Cuckoo's Forfeiture

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness---and the healthiest way of being ill---is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. -- Susan Sontag

Meryl Streep presents herself as a translucent mirage in Dark Matter (2007), a progressive caught between multicultural faith and the reality of academic politics. Forget extrapolations. Chen’s direction and Shebar’s script are irresponsible in their rendition of events that transformed Gang Lu into a spree killer, with his goal perhaps being the elimination of an entire department. Liu Xing is too sympathetic as an alter, and the triggers that lead him to kill Aidan Quinn’s Reiser foreshadowed on the cheap, with tai ching intersplices dispersed between scenes; its binary closures of the women racing, both the attache and the mother, in a fatuous attempt to contain the damage. The Virginia Tech massacre was a real and traumatic event, one that perhaps forever pierced the notion of intellectual ambition as a form of insulation against the vulgarity of urban violence.

In many respects, I am a radical advocate of free speech, doomed and dwarfed thereby due to the worrisome rise of the digital global conglomerate, and rarely engage in the moral chastisement of cheap theatrical manipulations, but Bridget Fonda’s Single White Female falls into the same category as Chen‘s lame interpolation. The unedited scene of deceptively forced fellatio between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Steven Weber was a masturbation stimulant that I did not need to incorporate in the psyche of my delayed sexual maturity, but the scene made an indelible impact, this out of nothing but a B grade slasher formula dressed up by psychological excuses for purposes of justification, just another patriarchal brick thrown at the shrieking and hysterical female, not a few leagues past the range of veracity.

I’ve needed a bit of rest, trying to finish some much needed chores, remind myself that I actually was a writer before portals and search engines. At my age it's increasingly difficult, and in the rare instance that I view television to escape, I did not need that unexpected tantrum of blood and guts with a shiny Colt revolver and a bling starburst.