- A composer, Les, feels compelled to explain his motives for the apparent murder of his wife, Lisa. Through a description of his fears and obsessions we learn something about the infantile male psyche and its relevance to misogyny.
- A composer, Les, feels compelled to explain his motives for the apparent murder of his wife, Lisa. Through a description of his fears, and obsessions, we learn something about the infantile male psyche, and its relevance to misogyny.—Al Sutton, Executive Producer/Writer
- Les (Al Sutton), a composer, is sitting at the piano in his New York loft, working on one of his compositions when he casually asks his wife, Lisa (Susanna Dalton), "What's for dinner, dear?" Lisa doesn't answer, and when the camera zooms out, we realize why. Lisa is lying prone on the chaise lounge in the living room with a knife in her back. Les seems unperturbed by this fact, and launches into a monologue analyzing the power of that phrase, "What's for dinner, dear?" In a home-made stand-up routine played to an imaginary audience, Les explores the first of his valid reasons for his having murdered Lisa, namely obsession. His routine includes the fixation he and his fellow men have with attaching names to female parts.
In his next subject, adoration, he extols the grace, competence and sensuality of women, culminating in an hysterical vocalization of the Kyrie, from Bach's B-minor Mass, as a testimony to womans fertility.
Jealousy is the next subject he tackles. While he does not believe she was unfaithful to him, he is jealous of her sensuality, even when she is with him. Her ability to experience and remember sensual moments contrasts painfully with his own wooden sensibility. Even her menstrual periods become an object of his jealousy, as being an attention-getting device. Further, he feels that her periods are an indictment of him for not having impregnated her. He becomes progressively unraveled, asking her, "Who's more important, you or I?" This is clearly for him a question of primal existential import.
The last subject of his valid motives is conspiracy. The notion that there is a conspiracy among women that excludes men is deeply disturbing to Les, as his mood dips into a serious vein. He can no longer manage the bravado of the earlier scenes, and his apparent glibness has given way to an insecure fragility. "What do I need to do to become a real boy?"
Having concluded his confessional diatribe, he now appeals to Lisa's prone body, "I'm sorry about the knife, Lisa,--but I was just trying to get your attention." His monologue is interrupted as Lisa awakens and pulls Les down to her. "Not the knife thing, again," she chides him, lovingly. We learn the knife was not real, but rubber. It was merely a device he often used to allow him to explore his intimate feelings, and the infantile residues that interfered with his ability to relate to Lisa.
Perhaps this was a means for him to get to his truth, their truth, our truth?
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