Odd Jobs by John Updike

too, that the villain of the piece, in this case the inquisitor Bernard Gui, be dealt a bloody death. The torturer falls from a great height and is many times pierced by a hay rake. The book, on the other hand, merely lets Gui sink back into the morass of history, which is so replete with villains that none can be dignified with punishment.
    Movie logic demands as well that the nameless peasant girl who impulsively and wordlessly (for she speaks a dialect remote from Latin) bestows herself upon young Adso be spared the death on the pyre to which Eco, with historically correct heartlessness, casually and irrevocably consigns her. But in the rigid ethical system, based upon wish-fulfillment, that controls the myth-making operations of the cinematic art, she must be saved and glorified, not just because Adso loves her. It is
we
who love her: how, once she has, in the movie’s one sex scene, so charmingly shown us her breasts and buttocks, can we watch her burn, or think of her burning? Even the ferocity of Bergman’s films, wherein animals and fish are killed before the camera, balks at the sacred inviolacy of the bared female form; in
The Seventh Seal
, the condemned young witch survives. Further, Adso prays to the Madonna that the girl be spared, and in our cinematic universe not only is sexual energy always conserved but prayers are always answered. We viewers of
The Name of the Rose
can scarcely withhold tears of gratitude and religious hysteria at the sight, appropriately phallic, of the deserted stake where the movie’s lone heroine has been somehow saved. Saved, the movie tentatively suggests, by a peasant uprising, in behalf of lovely young witches and the chthonian fertility they represent.
    After touch, the visual is the supreme erotic sense, and there is no keeping sex marginal in a motion picture. If it is there at all, it will overflow the screen, and demand to rule the plot. An erotic incident minor (and pedantically overwritten) in the novel irresistibly becomes central in the movie, and though Adso in the end rejects the live girl in favor of monkish celibacy, this is movie logic also, for thus he enshrines her forever in his memory. He even, in the most surprising twist given the novel by the moviemakers, makes her illiterate silence the point of the title: she is the rose who never acquired a name. And perhaps Adso’s typical romantic deferral of perishing actuality, this heretical (accordingto Denis de Rougemont) act of eternalization through denial, is not unfairly read into the novel’s title, taken from the Latin “stat rosa pristine nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.” The rose remains pristine in name; we hold (keep) her name (the idea of her) naked (pure).
Overboard on
Overboard
    I SAW A NUMBER of last season’s well-reviewed movies, and some, like
Moonstruck
and
The Last Emperor
, lived up to their notices, and others, like
Broadcast News
and
My Life as a Dog
, seemed to me to misfire, though their good intentions were obvious. But the motion picture I liked best was one I went to impulsively, at the local second-run house, with no memory of its reviews save the dismissive observation, somewhere, that Goldie Hawn should pick her material better. I went to
Overboard
expecting only that it would contain Goldie Hawn and would attempt to be funny and at least wouldn’t depress me. In the event, it moved me, and I feel I should, apologetically, try to explain why.
    First, Goldie Hawn. I used to love her on
Laugh-In
, which was one of the Vietnam era’s few light-hearted spots. She and Judy Carne would revolve their bikini-bared bodies, painted with slogans in that heyday of angry graffiti, and it would seem that anger wasn’t everything, and that thanks to laughter and bimbos we might survive. Her face, on the verge of pop eyes and buck teeth, was a semi-comic valentine, surrounded by tumble-dried blond hair. We go to movies to see a star, just as they did in the Thirties—a dependably familiar presence