Jumping out of the L’il Abner’s hillbillies from Dogpatch, yet too grandiose, even for animated fiction. ”Down here we says heeez got sum good idears”. Buford T. Justice, southern sheriff, interpreted by Jackie Gleason. Irony is Gleason and Burt Reynolds, a couple lushes at dawn and world class drunkards by lunch, starring in Smokey and the Bandit, a movie about law, contraband alcohol and social order with both completely inebriated while driving motor vehicles at high speeds. General admission cinema for the entire family. You could call them stone cold sober, though decidedly lowbrow.
The talent of Gleason and what he projected is remarkable in terms of depth and range. Within the context of an extreme vulnerability and insecurity from bipolar disorder and fragile from profound suffering, he was able to capture something magnificent in human nature, a slice of genome, in which he wrestled with and defeated his alienation and disorder to arrive at something intimate, social and enduring. In ”The Hustler” he claimed to be portraying himself in the role of Minnesota Fats: ‘‘Jeez, that fat man, look at the way he moves. Like a dancer. And those fingers, them chubby fingers. That, stroke. Its like he’s playing the violin or something.” ( Fast Eddie Felson marveling at Minnesota Fats )
Jackie Gleason, Paul Newman, The Hustler, 1961
Like other creative artists, with bipolar, such as Jackson Pollock or Edward Munch, there is a healthy and adaptive creative cognition at work within Gleason’s oeuvre. A transformation of a hallucination into art preceded by breakthrough conceptions. Known as the Janusian and homospatial processes which are characterized by conceptual unification and articulation ;and the simultaneous production of multiple opposites or antitheses. An attraction and detraction of opposite energies.
” Firmly held propositions about the laws of nature, the functioning of individuals and groups, or the aesthetic properties of visual and sound patterns are conceived as simultaneously true and not true.” Contrapuntal television from Gleason as Bach used the same theory of counterpoint in his Fugues such as the Goldberg Variations.
Video of Gleason being ”transformed ” by a hallucination brought on by an LSD trip in a unlikely counterculture film by Otto Preminger called Skidoo.
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