Movie	Year	Director	Actor	Actor	Ranking
The Fly	1986	David Cronenberg	Jeff Goldblum	Geena Davis	4
Common Threads	1989	Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman			16
Somewhere in Time	1980	Jeannot Szwarc	Christopher Reeve	Jane Seymour	70
Man Hunt	1941	Fritz Lang	Walter Pidgeon	Joan Bennett	71
Invasion of the Body Snatchers	1978	Philip Kaufman	Donald Sutherland	Brooke Adams	75

One of the cruelest things that can happen to a person, and one of the most common, is to realize that the tragedy one is facing down is not unique. A death in the family, the illness of a close one, the decline of a lover feel unique because the person is unique. Zoom out even a little bit and it becomes a trope, and I can think of no more disrespectful way to view personal tragedy. It’s the problem of Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, which is pointedly about people other than lovers and spouses too. The idea of the Quilt is to memorialize the person who has died, the person who the survivors will be seeing in double vision for the rest of their lives. It’s also to join the small panels which add up to more than a million square feet in total. The Quilt allows the dead to be counted by the survivors. Common Threads asks the survivors, such as they are, to expand with an annotation, the scratches on a headstone.

From the first, the pair that gutted me most was Vito Russo and Jeffrey Sevcik, which, in the way of the film, is to say that Russo is the person in the documentary who most caught my eye. They seem like an odd couple, not that we really see them together. Russo has this matter-of-fact way about him, a boldness in the way that he presents his opinions. Sevcik was quieter, did not attach his name to the gay rights movement like Russo did, and to boot was like twice Russo’s height. The movie moment that Sevcik identified as particularly powerful to him was Ethel Waters’ performance of “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” in The Member of the Wedding, which is, to say the least, one of tremendous tenderness in a film with enormous emotional swells. Like the other interviewees in Common Threads, Russo shows remarkable bravery in looking backwards but also great vulnerability in sharing this relationship that was scythed down in front of a camera. The panel for Sevcik is sufficient; so is the care that Russo and so many thousands of other partners had to deliver despite having no real background in medicine or nursing. The interviews, the intentional peeling of scar tissue, are above and beyond the call of duty.

We don’t see the day-to-day of Sevick’s faltering in Common Threads, not any more than we see Russo’s ultimate death from the same root cause. The Fly, which, barring some absolutely unprecedented work of heartbreaking genius, will remain the key allegorical text in our cinema for what it means to watch someone die. The AIDS connection is impossible to get away from, although I suppose it could just as easily be any other terminal disease: opioid addiction, inoperable cancer, ALS. There is nothing that Ronnie can do to stop the development of Brundlefly. There are signs that something wrong is happening to Seth pretty quickly after that teleportation experiment with the stowaway, but they’re brushed off. The signs that he’s changed are at first welcomed; Brundlefly is a supremely powered being who is choosing between heroism and villainy. The genius feels himself becoming geniuser, stronger, sexier. But the downfall occurs quickly, and the part of him that has been written onto his genetic code is the work of a malevolent self-God out to destroy his disciple and himself. Ronnie isn’t around for much of this, although she’s around for enough of it that she gets the front row seat to watch Seth’s body turn into an unprecedented physical horror. From a medical perspective, this is fascinating, and the film invites us to consider the magnificence of the technical work that goes into it. Some of us are just hypnotized by it on the first go-round, while others have to wait for a rewatch to really appreciate the applied grossness of it all because the story itself is so moving. Both are the right answer, and perhaps no moment of the film is more spectacular than the final stretch where a human-sized fly emerges from the pod.

This would be a good love story no matter what. I’m a sucker for these stories of arrogant scientific men who prove to be the biggest idiots when countered by normal questions from normal women (I think even more highly of Altered States than The Fly), and their relationship is riddled with the fear that she could become more like him. I’m also only sort of kidding that it’s nice to see two tall people find each other like this.

What makes this film a great romance is this final encounter between Seth and Ronnie. The fly crawls to Ronnie, but it’s not the fly, it’s Seth trapped inside a body that can no longer express itself as a human one. Many of us will have to watch someone die of a terminal illness, be in the home or the hospital or the hospice with them and see them literally wither and die. “Quality of life” is the phrase you start to hear. What is that person living for if they’re just alive but in constant pain, alive but trapped inside a body that no longer functions for them, alive but without the power to show love back. And what we find in these situations is that the vast majority of people still won’t unplug that life support machine. Life has a sanctity regardless of its quality, but I don’t really think that’s the first thing that keeps us from taking off breathing apparatus or, as in Amour, smothering someone with a pillow. What keeps us from doing it is that it would hurt us too much to lose that person, no matter how bad things are. The fly heaving itself toward Ronnie, grabbing the shotgun, putting it to what remains of Seth’s skull: it’s easy for us to say, yes, there’s nothing left for him, just kill him. Then there’s a cut to Ronnie sobbing, barely even holding the gun anymore. The screen is filled with the raw meat of Seth’s body, but there she is, looking at the father of her unborn child and completely unwilling to euthanize someone who will never be less than the planet’s most grotesque animal. “No,” she says, “I can’t.” That she does after some more prodding from Seth is not about her changing her mind. She kills the person she loves because she loves him; it is a personal sacrifice that no one else can make.

The opposite problem strikes in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another movie where Jeff Goldblum really seems to be having the worst time. Elizabeth, despite all of Matthew’s best efforts, is snatched up bodily, and so what remains of her is not the bright, responsible, and occasionally punchy self that Matthew fell for. Her body remains, remains so profoundly that her bare breasts are right there for Matthew to see right after she’s been taken. It’s an invitation to Matthew to give up, an invitation that he does not take willingly and, furthermore, that he takes like a knife. The aliens gestated through anthropoid pods don’t quite understand that Elizabeth’s nudity doesn’t make Matthew want her body more. It’s so antithetical to the person she was before she passed(? somehow euphemism makes more sense in this world titled so euphemistically, though of course that’s at the essence of this bloodless race of bloodless conquerors) that Matthew cannot celebrate what he’s surely fantasized about many times. He’s a sensitive person, I think. He takes a certain pleasure in exposing the little rat turd in that fancy French joint, though I think it must burn him even more to be such a fine home cook and to be in a constant state of judging the restaurants he doesn’t work at purely from the standard of cleanliness. Elizabeth’s boyfriend, partner, lover, but in San Francisco presumably not her husband, is much more the model of a tough guy than Matthew. He is living a bachelor’s life, sexless and mooning over the most desirable woman in his little group of friends like the stuffy-nosed nerd at the edge of the cafeteria table.

One of the sick ironies of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that it puts Matthew and Elizabeth and their little crowd who have survived the first wave of snatching in the position of resistance fighters. Or at least they think they are. Maybe they’re more like people who feel the bullet entering the abdomen and tell themselves they intend to fight to survive, when that decision of survival has been made in the negative against them. The bouquet of a burgeoning maquis wafts up to Matthew’s nostrils with the same umami quality as his wok-cooked meals, and the sense of pride of belonging even manages to hold out against the fear and confusion of seeing another Jack on the table. The smell of mushrooms sizzling in a pan or the smell of coffee dripping into a mug are heady ones, but that head of earthiness is not that far away from a bowel movement. With Geoffrey out of the picture, Matthew acts too slowly, relishing this time with Elizabeth more than is gentlemanly. He doesn’t say things about it, nothing we can stick him to in a deposition, but God bless Donald Sutherland for his ability to play a white knight who leaves muddy footprints with each clank. An intellectual seizes his opportunities to grab this woman based on intellectual approaches, through the attempts to ease her emotionally, the way of presenting himself as the man with the logical course of action. Matthew does a nice job of preserving himself for a while, all things considered, but the epicure never allows himself to eat, drink, and be marry. If there ever was an opportunity for him to stir the yogurt, he realizes its absence only when he sees Elizabeth in the undress one expects before that process begins.

Two more unattainable women remain here, although, like Elizabeth, the reasons that they are unattainable are more surprising than they appear at first glance. Elizabeth was unattainable for Matthew because she was doomed to fall asleep at some time, because the two of them lived in San Francisco at the same kind of moment Billy Pilgrim lived in Dresden. It’s not impossible to imagine that a man with more boldness might have stuck his crowbar between lovers in order to stick his crowbar somewhere else; the reason that Elizabeth is unattainable has nothing to do with his politeness. Which one is the furthest from her man’s grasp is the question.

The easy answer seems like it should be Elise of Somewhere in Time, given that her romantic rendezvous with Richard is one that can survive only as long as he can forget that he’s actually from the present day and not actually some oddly dressed dandy in 1912 making love to an actress. Somewhere in Time understands the circuitousness of time travel in a way that I like pretty well, recognizing that the person who goes back in time has simultaneously gone back in time but not yet gone back in time in accordance with his own memories. It treats time travel as an exercise of will, which is also a quality I like about the picture; it literally makes as much sense to believe time travel would work if Richard imagines hard enough as it does to believe a big contraption would do it. The one who writes plays falls for the one who performs plays, and the great roadblock to their love is not the scientific awkwardness of their situation but, amusingly and rightly, the actress’s agent. The longer this magical weekend goes on around the hotel, the more attainable she is for the seeking protagonist, this most romantic fool who fools himself into the years before the Great War. The film sets itself up, in the end, to believe that the two of them can be together in a goth-metal way, although I think it would be just as dramatically effective if it were to end with him just sticking around with Elise in 1912, kicking Christopher Plummer in the junk, and dodging the draft. Elise is attainable enough for a mature woman old enough to be Richard’s grandmother without recourse to the Harold/Maude path, and attainable even though she looks like Jane Seymour. The one who is truly unattainable here is the one who dies in front of us, and that’s Richard. All it takes is a single unintentional slip-up, the most random presence of a penny flipped the wrong way, and Richard succumbs to scientific fact.

Incredibly, the right answer for “most unattainable” is Jerry of Man Hunt. She falls for Thorndike with apt ’40s movie speed, and he does not reach out to take her for reasons of propriety. (She is young…she has a funny accent…she has no money…the second one genuinely feels like the most important one.) Yet the reason Thorndike has to watch her die rather than marry her in some pleasantly posh ceremony is because one cannot marry Jerry any more than one can marry John Bull. Man Hunt is a badly misunderstood film because of its gripping and hilariously unrealistic opening. Just because Thorndike is stalking Hitler in order to prove to himself that he could shoot him like he could shoot a tiger or an elephant doesn’t mean the movie is some kind of documentary. Using that opener as a cudgel against Man Hunt is like saying that Hitler didn’t autograph Henry Jones’ Grail diary in real life, but it’s worse still because it ignores the allegory of the picture. Thorndike has the power to kill Hitler, and chooses not to do so through his own inaction. Because he errs, because he pulls up his rifle, because he lacks the will to act decisively and seriously, someone else has to die.

To attain Jerry is to save her. To save Jerry is to protect her from the ravages of Nazi Germany. To protect Jerry from the Nazis is to say this far and no further to Hitler somewhere around 1935 rather than 1939. Jerry is the purity of the civilian, the hauntingly spirited young woman who is more beautiful than any of the faces in Listen to Britain but much less real than any of them. She is a Phony War Britain who aspires to the toughness and will of Britain during the Blitz, although she is not entirely sure what kind of sacrifice it entails to be that kind of nation. Her willingness to help Thorndike, who I think would be supremely sexy and mysterious even without having Walter Pidgeon’s voice, is proof of the fiber that she has in her system that he lacks. She rises to the occasion without a second thought; she would not have looked at Hitler in her sights and sighed contentedly to herself. Thorndike has some backhanded responsibility for Jerry’s death no matter how you look at it, even if the Gestapo obviously deserves the vulture’s share of the credit. Not that it’s any consolation to her, but the worst thing that could happen to Thorndike does happen. He falls in love with her just in time to be hurt most grievously when she’s thrown out a window.