An elation had evidently penetrated to his vitals, and caused him to dilate as if he had been filled with gas. He snapped his fingers in the air, and whistled fragments of triumphal music.-- Stephen Crane, "The Monster"
Eyes of Laura Mars is too diaphanous in its denouement to amount to anything, but the link it makes between glamour, violence, our belief that there is something to ESP despite the charlatan horde, women scarred by it, men fractured by pain into remorseful killers trying to police themselves, makes it the signature syndication vehicle of adolescent imprint, laudably modish. The seventies lost itself into that kind of couture, that sartorial sensibility that Orhan Pamuk might wish upon Turkish police, the shag was real, so were bell bottoms, and Ms. Dunaway's boots, Carole King hair. It might have amounted to something if Jones, the rising Texan boy, had killed Faye, gotten away with it, and went on his merry way, though the script would have needed tightening. In the course of this project, I thought I had found the equally mopey British movie about a fraudulent EMS driver who steals a doctor's medical board exams and then destroys his one, two, friends who learn the truth. It too was a mediocre soppy deal, but Britons at least have the courage not to lie to themselves about brutal lack of ethics, and I believed I had tracked this chilling little number down and placed it in keywords, but if I did I can't find it, frighteningly plausible as it is. With Mars as a noted exception, Jones generally stays within his range, and developed his own sartorial sense in his sugar daddy years, opting out of his libertarian liberalism of The Park is Mine (why the fuck was this movie made at all?). Idiotic as this vet drama is, it was produced the same decade Terry Gilliam decided to dazzle his clique with Brazil. "Park" is like a weak stream of mostly water-clear urine that nevertheless anticipates 9/11 with its clueless governing class, who try to deliberately mislead the public about an angry PTSD warrior with an agenda. Race issues are very lightly trod, with Yaphet Kotto as the pragmatic operations officer, who kills a guerrilla fighter his superiors had approved to take Jones out, while meanwhile, in the background, your typical hustler is hawking orange Tees to feed the movement Jones supposedly sparks with his one man insurrection. Only through the droll do we get to the expansive legitimacy caricature of Men in Black, or the stoic disillusion of No Country For Old Men, or the warrior who has reached his limit in The Hunted. The reality of Jones' textured bluntness in this is life as hard as it is is complex, much like Crane's feudalism in his little New York town. Beneath the surface, "The Monster" asks many complex questions about moral obligation and social codes, the cruelty of social norms in every demographic. Ingenious novella that it is, if Harper published it today, it would remain a telling fable on the limits of tolerance on all sides of the isle, and nothing has changed in the America of black and white. Crane's naturalism has a veracity Caucasians are now forbidden to depict, the controversy I've sown a case in point.
No comments:
Post a Comment