16. SAM WATERSTON (by guest fixator S. Milkes.)

No, not the eyebrows. Everyone says it's the eyebrows. Mention his name, and it's "Oh, that guy on TV with the eyebrows?" Someone built a fan site called "The Raised Eyebrow: A Tribute to Sam Waterston," but they're all missing the real point: the eyes. His eyes. Samuel A. Waterston's glinting, brown eyes.

I fell in love with the actor when I saw Three, a bland, New-Wavey 1972 James Salter film, on TCM last winter holiday season. I missed the plot, but it featured a 32-year-old Sam with all the '70s requirements-feathery-hair, tight slacks with a high-collared shirt tucked in, and a morose, blank-yet-somehow-deep expression. I was channel-flipping, but those limpid eyes caught mine, and there was no turning back. Something in me changed; the following Wednesday night, I paid extra close attention to "Law & Order."

Cop and lawyer shows generally do not hold my attention for more than a single episode. I do not join the internet cults. Criminal law rarely excites me. And I am never sold by the promise that something is "based on a true story" or "ripped from the headlines." Nonetheless, an occasional viewing of "The Practice" or "Law & Order" can be pleasurable, for reasons that do not matter here. But now-now I have a something to go on, a cult of my own: those eyes, those shining, smiling eyes...peering from a face that is now an Executive Assistant District Attorney's.

The first week away from my parents' cable box, and the A&E channel's twice-nightly showings of "L & O," proved painful. Something like drug withdrawal set in. I adjusted--oh, how I adjusted! My mission lay before me, and friends, I could think of nothing more spiritually uplifting than to perform it: I had-had-to put up a Sam Waterston Film Festival of One-location: my TV room; dates: January through February, 2001; corporate sponsors: Knapp Video, Hollywood Video, my wallet.

My true fandom had begun.

I started with the obvious: The Killing Fields, 1984, directed by Roland Joffe (who, I was surprised to learn, now directs the MTV sexfest Undressed). All historical background and cinematic subtext aside, this movie boils down to a "buddy film," plain and simple. The wiry, embittered American journalist meets the eager, idealistic but wise Cambodian jouralist in a besieged country on the verge of revolution, and they fall in love. Okay, not really, but don't tell me buddy movies aren't, if not homoerotic, at least homo-suggestive. Watch this movie's ending, where the two embrace after years apart, and explain to me how that's any different from [insert ideal example of lovers reunited in cinema here]. Trivia fans may note that this movie garnered Waterston his only Oscar nomination. While I like the idea of the whole world recognizing what I know-that Sam is awesome-I mostly don't give a shit about this bump of fame in his cinematic biography. My love is something altogether else. My love is fanaticism, and fanaticism never shares a page with industry respectability.

I should mention that I like to knit while I watch TV or rented movies. At the beginning of my S.W. Film Fest, I started to knit a shaggy scarf. More of a boa, really. The yarn is a passionate deep magenta. Forty stitches a row, on #7 needles. I could be productive while whittling away my youth hypnotized by a pair of 60-year-old yeux bruns.

It did not take long for me to remember Serial Mom. I saw it last summer, and since I still haven't seen Cecil B. Demented, it remains the most boring John Waters movie I have ever seen. I am not a Waters fanatic, but I respect his work, and his unwavering desire to pervert America. Waterston plays the dad to Kathleen Turner's Mom. He's the archetypical straight guy, an upright citizen of suburbia, in contrast to his serial killer wife. Maybe this resort to types is what killed this movie, I dunno, but upon this viewing, it occurred to me that my fondness for this man is nothing more than a variant on a nerd fetish. While Sam is fairly well known to take a lot of straight-guy roles, his part in Serial Mom just topped them all. The ties, the suits, that naïve shocked expression every oddball occurrence elicits-ooohhh, God!

The easily titillated among you now expect me to talk about the sex scene in this movie-oh, all right: Sam Waterston has sex with Kathleen Turner. She doesn't remove her nightie, he keeps his undershirt on, and their lower halves are deeply embedded in the sheets. The whole scene was Waters' swipe at straight sex, with the added laugh that the woman is especially aroused because she'd just snuffed their son's math teacher. As deranged as I am now, I still cannot not consider this scene true Sam Waterston Erotica. Sorry, folks.

At some point I thought, what am I doing knitting myself a fluffy boa? Shouldn't I be making a manly plaid scarf, something fitting of, say, a District Attorney or other white-collar type, and mailing it to the New York NBC offices? No, no, no-that way lies madness, and I've been walking a thin enough line as it is. I think at the beginning of all this I'd promised myself not to think too much about Sam Waterston The Real Person With A Life And A Family And Other Things To Think About Besides His Fans, and focus instead on Sam Waterston The Two-Dimensional Illusion On My TV.

Next I checked out Mindwalk, and got my first inkling that my obsession was overrunning, if not outright flogging, my sense of good taste. This screenplay should never have been put to celluloid or gelatin or whatever they're making movie film out of these days. It's by the author of The Tao of Physics, which should have been warning enough. Three characters walk around the Ste. Michelle monastery in France, discussing politics, science, and art, and how the three could synthesize for a more peaceful planet and harmonious humankind. Feh. I suppose the scenery gives this one a leg up on My Dinner with Andre, but barely. While I enjoy a certain amount of cerebral masturbation in my life, I do not like it mixing with my real or imagined passions. Thank Christ this movie tanked at the box office. I mean, fuck, in the whole excruciating 90 minutes, Sam never once loosens his tie! And dammit, not enough closeups on the face.

This was getting way out of hand. By March, the scarf ran the length of my body, and still I kept knitting-and watching. I rented four movies a week, and they started to run together like a dream-The Great Gatsby, Gore Vidal's Lincoln, Rancho Deluxe, interminable Woody Allen dramas, Hopscotch, and every "Law and Order" premiere and rerun I could catch. I learned a few things: reducing the greatest American novel of the 20th century to a sappy love story starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, and sidestepping the whole parable about class distinctions and facades, was a terrible idea. The 14th president was kind of sexy. Woody Allen should stick to comedies (though I did like Crimes and Misdemeanors), and let Ingmar Bergman make all the Ingmar Bergman films. I do not or can not understand how a bizarre Westerns-spoofing stoner flick, that is not only a forgettable Sam Waterston movie, but also a forgettable Jeff Bridges movie, can be trumpeted by blurb-writers as a "cult favorite." And Walter Matthau made at least one misstep in his career.

The fact had to be faced: my hero had acted in a lot of mediocre or downright bad movies. And most of them couldn't even be chalked up to "camp" or "cult," though I see others before me have tried. Spring came, and the knitting had to be set down and the TV turned off. The brown eyes still glowed, though in black and white monochrome, from the glossy head shot on my wall that I'd bought at a movie memorabilia store. I accepted the fact that much of Waterston's filmography was completely inacessable to me-no Boston-area video store stocks Sweet William, Journey into Fear (1975 version), "I'll Fly Away," The Eagle's Wing, "Q.E.D.," Who Killed Mary What's 'Er Name?, or Fitzwilly. Though available, I'd decided I didn't really want to see The Man in the Moon, The Proprietor, or Just Between Friends. There was no sense in tracking down a solitary episode of "Tales From the Crypt," and I certainly wasn't going to sit through all the Time-Life "Lost Civilization" documentaries, just to hear his voice spout encomiastic platitudes about ancient Egypt, Greece, the Mayans, and Tibet.

One film made this whole endeavor worthwhile, though. So far I have led you to believe that our Samuel's cinematic career is one of comfortable Hollywood mediocrity, with a generous handful of shining moments expected of such a well-respected actor. I have not prepared you, just as I was unprepared when I saw it, for James Ivory's Savages. I had searched feverishly for this one in video stores and libraries, to no avail. I knew from internet sources that it was a surrealist film; that it was a Merchant/Ivory production-but unlike their later, more popular, period pieces; that it was an allegory for upper class hypocrisy; and that the plot involved "mud people."

By pure chance-or was it fate?-I saw a poster advertising a surrealist film series at a small Cambridge gallery. The very next film scheduled was none other than Savages. Off I went, expecting (or hoping?) to finish off the S.W. Film Fest with an interesting flourish.

The first five minutes of Savages is in hazy sepia tone, with art deco title cards. We are shown and told about about primitive "mudpeople" hunting, gathering, and performing rituals in what looked like a New England forest. They are clad in loincloths, raccoon tails, and dreadlocked papier-mache masks. They eat things off trees. They rut, doggie-style, randomly and frequently. We are shown an annual ritual where a "consort" is brought to the "high priestess"; they fuck for about five seconds, then the consort is tied to a tree near a short cliff, off of which another mudperson is about to hurl a large boulder, apparently in ritual sacrifice of the priestess' mate. But wait!! Out of nowhere, a croquet ball falls to the ground. The mudpeople have never seen anything so perfect and round! The human sacrifice is interrupted, and they go on a quest for the ball's source. On the way they kidnap a stray woman from "another tribe" (the actress is Indian; all the mudpeople so far have been Caucasian). They hike a bit. Suddenly, the come upon a clearing, and a a large American colonial estate-in color, now no longer a deranged documentary. The group of savages explore the abandoned estate, doing savage things like licking oil paintings and using top hats as drums. Oh, and more indiscriminate rutting. Eventually they discover 1930s-style clothes. I can't remember the exact nature of the transition montage, but eventually we see a group of well-dressed upper-class twits circa 1935, frolicking about their estate and flaunting their upper-class twittiness. Though it's hard to tell without the beards and dreadlocks, these are pretty clearly the same mudpeople, scrubbed and dolled up and suddenly speaking English instead of the grunts and moans we'd heard earlier.

It gets weirder. Sam plays "James, the Limping Man"-he smokes cigars and regales his fellow erstwhile primitives with stories he's lifted verbatim from old books. In a scene that makes even less sense than the opening ones, he dies, throwing himself or being thrown into the estate's swimming pool and left to drown. There are some gratuitous lesbian scenes an old Studebaker, the symbolism of which I never figured out. There's a guy in the attic playing cello for half the movie, who I think was a visitor and not one of the original mudmen. One couple is cross-dressed, but this is never referred to. Croquet is played. There is fighting in the coal cellar. The whole mess-and I should add here that I thought the cinematography, however "experimental" or "avant-garde," was really, really shitty-looks like an Edward Gorey pastiche, without any of Gorey's wit or method, and draped with symbolism I could neither decipher nor dredge up any interest in doing so. But dear lord, did I have a great time watching this one! Finally, my unhealthy obsession with Sam Waterston has yielded a true gem! Alas, due to the experimental nature of the film, there were very few close-ups on the face, and due to the crusty quality of the gallery's print, the baby browns were indistinguishable--hell, I couldn't even figure out which mudperson was him in the beginning.

Sigh. It is May. My one-sided love affair has carried on for five months, almost. I got to see some great movies. I got to see some terrible movies. I got to see unintentionally hilarious movies. Great heavens above, I got to see Savages. The boa isn't finished; it probably never will be. I thought my knitting project would be a fine metaphor for this whole endeavor, and maybe it still is: both pursuits are now looking a little worn out, a bit frayed at the edges, and both are bittersweetly interminable. I am no longer ashamed of my hobby, though I don't think I'll be building a web page anytime soon; what's already online about Mr. W. is so dense and frightening--you didn't think I was alone with this one, did you?--I couldn't compete. Instead, I shall broadcast the fact of my fixation the old-fashioned way: in the print you see here, and by word of mouth. So pass it on: Sam Waterston is beautiful! And don't even pretend otherwise.