oh, dance in the dark of night

Books in the old unread pile: 5

I'd gotten Kathleen Turner's autobiography Send Yourself Roses: My Life, Loves and Leading Roles quite a while ago, but I had trouble getting into it then and put it aside. This time in trying to read it I had no problem and devoured the whole thing, and I couldn't even tell exactly where I'd stopped reading it the last time. I think reading a bunch of other celebrity memoirs in the meantime has gotten me used to some of the style they use.

Her autobiography is so interesting! I didn't know that much about her (beyond her work) before starting the book, and it's a fascinating look at being a white actress who rose to prominence in the 1980s, with her sexualization right off the bat with her first movie, the casual pairing of her with male actors who are significantly older than her, and her determined crawl for power and choice in what way was limited to her as an actress. She has opinions about being a sex icon (what does that even mean, she asks), other opinions about aging and ageism, and even more opinions about her activism and using celebrity for good.

Turner recounts her career experience with pride (at her accomplishments, at her ability to choose roles as she liked, and at her seeking to only play characters with agency), with only some anger here and there at the ways the system fails actresses and women in general through stereotypes and objectification. But you can also read her description of filming Body Heat as a direct argument for intimacy coordinators, even if she herself didn't think of it that way at time of writing. (The book was published in 2008). She is quite blunt about some actors she had bad experiences with, like Burt Reynolds is totally on-brand for that guy, and Nicolas Cage in Peggy Sue though he has repeatedly apologized to her since.

There's a section in there about her experience with rheumatoid arthritis, and the ways she dealt with her disability, both good and bad. She namechecks Michael J. Fox for hiding his Parkinson's for as long as he could, and she did the same for the same reasons, i.e. fear of losing chances to work, especially when she needed to because her then-husband lost his business due to a fire tragedy and she needed to support her family. Turner admits that RA led to her drinking, and the drugs made her very difficult to work with, though I think it's also telling that Turner is open enough to quote from her fellow actors who called her out without being defensive about it. She was difficult and angry for a time there, and this is why, but that doesn't change that she behaved badly.

Other things that were interesting:
- Her father was in the diplomatic corps so she grew up in multiple countries outside the US in a time when even traveling overseas was not common, and that influenced her own perceptions of self-worth, openness to other cultures, sense of adventure, and sexuality.
- Her teeth weren't fixed yet when she filmed Body Heat so she wore... snap-on teeth? Which changed the shape of her mouth.
- The cast of Romancing the Stone stayed at Jamal Palais, which made me double-take because I literally just read an Agatha Christie book where the characters stayed there.
- She did Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a young(er) David Harbour, and although it was a good project, during one performance he got annoyed at her and bit her hard on the neck, which she smacked him down for after the performance was over.
- The past is another country - Her grandfather fought in WWI; Turner was adult before the pill was normalized; Turner's grandparents divorced so that her grandmother could work because only unmarried women could be teachers, though they were still functionally married and officially remarried later; Turner's mother couldn't get a credit card after her father died because women weren't allowed to.

Reading Turner going through her filmography, I realized I've seen and enjoyed way more of her work than I thought. I've watched Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, Peggy Sue Got Married, War of the Roses, House of Cards (a little known eerie fave of mine when I recorded it off TV), Undercover Blues, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that Hallmark Cinderella adaptation that no one seems to remember, her Friends episodes, A Simple Wish, Monster House (if that counts)... It's possible I've also watched V.I. Warshawski because I very distinctly remember watching a movie of hers on TV at night, which had a scene where a man who's out to kidnap her tries grab her from behind and she slams him against the wall matter-of-factly as it's clear she knows what she's doing -- and that scene has stuck in my brain ever since as an iddy depiction of a woman's simple competence in the mundane violence of self-defense (like that scene in T2 where Sarah uses the baton in a quick, ruthless strike). I can't be sure that scene is from this particular movie, but nothing else in her filmography seems to fit.

Books in the old unread pile: 6

I got Isma Ismail's Mistika Legenda at the same time as that Asian Folk Tales book I posted about recently, I guess cos I was on a local folktales kick at the time. This book's a retelling of Mahsuri's story, interspersed with brief retellings of other legends such as the Merong Mahawangsa battles Garuda story, the fae princesses of the seven wells (a Hagoromo legend variant), and Sang Gedembai, as told within the story by Mahsuri, her father, or her husband Wan Darus.

The legend of Mahsuri summed up is basically: Mahsuri was a beautiful and pious woman who lived on Langkawi island, who was accused of adultery by jealous parties when her husband was away at war, and when she was stabbed to death for her "crime", she cursed Langkawi to seven generations of misfortune, and her blood flowed white as evidence of her innocence.

Obviously there's more detail than that, but that's the gist of it. The seven generations have since passed, and the legend is very well-known here and is such a part of Langkawi's identity, and elements of the legend are familiar in other regional folktales. I remember reading in the news of Mahsuri's descendants visiting Langkawi in modern times, for example.

( Cut for length. )