How About Dejeuner sur l'herbe?
Depends: Have they finished eating?
What is it about afternoon? You run into somebody in the morning, you say "Mornin'!" or "Good mornin'!" It pops.
In the evening, you can stretch it out a little: "G'd eeeev'nin'," maybe. "Good eeevv-nin friends!" Or a straight, formal "Good evening" can hum.
But if you run into somebody in the afternoon, you can pronounce all the syllables fully and carefully, "Good af-ter-noon," which sounds like English is your fifth language. Or you can try to quick it up and somehow the af- turns into e'yf, and you hit a snag: have to almost swallow to get on to -ter. And then of course noon flows on out -- not greetingly, though, but bluesy:
Woke up this mornin',
And it was afternoon.
Lord Lord.
Work up this mornin',
And it was afternoon.
Got no more git up and go now
Than the man in the moon.
Afternoon is deep. Afternoon is a problem. Afternoon works in the arts.
The Library of Congress's National Film Registry selects 25 movies every year "showcasing the range of diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation." Not one of them has "Morning" in the title. Two have "Afternoon."
Of course "Singing in the Rain" has a wonderful "Good Morning" number, a lovely innocent threesome: Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds falling in love hoofistically without quite realizing it yet, and Donald O'Connor feeling by no means like a fifth wheel.
"We've talked the whole night through," they sing. Still a little risky for mixed company in movies those days — but it's only 1:30 in the morning, still dark outside, and at the end they realize — tumbled together like puppies on the couch that they have just flipped choreographically (spontaneously, jollifyingly), that the great idea they've been celebrating is not, it appears, going to work. You wouldn't want "Good Morning" to be the title of the movie.
I can think of two "Morning" movies. "Joy in the Morning" sounds like it might be trying to sell something that's kinda flat: "In 1927, Carl Brown [Richard Chamberlain] marries Annie McGairy [Yvette Mimieux] and goes to college but taking his young wife with him creates difficult challenges for both of them, for their parents back home and for the campus faculty."
See.
"Good Morning, Vietnam" is a movie worth preserving, but although Robin Williams is a strong morning presence, you wouldn't call this a morning movie, because it has a war in it.
The two afternoon movies are intrinsic afternooners. I don't mean they would be good to watch in the afternoon. I mean because afternoon is the heaviest part of the day. Sweatiest. It's a transitional segment, from bright to less bright. "Dog Day Afternoon" is a fraught would-be-trans romance that ends darkly, except (deservedly) for Al Pacino's career. Armed robbery, for the sake of a relationship, on a stifling afternoon.
Really you shouldn't watch any movie in the afternoon. You come out of the theatre, or — okay, okay — you turn off your damn viewing device and crawl off the couch, and everything in the late-daylight world is too much like the other Registry afternoon movie.
Which is "Meshes of the Afternoon," silent short, 1943, directed by Maya Deren. Woman comes home before dark, falls asleep and has dreams in which the subjective and the objective do not mesh. Angles and shadows. A key becoming a sharp, serrated knife. A shrouded woman whose face is a mirror. Floppy flowers, staring eyes. You can see how Deren influenced David Lynch, and why she has been sampled (according to imdb.com) by a pioneer industrial metal band called Godflesh, an alternative rock band called Primal Scream, and an experimental electronic artist named Sd [sic] Laika. God forbid you should have an afternoon like this.
You should have an afternoon like "Afternoon of a Faun," in which a goat-man wakes up from a nap and here we go dreamy again, but this time with nymphs. Two nymphs. They don't have clothes on, and the faun finds them still sleeping in each other's arms. You want mesh? The faun picks up, bodily, the double-armload of nymphs at once. The nymphs flee, after some split-level depth-sounding, but in the first staged version, Nijinksy played the faun so strong that Paris was scandalized.
In America, today, when people use the expression "afternoon sex," they have in mind, pretty much, slipping around. Trying to work it in before the kids get out of school. But don't you have a job? There’s not enough air-conditioning in the world —
The countryish pop song “Afternoon Delight” was ranked by Billboard, in 2010, as the 20th sexiest song of all time. Lyrics like: "Why wait until the middle of a cold dark night?/ When everything's a little clearer in the light of day/ And we know the night is always gonna be there anyway." So this is a committed couple, going to be getting it together afternoon and night.
Right.
In 2020, "Afternoon Delight" didn't even make the top 60. Believe it or not, the number-one sexiest song in both rankings, twenty years apart, was Olivia Newton-John's "Physical."
Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway's book about bullfighting and his father's suicide, inspired a recent essay-title in the New York Review of Books: "Gored in the Afternoon." It's a review, by Sigrid Nunez, of a recently published book by Annie Ernaux, winner of this year's Nobel for literature: "the diary of a sublime love affair -- both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self -- in which she lived in a state of exquisite torture." The fella was a cavalier, married Russian boyo who spoke fondly of Stalin. To this gink, Ernaux became "both mother and whore," she writes: "Nothing in my life had ever meant as much to me as lying in bed with this man in the middle of the afternoon."
Ernaux describes their "descent into sadomasochism" as "gentle, without violence," even though afterward she is "bruised all over" and "at one point I thought I was torn." The "unbridled, violent intensity" of the affair, according to the review, "leaves her emotionally destroyed. She is gored and gored and gored."
Nothing I would want to get into, which is a good thing, because I for sure would not be able to get away with writing about it. Even if I could summon the intensity, I'd be out of my lane. Today's afternoon is not of the faun.
Limerick of a satyr but wiser man
"I used to be, you betcha, a faun,"
Says a fellow now known as Shawn,
"But these days the emphasis
Is so much the nymphs's,
I'm an ornament on some lady's lawn."
“Afternoon of a Faun” is a favorite of mine. I first heard it in a 20th century music class where I learned that it caused a riot in Paris! It does stir one up!