesis chair. I also thank the rest of the fiction professors of MFA@FLA—Jill Ciment, Padgett Powell, and Amy Hempel—as well as the other members of my thesis committee— Michael Hofmann and Eric Kligerman. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 6 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 7 LIFE-COACHING SESSIONS WITH MARLON BRANDO .............................................. 8 REFLECTIONS ON THE TIME WHEN LEE MARVIN MAY HAVE STABBED A PHOTOGRAPHER (BUT PROBABLY DIDN’T) ...................................................... 30 Arlington, 1997 ........................................................................................................ 30 My Brother’s Lee Marvin Story, 1965 ...................................................................... 31 The First, 1978 ........................................................................................................ 33 The Second, 1987 .................................................................................................. 39 Fact-Checking the Lee Marvin Story, 1990–1992 ................................................... 44 The Third, 1993 ...................................................................................................... 46 Arlington, 1997 ........................................................................................................ 55 THE FUTURE-GHOST OF CHARLES BRONSON AT HOME DEPOT ........................ 57 THE STERLING HAYDEN OF SHIPPING AND RECEIVING ....................................... 67 A PROMISED LAND IN THE CENTRAL PACIFIC ........................................................ 85 THE SEXUAL IDENTITY OF JAMES DEAN AS A MODEL FOR THE MULTIVERSE 100 LOVE AS AN EIGHT-POUND CALICO OR TABBY.................................................... 114 Sunday .................................................................................................................. 114 Monday ................................................................................................................. 116 Tuesday ................................................................................................................ 121 Wednesday morning ............................................................................................. 123 Wednesday evening ............................................................................................. 124 Thursday ............................................................................................................... 125 Friday morning ...................................................................................................... 127 GRIEF AS AN EVENING OF RECOLLECTIONS ABOUT BREAKING AND ENTERING ........................................................................................................... 129 THE LEGACY ASSESSMENT .................................................................................... 139 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 145 5 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page Figure 1. The Sturgess subterranean bunker .............................................................. 141 6 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts MASCULINE TOUCHSTONES OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY CINEMA By Neal Hammons May 2018 Chair: David Leavitt Major: Creative Writing This is a collection of short stories, the first six of which focus on issues related to masculinity as viewed through the characters’ relationships to different male icons of twentieth-century Hollywood film—Marlon Brando, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Sterling Hayden, Yul Brynner, and James Dean. Two other stories use surrealistic elements to address how men confront death and marriage. The final story, presented as a “found document,” addresses how men confront the prospect of their legacies after death. 7 LIFE-COACHING SESSIONS WITH MARLON BRANDO My son, Jonathan, lives with his mother—Shelly, my ex-wife, as of one year ago—in our old house near Chickamauga Lake in Chattanooga. The house isn’t on the lake, but it’s close enough that Shelly can take Jonathan over there with the jet skis on the weekends, and if Jonathan brings one of his friends, they can just use mine, which I left over there because the apartment where I’m at now doesn’t have a garage. He’ll usually tell me, on the weekends when he stays with me at the apartment, if he’s used my old jet ski recently. During one of our weekends, Jonathan and I were sitting on the couch and eating chicken patties and Spaghetti-Os for dinner. The Cardinals and Cubs were on television, and the Cubs were up big in the fourth (Wainwright got run out after two-and- a-third). Jonathan’s sandwich was a chicken parmesan-esque thing with a layer of Spaghetti-Os above and beneath the chicken patty. By the time he took the last bites, pieces of the hamburger bun were wet and stuck to his fingers. “How is it over there?” I asked. “With Lance and coming over and everything.” Jonathan finished chewing, swallowed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know he doesn’t live there. I just mean, is it all right for you? Are you comfortable with him being there?” “I guess. It’s just weird.” I muted the television. “Son, if something’s wrong, you can always—” “Oh my god, will you—” He stood from the couch. “That’s all you talk about. You’re obsessed with Lance. Can we just watch this, or not talk about it?” 8 The Cardinals lost the game 19-0. By the ninth inning, one of the outfielders was pitching. After Jonathan went to bed, Marlon Brando and I sat in my living room. The first time I’d seen Marlon, six months prior, I didn’t recognize him. I was accustomed to On the Waterfront Brando, a young man who gave people the impression they were discovering something perfect. This Brando, the old Brando, post-The Score Brando, looked like a bloated corpse. This Brando looks like Terry Malloy would have looked if the union bosses from On the Waterfront had put two bullets through the roof of his mouth and his body had dragged the bottom of the Hudson River for a few months before washing up in my living room. I reclined on the couch, and Marlon sat on a bean bag next to the television, his 450 pounds of muumuu-covered girth nearly eclipsing the bean bag. His face was a sagging square. He was balding, with a few strands of white hair across the top of his head. We watched Don Juan DeMarco on cable. The movie wasn’t one of his best, but Marlon was still powerful. He could talk to this delusional Johnny Depp character and get him to listen. And the kid looked so grateful. “I wish I could do what you do,” I said. “Shelly—she can do it. She can change herself to come off as this new thing that everybody actually believes, some inspiring parent. Me, I can’t ask Jonathan two questions without him wanting me to shut up.” Marlon’s eyes scanned the carpet, the coffee table, as if searching for his next word. “You don’t become someone else, Neal.” He reached into a bag of Ruffles and stuffed a fistful into his mouth. “The ocean, you know. It’s beautiful. It can look so 9 beautiful. But there are sharks out there, whales, giant squid, nuclear submarines, shipwrecks, skeletons—do you know how many skeletons there must be in the Pacific Ocean?—there are storms out there, storms that can wipe out entire islands. That same ocean that looks so beautiful. It’s doesn’t have to become anything else.” My conversations with Marlon began after my separation from Shelly. Jonathan was twelve at the time and had begun the terrifying transition into an entity whose responses I could never anticipate. I could no longer make our conversations move forward. It was like I was taking care of a stranger’s kid on some of our weekends. In the days leading up to our weekends, I would write out some ideas of things to say to Jonathan in case he ended up in one of his difficult moods, things that could soften a person determined to be inscrutable. As a teenager my father showed me the movie version of A Streetcar Named Desire. I hated it. All the characters were awful people. Stella Kowalski couldn’t see past the virility of her binge-drinking husband, for most of the movie; Blanche DuBois was condescending, unlikable even after she got raped; and Mitch’s love for Blanche was just depressing to watch. Marlon was something unexpected, though. He was so good that he didn’t seem like an actor. He seemed like a real guy, Stanley Kowalski, who did not know he was in a movie. A real guy surrounded by actors doing their best to approximate real people. Later, when I saw On the Waterfront and Viva Zapata!—and even The Score and The Fugitive Kind—I couldn’t believe how he showed up as a real guy, but always a different real guy, in each of those movies. That ability to adapt, perfectly,