Scarlet Verve

Nicole Kidman's travail after her break up with Cruise only entered my conscious minutely, as both she and he are manufactured Caucasian royalty, whatever nostalgia one wants to evoke over the demise of the studio mongul, Hollywood has not changed the ends, simply the means by which stars become different and untouchable. I can be critical of white cultural norms as well, and arguably, figures like Tom Cruise and Governor Romney represent the worst aspects of vestigal European privilege. I know these are real people, as Ebert said on the radio, but I disagree with him to this extent: They are real people trapped within the facade of what projects them, and can no more do the normal things like take a dump in my sterile public housing toilet than I can work myself to death to give myself even a simulated version of Nicole's body. Kidman and Cruise, and to an extent, our favorite vacuous Mormon, are the super whites, the top of the top, and I resent this almost, a sliver not as much, as I have come to resent urban black culture and homosexual lifestyles; but  Alejandro Amenábar deploys this aspect of Nicole's celebrity to great effect in The Others (2001), and I am kicking myself for two things, not seeing the great Jamesian influence on this film, which after doing a search, is quite obvious, and not seeing the film sooner, when Kidman did such interesting promotional articles for it, and I find it, as a cinematic ghost story, to be superb. The cinematography is excellent and achieves what Amenabar wishes to do in haunting us; that shot of the husband's profile on the pillow turning corpse-like next to Kidman's lilly pallor made me shiver with revulsion, and our macabre fascination with infanticide is handled with just the right touch. I evidently missed my calling by not finding my way into marriage with directors like Amenabar or Inarritu. They understand the power of what film can do organically, and how it is different, on a collective level, from narrative text. The Others is worth spending my money to view again, and Kidman managed to reach me more than unnerve me with her hyper vigilant iciness. To imagine what her life was like with Cruise literally makes me think of felines freaking out on a hot tin roof. She possibly deserves better.