A Millennium Cow Ruminates
Dear Mr. Spielberg:
Have you heard about the Maglev? It’s a train that runs on a magnetic field and can top 250 m.p.h. One of your Senators rode a Maglev in Germany and wants to buy one for his state. He said everything goes by in a blur, but it’s exhilarating. Yikes! Does that sound like life nowadays or what?
Cows aren’t known for their smarts—most of us are going to wind up as some guy’s hamburger for God’s sake— and we don’t read The New York Times or Vanity Fair so how hip can we be, right, but we’ve been watching you and it’s scary out there.
Everything’s going faster—cars and catamarans and the Concorde and computers, then there’s Jiffy Lube, Insta-Soup, Quick Smog (don’t ask). I’m not suggesting they ought to slip Nembutal into the Cornflakes, and this probably sounds retro what with the speed gods they worship every morning at Starbucks, but instead of the Yellow Brick Road doesn’t all that bustle make you think Twister meets The Titanic? And we haven’t even talked road rage, fossil fuel, Bovine Growth Hormone (if it makes us grow faster, what’s it doing to you?).
I know movies won’t change the world, but what about a movie with a cow hero? You’re into critters—the spiders in Arachnophobia and that over-the-top-grumpy guy with all the teeth in Jaws and ET looks like a turtle. Anyway, people would see creatures who don’t whine if the bus is ten minutes late or fight over who got there first—or over anything for that matter, but that’s another movie—and take time to smell the weeds and aren’t stressed out and maybe there’s a connection.
Not a message movie where you bludgeon people over the head with some Universal Truth, but a subliminal feelgood ride that eases overwrought brains down to a civilized alpha. By the time people amble out of the theatre they’ll look at each other and go, “Whoa, I think I’ve just had a Zen moment. Maybe those cows are are on to something.”
Instead of another cliché couple of hours watching Bruce or Keanu chase bad guys around the place and all that gloom and mayhem, there’d be Guernseys, Jerseys, Dutch Belteds! Isn’t that refreshing? We dawdle and plod incomparably. Pretty scenery, too. We’re green freaks so you could even bill the movie as an eco-flick. The studio’s promo department would love that. Appeal to the environmentalists. And while we’re talking demographics, the movie would be a natural for the ranchers. Get the tree-huggers and cowboys together for a change.
I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to do your job, but I see fading in on some cows grazing on a hill, while on the soundtrack the Eagles are singing “Peaceful, Easy Feelin’,” maybe dissolve to a two-shot of cows contemplating a field of daisies.... The mind reels.
Yours Udderly,
A. Holstein.
©Lucy Aron, The Bohemian 2001
