Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around

(Cause somewhere deep down inside someone is saying “Love doesn’t last that long.” I got this feeling inside night and day, and now I can’t take it no more. Listen, honey, can’t you see.)

Yesterday morning I was telling my friends, Roberts and Hanks, about a movie I had watched on the weekend with my man, Sydney Pollack’s The Electric Horseman, and how it had felt like divine providence to have it appear on the Recently Added -list on Netflix. For years I had tried to find it, back when I was collecting DVD’s, and was never able to find it anywhere.

“Yes, I saw you were eyeing it on IMDb earlier”, Hanks said.

“Yes, with the moustache”, Roberts said, meaning Robert Redford, I hope.

“Yes. It was so lovely, I loved it so much, both of us did, and it was one of those rarities of the Seventies neither myself nor M. had ever seen. Such of heartbreaking love story, and a story of coming into one’s own as an adult. Sort of. You probably would have hated it.”

Hanks laughed a little. “Probably.”

The Electric Horseman tells the story of Sonny Steele, played by one of my all-time favorites, Redford, once a champion cowboy, now reduced to acting as the face of Ranch cereal for a major national company and putting on a horrible sparkly pretend cowboy outfit, rigged with hundreds of light-bulbs, to ride around arenas, barely able to stay on the horse because he hates his life and what has become of him so much he is in constant drunken haze to numb the reality.

One day, while doing a promotional appearance in Las Vegas, he finally reaches his quota, and decides to do something about his pathetic life. What does he do?

Well, he takes the horse, drugged and shot full of steroids, the mascot of the conglomerate, brought in to advance sales and make an impression on possible merger partners and the audience of the live show at the casino when Sonny Steele would ride him around the stage, wearing his light-bulbed cowboy costume, and rides right out of the stage, the casino, the hotel, into the darkness of the night, where the only twinkling lights are coming from his ridiculous stage getup.

Thus begins the story of his shedding his drunken stupor, coming to terms with years of sliding down the downward spiral of easy money and an easy job, becoming not who he was before his gradual downfall, but someone else, finding the person stuck, hidden, inside the boorish drunk; a better man. He heals the horse back into true form, reconnects with the nature, the grand America, around him, and, while trekking on foot through the breathtakingly gorgeous land, becomes once more the person who he really is underneath the shiny spark plug suit. (Tell me why you want to lay there and revel in your abandon. Honey, it makes no difference to me baby, everybody’s had to fight to be free. You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee.)

All of this is witnessed by a hard-ass TV-journalist, played by Jane Fonda, who against all odds finds Steele in the wild, convinces him to make a statement on television as to why he took the horse, the twelve-million-dollar piece of goods the heads of the conglomerate are now looking for and desperate to get back, what made having every police in the tristate area looking for him and the animal worthwhile. And while all of this is happening, Willie Nelson sings Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys in the background.

Let me come with you on this trip, she asks the cowboy. And while they are on their journey, phoneless, and, after a while, without any electronic equipment whatsoever after Sonny throws her recording gear into a river, they learn about each other the way no one learns from anyone nowadays anymore, because the connection of two people, walking, with only each other as company, is something we the modern people would never waste our precious time on anymore.

Does anyone know their friends like this? Their significant other? Their family?

If the answer is yes, that makes me the happiest woman alive.

The heads of the firm, having checked the sales figures and astonished to find the cereal sales increased after Sonny Steele took the horse, have a change of heart about finding the culprit who rode away with their possession. Sonny Steele’s heartfelt monologue about how the horse was being treated badly, how he for one isn’t about to let them destroy the beautiful animal, is heard all over the country, and in the end, everybody is behind him releasing the horse back into the wild.

The story ends as the couple, having done the deed, is faced with reality, and when they say goodbye to each other, never telling the other person they love them, because there is no need for that, the feeling is not that of sorrow and sadness, but of hope and optimism. The police are no longer looking for the cowboy, and he can now find a new path for himself, one that is true to who he is.

After boring both my workmates with details about the movie, I went in the back, to have lunch in the kitchen. I had my Robert Redford biography with me, as I had been inspired to finally start wolfing it down after seeing the beautiful picture. But first, why don’t I check the news, I thought.

Las Vegas. 

Because there are no words for it, because music is supposed to be the universal language of freedom and love and togetherness, because country music out of all the music is supposed to be the one avenue for understanding the heartache and pain and love and reverence, and because there is no crying in baseball but in country music the lonesome tear falling is an integral part of the imagery, I can only ask our friend Emmylou to help us today.

I don’t want to hear a love song

I got on this airplane just to fly

And I know there’s life below

But that all that it can show me

Is the prairie and the sky.

And I don’t want to hear a sad story

Full of heartbreak and desire

The last time I felt like this

It was in the wilderness and the canyon was on fire.

And I stood on the mountain in the night and watched it burn.

Who are we? When did the humanity and kindness end? Are we animals? We aren’t, because animals would never do what we are doing to each other, systematically destroying each other till there is nothing but rudeness and guns and pointing fingers and trigger-happy arrogance and a sense of hopelessness left.

Sense of humor, the ability to laugh at ourselves, empathy, support, smiling, a few kind words, a real person instead of answering service or just letting the phone ring, saying we care, hello, music and literature and cinema and writing as positive life-forces, agreeing to disagree, not being afraid, letting love rule instead of hate, encouragement, walking the desert with a stranger, giving them our time and attention and learning to love them despite the fact that we are different. Why am I crying?

Baby you tell me.

Title borrowed from Stevie Nicks with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Excerpts taken from the following songs:

Don’t Do Me Like That, Refugee, You Tell Me, by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Boulder to Birmingham, by Emmylou Harris.