Yesterday I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the first time.  The Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor version from 1958.  I saw it on the guide, running at something like 2AM and set my DVR to record it.  I love old movies and will do this when I notice one I haven't seen. 

 

I'm sitting there, taking it all in; getting so lost in the tense dialogue and the southern accents I can almost feel the humid air of the stormy summer night despite the snow falling outside my window.  Then, in the slow building climax of the movie, I get completely distracted.  Paul Newman's character has gone to the crowded cellar to find his dying father.  A few minutes into this scene the father, says "You know what I'm going to do before I die?"  He waves his hand around the room.  "I'm gonna open up all these boxes."   Right away my antenna goes up.  As carried away into the story as I am I can't help but start thinking how this man has all this unresolved "stuff" in his basement weighing so heavily on his mind that knowing his time is limited, one of his first thoughts is that he wants to look through these boxes. The cellar appears to be huge.  Statues, lamps, chandeliers, vases and furniture are strewn about, willy-nilly, like an antique store that was tossed by the law and order team years ago and never put back together.     He explains that much of it was bought in Europe, on a trip he and his wife took where she just "bought and bought and bought," but, with his mortality on his mind, he adds that "there's one thing you can't buy in a Europe fire sale, and that's your life."

 

Now I'm completely distracted.  I'm sitting up and listening intently to every word.  The father asks the son why he didn't come to him in troubled times – to the people who love him, leading into the 'I've given you everything' speech and Paul Newman's character says "You can't buy love.  You bought yourself a million dollars worth of junk and look at it!  Does it love you??"  

 

I can barely concentrate on the plot anymore, my mind is whirring with thoughts about how this movie came out in 1958 with this great scene about how nothing you buy can compare to what's really important and fifty years later – that's half a century - so many of us still struggle with this.  I'm also thinking about how, in this movie, there is a relation to the fact that they blew so much money on junk because they are rich.  As fifty years passed, while the majority of us haven't caught up to these millionaires in the bank balance department, one thing that has trickled down is the proclivity to spend a disproportionate amount of our income on unnecessary stuff.   The income gap has gotten wider but the basement-full-of-stuff gap has narrowed.

 

As I'm thinking all of this Paul Newman's character starts knocking things over, smashing the junk that doesn't represent love or life.  He grabs something that might be a fireplace tool and swings at everything in his reach crying out "Waste!  Waste! Worthless!" with every blow.  I smiled.  I couldn't have said it better myself.