One of the over-the-air movie channels has been airing the 1969 movie The Sterile Cuckoo regularly. Id seen random portions of it before, and Liza Minnellis character (Pookie Adams) simply seemed kooky and fun. A few weeks ago, I read a blog post about the film, pointing out that Pookie’s love-starved neediness starts to reveal itself to be part of larger, more deep-rooted emotional problems. The movie aired again yesterday and I watched the movie from beginning to end. (Shown here is a scene from the beginning of the movie, where she first meets a young man named Jerry who eventually becomes her boyfriend.) Watching a romantic movie, we are rooting for the lovers, and for awhile we are happy these two outsiders have found each other. But Pookie is much more of an outsider than Jerry, and in the end drives him away. (He even puts her on the bus at the end, to make her go away from him.) There was an interesting scene near the end where Jerry asks a girl from Pookies college if she knew where Pookie was (after he had asked not to see her for a month, perhaps exhausted by her overwhelming personality), and the girl (who is playing an acoustic guitar) answers that she doesnt know, that shes not close to Pookie. And one gets the vibe from the girl that one doesnt *want* to get close to Pookie, that shes (to quote Pookies own word to describe others) a weirdo. (The guitar-playing girl, however, seems too mature and nice to call her a weirdo, unlike Pookie who will lie to a nun to get her way, as we see in an early scene.) Ultimately I felt sad for Pookie as she looks out from the window of the bus as it drives away. (Unfortunately that final scene is not on YouTube.) She doesnt seem to realize that she is being rejected by the one person in the film who had been willing to love her -- or rather, the only person in the film that she had been willing to love (clingingly so). The blogger noted that the film ends as it began, with Pookie taking the bus, which suggests that this is a cycle for her, desperately latching onto someone to love but in the end being pushed away. Its possible that my reading of the blog entry colored my perception of Pookie as I watched the film. One person in the blogs comments section wrote, I wonder what the filmmakers wanted audiences to make of Pookie. Were we supposed to recognize that she was pathological? I dont think so. One great thing about the film is that, in the end, Pookie survives. Will she change? Maybe, maybe not. The blogger replied, The ambiguity you spoke of (is Pookie fine at the end? Is she really disturbed or just an eccentric?) is for me a bit part of why the film still works after all these years.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 22:25:29 +0000
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