Anna, This Is Lauren Bacall

Comments

That's Charles, objectifying women even when they die.

BOTH are Lauren Bacall, man. People are still beautiful after they get old.

matt on August 12, 2014 at 5:57 PM

Jesus, I got on to write the same thing as @1. For Charles, it's ALWAYS about his boner. A photo of Bacall achieving something (even something as vapid as an Academy Award) is not what his boner wants, his boner wants sultry, noir, hypnotic Bacall. Therefore, older Bacall must not exist! Come on, Anna, you silly girl!

Dudley on August 12, 2014 at 6:06 PM

@2and @1, you have no love for cinema. None.

Charles Mudede on August 12, 2014 at 6:40 PM Stranger Staff

Thank you Charles. Right there with you.

Gurldoggie on August 12, 2014 at 6:42 PM

@3, you have no seemingly no respect for a GREAT person.

please keep silent in the future if you are moved to write anything.

also, please don't try to school @minardanna. she has more communication and writing skills than you could handle.

i'm telling you this out of love.

Deadhead Ned on August 12, 2014 at 6:48 PM

I intended to say essentially the same thing as @1 & 2. Also, apostrophes. Goddamn, they're not that hard.

pemulis on August 12, 2014 at 7:23 PM

Oh, and @3, I love Bacall's movies, especially with Bogart. Bacall draped across Hoagy Carmichael's piano or bantering with Lionel Barrymore was amazing. But that doesn't mean that she can only be remembered as a sultry sex symbol.

pemulis on August 12, 2014 at 7:45 PM

I hope when I die, the people who loved and knew me don't turn into holier-than-thou bores going on about "respect," enforcing some rigid, misguided code about the exact manner in which I can be appropriately remembered.

schmacky on August 12, 2014 at 7:49 PM

Mother Vel-DuRay's role model! They were the same age, and to look at the family pictures, Mother was a low-income, Midwestern version of the great Ms. Bacall. At her funeral, an old woman commented "your mother was the prettiest girl in Council Bluffs (Iowa)!" In my mind, I heard Mom say "well, there wasn't that much competition"

I suppose the best that any of us can hope for is to be as lovely in old age as we were in youth - and she was.

Catalina Vel-DuRay on August 12, 2014 at 7:58 PM

@8 And I hope that when I die some ass who I don't know causes a very small kerfuffle by telling others that they must remember me because of how young and sexy I once was. But I hope they don't use the possessive pronoun "its" when going for the informal contraction of "it has" by leaving out the apostrophe.

pemulis on August 12, 2014 at 8:01 PM

@8/@9/@10 said it well.
She was smart, she was a great mother, was sexy not for some fantastic physical asset, just for her bearing & intellect.

My brothers were friends with her son at college, and they were stunned by the 'old lady'.

But she was not a TEEVEE person, so her internet wailing wall is thankfully 35x smaller than the one we suffered through yesterday. Farewell, Betty.

Karlheinz Arschbomber on August 12, 2014 at 8:11 PM

I'm just hoping freelance film reviewer Erik Henriksen doesn't post about how he's creeped out that her first husband was twenty-four years her senior.

on August 12, 2014 at 8:15 PM

Ha @3, I love cinema plenty, fuck you very much. But nice try!

Dudley on August 12, 2014 at 8:26 PM

Great bit of manspaining here.

In the picture Anna posted is of a beautiful woman holding a symbol of her professional accomplishments. The one that Charles posted here is of a pretty woman who looks like she could be a teenager. In fact, she kind of looks like she could play Buffy's little sister.

seatackled on August 12, 2014 at 8:35 PM

It was the smoldering beauty of her youth that made Lauren Bacall who she was. Thanks, Charles.

seandr on August 12, 2014 at 8:37 PM

@ 11, the fact that she died of old age decades into retirement, as opposed to committing suicide while still active, may have something to do with it. And despite his last work being in a medium in which you seem to look down upon, he was mostly a film star.

Anyway, she was a terrific actor, a brave champion (she and Bogart defied the Hollywood witchunt of the McCarty era) and a lovely woman. RIP.

And if celebrity deaths do come in threes, here's hoping the next one is a truly execrable person, to make up for the loss of two genuine humanitarians.

Matt from Denver on August 12, 2014 at 8:44 PM

...and it's got to have an apostrophe.

Ernie1 on August 12, 2014 at 8:46 PM

Charles: How dare you try and tell Anna how her memory of Lauren Bacall should be.

sperifera on August 12, 2014 at 8:50 PM

My sophomore year at college, a roommate had that exact picture as a poster on his wall, though Bacall would have been some 35 years younger than him. She was the only woman he loved and wanted to marry. Not the Bacall of our then present, who was at that time doing gravelly voiced commercials for coffee, but the one in the picture. Didn't make sense to me then, but seeing it again. Yes.

Supreme Ruler Of The Universe on August 12, 2014 at 8:52 PM

@17 Damn right. It's important

pemulis on August 12, 2014 at 9:10 PM

So if an old woman doesn't make a self righteous Seattle male horny anymore, she may as well have died 50 years ago?

peskypoop on August 12, 2014 at 9:51 PM

The picture Anna posted looks like a classy old woman. The one Charles posted looks like a stunningly beautiful Hollywood icon. We don't have to choose one over the over, but I'm going to watch To Have and Have Not again tonight - made some some 30 years before I was born- and am not going to think for one second about my Grandma.

Gurldoggie on August 12, 2014 at 9:52 PM

If the other stranger writers don't call Charles out on his misogyny here, then it will show that once again stranger staff members don't hold themselves to the same standards they so gleefully hold EVERYONE ELSE TO! This post is absolute sexiest bs. Charles would not have posted the same thing about robin Williams, because Williams is a man and is allowed to be more then just his appearance. Fucking bs post.

j2patter on August 12, 2014 at 10:10 PM

Charles is the coolest guy he knows. I hate those kind of people.

CHACHMO on August 12, 2014 at 10:22 PM

Charles, stick to making outdated jokes about Interpol, it's a least less offensive.

j2patter on August 12, 2014 at 10:25 PM

@20,

I'm a pretty strict grammar nazi, but you do know you're reading a blog post, yes? If you're gonna get all irate over every missed apostrophe you encounter, you may want to stay off the Internet.

mikethehammer on August 12, 2014 at 10:29 PM

@19

Good link. From noir Venusian babe to tacky coffee schlup. Nice career arc.

dnt trust me on August 12, 2014 at 10:47 PM

@23 Oh fucking bullshit. What misogyny? What sexist bullshit? Charles said it had to be a b&w photo, it had to be noir, and it had to feature those amazing eyes. He's recalling the era and type of film that Bacall utterly ruled...a genre she practically defined. If you want to remember Bacall that's what you want to recall.

Of course he wouldn't have posted anything like that for Williams. For fuck's sake: he wasn't b&w, wasn't noir, and his eyes conveyed entirely different messages.

Are you even familiar with the movies she was in?

gnossos on August 12, 2014 at 11:40 PM

To put it a different way for all of you harping all over Charles: say his post was about Bogart and had a b&w photo w/smoke wafting over his forehead and a squint. Would you have an issue? I bet not. And if you did, then you truly know nothing, and care less, about cinema.

gnossos on August 12, 2014 at 11:47 PM

Also @20,

Are apostrophes more important than periods? Jesus Shit, I wonder what percentage of blog comments criticizing punctuation and/or grammar contain glaring typographical errors themselves. Fucking sad.

mikethehammer on August 12, 2014 at 11:53 PM

I'm sorry gang, but Mudede's right about this one.

on August 13, 2014 at 3:33 AM

@19: You're bad at math. Your roommate was gay :)

rob! on August 13, 2014 at 4:13 AM

I think the point is not that we shouldn't remember her for what she was initially known for, and not that we shouldn't see her older. Why not both? What the problem is lies with Charles demanding that it be only one way. He could have written his response much more elegantly and it would have been fine.

Akbar Fazil on August 13, 2014 at 7:35 AM

When I lived in SF, I worked at The Wharf. I was in a specialty imported foods shop there one day when I heard that deep, smokey voice that was so distinct say "Don't forget the honey, honey." And I looked up to see her in the aisle in front of me with Bogart's son. I almost fainted. What a legend!

Pope Peabrain on August 13, 2014 at 7:43 AM

@33 agreed, it's the way Charles wrote it that makes it misogynist. That it HAS to be the young version, the one he can sexually objectify.

Doesn't help that the title is pretty much "Look sweetie, this is Lauren Bacall".

Bah I miss the days of Lindy West, who had guts to call out other Stranger staff on slog for shit, no one's done it since.

j2patter on August 13, 2014 at 9:09 AM

What the hell is wrong with you people? The weather or something?

Charles is 100% correct. Betty Bacall is a film icon of the highest rank, and his picture is much more aptly related to her legend than the more recent one. None of your other idiotic irrelevancies about punctuation matter to anything. "Sexually objectify"? Fuck me with a popsicle stick. She is an object of worship, peon.

Fnarf on August 13, 2014 at 9:22 AM

Other misogynistic sources on Lauren Bacall:

The New York Times

Washington Post

National Public Radio

Seattle Times

CNN

Time Magazine

None of whom care about women and cinema as much as you Slog heroes!

Gurldoggie on August 13, 2014 at 9:31 AM

You hear that, Anna Minard? Your condolences don't count unless you include something for Mudede to touch himself to.

I'd call Chuck a perv, but his ilk seem to find that sort of thing a compliment for some reason. Pervert.

treehugger on August 13, 2014 at 9:37 AM

@3: And you do not respect women as people. At all. It shows, over and over and over again in nearly every single piece of tripe you vomit onto this website.

treehugger on August 13, 2014 at 9:39 AM

@23: THIS! THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!

Fucking self-righteous lefties.

treehugger on August 13, 2014 at 9:42 AM

@35: Then you are looking at the past through rose-tinted shades, as Lindy West is just as hypocritical of her peers, she's just more likely to use the size of her breasts as part of her argument.

treehugger on August 13, 2014 at 9:44 AM

Just as hypocritical AS her peers. Peas in a pod, folks. There's a reason she fit in so well around here and still gets her asshole licked by the Stranger staff from time to time.

treehugger on August 13, 2014 at 9:45 AM

The body of work of Lauren Bacall is not Lauren Bacall, in the same way that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe:

http://foucault.info/data/styles/large/p…

Sam Levine on August 13, 2014 at 9:51 AM

Here's one you might have missed, from Roddy McDowell's amazing home movies from 1965 that were released a few years ago. Bacall shows up at ~0.46, though before that it's just some old lump called Kirk Motherfuckin' Douglas, that's all. The films are silent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsvJHwH…

And you people are vacuum-sealed morons. I'm on Team Gurldoggie and Team Charles.

Fnarf on August 13, 2014 at 9:57 AM

Come on Sloggers, Charles can't acknowledge that a woman, famous for her beauty during her younger years (not just her beauty, but come on), is beautiful, or he is objectifying her? As if her career and the process of objectification were not intimately linked. What reality do you all live in? This is kind of ridiculous.

Jude Fawley on August 13, 2014 at 10:42 AM

@30 I was bothered because this post by Charles was condescending and self-congratulatory, and seemed to reflect a need to reduce a person's life to only those (sexy) things about her that Charles finds important.

And despite all that smugness, the punctuation was fucked up in a way that made his statements literally meaningless without the reader doing an internal and possibly unconscious correction. I decided to focus on the apostrophe in an exaggerated (and, I hoped, humorous) way, since the substantive objection had already been written and seemed to be the emerging consensus. Then somebody @17 made my point, but better, by using the same sentence structure as Charles but with the apostrophe in the right place. In agreeing with that post, I did not end my last sentence with a period, which in no way changed the meaning of my words and contributed to exactly nobody's confusion about the nature and function of the period.

pemulis on August 13, 2014 at 12:48 PM

Wow, they look like regular people in that home movie at McDowell's house. Some even look embarrassed being filmed.

sarah91 on August 16, 2014 at 9:48 PM

Isn't the entire point of cinema objectification, particularly the cinema of Hollywood's Golden age in which a star's iconography WAS their persona? Perhaps the correct answer would have been to post a iconic picture as well as a current one when someone of Bacall's stature passes, but I found this to be an appropriate answer post to the original. Perhaps the smugness of the caption could have been phrased differently, but I think they are both Lauren Bacall, and the fact that she was an iconic sex symbol is hardly irrelevant in her memory. It would be hard to imagine Olivia de Havilland's passing without a picture of her as either Melanie Wilkes or Catherine (The Heiress) as those are how she is identified by those who know her work. It doesn't diminish a memory to have a particular one - Bacall's career had a vast span; to remember any point in it is valid.

Ken_in_los_angeles on August 18, 2014 at 3:15 PM

Anna, This Is Lauren Bacall

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