R.I.P. Sidney Lumet. No Hyperbole Here.

In my years of writing publicly, I have learned to not fear hyperbole. “Hyperbole” is often used as a criticism by those who are embarrassed by deep feeling, or those who think “obsessions” are somewhat childish. I know when I’m exaggerating, and I know when I am not, and I can say that when I was 12, I saw Dog Day Afternoon, and it changed the course of my life. It is partially responsible for me being who I am today. It also represented an immensely painful even traumatic growth spurt that happened (in retrospect) when I was too young.

I saw it one night when I was babysitting. I was in middle school. I was way too young to see that movie, and I didn’t understand a lot of it. The sex-change operation thing went completely over my head, but what I do remember is the raw power of Al Pacino’s performance and the effect it had on me. The parents of the kid I was babysitting came home that night, and had no idea that the girl sitting on the couch was totally altered from the girl who had arrived at their house 4 hours before. The father drove me back to my house. My mind was BURNING with thoughts not of Al Pacino, but of Sonny, the real-life character he played.

One indication of how deeply the film got to me is that I remember, on that short drive home, not just considering writing a letter to the real Sonny in prison, but planning on doing it, and wondering how I could figure out where he was imprisoned so I could make sure he received it. I thought to myself during that short drive, “How can I figure out where he is and write to him?” I don’t know what I wanted to say to him, but I just knew I wanted to reach out. There was no line between character and actor. Al Pacino’s performance made me want to find “the real guy”.

The soul does not grow in a linear way. There are events in life that catapult you forward, where your soul skips a phase, and expands to three times its former size. It hurts. It seems we are meant to grow in a slower more gradual way so that you can’t actually feel the growth. Watching Dog Day Afternoon was one of those growth-spurts for me. It actually hurt. I walked around for days, aching.

Now I look back on it and see that it was a growing pain. My soul had done a quantum-leap, in one evening, and I was no longer the same ignorant clueless self-centered girl I had been. After seeing Dog Day Afternoon, for weeks afterward, I would lie in bed at night and actually press down on my chest with my hand, trying to calm everything down in there. I couldn’t get the image of sweaty Al Pacino’s face out of my mind. He haunted me. I understood totally why the hostages would choose to stay with this man. I understood it completely. 12 years old.

(Other movies I saw “too soon” that had a huge personality-altering growth-spurt effect on me were both Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden – I know I saw East of Eden around the time I saw Dog Day Afternoon, and those two movies were a one-two punch to my childhood. Rebel Without a Cause came maybe a year later, again, seen when I was babysitting, and Plato’s death was one of the worst things I had ever seen in my life. I could not believe it had happened. The first “too soon” movie is the real Big Kahuna and that was Stanley Kramer’s Bless the Beasts and Children, which I watched on the little black-and-white television in our den when I was around 9 years old. The movie wrecked me to such an extreme degree that my helpless parents were actually worried about me. They hadn’t seen the movie and they had no idea what I was reacting to. I remember hearing my mother say, as I thrashed around in my bed, “WHAT was in that movie, Sheila. Please tell us.” But I couldn’t! How could I tell them that the sight of a herd of STATIONARY buffalo had made me cease to be an innocent child? How could I make them understand?? Bless the Beasts and Children was a moment from which I never fully recovered.)

I didn’t even know what the hell was going ON when I first saw Dog Day Afternoon, that night babysitting. What was “Attica” and why was he screaming that at the crowd? I needed to find out about that, too, I realized, and I went and looked at a couple of books in the library (I wasn’t a librarian’s daughter for nothing), and I found out what “Attica” was and why he was screaming it. I was 12 years old, starting to be obsessed with Casey Kasum’s Top 40, and also my leg warmers and my friends and going to dances and doing my homework. But I was also researching Al Pacino, the real “Sonny”, and Sidney Lumet, trying to put it all together in my head: How had anyone CREATED this movie? It felt LIVED, it felt like a real event, it felt like news footage. I knew enough to know that what I was watching was the result of hard work of some kind, but it still baffled me and obsessed me. How does one go about creating something like Dog Day Afternoon?

In the moment of watching Dog Day Afternoon, way too soon, before I was ready to handle it, let alone understand it, all I knew was that Attica meant something very important to those people, and that understanding what it meant was important for me too.

I have a great affection for the things in my life that I encountered “too soon”. There is, as always, a loss of innocence connected to such moments, and that’s why it hurt so much. That’s why I lay in bed at night, eyes towards the dark ceiling, thinking about Sonny in his prison cell somewhere, wanting to reach out to him personally, and pressing my hand down on my chest to calm everything down in there. I had never seen a movie like that before. It marked me with indelible ink.

Rest in peace, Sidney Lumet.