Fustian Saturation

"Go and fuck your fish."--Barry Unsworth

We can appreciate Amanda Plummer, appreciate that she is fatally typecast with assurance, despite its reasonable guarantee of employment, as the creepy female, the woman who is always slightly off key, ripe for victimization or elimination. She emotes from the heart because the duress of special circumstances and the atmospheric supernatural grips this much vaunted organ in a gaunt frame of a woman neither beautiful nor homily, not quite, so much as intriguing. Beady watery eyes that yet impels us not to look away as they well with an outcry to save a lost kitten adrift, that she chose to carry the weight of  Seven Days to Live, an amalgamative lurch and slosh between The Amityville Horror, The Shining, and The Poltergeist rolled into one, was an unfortunate decision on which to propel her insouciant inscrutibility. If a script this badly written can be produced and directed by someone who borrowed Tom Hank’s bladder infection, then I can always adopt Dirk Ahner as a pseudonym in my retirement planning. Mimesis needs to involve a plausible, derivative irony. This film positively lacks it all. Not camp, not homage, it limps toward any build of  foreboding and suspense, as the death of the son in the opening should have included the violence and trouble of a tracheotomy. Amityville itself was an early form of gonzo journalism, so much crap in short order that succeeded because it tapped into an underlying anxiety about affluent homeowner associations, I balk, nonetheless, at the meristic designations. The most empirical laboratory observer is still limited by a narrative configuration evolved within an omnivorous primate brain.

This is not a defense of Jonah Lehrer or plagiarism. My former supervisor Linda has not filed defamation charges against me because I have not written any fabrications about our interactions, and indicted myself as much as she. In other words, whatever my tilt, I am not a rip off, but my objection to the excoriation of plagiarists is that it's a false dichotomy. Written language is manipulative because symbolic vocalization is a lightning bolt of cognition, and the lines between fraud and bias and verity within the use of the written word is more ambiguous than credentialed academicians might wish.