Orderly Mayhem

Using a small number of myths taken from native communities which will serve as a laboratory, I intend to carry out an experiment which, should it prove successful, will be of universal significance [sic], since I expect it to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.-- Levi-Strauss, the raw and the cooked


I was in my small cramped and exasperating kitchenette getting coffee when Paul Picerni, the doomed Gino, gesculates to Conte from behind the steering wheel, not that I wanted to miss the scene. Miscalculated the minutes in the commercial break, but since my hearing loss mitigates in certain circumstances, I heard the dialogue, and Conte's equivocation is a contingent issue in terms of willful blindness. Did Eddie know, as Lamotta, (Bellaver) asserts, "what was going on?" and know it the whole time, subconsciously wanting the whole problem to go away so he could erase history and become the all American consumer, his blood ties conveniently eliminated? This exposes a kernel into the heart of darkness this nation sublimates through constant bombardment of advertising, and it took off, ushered in the modern era, after the war. I have mined my Austrian-Polish grandmother repeatedly, and it is from her that I was integrated into the lie of iconic fanaticism, neither entirely vanquished, nor repelled, in continual battle in my psyche, and the thing that killed my mother, at the end of the day. My mother and maternal grandmother, setting each other off, were far more scary than my scarred neural network. Elements of this are in Rico, in a condensed artifice, and in the context of Simenon's sparse, perhaps even elegant, civil brutality, fenced in, certainly, by structuralism.

I am going to start an uproar among the feminine players, and suggest, as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, that Eddie Rico blinds himself to the truth because he is afraid of losing his wife. Dianne Forster and Kathryn Crosby may not have much to do in this film, but they hold the reigns, and they hold them with a force that was all but eroded and dead not 20 years later.

No, I am not eschewing sexual equality, merely asking you to see that defined gender roles, however constricted in traditional terms, provided payoffs that have long since vanished, but also orchestrated the horror, as our great writer alluded to it, in the price our species has paid for the prevalent domestication of both, natural ecosystems, and primate aggression. The feminine principle is inexorable, and, in the events of this decade, being challenged, pushed back against with indeterminate regression.