Schadenfreude, Part I

Saw Amadeus again. Always loved the concept. How ostensibly the whole movie is driven by Salieri, who's the narrator/main character, how it's really his movie but it's the prodigy, Mozart, who ends up appropriating the movie for himself. They even named the damn thing after him. And it took me a while to even realize this blatant device by the filmmakers; that Salieri was essentially playing second-fiddle (no pun) in his own film and, on a grander scale, his life. But then again, I always surprise myself at how increeeeeedibly slow I can be sometimes.

There's one scene though that every time I watch the movie really gets me. You know the one scene in certain movies that completely floors you the first time you see it? And then every subsequent movie is just anticipation for that single scene? (When I was younger most of these scenes involved female nudity in one form or another. For those who remember, I would like to introduce Exhibit A, Total Recall. The scene in question of course involved the beautiful alien lady w/the 3 breasts. That scene perfectly embodies the "anticipatory moment," as I call it). In Amadeus that scene for me is where Salieri makes his pact w/God. The whole thing is comically absurd to a degree and probably as close to campy as the movie gets but for me it sums up the emotional character of the film. And despite the fact that it is slightly campy, the scene finds a way to be incredibly poignant and - if you look at it in the context of the entire film - devastatingly sad.

What happens in the scene is that the young Salieri, a boy of about ten it seems, wants more than anything to be an accomplished musician. But his father isn't having any of it. So Salieri stands there, looking to the sky, and prays to God to grant him his only wish. He swears that he's going to be celibate and sober and every other thing that Christians believed God wanted them to be. Next thing we see is Salieri's father, who's been standing in the background the entire time, dropping dead. Literally. Just like in a bad SNL sketch (which is most of them nowadays).

Why is it always these idiotic things that come through the hardest? I'll try to explain my best but I feel a long session coming on so I'm gonna reserve that for part II. So as long as I don't keel over myself, I'll see y'all (and by y'all I mean, me, the only person who reads this silly thing) in a few.