Gates on the Cutting Floor

"Stop complaining about your on site visits." The former Linda Richman, failing to consider my future rate of attrition.

Hollywood has so commercialized the process of dying it is easy to forget how radicalized the ritual has become since the human animal invented cultural memories. Death through aging or illness used to be an unfortunate but expected communal reality. The invention of theatrical role playing as a form of didactic social instruction reflects this, (setting aside totem transformations). The tragedy of Hamlet is camped today, but in Renaissance Europe, a dead king convulsed the state. Medicalization robs us of communal sobriety and the sharing of grief. It is palliative care, family grouped around a bed, patient set apart by monitors, intravenous feeds, hospice, morphine, barbiturate saturation. We still have sudden death, the shock, handling a dead pet we could not save, losing a husband at the race track to thrombosis, mechanized destruction of our flesh by machine, these days even more chilling since a joystick can deliver it, but the sanitation of death is reflected back via media norms on an ever shifting landscape. The 21st century insists we process the dying as a psychodrama with its own rules. I have dealt with a few of these films, one that eludes me at the moment but it is either still on my other account or buried in here and will come round again, but more important is the modern death as a jigsaw puzzle is a common directorial scheme, good or bad. Darkness, Jacob's Ladder, the poorly made I Inside, Identity. All of these jump cut, keep us guessing, want the viewer to feed on uncertainty.

Fascinating, therefore, that E. G. Robinson would use it, the dying itself, to force Charlton to live energetically in his lead in Soylent Green. I researched this uncited Wiki passage, and dissatisfied, changed it to what traceable sources assert.

This doesn't mean Robinson, who carried Hollywood through the golden age, did not manipulate Heston, shocking the younger man into a raw integrity within a dystopian landscape, already creeping upon us, despite our billions in number. MRSA now eats people because of western healthcare's brutal success. For those of us not species optimists, that spaceship lottery will no doubt be a dicey proposition.