Tag: movies

Review: My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, by Sissy Spacek

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

The moment I was introduced to Spacek, I knew I was fucked. Her beauty struck me, of course; if I had to picture physical perfection, 1972’s Sissy Spacek as Badlands captured her may be as close as it gets. But it was her peculiar way of speaking, her strange little mannerisms, and the way she inhabited each moment that made me feel: here’s a whole person. For someone like me who isn’t interested in people, who can’t really connect with them, that had only happened once before: when I became massively obsessed with Joanna Newsom back in 2011-2013. I knew what was happening to me, and I didn’t want to stop it even if I could. It was a matter of time until I got through the account of her life by the lady herself (to be fair, also the other woman who has a co-writing credit.)

Maybe a couple of months ago, I was investigating the movies that influenced Cormac McCarthy while working on his final two books, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The reason for this is that I had been obsessed for a good while with Alicia Western, the doomed genius around which both of those books orbit. I knew that McCarthy started drafting and researching that story in the mid-to-late seventies. Without even looking up what the man himself had said about his favorite movies from the seventies, I watched Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces, and I was struck immediately by the similarities between the protagonists of both that movie and McCarthy’s books: both named Bobby, both having a special relationship with their musician sister, both unable to find in life any situation that felt worth inhabiting permanently anymore.

I looked up whether McCarthy had said anything about Five Easy Pieces. He called it his favorite at some point. He had also praised Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. That led me straight to Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands, starring Sissy Spacek, and thus this curse began.

Her autobiography was written when she was as old as her beloved, saintly mother was when she died. I needed to learn from Sissy’s own words how she had experienced her life, what lessons she had learned, and as many details of the vanishing world she had lived through as she cared to record.

Sissy came from Czech, German, English and Irish ancestry, hardworking old European immigrants. Sissy writes at length about the relatives that came before her extraordinary self popped up into the world; many of them were daring, industrious, and knew how to stand tall when push came to shove. I recall an anecdote about one of her relatives, who owned a bank during the Depression. Citizens were pulling all their money out of banks, and her relative knew that a similar horde would come to his bank, so he went to whatever reserve owned his bank’s money, got them to give all of it in cash to him, then rushed back home. When the terrified customers came to take their money out of the bank, he showed to them whole pallets full of cash and told them that while other banks were going bust, his was healthy. His bank was saved that day, and I feel that the whole episode exemplifies Sissy’s attitude and grit toward the awful nonsense that life threw at her (her music career failing, family members dying, muggings, being defrauded, her daughters constantly getting injured): she just picked herself up, stood tall (as tall as a five-foot-two woman can), and kept going.

She grew up in Quitman, Texas, a tiny town of about 1,300 people. Sissy called her youth there idyllic. She spent those years, from an irresponsibly young age, exploring the town and its surroundings barefoot, often following and being involved in her older brothers’ hijinks, whom she idolized. I think she must have been about six years old when, alone at home, she casually entered her neighbor’s home and wandered around while the neighbor was at work; the neighbor didn’t lock the door (it was that kind of town). She also crossed the town to visit her mother and father at work. She was a headstrong tomboy who loved to pick up treasures from trash dumps, mount cows, end up dirty. She had a terribly ambitious streak that remained later in life when she pursued movie roles she had fixated on: riding, hula-hoop, twirling contests; whatever it was, she had to win.

As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a songwriter. Apparently she went everywhere with a guitar, played for many of the townspeople at various occasions. In general, her talents were welcomed. She always got the feeling, though, that her time was running out to make it as a musician; she believed that by twenty she would already be too old for the industry. Sissy never ended up making it as a songwriter (even though she got an album published in the eighties), but the movie people recognized her appeal, and she got to play the guitar and sing in a few movies during the seventies, for example in this excerpt from The Girls of Huntington House:

She treats us with an intimate panorama of the people who inhabited sixties Quitman. Her mother’s friends. Her favorite shop vendors. The town’s switch operator. Sissy’s little friends and boyfriends. Her account gave me the impression of a town where everyone had a place, everybody knew everybody else, and like her mother later in life attempted when she got to New York, they wouldn’t abandon a homeless man to sleep in the streets.

Sissy was barely conscious when she lost her two sisters. They died in infancy. The biggest shock, which as she mentioned made her fearless, became her fuel to pursue her ambitions in the world, was losing her beloved older brother Robbie to leukemia when she was still in high school. They moved for a while to Houston so that they could follow Robbie’s treatments. His deterioration was a long process; Robbie still lived when Sissy tried to get a foothold in New York. She moved with her first cousin Rip Torn, who was an accomplished actor already. His wife, Geraldine Page, a natural at Broadway plays, took Sissy under her wing. Sissy watched plays nearly every day, and was included, even while underage, in conversations with important artists, most of whom Sissy wasn’t aware of.

She told that one day, as she was playing a song about her brother’s illness, one of the guys in that circle got into his head that the song was about Sissy, then underage, having sex. The guy had either written or directed a movie about a very young woman’s precocious activities, and he tried to interview Sissy about her experiences. The whole thing got really awkward. That guy ended up writing or directing the famous movie Easy Rider some time later.

The distance from home, from her brother Robbie’s illness, let Sissy believe that things would work out just fine in her absence, until she got a heartbreaking letter from her brother, which is reproduced I assume verbatim in the book. He sounds terrified and lonely, knowing that he would die without having experienced the world. He begged for Sissy to write him every day, and so she did.

That initial short period in New York ended, and she returned to her family in Houston. Robbie died shortly after. Sissy had to return and finish high school, but she no longer felt like she belonged there. Most of the activities that had felt so important before (twirling with the marching band, for example) now seemed utterly pointless. Sissy said something to effect that Robbie’s death had made her fearless, had provided her with the fuel to pursue what truly mattered to her, and to let go of what didn’t. She briefly attended college, but she couldn’t fathom having to study for four or more years longer. She felt her place was in New York, and that a career as a songwriter was just a lucky audition away.

Her parents promised to finance her dreams for four years, but if she hadn’t made it by then, she would need to return and go to college. She moved to New York and lived in small apartments with roommates. One of the roommates, whom Sissy referred to, if I recall correctly, only as “Club Girl,” casually stole Sissy’s clothes, even when she installed a lock in her wardrobe. This Club Girl got Sissy a temporary job as a receptionist. A couple of months or so after she had last stepped into that office, Club Girl returned home freaking out, saying that they (including Sissy) had been found out, that they were in deep shit. Turns out that Club Girl had been signing Sissy’s name and pretending that she was still working there, while Club Girl cashed in the checks. Sissy went to the office and explained that she hadn’t been involved with any of it. When she returned home, Club Girl had thrown Sissy’s stuff into the hallway, and had stolen some of Sissy’s clothes. Club Girl had enough sense to leave Sissy’s two guitars outside; Sissy said that otherwise she would have broken the door down to rescue them.

I’ve always thought that you need to be a special brand of crazy to want to live in a city like New York, that you likely seek chaos because there’s something wrong with your brain. Sissy’s experiences only strengthened that impression: she was mugged a few times; one of them, she had to chase down and wrestle her guitar case out of the mugger’s hands, who could have very well stabbed her. One time she got her literal piggy bank broken by one of those muggers, while she took off her mother’s ring and put it in her mouth to prevent it from being stolen.

Gorgeous as she was, she found work modeling, but only for teen clothes. She was also the face of Chanel 5 for a while. But the auditions to make it as a songwriter weren’t going well. Some shitheads told her straight to go back to Texas, grow older, and lose the accent. Another company told her that her niche was already filled by a certain Loretta Lynn, someone Sissy had never heard of (if you know Sissy’s movie history, you know how ironic that is).

Sissy was losing faith when she got the opportunity to star in a movie. She was hanging out in Andy Warhol’s studio at the time, and I guess someone recognized that she’d look good for the role. It was a significant part in a movie alongside Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, titled Prime Cut (link for my review of the movie). She appeared almost entirely naked. Sissy doesn’t speak very positively of this movie; she mainly refers to the fact that she doesn’t like her acting in it, and that “they exploited me, but I exploited them.” It was her stepping stone.

Sissy became good friends with a fellow actress named Janit Baldwin, who played the other main trafficked girl. Their friendship extended for a few years afterwards before they lost touch. They even lived together for a while. Regarding other co-stars, Sissy was surprised that Gene Hackman, notorious for playing utter scumbags, was a very nice and decent guy. She recalls him helping her and Janit do art collages in their trailer. Gene Hackman ended up dying in his nineties of cardiovascular disease, so deep into Alzheimer’s that he likely didn’t realize that he had been living around the corpse of his much younger wife for about a week.

Experiencing Los Angeles for a while convinced Sissy that living in New York had been a bad idea. She never lived there again.

Sissy found herself preparing a new film with a then novice filmmaker named Terrence Malick, for what would become his first film, titled Badlands. It was a tiny production in which everyone had to pitch in and work hard. Sissy said that those days felt like they were at the center of the world. Badlands became a nexus of meaning in Sissy’s life: it was the movie that made her believe that she should continue in the industry, the one that taught her that filmmaking could be art, the one that convinced her that she should face the world as little Sissy from Texas instead of pretending to be someone else, and the movie in which she met her soulmate and love of her life, Jack Fisk.

Jack Fisk, slightly older than Sissy, was already an incredibly talented, driven, hardworking art designer. His best friend was a peculiar young man, then utterly unknown, named David Lynch. They had met in high school, and Jack believed so much in his friend David’s vision that some of Jack’s full paychecks went to finance David’s work. Over the course of his career, Jack has been recognized by many as the most talented art director in the entire world, having been the dynamo behind artistically striking films like The Revenant, The Master, There Will Be Blood, Killers of the Flower Moon, among many others.

Jack Fisk fell in love with Sissy the moment he saw her descend the stairs for the first time at the home Terrence Malick was renting for the production. Jack seemed to take the opportunity throughout the production to shoot his shot, hiding around in the set, including inside drawers, little items for her to find. The first time he invited her on a date, the boat they were on sank due to a flash flood, and they ended up lost in a torrential rain for a good while. Sissy said that with Fisk, she felt she could truly be herself, that it was like hanging out with her brothers or with her best friend. They got married one or two years later (with only their beloved dog Five and David Lynch as witnesses), and they’ve remained together ever since.

Janit Baldwin, Sissy’s co-star from Prime Cut, apparently had a role in Badlands: she played Sissy’s character’s best friend. Malick filmed a scene in which Sissy and Janit made out like teenagers, trying to train for their eventual boyfriends. Malick ended up cutting Baldwin’s role entirely from the film. Regarding the lesbian kissing scene, Malick discarded it because it felt “weird.” Where is the footage, Malick? Anyway, Janit’s mother plays a role in the film, as the deaf maid that Martin Sheen almost kills.

Janit ended up quitting the industry a mere ten years later. Although I wasn’t very impressed by her work in Prime Cut, it feels weird to have briefly encountered a whole person who inhabited Sissy’s present, and who eventually failed at her own ambitions and retired to a private life. I’m also unlikely to ever see her again in anything.

When Sissy watched Badlands in the theater, she was overjoyed. She felt that even if she never starred in a movie again, she had already appeared in a near-perfect film. But Badlands was very much ahead of its time (it became a huge influence for Tarantino and similar filmmakers years later), and the movie scene didn’t know what to do with Sissy. Starring in Badlands barely got her any work. Sissy mentions starring during that period in two forgettable movies that barely paid; I suspect she refers to Ginger in the Morning and The Girls of Huntington House (links for my reviews). Oof. Reading the autobiography made me realize that the most poignant moment from Ginger in the Morning, an anecdote about deer hunting, came straight from Sissy’s brother Robbie’s experience. That whole movie was built entirely around Sissy’s appeal as a human being, so I’m assuming the she freely talked about her past to the screenwriter.

Significant movie offers were drying up. Sissy worked as an assistant to her husband, Jack Fisk, until she had to face that she really wasn’t very good at it. She was working on the set of then-established director Brian de Palma, known for being grumpy and demanding. Jack was away for some reason when the set had to be repainted. Sissy had missed some of the basics of painting a set, so she ruined it. She got the impression that Brian de Palma regarded her from then on as the worst set designer he had ever worked with.

Sissy hadn’t finished working with Brian de Palma, though. A little film named Carrie came to be, and after Sissy read the screenplay, she decided that she absolutely had to do that movie. But she was also auditioning for an advertisement, which would pay well and conflicted with the Carrie audition. She asked Brian de Palma whether she should go for the audition or for the movie. Brian told her that he and the producers already favored another actress for Carrie’s role, so Sissy should audition for the advertisement. That pissed Sissy off to no end. She decided to ditch the advertisement, and instead prepare herself for the audition: she would show up as Carrie was supposed to be. Vaseline on her hair, unwashed face, an old sailor uniform her mother had made for her when she was young. When Sissy showed up like that to the audition, the makeup people rushed to her, intending to undo the disaster. Sissy ran away from them shouting, “No, no, no!” and did the audition. As Brian de Palma said it, the moment Sissy’s audition reel played in the room for the director and producers, they knew immediately they had their Carrie.

Carrie became the movie that Sissy was recognized the most for. Even fifty years later, people who don’t know her from anything else still remember her as “the girl from Carrie.” Now that a new rendition of Carrie is doing the rounds, a reimagining for the modern times, I keep getting increasing hits on some of my Sissy Spacek posts, likely from people who watched the new Carrie, proceeded to watch the original, and realized that Sissy Spacek was special.

After this movie became a worldwide hit, Sissy was suddenly everywhere. Interviews, magazine covers. But her movie roles afterwards didn’t become as huge as they likely should have. Sissy was uncomfortable with the Hollywood machinery, and she preferred to star in family-like affairs.

By that time (maybe even before she filmed Carrie), she had starred in the godawful Welcome to LA, an ensemble piece built almost inexplicably around a terrible set of songs, where the script kept reaching for profound statements that fell flat, and the characters kept looking at the camera like they were in an episode of The Office. I recommend against watching that movie even though Sissy is mostly compelling in it; she plays a maid who cleans while topless and casually prostitutes herself on the side.

Pictured: Sissy’s beautiful back in an awful film

Honestly, that movie was a ruin, and I feel like it poisoned my brain. I was surprised when Sissy briefly mentioned it in her autobiography, although it was mainly in the context of Robert Altman, a famous independent filmmaker at the time, discovering Sissy in the dailies, and choosing her for his next movie, 3 Women. I can’t say that I enjoyed the movie a lot, although Sissy is delightful in it, playing a childlike waif. I suspect that Sissy was ambivalent about the movie as well, but that may be me wanting her to feel ambivalent about it.

One of the highlights of the movie is when a main character gives birth. Sissy’s co-star Shelley Duvall (who was famously tortured by Kubrick in The Shining just a couple of years later) walked slowly, hands bloody, eyes wild, to Sissy’s character, then slapped Sissy hard for reasons. It was a haunting moment of the movie, and after the scene ended, Sissy approached the film crowd, including the director Altman, as they were gathered around some screens seemingly enthralled. Sissy though they were watching the replay of the emotionally grueling scene she had just finished, but they were watching a sports match. That had to be disappointing.

She lost many opportunities because she simply didn’t care to belong to the Hollywood machinery. Her biggest role, the one that ended up earning her the sole Oscar, was pushed upon her in the strangest way. A famous female country singer that showed up in talk shows often, a certain Loretta Lynn, kept announcing that a movie about her life was in the works, and that “little Sissy Spacek” was going to play Loretta. There was just a problem: Sissy hadn’t been told this, or asked for that matter. Whenever Loretta said this on TV, Sissy got pissed and yelled at the screen. She absolutely didn’t want to do a biopic, which she felt ended up mostly as jokes, with people lip syncing through it, and the screenplay lacking bite because the artists had to look good. Sissy went out of her way to face Loretta and tell her in person that she wouldn’t do the damn film, but when Sissy met Loretta, she was struck by that fierce woman, a small, headstrong dynamo that was uniquely herself.

Sissy ended up agreeing to do the movie, which was titled Coal Miner’s Daughter. She spent a lot of time with Loretta and became like sisters, to the extent that when Loretta was close to dying, Sissy accepted an award for her, and almost cried through her speech. I have yet to watch the movie (I haven’t gotten through all of Sissy’s work from the seventies). People seem to remember it as a genuine film that showed ugliness and grittiness when it should. Sissy played and sang all of the songs.

Earning the Oscar undid Sissy to a significant extent. She was required to do interviews everywhere. Her hometown of Quitman declared a Sissy Spacek Day, and changed the name of a major street to hers. But what truly broke her was flying from country to country, doing round after round of interviews in which she had to invent new things to say. One of those days, while in England, she was so utterly drained from that nonsense that she found herself out of it while booked for a talk show. The other interviewee, also an actress, tried to dissuade Sissy from doing the interview given the state that Sissy was in, but Sissy was too out of it even to refuse. She ended up having a mental breakdown while being interviewed, falling into a sort of dissociative state in which she couldn’t understand what the host was saying to her, or what the other interviewee was saying to defend her. She only understood that the host was tearing into her. It seemingly was so bad, that when she was at the airport trying to return home, people who had seen the interview and recognized her looked at her with concern. I haven’t found that interview, and I should probably be glad about that.

This is an interview from that era, likely from the circuit of interviews she had to give, in which she sounds diminished from the effort, compared with other interviews.

That post-Oscar period was definitely a turning point. She and Jack had been living in Topanga Canyon, in a beautiful home that mostly Jack put together, but one time that they returned home, they found it ransacked. They had even stolen Sissy’s two guitars from her songwriter days in New York. Then Sissy and Jack found out that someone had jacked into their phone lines and racked up about $3000 in calls. They had enough, so they moved to a historical farm in Virginia. By then, her beloved mother was dead, she was pregnant with her first child, and she wanted to give her children a childhood like the one she had in Quitman, growing up in a small community in which you could get to know individual people and be treated like one of them, instead of like a fancy Hollywood actress.

The stories she tells of living in Virginia are strange in the sense of how peculiar the people she interacted with were. For example, close to their home, a farm belonging to the Jefferson family still operated, an unbroken line from Thomas Jefferson himself. Many of the characters Sissy met seemed picked from some bizarre branch of old England that had been transplanted to Virginia. In any case, Sissy was well known by cashiers and small town people; when I looked up Sissy’s videos, I came across quite a few comments like “I used to serve Sissy at this shop back in Virginia during the eighties; she was delightful.” Sissy was a small-town girl at heart, and she has remained so.

Sissy mentions how moving to Virginia meant for the Hollywood people that basically she had retired. Although she didn’t, her post-Oscar career is comprised, at least until the time this autobiography was released about fifteen years ago, of small independent films, some that involved people she had worked with before and whom she loved, like Tommy Lee Jones, David Lynch, and such. She emphasizes that her films were family affairs: her entire family moved to the location for a while, and her daughters sometimes contributed or even acted in them. One of her daughters, Schuyler Fisk, became an accomplished singer-songwriter and also an actress, although I haven’t heard her or watched her in anything.

I don’t mean to imply that Sissy basically disappeared after her Oscar. She received further Oscar nominations for Missing, The River, Crimes of the Heart, and In the Bedroom. Yet, they are movies whose existence I was fully unaware of before I researched Sissy’s life. In a strange way, it feels like an alternate dimension where Sissy Spacek was a thing got merged with mine, and it was only at forty-one years old when I found myself thinking, “How on Earth did I miss her and everything she did for the four decades I’ve been alive?”

Once Sissy had her children, I believe she mentioned that she finally had found what she was on this Earth for. She and her husband devoted themselves to raising their children and giving them the best childhoods they could. Her two daughters became free-spirited artists who weren’t afraid of much, sometimes to their detriment. Sissy shares anecdotes of bizarre accidents their daughters suffered or were involved in. One of them involved Jack recovering at home from a hernia surgery, only for her daughter to call home saying that someone had been run over. They thought it was the girl’s cousin. Jack, at the risk of his stitches unraveling, ran to the site of the accident, only to find out that one of their dear dogs, unfortunately named Lucky, had been run over by a truck. In another occasion, the family was getting a friend accustomed to horses, when Schuyler fell from a tree and dislocated her shoulder terribly, to the extent that she had to wear a cast for months. They had the family friend drive a van to the hospital, and as if that wasn’t enough, she misjudged the height of an underpass, and the van ended up with its top sheared off.

Sissy is also candid about her own goofiness, her proneness to accidents. She had already broken some toes when, during a reunion in which she was to cook for the guests (even though she isn’t into cooking and isn’t good at it), she realized that a stray cat had jumped onto the table and was about to ruin the turkey. Sissy ran to shoo the cat away, with enough bad luck that she banged her toe real bad. She didn’t know how bad yet, but she had snapped it in half; she mentions that the toe ended up sideways. After getting rid of the cat, in pain, she sat at the table, then fainted. She was awakened by her husband. Sissy thought that something had happened to her eyes, as she only saw red and they burned terribly; it turns out she had fainted into the spaghetti sauce.

Her autobiography ends shortly after her father died when he was ninety, which was followed by the death of another one of their elder relatives that had been living with them and helping with their children and the farm. Looking back, one of the things that pains me the most from reading this autobiography is that I was reading the account of a dead world, even beyond what Sissy expected when she finished this at sixty-two. Most of the intimate family members and friend from the art world, like Rip Torn, David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Bill Paxton, Shelley Duvall… they’re all gone as of 2026. Sissy is now seventy-six years old, a happy grandmother that probably doesn’t have much longer to go.

Bill Paxton was a teenager working for Jack Fisk, alongside Sissy, in the early seventies. He even housesat for them at their Topanga Canyon home for a while, and got their parrot killed. David Lynch was Jack’s intimate friend; he worked on art direction for some of David’s films, and even starred briefly in Eraserhead. Sissy starred in one of David’s films back in the nineties. Here are both Bill Paxton and David Lynch honoring Sissy for her deserved star at Hollywood Boulevard:

I recall Sissy mentioning in one of her interviews from the last two decades that nostalgia was increasingly rushing at her feet. Something to that effect anyway. I can’t imagine how she must feel now. She said that the seventies was a magical decade for her, and even in her autobiography, the details from that era are more vivid and meaningful that most everything that came afterwards. I never got to live an extraordinary life like hers, but I also don’t have to live through reaching her old age feeling that all of it has mostly disappeared. As for me, I have to deal with the grief of arriving too late: discovering Sissy’s existence when her life is already complete, encountering friendships on the page that no longer exist outside it, wanting to inhabit a world I can only read about.

Sissy Spacek is a small-town girl who forever remained genuinely herself.

Life update (10/05/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last night, my brain gave me convincing evidence of how deep it has sunk into its obsessive nature with its latest target. I dreamt I was walking along a forest trail in Virginia when I spotted a bear coming out of treeline. It started pursuing me. As I was running away, knowing that bear would likely catch up to me, I saw a figure jogging my way. It was Sissy Spacek, aged about mid-thirties or forties. I waved and yelled. “A bear is chasing me! Run away, Sissy!” She stopped, looking shocked. The bear jumped onto my back and started chewing on my shoulder. Sissy was still there, eyes wide, not knowing what to do. I yelled again, “Sissy, run!” She snapped out of it, turned around and fled.

Somehow I survived being mauled by a bear. Sissy found me some time later and seemed sad at the extent of my injuries. She asked me why I focused on saving her while a bear was already trying to eat me. I said, “You’re extraordinary. If one of us should fall, it should be me.” I woke up immediately with tears in my eyes. It was two in the morning, and I wasn’t able to fall asleep for the rest of the night.

I’ve decided to try therapy again. I don’t believe in psychotherapy; it feels to me like the whole industry is a scam, whether or not they’re aware of it. I’m even more suspicious of its origins. But the site is close, and I figured that I may as well talk to someone who has no choice but to listen. The reason for this decision is that I’ve been unemployed for more than a year now, I’m 41 years old, my savings are running out, and I feel completely paralyzed. I worked tirelessly throughout most of this last year trying to figure out how to turn my software-development abilities into money. Nothing worked. Worse yet maybe, I lost my interest in the most promising projects. And I can’t be arsed to even redesign and update my curriculum to send it out there.

I fundamentally feel that there’s nothing for me out in the world, that every job I could possibly end up at is just going to be torture for a sensitive, permanently bruised man with high-functioning autism and Pure O OCD, who can only endure the weight of being conscious by engaging constantly in escapist daydreams or by losing himself in elaborate projects, who can’t stand being in the same room with another human being for more than a couple of minutes without enduring mounting anxiety and wanting to leave. To have a chance at life, I would need to press a reset button and hope for the best.

These past few days I’ve been dragging a loss of motivation on top of everything else, that may be some level of depression. I can’t manage to care about any of my programming projects except one which is basically finished for the purposes I use it. The other programs I use on a regular basis (for audio mastering and YouTube video rendering) were finished some time ago and they warrant no further work. I love turning my song lyrics into songs through Suno, but it serves no purpose other than my emotional satisfaction. For most of the day, I’ve sat at my desk idly, being unable to muster the motivation to do anything. I can’t even passively watch a movie.

I’ve been thinking about the daydreams I’m drawn to. I suspect I have quite the powerful inner theater, which helps me disappear from the real world whenever I don’t want to deal with it. I find those daydreams so compelling that I find little point in reading other people’s stories instead. After I became haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s Alicia Western, I imagined myself in my time-traveler form (which is a vastly improved version of myself apart from the time-traveling) going back to 1972 and preventing Alicia’s suicide. Then I help improve her experience of being alive by showing her movies and songs from the future and alternate timelines, and also by buying her a mansion in which she could start to figure out what she wants to do with her life now that she has decided to stick around.

Ever since I became obsessed with Sissy Spacek to the extent that she randomly appears in my dreams, my daydreams have shifted into visiting the Spacek family in the late sixties as my time-traveling self. Back then, Sissy’s brother had been diagnosed with leukemia, a condition that eventually killed him (Sissy includes one of her brother’s heartbreaking letters in her autobiography; the poor kid spent the last stretch of his life terrified and lonely). They moved temporarily to a rented apartment in Houston in order to follow his treatment. I introduce myself as a time traveler, and I show them a tribute video of Sissy for them to understand how I came to learn about their existence (actually, this video). I give Sissy’s brother the cure for his leukemia. Once they return to their small hometown of Quitman, Texas, I hang out with them for a while, showing them Sissy’s movies and also other cool stuff from the future.

I thought briefly that maybe this is how wannabe parents get before they make the (usually mistaken) decision to have children: perhaps they just have the instinct to show cool stuff they like to a captive audience who feel indebted to them. Then again, it’s not really the same: I love Sissy’s personality. If you have a kid, they could turn out to be someone you wouldn’t even have wanted to cross path with in the street. I never got along with my siblings to any meaningful level, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid engaging with them. But clearly my daydreams include the common theme of being able to hang out and enjoy together experiences with people I’m actually fascinated by. It just happens that I haven’t encountered in person anyone that truly interested me, even the girl I dated the longest many, many years ago.

I guess that’s all I had to say for today.

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.

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: Ginger in the Morning

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

This is a review of an obscure 1974 romantic comedy, or at least I’m assuming that’s what’s supposed to be, starring Sissy Spacek and a bunch of other people who don’t matter as much. The movie was filmed in 1972, when our little Texan from Quitman was a mere twenty-two year old. The story seems mostly set near Albuquerque, a few decades before the rise of Walter White’s empire.

The whole movie is up on YouTube for some reason, and that’s where I watched it. Shown below.

Now, why did I bother watching this film? Because I also picked up this strawberry-blonde hitchhiker while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and the same as the hapless protagonist of this movie, now I can’t get that little Texan out of my mind. As far as I’m concerned, Sissy Spacek in the 70s was the most precious flower. I usually don’t get interested in people, other than a previous burning obsession with Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. So I went to the trouble of immersing myself in a movie from fifty fucking years ago because there’s a limited amount of material that captured the passage of 70s Sissy Spacek through this world before entropy set in, and god damn it, I’m going to get through all of it.

Sissy plays a hippie hitchhiker. Being that gorgeous and young, it’s a surprise she hadn’t been killed yet; plenty of serial killers must have been roaming around in the 70s. Now, I don’t like hippies, and I think that giving people like that any power will ruin a society, but Sissy remains her delightful, charming, vulnerable self. Like the protagonist, I was inclined to give her a pass on whatever she said about coffee giving one wrinkles, or about whipped cream being synthetic, as long as I could see her smile. So I can’t blame the protagonist that much for pussyfooting around Sissy’s character’s whimsical nonsense that the world hadn’t yet beaten out of her.

That said, I experienced an arc of my own with the male protagonist. He started out as a sensitive, good man who, after his divorce, may have deserved the good luck of picking up Sissy. He was respectful and kind to her. However, shortly after the movie introduced a drunken friend of his, the whole movie, as well as my respect for the male protagonist, collapsed. And it happened fairly early.

This is a spoiler, but whatever: the same way the male protagonist’s cowardice led him to pussyfoot around Sissy’s nonsense, he also decided to speak about Sissy, for whom the guy had already fallen hard, as just some random “sure thing,” a “hot number” he picked up on the road, in order to placate his friend. Sissy heard him talk about her as though she were nothing more than an easy lay, and naturally her respect for this man shattered completely.

Now, we know that the male protagonist didn’t really mean it. But it doesn’t matter. The guy is in his late forties as far as I can tell, and he not only decided to talk that way about someone he clearly had fallen for, but also proceeded to blame his friend as if that drunkard had pried the words out of him. From then on, I was on the wounded hippie’s side: she should have taken the next bus to Colorado or wherever the fuck she was going and forgotten this whole episode even happened. The male protagonist showed a clear incapacity to connect with her emotionally, and even raised his voice when she was there hurting. I could see how he had ended up divorced.

I didn’t get the impression this was part of his character arc, as some flaw that he was supposed to fix; I suspect that the screenwriter was treating it as “Well, he’s a man. That’s relatable, isn’t it? She should just get over it.” That impression was enhanced later by the casual way the screenwriter treated spousal abuse; the male protagonist, drunk at that point, seemingly found it hilarious.

We never learned all that much about Sissy’s character as a person other than that she was a songwriter, wrote poems, was a hippie, and thought that some of her random delusions were facts. But Sissy sold all of it with her charm, beauty, and peculiar mannerisms: her casual and disarming sincerity, never concealing either her enthusiasm or hurt, the way she looks into other people’s faces as if taking it all in openly, those precious smiles of hers. And she also plays the guitar briefly; Sissy’s initial goal was to become a songwriter.

In an introduction for the 50th anniversary of the movie, the fifty-years-older male actor said that the movie had been financed because someone introduced Sissy Spacek to the money guy, who proceeded to fall in love with her, and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce the movie. I assume that the 70s was a sequence of random men casually encountering Sissy Spacek and falling madly in love with her. Sissy’s eventual husband, the art director for Badlands, saw her first coming down some stairs, all strawberry-blonde, beautiful, fair, small, and dressed in baby-blue overalls, and was struck instantly.

The dialogue was simultaneously cringier and cleverer than I thought it would be. The most moving part of the movie for me was a little monologue about deer hunting; I thought that was quite touching, and it came from the drunk otherwise involved in collapsing the movie. But I wish this story had been instead about Sissy Spacek and the male protagonist getting to know each other more and falling in love properly, and her eventually deciding for good reasons that she shouldn’t continue her doomed journey as a hippie hitchhiker. Instead, the film we got seemed unwilling to take Sissy’s character’s hurt seriously.

Watch it if you enjoy the 70s, and especially if you’re as enamoured with 70s Sissy Spacek as this old heart of mine is.

Review: Prime Cut

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

A 1972 lurid crime thiller that I only found about because of my ongoing obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek. This was Sissy’s first feature film, in which she starred alongside Gene Hackman (who’s always compelling) and some older guy I had never seen before.

Sissy started with hopes of becoming a professional songwriter, but it didn’t pan out that way. Because she moved in the right circles and her cousin was a professional actor, and also because Sissy was mind-meltingly beautiful, doors soon enough opened for her to star in films. Prime Cut was filmed relatively shortly before Malick’s Badlands, which would make Spacek into a cult actress for independent filmmakers (eventually working with Robert Altman, David Lynch, and others), and also would make her the subject of infatuation for I’m assuming thousands of people worldwide. I’ve only been enamoured with her since I truly awakened to her existence about two weeks ago, but on my search for clips, I’ve read the words of poor saps who saw her back in the seventies or eighties and have never been able to forget her since. I hope my case eventually passes, as it feels almost like rubbing salt on a wound at this point.

Anyway, this is a movie that simultaneously tries to make selling young women (likely teenagers) a terrible thing to do, while also having Sissy paraded naked, with her delightful little body and titties out for our viewing pleasure. In one scene, she’s dressed in a beautiful see-through dress in an upscale restaurant; for some reason, the same man who saved her from sexual slavery decided to dress her up and parade her around in a dress that clearly displays her tits. I’m not complaining about any of this, mind you: I like when movies cater to my desires, and I absolutely wanted to see as much of 70s Spacek as humanly possible, including her pretty tits. The hypocrisy just irks me the wrong way. Ultimately, though, I suppose the movie is not apologetic of the fact that it caters to one of men’s most basic fantasies through the ages: that of rescuing a gorgeous, innocent princess from worse men, then keeping her to yourself so she can carry on your bloodline.

Now, this movie is a six or a six-and-a-half at the most. We’re treated to editing that repeats the same things over and over without much movement (driving cars, loading weapons, shooting, a combine chase). Some dialogue is plain dumb. There’s also not much to the plot beyond an out-of-town “detective” rescuing a gorgeous princess, then fighting the evildoers who captured her.

Things I appreciated: the sense of inhabiting the 70s was wonderful. Those cities from fifty years ago. The general ethnic homogeneity to the extent that they had to invent slurs for the Irish. Gorgeous upscale hotels that you can hardly imagine existing anymore in that form. The beautiful Midwest stretching from horizon to horizon. Quaint 70s fairs full of happy, fit young people who didn’t grow up on smartphones. Better times.

Some of the characters were memorable in their little details. Hackman’s role was of a nasty crime boss who sold fresh girls as cattle, and placing him in the plains of the Midwest instead of a city like Chicago gave him a peculiar air. He was also named Mary Ann for some reason; not sure if that was ever explained. His brother was a greasy guy who always wore a wife beater and constantly had a sausage at hand from the industrial butchery where he worked. I can’t say I liked seeing him, but he was memorable.

Now, Sissy’s character. A girl raised in an orphanage seemingly dedicated to providing fresh meat for the sex-slavery circuit. In a monologue, Sissy tells the protagonist that growing up, she used to make out with her best friend at the orphanage (another girl), pretending that one of them was a man. That she even put on a low voice to sell the act. She said she imagined how a grown man’s hands would feel roaming all over her. Naturally, she falls for the protagonist the moment he rescues her, and for the rest of the movie she gets led around as she experiences the wonders of an upscale restaurant and a fair with childish innocence. There’s a moment in which the protagonist and his crew are dealing with a couple of dairy farmers in a pointless exchange except for the fact that Sissy is in the background eating cotton candy with delight. She also looked mesmerizing in her white dress.

So, to anyone reading this (not sure why anyone would read a review of a random movie from 1972, let alone one written by me), watch this movie if you’re interested in inhabiting the 70s for a while, or if you’re afflicted with a burning obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek that prevents you from sleeping properly and fills you with ungovernable despair because you didn’t live through the 70s and were unable to meet the perfect creature that Sissy Spacek was during that limited span of time.

Some photos of the movie. And by “of the movie,” I mean of Sissy Spacek in the movie, which is why I watched this to begin with.

Life update (09/09/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

My disappointment of the month: Suno 6.0 has come out, and it’s shit. Not only that: it’s the Udio debacle all over again. The music industry has castrated the leading music generator. I tried generating a segment with four simple lines of lyrics from my Odes to My Triceratops cycle of songs, and they were moderated due to copyright even though there were no true copyright issues. Next batch of lyrics: moderated due to violence. And the music sounds more artificial than it used to two models ago. Suno is done.

The sole alternative is to wait for a local model to sound as good as Udio did during its Wild West days. This may happen. But I doubt it’ll happen for at least a couple of years or so. Which means I have to park my fourth album even though I’ve written all the lyrics.

Cormac McCarthy’s artistic landscape contributed heavily (didn’t start it) to my long-lived obsession with the 70s, or at least the 70s like I prefer to think of them. A time before the internet, before the image-obsessed 80s, after the peak of the damn hippies. An era when a new way of living could have settled, only for the 80s to come and make everything mostly a cocaine-infused joke (I enjoy the 80s, don’t get me wrong, but it did ruin the promise of the seventies). Anyway, due to finding out that McCarthy loved Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 movie, and that it seems to have fed into my favorite books of his, which are The Passenger/Stella Maris, I proceeded to watch other movies related to directors McCarthy had loved. That led me to Terrence Malick, which led me to his exceptional Badlands, which introduced me to Sissy Spacek, and now I’m enamoured with Spacek.

Earlier today I watched Altman’s 3 Women, which I didn’t like much as a movie, but it features another mesmerizing interpretation by Sissy Spacek as a sort of a wild child alongside Shelley Duvall, that weird-faced poor lady who got abused by Kubrick and Nicholson on The Shining. Partly due to my sudden infatuation with Spacek, partly due to the fact that her character in 3 Women was an innocent, wild, lovely flower (possibly autistic?), a moment in the movie when Duvall basically tells Spacek to fuck off made me want to slap the hell out of that woman. I had to ask ChatGPT why would anyone do this to poor innocent Spacek’s character, and ChatGPT told me to calm down and keep watching. The movie had interesting shots, and it made me inhabit the isolated, strange 70s again, so I appreciate it for that, but it was quite the mess of a story, and that score was godawful.

It really pisses me off that, having been born in 1985, I didn’t grow up with a crush on Spacek. I didn’t even know about her until my teens, I think, and the impression of her was heavily distorted by her having acted as Carrie in that adaptation of the Stephen King novel. I can barely stand Stephen King (and only his adaptations; I despise his writing), and I hate even more that the impression most people have gotten out of Sissy Spacek is her being covered in pig blood and telekinetically massacring everyone.

Spacek was the most gorgeous, unique creature in the 70s as far as I’m concerned, and the sole actress I can imagine playing Alicia Western. And there’s an additional connection to Alicia Western that leads me to believe that McCarthy would have agreed on the casting. Spacek pushed for the production of and to star in a movie adaptation of a play named ‘Night, Mother. It’s about a mother and her suicidal daughter, with the mother spending the night trying to talk the daughter out of suicide. McCarthy praised that play. About twenty years later, McCarthy wrote The Sunset Limited, about a man trying to stop another man from killing himself. It also takes place in basically one place, and only the two characters are present. And McCarthy’s final book was Stella Maris, featuring two characters in a room: a therapist and Alicia Western, with the first one trying to prevent (unknowingly) the second’s suicide.

Time destroys the present tense of everything. An online music service allows you to generate beautiful songs that sound backed by a real band, only for the music industry to make the model disappear. Magnificent people exist at their best for a short period and then fade away. Reality is too heavy and painful and soaked in melancholy for it to be carried on one’s shoulders all the time. No wonder people drown themselves in their jobs and their families and their sports teams.

Gorgeous women of the 1970s #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve spent most of my life drawn to the 1970s despite being born in 1985, and I’ve never quite known how to explain why. It’s not really nostalgia. I wasn’t there.

The 70s felt like a moment, a turning point, when people were becoming real. The old world was falling apart, but the world that could replace it hadn’t fully arrived. So you get this period of unfinished freedom. People seemed earthy, awkward, sexual, lonely, funny, impulsive. Their clothes look worn, their homes inhabited. Music is something you put in a room. People sit around and talk. Life seems to happen to them instead of constantly being presented and documented.

Then the 1980s arrived and short-circuited it. Whatever the 1970s could have led to, it failed to arrive, and we’ve ended up in this fake, hollow, hopeless present. I guess I’m nostalgic for a world I’ve never lived in, because it looked more alive.

Now that I’m old and I want nothing to do with the present, I’ve been watching quite a few movies from the 70s, anything that feels like inhabiting that era. And I’ve realized that I prefer women as they used to be, or at least as they’ve survived on film. So I’m presenting two beauties that came and went.

Sissy Spacek from Badlands (1973)

Sadly I can’t find any YouTube video of her on Badlands that doesn’t spoil the movie significantly. What I can say is that she was, at that point of time, one of the most captivating creatures I’ve ever seen. The movie is fantastic, too. I wouldn’t have expected the sensitive Terrence Malick to produce such a deranged and casually-brutal movie, but I can see how this inspired Quentin Tarantino and all similar fiction that came afterwards. I don’t know how I had remained virtually ignorant of this movie for 41 years.

Jane Birkin from Love at the Top (1974)

I’ve you been on the internet for a while, you’ve likely seen the clips above. That was Jane Birkin back in 1974. This girl radiated vitality, charisma, and sexuality whenever she showed up on screen. Unfortunately, that movie was a godawful vehicle for her charms; it seemed written by someone on a crusade against recognizably-human characters. Don’t watch it. I wanted to turn it off about fifteen minutes in.

Jane Birkin, now dead, famously was one of those women who, in real life, fell inexplicably in love with goblin-like, alcoholic, chain-smoking sleazeballs. Don’t know what’s with women and this sort of bad boys. Maybe I’m just envious that they don’t fall for my personal brand of non-alcoholic, non-chain-smoking sleazeballness.

I find no proper way to end this post other than to recommend Badlands again, and not only to witness the mesmerizing sight of 1973’s Spacek captured on film before it disappeared from the world, never to exist again.

Five Easy Pieces’ links to The Passenger/Stella Maris

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

I’ve been on a binge of 70s movies lately. I wanted films from that era that provided the feeling of inhabiting the 1970s. One that ChatGPT recommended was Jack Nicholson’s 1970 movie Five Easy Pieces. I actually tried watching it years ago, but I didn’t connect with it enough, so I quit about a quarter of the way through. This time I felt differently.

It follows the character of Bobby Dupea, a former pianist prodigy who abandoned his family, who are a bunch of intellectuals and artists, to live as a drifter of sorts, never settling for long enough at a single place and among a single group of people. I got into this binge of 70s movies because I remain haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which belong to the same story set in that era. And I was surprised to find out that Five Easy Pieces undoubtedly influenced McCarthy’s last two works.

McCarthy died about three years ago, so one might think that a movie from 1970 is a bit too distant to be considered a clear inspiration to his last two books. But The Passenger and Stella Maris were conceived, worked on, and majorly planned in the mid-to-late 70s, as well as early 80s. It pertained the real-life institutionalization of McCarthy’s love-of-his-life Augusta Britt, who ended up in some mental hospital somehow related to Stella Maris. As I kept watching Nicholson’s movie, the similarities became obvious.

Bobby Dupea, the movie’s protagonist, comes from a highly cultured/intellectual family. He’s a musical prodigy. His sister is a musician. His sister desperately wants him back. Bobby abandoned his privileged/intellectual origin. Bobby is angry, restless, alienated. He can’t tolerate the feeling that a life is settling into place. He moves from place to place. He has an almost pathological resistance to permanence.

Bobby Western, the protagonist of The Passenger, comes from an intellectually and scientifically exceptional family. He plays mandolin; deeply associated with music. His sister Alicia is a musician/intellectual. Alicia’s entire relationship with Bobby is haunted by his absence and her longing for him. Bobby has abandoned conventional society and spends his life moving around. He’s restless, melancholic, alienated. He’s made flight his mode of existence. He moves from place to place, ultimately leaving America. Bobby’s entire existence becomes a kind of permanent exile.

In the movie, Bobby’s explanation for his restlessness is that he can’t bear the moment when a new life starts to look like a settled life. He gets frightened when something begins acquiring the shape of a future. Bobby Western feels that he can’t become anyone because the world no longer provides a place in which such a becoming is possible. You see the family resemblance.

In the movie, Bobby’s sister is the person from his old life who still wants him back. She’s a musician, she understands him in ways no one else does, and she serves as the emotional bridge between Bobby and the world he rejected. Alicia fills a far more elaborate version of the same structural position. In the movie: sister waits, brother comes home, brother leaves again. In McCarthy’s story, it turns much darker: sister needs brother, brother fails to save her, sister dies, brother spends the rest of his life unable to return home.

Both Bobbys possess the capacity for civilized/intellectual life but refuse to inhabit it. I can imagine that McCarthy felt reflected in Nicholson’s character. Dupea can play Chopin beautifully, but he lives as an oil worker. He’s capable of being something “higher,” yet he’s miserable when he inhabits that world. Bobby Western is a physicist, mathematically gifted, musically inclined, yet he doesn’t belong to any of those worlds. He’s a diver, a smuggler, a mechanic, a gambler, a fisherman, a wanderer. Dupea runs away from society. Western runs away from civilization. Ultimately, McCarthy’s protagonist seems to run away from existence itself.

I asked ChatGPT if McCarthy had mentioned Five Easy Pieces at all. Not only he had: he mentioned the movie was one of his favorites. One of the references mentions it as his favorite. So that’s that.

I’m sure this won’t matter to anyone who doesn’t occupy my mental headspace, and who doesn’t retain an unhealthy attachment to Alicia Western and therefore to McCarthy’s last two novels. But I found it interesting enough to record nonetheless.