Tag: fiction

Life update (10/01/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

Earlier today I was reading Sissy Spacek’s autobiography when I came across this passage:

To be an actor, you have to live a life. If you want your work to be real, you have to be a real person yourself. I began to understand that the art forms that excited me most were those that illuminated the human condition, explored our shared experience, and connected us in some way. What I loved most about performing music was the way the audience was right there with me, feeling what I was feeling. It reminded me of the way twilight feels, shimmery and soft, when the day and the night blend together and envelop you. With music, I could conjure up that magic hour whenever I wanted. And now I could see how acting could create that same kind of connection by weaving my own life and experiences into what I was doing.

The notion that to become an artist, you have to be broadly connected to life was something I resisted when I was younger and dreamed of becoming a professional writer. My stories came out of me either because I was compelled to write them or because my subconscious resonated with something I had been thinking of. The thought of other people never entered my mind.

Honestly, when I dared to attend writing courses ten years ago or so, I thought I would enjoy other people experiencing my material. There were some who appreciated it for whatever reason; one of them even brought a written piece confessing that he had dreamed about something I wrote, and that when he woke up, he realized he had ejaculated in his sleep. My written piece he was referencing was about a monstrous woman disguised as a regular human who welcomed a traveler into her home and ended up absorbing him whole through her vagina. I don’t know what prompted me to write that or why it would make some random other guy from the course cum. The whole thing was just awkward.

Anyway, most of the feedback I got from people reading or listening to my stories, and I’m talking about works far more normal than the vagina monster, was that my writing disturbed people and made them uncomfortable. One of the instructors accused me, in the middle of the class, of lacking empathy (she had ordered us to write a piece with her as the protagonist, and the fact that I didn’t think of her daughter when her fictional self was in trouble apparently was a faux pas); that was the last time I attended her writing course. In fact, that week was the last time I attended a writing course, as I had also endured bad experiences with the other one I had been attending, so I quit both and ceased interacting with the local scene. I also stopped trying to make it as a professional writer in anything resembling a normal way.

I think that most of the people I met in those courses saw creating art as a way of getting closer to others. But I don’t want to be closer to others. There are exceptions: the few people I’ve become interested throughout my life, two of them being remote women I admired and became obsessed with (Joanna Newsom and Sissy Spacek). But regular people? My daydreams are more interesting.

It could be that I’ve been unlucky. If growing up I had met a creative soul who needed to create art of her own and who would have inspired me to write and create stuff in general for her, then I may have been singing a very different tune. But I simply never crossed paths with anyone like that.

That reminds me that I recently received feedback on something I wrote about two years ago. It was mostly an experiment, but still. I opened that notification, thinking about how rare it was that someone went out of their way to write about anything I had done. The feedback was two words: “This blows.” I immediately blocked that dickhead, as I have no tolerance for people who worsen my life even a little bit.

I’ve been digging up Sissy Spacek’s life due to my sudden obsession with her. She had a good family, grew up in a good community, had plenty of friends. She was also very attractive. She already had a foothold in New York before her brother died, even though life wanted to drag her back to college. She met many people there, dared to play for tons of people, attended auditions, made friends and professional contacts. She felt awkward about herself, thought of herself as a little country bumpkin, but that didn’t change the fact that dealing with people not only felt natural, but her artistic expression depended on connecting with people. That’s something I have never felt and never will. I’m simply not drawn to such a life, so I never had any business being a professional artist. Even supposedly “reclusive” authors like Cormac McCarthy had lots of friends; he simply was very private about his life (and for good reasons, given that he met the love of his life when he was roughly forty-two and she was fourteen, and the FBI ended up looking for him). Meanwhile, I can’t be in the same room with another person without becoming increasingly anxious and wanting to leave.

Being physically attractive, of course, goes a long way. Not only in the art world but when it comes to getting a regular job. I’ve always looked weird, partly due to having grown up wrong due to a pituitary gland tumor, and the fact that I never acted right due to high-functioning autism meant that people simply didn’t want me around. I lost my career as a programmer in my twenties after two managers (both non-technical women, if that tells you anything) decided that despite my technical work, I simply wouldn’t work well on a team. My last boss even defended me during that meeting to no avail. I also ended up having to quit my job in IT because the chaos and the constant human presence and interaction drove me to the ER with heart and brain problems.

I didn’t have a broad point to make with this post. I just read that passage in Sissy’s book and thought of how different the experience of a talented woman with good genes, good looks, a good family, good connections, and a good hometown is from my isolated, miserable life. What hurt wasn’t simply that she succeeded and I didn’t. It was that other people seemed to give her room to become herself. So many of my encounters left me feeling that being myself was precisely the problem.

Review: The Girls of Huntington House

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

This is a 1973 TV movie I only discovered because Sissy Spacek was in it. It features Sissy at the peak of her beauty, same era as Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Sadly, the sole available sources for the movie are the YouTube video below, along with some shady Russian sites. The movie seems to be on DVD, but sold from a single seller and with no guarantee that the quality is any better.

Despite the somewhat-blurry nature of the video that prevents the viewer from picking up all the details, Sissy looks luminous and ethereal. She’s placed against a whole cast of girls around her age, which makes her stand out more as unique. Her peculiar mannerisms and microexpressions are as charming as ever, as well as her distinct voice.

I’ve realized something fairly obvious about the two women I’ve been obsessed with in the last fifteen years: they both grew up in a small town, had ample access to nature, and had loving and involved parents that encouraged their children’s creativity. I wonder how much that upbringing helped preserve the idiosyncrasies that capture me, the sense that they had been allowed to become themselves without having their peculiarities sanded off. That’s both Joanna Newsom and Sissy Spacek. In an interview, Sissy said, “I already had my core when I left my little town in Texas.”

Of course, both were gorgeous at the time as far as my tastes go; I doubt I would have become obsessed with them to begin with if they had looked like trolls. I’m not sure what it all means or if it has to mean anything beyond the fact that this combination captures me beyond my ability to deal with it in a sane manner.

Anyway, this story follows a clash between Sissy (a free-spirited, romantic teenager who got herself pregnant at seventeen) and a stuck-up teacher in her mid-thirties who yearns for independence and logic above all. The movie starts with Sissy and her lucky boyfriend holding up traffic as the boyfriend dumps Sissy at Huntington House because he can’t handle a pregnant teenager. Sissy gets mad at the aforementioned teacher because she didn’t stop rightfully pressuring the couple to move their van out of the fucking way.

I found Sissy’s character too bratty for my tastes. She sought confrontation regularly, was inordinately rude toward her teacher, and considered herself the sole person around who knew what love was. Sissy’s character identified the teacher as a stuck-up, nearly dried-up woman in her mid-thirties who was afraid of having feelings and of falling in love. Sissy mocked the teacher for lacking a man in her life.

This obnoxious prying into the teacher’s personal life annoyed me; let the poor woman do her job in peace! Maybe teenagers would have identified more with Sissy’s position here, but I wanted her to stop lashing out at whoever was available just because she felt bad about having ended up pregnant at seventeen and stuck at a kind of warehouse for pregnant teenagers who had been thrown out by their parents, abandoned by their boyfriends, or found themselves unable to take care of themselves for whatever reason.

At one point, when Sissy’s accusations that the teacher was afraid of feeling were getting to the older woman, the teacher met with her on-and-off man. He seemed quite irritating to me, so I didn’t blame her for wanting to remain independent. Curiously, the man was the one eager to get married, while she claimed she didn’t understand why the law had to get involved in people’s private affairs. Oh, how the times have changed.

I was simultaneously surprised and irritated by the writing in this story. Some of the residents of Huntington House were depicted as markedly different, which was good, but the moral argument between Sissy and the teacher was too hamfisted, with Sissy latching on to the teacher’s supposed inability to feel and the fact that she didn’t open herself up to a romantic relationship. The film seemed to mistake the teacher’s right to a private life for an emotional defect that the teenager had to cure. The arc was obvious from the beginning: the teacher would soften up and learn to love thanks to the irritating, bratty insistence of the free-spirited pregnant teenager. To be fair to the teacher, though, if Sissy Spacek had pressured me into opening myself up to love, I would have given in as well.

A side plot surprised me by making me fall for the same assumptions as the teacher did. A new girl entered Huntington House close enough to her due date that she wouldn’t stay until graduation, but she still had to take classes. This girl was simple in a way that suggested intellectual retardation, which was obvious to the teacher.

She asked her students to write an essay about nature. Afterwards, the dim-witted girl approached the teacher to ask eagerly what score she had gotten on her essay. The teacher, not wanting to upset this clearly stupid girl, was careful to bring up the fact that the girl had copied her essay from the classmate seated next to her. The girl burst into tears, claiming that everybody was the same, that nobody believed her, that she hadn’t copied her essay and she also hadn’t stolen her sister’s scarf. I found myself making the same assumption as the teacher: the girl is a lunatic and that there’s little to be done about it other than resign oneself to the fact that a simple lunatic would have a child who would likely inherit the stupidity and the lunacy.

But the stupid girl’s classmate ends up confessing that she was the one who copied the essay. At no point did it occur to me that would be the case; clearly, if two essays were virtually identical, then the stupid girl must have copied it. At that point, I felt myself in the teacher’s shoes, who rushed to apologize to the crestfallen idiot.

Anyway, Sissy plays the guitar in this. Some kind stranger uploaded that clip to YouTube for posterity.

Sissy’s song is appropriately lovely. She spent her teenage years in the sixties going around everywhere with a guitar, playing for the residents of her community. A passionate, creative soul. She was a genuine songwriter, creating her own songs, hoping to one day play them for the world. But when she left her hometown for New York, studio executives told her that they already had songwriters covering her niche. The main one they mentioned was Loretta Lynn; if you know Sissy’s movie career, you know how ironic that is. So Sissy never made it as the kind of musician she dreamed of becoming, even though I can easily imagine an alternate seventies and eighties when she’s a popular touring musician with multiple albums and thousands upon thousands of followers, like Melanie and others were at the time. Instead, Sissy had to settle for six Oscar nominations and a win. To be fair, she did eventually release an album in 1983, but it didn’t sell well; I suspect that by then, plenty of the passion and creativity had moved elsewhere.

Yet another blurry copy through which I’m trying to reach something distant, and that leaves a deposit of sorrow in my middle-aged soul by the end. This all took place more than fifty years ago.

Covers of “Supernova Snack” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 2

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

This was one of the first songs I remixed through the improved Suno model about half a month ago, but only relatively recently I found out that my method of extracting the stems of the original Suno song in order to work out their placement was worsening the songs; Suno had the bright idea to add wet effects to stem extraction, which renders them basically useless for this purpose. So I had to rework the six cover songs for “Supernova Snack.” It’s fine. This is now a video I will be able to return to regularly without feeling bad about it.

In the fiction of Odes to My Triceratops, this song was produced during William’s happy days, when he was dating Claire and they had a blast hanging out at their hideout in the mountains, singing songs, joking around, getting high. Huge contrast with William’s present whereabouts as a garbage worker in a city unlike his hometown, and tortured by regular nightmares about Claire’s disappearance and the likely disasters that would have taken out a blind, illiterate redhead.

New song “You Stay Eighteen” from Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 4

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

This was by far the hardest song to produce through Suno. So many things went wrong. I originally intended for this song to run very long, maybe about ten minutes, with the singer struggling to get the words out at times, and at other times letting them out in a raw, pained manner. In some instances, the singer’s voice should sound choked.

Ironically, the vocal delivery was the easiest thing to achieve. The problem is that Suno generally refuses to produce songs longer than about six minutes, or six minutes and a half. The reason is obvious: the generation model they have tends to degrade the song towards the end if the generation runs too long. This doesn’t happen often, and can be bypassed by remixing previous attempts, but I struggled for hours to figure out how to produce a ten minute song in a way that Suno wouldn’t discard most of the tail end of the lyrics, while still producing the instrumentals needed to capture the emotions involved.

First I picked up a song generation that had a long-enough beginning that sounded good. That ran to about a third of the song. Then I cut the remaining two thirds, and went through the absurdly painstaking process of extending the song in the Suno editor to produce the remaining parts so that the vocal delivery convinced me. The song became long enough without the Suno model screwing it up. It soon became clear that the extension model is very hard to wrangle so that the music aligns seamlessly enough. So I discarded that direct approach and instead decided to remix whatever satisfying mix I produced in Studio.

Well, remixing the Studio production didn’t work either, because Suno just refused to produce the tail end of the lyrics due to artificial constraints about song length. I was about to tear my hair out; I feared that one of the most important songs in the album couldn’t be made. Then I figured out that the lyrics allowed splitting the song along temporally-distinct blocks, and each block has its own emotional payoff, so it worked out fine. The final album will have You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 1 and You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 2. Both are in the video above. The split also allowed the second part to contain poignant instrumentals that the original song wouldn’t have allowed due to length issues, so it all worked out fine.

My sole concern now for the rest of the album is that at least one of the lyrics will be rejected due to moderation. Not sure how I will handle that.

Review: Katherine

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

A 1975 TV movie I only learned about due to my infatuation with Sissy Spacek. She’s the titular character: the beautiful daughter of upper-class parents, someone with the means to lead a comfortable life, but who ends up joining a revolutionary marxist group in the vein of the Weather Underground from that same era, and subsequently ruins her life.

Full movie below. It’s on YouTube.

I will start by saying that I didn’t enjoy the movie. I can’t stand fiction about racial and class struggles. I despise marxism and its adherents. So the experience of watching this movie is something I mostly subjected myself to because I wanted to witness Sissy’s presence and acting. And she did a fine job, so in that sense it was worth it.

What I found particularly interesting early on is how the fatal flaw of Katherine, Sissy’s character, seemed to draw from her own life in a way that maybe she deliberately brought up to the screenwriter. Otherwise, maybe she sought the part because it reminded her of herself.

I’ve listened to some of her interviews, sought anecdotes behind the scenes, and read a third of her autobiography, so I know that Sissy Spacek is, or was anyway, very ambitious and competitive, and had a hard time losing anything. When Brian De Palma told her initially that she wouldn’t get the role of Carrie White in the famous movie, she let out expletives and hung up the phone. When a few years later she was told she likely wouldn’t get the part of a beat poets’ muse, she broke a glass in her hand. In both cases, she ended up getting the part. Regarding that beat-poetry-related role, breaking the glass actually helped her get the part, as it fit the character she was auditioning for. Sissy was a very headstrong, ungovernable person who fought like hell to get everything she wanted, even as a child.

Significant spoilers from here onward.

When it comes to this movie’s narrative, Katherine’s inability to handle failure is exemplified when, after graduating, she decides to move to Peru or some similar backward-ass country in South America, where she goes to teach them how to read and write. As I believe her own father put it, weren’t there enough uneducated children in the US? He also suggests that she wasn’t doing it for the poor people there, but to please herself.

When she gets to the country, she learns that the landowner is barely paying his workers, refuses to let them learn how to read or write in case they get uppity, and threatens to raise their rents if they become annoying. Sissy’s character is infuriated. She gets one of the workers flogged due to her influence, and afterwards she tries to join their militant group in the mountains, where they’re preparing for bloodshed. At that point, Katherine doesn’t believe in violence. When she refuses to supply weapons to the rebels somehow, their leader tells her that education is pointless, as the ones in charge possess the money and the means of violence to keep them oppressed forever. That “education is pointless” argument will return later in the movie.

Katherine is quite disillusioned already with the conditions of that country and her inability to make any changes, when an agent of the American embassy tells her that, due to her seditionary activities, she better fuck off back to America or else. She did return, but that became her turning point: she had attempted to change things in that foreign country and had failed miserably, returning with her tail between her legs. Her resentment and bitterness grew and grew, and never did stop until the explosive finale. Her concern for other people was contaminated by wounded pride, and I got the feeling that changing their circumstances was less important than defeating the people she blamed.

Katherine decided to become a volunteer teacher at a school that taught black children. There she met Fonzie, the popular guy from Happy Days. I’ve never watched that show nor have any wish of doing so, but the cultural impact of that character remains, from the “jump the shark” expression to Matt Damon doing Fonzie gestures on Mars. Happy Days was already ongoing when this TV movie was filmed. Although I didn’t like Fonzie’s character in this, he was often more sympathetic than Katherine. I got the feeling that the guy was very enthusiastic about being able to act as Sissy Spacek’s boyfriend, with all the cuddling and kissing it involved.

The movie was quite prescient about what would eventually become the US’ demise in real life, as pictured at 33:05 of the linked YouTube video.

Anyway, that period of Katherine teaching black kids ended in a chilling way. If the movie had been made in these marxism-soaked modern times, people of other races would have been depicted as innocent, blameless, oppressed for no reason. But Katherine and Fonzie are dismissed by a group of black supremacists that tell them that they should stop teaching black children, lest those children grow up to say shit like, “All whites aren’t bad; I liked my teacher.” They’re told that whites are the enemy and that they should all die. Oh, the joys of ethnically-diverse societies.

Katherine learns very little about this. If anything, she internalizes that narrative. She and Fonzie get involved with the anti-Vietnam crowds and other marxist movements. She makes herself ugly on purpose, starts lecturing everybody (including her parents) about how they’re fascist pigs and oppressors of various kinds, and in general becomes utterly insufferable for the rest of the movie. Fonzie impregnates her, but she eventually decides that having a child is fascist and that abortion is harmless. Her distraught parents do what little they can to put some sense into their daughter, but by then it’s too late.

Katherine gets in deeper with violent revolutionaries. Fonzie decides that dating a single woman is an affectation of the bourgeoisie, and decides to abandon Katherine and join a commune to presumably impregnate other women and let the community raise his children. Katherine decides to assault a school (or a college, I’m not sure), indoctrinate for a bit the bewildered kids, then gets arrested for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and other shit. Finally she decides that the only way the system is going to change is through Timothy McVeighing some fitting public building.

I have to concede to this movie that it wasn’t trying to pull off a One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s disgusting marxist turd, by making marxist revolution romantic. He even ended the narrative with the daughter joining a similar movement as if it were a sweet character development. This 1975 movie presents a downward spiral kind of narrative. There are a few telling moments in which the narrative implicitly suggests “these freaks are so far up their own asses with their indoctrination that they can’t function as human beings,” like when Fonzie uses marxist ideology to justify wanting to fuck off to a commune and fuck other women, or when Katherine has joined an underground movement and nobody wants to clean up dishes, because that’s oppressive or something. Didn’t make the movie palatable enough for me, though.

Sissy Spacek was great in her role, despicable as it was. She sold the frustration, the bitterness, the pathological aversion to losing, the indoctrination. She also was absolutely gorgeous in the first half, until she made herself uglier as part of her marxist crusade against goodness and beauty.

Anyway, I don’t really recommend this movie unless you’re a Sissy Spacek completionist.

Review: Carrie

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I was born in 1985. Growing up, I didn’t watch movies from before the eighties. I had no control over what I could watch on TV, as I lived in my older brother’s bedroom. After I hit my twenties, I only watched a handful of movies from the seventies and earlier. The big ones, mainly: Jaws, Chinatown, Taxi Driver. I was aware of Carrie from popular culture. I knew that its protagonist was a shy girl who got bullied in school, lived with her religious nutcase of a mother, got deceived into going to the prom, had pig’s blood dumped onto her head, then proceeded to slaughter everyone inside. I didn’t know who Sissy Spacek was. The times I heard her name, I wondered who would have been so thoughtless as to call her child “Sissy.”

Recently I realized that I somehow managed to miss all of Sissy Spacek’s work from after I was born. Literally the only thing I briefly caught her in was Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod. She played Samberg’s mom. I didn’t even remember her from that movie, and by then, she was already old; sorry to say, I’m not attracted to old people. Hell, I’m not even attracted to most women my age. Also, I turned off the movie not even halfway through because I found it too goofy, and I was only watching it because Andy Samberg somehow managed to marry Joanna Newsom, with whom I was obsessed at the time.

Recently, as a forty-one-year-old man, I had the misfortune to come across Terrence Malick’s haunting Badlands, experienced Sissy Spacek properly for the first time, and I was struck in a way I couldn’t deny. Where had this girl been all my life?

Now I’ve watched Sissy’s Badlands, 3 Women, the godawful Welcome to L. A., Prime Cut, Ginger in the Morning, and two episodes of The Waltons she starred in. I was running out of her big roles from the 70s.

I didn’t want to watch Carrie. I hate horror movies, I don’t like Stephen King, and I didn’t want to see Sissy Spacek get abused. But tonight I put my big-boy pants on and started watching it. Sissy’s Carrie gets harassed by seemingly her entire class of girls for being bad at volleyball. In a strangely-erotic scene, we witness Sissy caressing her breasts as well as the rest of her beautiful, pale, freckled body in the shower, before she experiences menstruation for the first time. When Carrie, who had no clue what was happening to her because her mother is a sickening nutcase, begged her classmates to help her, they mocked her relentlessly and threw tampons and pads at her as Sissy curled into herself in a corner of the showers. Then a teacher came and slapped Carrie. Then she got called into the director’s office, who proceeded to call her Cassie four times.

By then I was done. I didn’t want to keep watching. People are terrible, I have had to deal with and witnessed terrible behavior at school, but I had a hard time believing that Carrie had happened to land in a class where virtually all the girls were sociopaths. I didn’t buy that the school director, principal or whatever that careless fuck was would get her name wrong four times after getting corrected. This was just piling on for some purpose that didn’t sit well with me.

It already hurt to see Sissy Spacek behave like a scared wild animal who can only expect to be mistreated. But I continued watching nonetheless. Thankfully, the rest of the movie is more nuanced than that. There’s cinematography and imagery to praise, particularly a sequence involving a circling camera during the prom dance. There’s a surprise along the way that I don’t want to spoil regarding the circumstances around Carrie getting invited to the prom. But in the end, I got mostly what I already expected to encounter: a shy, traumatized girl gets bullied, eventually invited to the prom, ends up on stage as the prom queen, and gets pig’s blood dumped onto her, which convinces her that every human being in sight deserves to die. I can’t exactly blame her for breaking.

The prom scene is extremely memorable, but simultaneously way sillier than I expected. Some general spoilers from now on. I got the sense that the filmmakers, when trying to put it together, ended up thinking, “She’s telekinetic, yes, but how on Earth would she use telekinesis to murder all these people?” So we have some silly moments with Carrie controlling a hose and spraying people. Electricity gets involved, someone dies who didn’t deserve it, and eventually the whole place seems to burn.

Looking back, I doubt that Carrie tried to kill people in the beginning. She went directly for the hose and went around spraying whoever was available. She could have launched any objects in sight as projectiles, but didn’t. Then, some people got electrocuted, and she pivoted to murder as if thinking, “Oh well, I’ve already caused some people’s deaths. May as well go all the way.”

Also, a couple of bastards get their car and themselves blown up after they attempted a little hit-and-run on the bloodied prom queen. Good riddance to those pig fuckers.

Before I watched the movie, I didn’t know what happened to Carrie after she returned home, and now I wish I still didn’t know.

What maybe hurt the most regarding Carrie is that, leading to the prom, she had started to assert and believe in herself. She put her abusive mother in her place, she made a beautiful dress for herself, and hoped that for once in her tragic life, she could spend a single evening in public without being abused.

Sissy did an extraordinary job playing Carrie. She inhabited all the fear, pain, hope, gratitude, murderous revenge. I understand how everyone for decades remembered her as “the girl from Carrie,” although this is a role completely unlike her as a person, as far as I can tell from interviews and her autobiography. And of course, Sissy was hauntingly beautiful on this movie. Also, her mother didn’t name her “Sissy.” That comes from the nickname her brothers used for her as their sister.

Travolta was also in the movie, playing a dumb motherfucker. Didn’t like him one bit, but I guess Travolta played him just fine.

I don’t have the kind of temperament that would allow me to like this movie even if I wasn’t obsessed with Sissy Spacek to begin with; seeing her being bullied and abused isn’t something I would do for fun. People liking this movie seems to me more like bonding over shared trauma. I can admire what the film accomplishes. Enjoying the experience of watching it is another matter.

Carrie White is a Medusa of modern times. She deserved better.

Review: episode “The Odyssey” from The Waltons

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I’ve now watched the second and likely last episode of the Waltons I’ll watch in this demented life of mine. Not because the show was bad; I found it compelling for what it was trying to do. But I have no other reason to watch it other than because a precious angel haunted two of its episodes: 70s Sissy Spacek.

You can download the episodes freely from the Internet Archive.

Sissy plays a sheltered girl who couldn’t wait to get out of her strict, religious nutcase of a mother’s clutches. In the previous Spacek appearance (“The Townie,” from the first season), she swore she would marry our wannabe-writer protagonist John-boy if only he asked, and days later she was already falling for a John Dillinger-wannabe. She convinced him to run away with her and get married, only for her to change her mind the moment that arrogant kid crashed his car. The girl is trouble, reckless not in a fun way; despite my obvious allegiance to Sissy, that John-boy is just too good-hearted of a kid to have to deal with that shit.

Anyway, the episode starts with John-boy being unable to write because his family home is full of crotch spawns who actively hinder the protagonist’s creative impulses. He decides to head off for a couple of days to a cabin somewhere uphill. We see him travel for a while decidedly not uphill. The plot made a big deal about a storm coming, and the production had to blow some leaves in John-boy’s face while he pretended to hear thunder, even though the sky was California blue. I’m surprised that the fans themselves didn’t appear in the shot. I’m not insulting the show, though; I’m sure they did the best they could with early-seventies resources. They could have paraded Sissy around until some financier fell in love with her and threw hundreds of thousands at them, like it happened for Ginger in the Morning.

John-boy reaches that isolated cabin only to find out that someone is hiding there: Sissy. He soon learns she’s run away not only from her mother but from her current legal guardians, who, according to her, were exploiting her. We never really find out if Sissy’s character exaggerated it. Given that her main preoccupation is marrying someone who could save her from a life of servitude, this girl and her romance-addled brain likely just hurried to get themselves acquainted with the first bad boy they could find.

Then, the episode reveals a twist that actually shocked me for a show as wholesome as this. I guess I had mistaken wholesome for sanitized. The second half of the episode deals with increasing complications that force Sissy to act out troublesome emotions and exertions. It would benefit this post if I could be more specific about it, but all I would want to mention are spoilers about the second half of the episode, and I don’t want to ruin the experience of discovering something new for anyone who may be reading these words.

I think Sissy did a fine job with the material that fell on her pale, freckled shoulders. One of the saddest points of that ordeal was Sissy’s character clearly realizing that John-boy would have made a fine husband. Just not for the kind of ambitious girl she was then.

The ending also left me unexpectedly sad. Partly because this was one fewer glimpse of seventies Sissy that I have left to discover, but also because I would never find out what else happened to that reckless girl who had gotten herself in such a mess of a life. We are told that she and John-Boy remained friends into adulthood, but we never get to see the life she made for herself. In the same way Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabited this show for a short time, we only got to witness a small part of a fictional life likely full of hardship, poverty, and terrible decisions.

Review: episode “The Townie” from The Waltons

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Now, why would I watch a random 1972 episode from a long-dead TV show? Why, because Sissy Spacek starred in it. It seems I’m in my “dig up episodes of a long-dead TV show to see more of her at that age” part of my obsession.

The episode is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabits a sheltered girl living alone with her religious nutcase of a mother, who has been raising Sissy’s character alone after her husband died. The episode starts with Sissy dating a certain John-boy, whom I assume is one of the main characters of The Waltons. A guy named John who’s a wannabe writer, because fuck me sideways.

Sissy is sick of being subjected to her mother’s impositions and restrictions. She wants to get married and leave as soon as possible. She even tells John-boy that she’d marry him in a heartbeat if only he asked. But John is a sensitive, sensible young man who only hears foolishness in such reckless behavior. Sissy is more in love with the notion of a passionate life waiting for her somewhere away from home than with our John-boy, so she starts dating this John Dillinger wannabe with a fancy period car. Initially she seems like she’s just trying to make John-boy jealous, see if he’d grow a pair. When he even gives her his blessing for dating that other guy, she clearly resents John’s pussyness. Will she choose that arrogant new man as her ticket out of their small town?

I appreciated Sissy’s acting here. She showed the raw hurt of her character in a scene in which she refused to grow up to become like her mother. In another scene, I noticed that she had a smiling fit in a moment when she definitely shouldn’t have been smiling. In any case, seeing her on screen is plain haunting.

I was struck as well by how this TV show earnestly tried to tell a human story. The Waltons came out seemingly before TV shows, and movies for that matter, became vehicles for subversion in order to further the goals of some groups. Better times, like most everything I experience from the 70s.

Sissy only stars in another other episode of The Waltons, in the second season, so I’m likely watching that next.