The Last Picture Show
Decades after its release, “The Last Picture Show” continues to crackle electric. There’s a stark and naked honesty to the picture that feels authentic and relevant in ways all the more remarkable for the fact that it came out decades ago, and that this saga of decay and deterioration is set decades before that. But maybe it isn’t so surprising that lost souls, naked and vulnerable and seeking love and desire and warmth in the harmonies and dissonances of simmering, molten sexual yearning, should seem so immediate to the contemporary day and age.
I graduated from High School four years ago in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, named Garland. It certainly wasn’t Anarene, but it was close enough to places like it that the authenticity of the picture really resonates with me. The restlessness, the boredom, the search for something bigger and better, the groping sexualities commingling from multiple points along the generational spectrum, the frustrations of adolescent libido and conquest and romantic manipulation all rung true for me in a way that bore all the hallmarks of my home.
Sonny and Duane are teenagers going on their twenties in a world in which the cultural foundations are crumbling without any conceivable replacement. The things my parents, and their parents especially, grew up knowing as the cornerstones of life as a human being, as a citizen of the United States or Texas specifically, are not things that I could ascribe nearly so much importance to by simple merit of the unforgiving pace of a cultural divide arising from the wholesale destruction of once rigid cultural norms. When the dust settles and the picture show closes down, the only thing that the people of Anarene have is the people that stayed, not the people that left. They, and we, must struggle to live in a world in transition.
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