LEGENDARY

I’m alone in the theater, the unlikely abundance of our way of life is not lost on me. The dark cascades down: Baudelaire, “Her Hair”: “Pavilion, of blue-shadowed tresses spun,/You give me back the azure from afar;/And where the twisted locks are fringed with down/Lurk mingled odours I grow drunk upon/Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.” It can get a little bit funky in here.

Opera. Cal’s a skinny Oklahoma boy whose dead-in-a-car-crash dad and since-estranged brother were high-school wrestling heroes. He goes out for the team. Lithe 135-pound boys scuffling in the gymnasium—not Western culture’s afterthought but its core, those lightly-sweating boy-chests. Big bro John Cena, I’m told, is the main WWE guy, I can see why, a monster, alpha-silverback body, huge lion-face, he destroys a giant biker-type in a barfight, oh he’s mean. He takes some convincing before he’ll help out Cal. Well, monsters do, it’s not easy to tug on the tuxedo and work out the steps to Puttin’ on the Ritz. When he softens it’s unbearably great, what if this soulful hulk was your brother and you could make him smile and he trained you in an abandoned warehouse, God it would be so amazing. And everyone would know not to mess with you, and he’d give you his baseball glove, and after a violent rampage he’d let you stroke his forehead with a cool damp cloth…

Go Tornadoes! The movies teach this: if you train blindfolded, when you later shed the blindfold you cannot fail. Patricia Clarkson cannot deliver an unconvincing line, she’s totally in the moment as the mom. When she finally shows up at Cena’s grimy dump of an apartment he thinks, my mom thinks I’m a loser, and she kind of does, but she’s also his everloving mother, and she holds all this in her face, and I weep, I dampen the armrests with my wiped-away tears. “Dad made me feel invincible.” “When you show up, things happen—I know that’s what Dad would say.” Dad. Dad!