Mythology
The society's members perpetuate the joke in the media. Tom Waits described it to Rolling Stone in 1986 as "somewhere between the Elks Club and the Academy Awards", and claimed to have met Jarmusch at an annual meeting of the New York chapter. When asked about the society by friend and collaborator Luc Sante in a 1989 interview, Jarmusch commented "I'm not at liberty to divulge information about the organization, other than to tell you that it does exist. I can identify three other members of the organization: Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Richard Boes ... You have to have a facial structure such that you could be related to, or be a son of, Lee Marvin. There are no women, obviously, in the organization. We have communiques and secret meetings. Other than that, I can't talk about it." Jarmusch revealed in a 1992 interview that the real son of Lee Marvin, Christopher, had objected to the existence of the organization in an encounter with Waits at a bar:
Six months ago Tom Waits was in a bar in somewhere like Sonoma County in Northern California, and the bartender said, ”You’re Tom Waits, right? A guy over there wants to talk to you.”
Tom went over to this dark corner booth and the guy sitting there said, ”Sit down, I want to talk to you.”
So Tom started getting a little aggressive: ”What the fuck do you want to talk to me about? I don’t know you.”
And the guy said, ”What is this bullshit about the Sons of Lee Marvin?”
Tom said, ”Well, it’s a secret organization and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
The guy said, ”I don’t like it.”
Tom said, ”What’s it to you?”
The guy said, ”I’m Lee Marvin’s son”—and he really was. He thought it was insulting, but it’s not, it’s completely out of respect for Lee Marvin.
— Jim Jarmusch, in interview with Film Comment, June 1992
Read more about this topic: The Sons Of Lee Marvin
Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)