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The Acting Career of Charles H. West Considered as Bad Karma
- Southern Illinois University Press
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67 The Acting Career of Charles H. West Considered as Bad Karma { 1 } where is it where is it where is it written that reincarnation is a good thing? what if what if what if reincarnation is like the film career of the actor Charlie West? the failure or the weakling in nearly three dozen Griffith films /1909–1912/ each film a new incarnation at the rate of three a month O the cruelty of casting! to be born the jealous miner who almost shoots his brother in His Mother’s Scarf only to die & be reborn the “evil companion” in The Crooked Road who persuades the young husband to choose a life of crime—never never never once a rebirth as the hero who saves Blanche Sweet/ Lillian Gish from the brutish invading Yankees in the nick of time { 2 } O Charlie Charlie Charlie I am talking to you now each day each day each day did you hope you would at last be the one who stood up for truth & right? With each scenario/ each meeting with Mr Griffith/ each day’s shooting did hope die a little death along with you? the best you could hope for to fail through weakness of the body—the frail brother who must be sent to a sanitarium in String of Pearls— rather than the soul—the good-for-nothing in For His Son who gets addicted to the patent soft drink Dopocoke & first steals, then hallucinates & dies—it must have been hard to believe in redemption or cosmic bliss when { 3 } every day every day every day what lay ahead of you was a new role/ new name/ new life in the same old wig where your old sins would visit you in new & fatal ways—where you would ask Mary Pickford shy Mender of Nets to marry you only to ruin both your lives by sleeping with an old undeserving girlfriend O O O you must have thought—better to be like Satan an outright villain & say I choose to rule in Hell rather than serve in Heaven but your lemur eyes your slight sloping shoulders denied you the role of villain as certainly as hero/ too weak to save the heroine/too weak to murder the one who does/ too weak to walk away 68 { 4 } so in the end the end the end what did you have left? in The Massacre your last film of 1912 you are again not the one who rescues your wife & wailing helpless infant—someone else gives his life to save them & you arrive to find the two alive through no virtue or sacrifice of yours O how even good luck can become bad karma! is there a god in this vision of the universe we can blaspheme or blame! if there is I imagine you were tempted like Job to curse that god and die—or did mere oblivion began to sing its song so that when D. W. Griffith—himself a god to some—left Biograph to make his greatest movies & didn’t take you with him maybe you sighed & sank willingly into the sea of nothingness your acting career becomes—nothing a form of being/ a way of knowing/ a sweet nirvana/ each day a wave/ each week an ocean/ any failure to swim/ nobody’s business but your own/ ...