'Ave Maria': Frank O'Hara at the Movies

According to Locus Solus, there's a nice reference to the Frank O'Hara poem, "Ave Maria," in A.O. Scott's article about kissing at the movies. The article appears in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Here's a preview via Locus Solus:

In his article “A Brief History of Kissing in Movies” in this upcoming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, the film critic A. O. Scott argues that “movies have always been about sex and have always provided, under cover of harmless amusement, the tools of sexual initiation. This is an open secret. The industry, the audience and the critics conspire to pretend that something other than erotic fulfillment is the reason for the art form’s existence.”

In order to demonstrate this point, he turns to Frank O’Hara’s great movie poem, “Ave Maria,” which portrays the movies as a site of sexual initiation and liberation:

In his poem “Ave Maria,” Frank O’Hara exhorts the “Mothers of America” to “let your kids go to the movies!” The first reason is to give Mom a chance to pursue her own adult interests: “get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to.” But they will also have the chance to get up to some mischief themselves (“they may even be grateful to you/for their first sexual experience”), to cultivate “the darker joys” that blossom in the dark of the movie theater and that include the possibility of “leaving the movie before it’s over/with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg/near the Williamsburg Bridge.” On the other hand, if the mothers don’t listen to the poem’s advice, “the family breaks up/and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set/seeing/movies you wouldn’t let them see when they were young.”

“Ave Maria” is a perfect refutation of the puritanical idea of the guilty pleasure. The guilt in O’Hara’s poem comes from the denial and delay of pleasure. The kids will see the movies anyway, and also find what pleasures they can — how do you suppose they went blind? — but the thrill will be gone, and the happy domestic arrangement that made it all possible will have collapsed. Without free access to perversity — to “candy bars” and “gratuitous bags of popcorn” — the children will never be normal. [...]

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