Complicity, Clintons and Pecking Order

"I find the word 'cured' to be very difficult to define." --Julie Andrews

I am not going to dissect Arlington Road in the same manner that I attempted to flake from the mica of The Brothers Rico as a film; this is in part due to the fact that the agenda of Pellington and Kruger speaks for itself  in the more contemporary narrative. The threat is from within, that the American self-reliant frontier mindset is its own cancer, perhaps a crab incurable, and as dark as any ultra right wing mentality with which it might be compared. Pellington also offers Easter eggs for the flavor of any ideologue.

These are my main points of complicit ambiguity, however, with the understanding, on your part, that I do not have access to the full technical issues surrounding the making of the movie:

1. Was the child Brady a deliberate lure, whether or not Fenimore was switch hitting on bringing Faraday in, or was intent on framing and sacrificing Faraday from the opening frame?

2. Was Hope Davis used in a dual role as girlfriend / operative to suggest that no one can be trusted? Towards the close of the film there is a student, a plant from Fenimore's apparently huge resistance to the federal, progressive sensibility. I cannot tell from the credits whether this woman is an extra cast because she looks like Davis, or she is Davis in a game of masquerade, but the implication is the same.

3. What were Pellington and Kruger implying when Robbins ends the film by telling Cusack "They'll let us know."?

Perhaps homo sapiens is limited and self-deluded by First Cause entrapments in politics and physics alike.

The cult of the icon, however, is the least plausible when it comes to the validity of fronts, props, and powers behind the throne. Are the Clintons, for instance, part of a left centrist snow job? No, not in the Machiavellian sense. Hillary did not drive Vince to his death. She and her husband have a passive aggressive self-justification that was perhaps not the best thing for the US at the time, but they did not run around DC saying "Kill the bastards."

I am not in the Hillary glee club, however, and I never liked her in any of her incarnations, though she receives a passing grade for getting out of State without causing riots in Montana. Marooned taps into the psychic scar tissues that the modern autocracy makes us pay, exacerbating them. Gregory is all too convincing as the operative who has to keep the government safe from its own fallibility, and this makes it more than a movie and closer to a crumbling edifice about the price we pay for the right stuff, how the feminine is hated even in stock objectification. That no one would raise a hand to the mechanized astronaut's wife doesn't mean she isn't discarded because it is necessary, and she knows that she is complicit in the deception thrust upon her.

In Rico the government is like a binary switch. On or off, dismissed until it is a necessary last resort. In Marooned, personified in the abstract of NASA, it is the new secular religion, and in Arlington, it is a duped and impotent eunuch.