Indemnity Double Down

"She's made her face chalk white, with black circles under her eyes and red on her lips and cheeks."-- James M. Cain, Double Indemnity, page 114

Vivien Leigh was dying while engaged in her ensemble performance on Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. It is an excruciating scene to view, her climatic moment with Lee Marvin, a real life alcoholic, standing in for Olivier, in a prospective rape that reverses expectations. A woman has to be insane to survive the force of male need, in other words. The people who control Porter's copyright ought to make Ship of Fools available to digital technology. I want to read it, but I am not keen on buying it it as a heavy handed siren against the Fascism Europe would not see in front of its face. Katherine was ponderous as a writer, and while this is not a fatal detraction to her other strengths, I hesitate to rank her long complex allegory as a classic. The film is so thick with portents you need a butcher's saw to cut through it, and my time is squeezed between knowing free legal access is going to dance jack shit on my burial plot and buying an hour of Philadelphia Bar association time is going to get me the reprimand that I've seen too many legal students overzealous in battle in a Grisham movie script-- but legal students are overzealous-- one asked me if I wanted to sue my sister and I had to refrain from snorting.

I know I've delayed the game considerably. I am not that dense, but somehow I cannot die without striking back, and there has to be some exemption in PA state law-- something a well versed advocate can do. I may just give in to the possession is nine tenths catch phrase and buy a damn used copy. Or does it matter to me enough to take a drive to Vine Street?

@PhillyChitChat did a nice feature about billy penn. I could just tweet this to him, but Philadelphia's hard muscled depreciation of inadequacy because NYC is the top east coast target has never sat easily on my native digestion. I wake up knowing I'm probably going to die right here, and worse yet, if I cannot move hell, I'll die with molasses matron Debra Horne making her crabbed Mississippi sanction over my blood red contorted grimace. I do plan to pay a visit to Philadelphia Magazine. Can't wait. If anyone on their staff has viewed this account, I am toast, but I do intend to do it. Whatever my nightmares, I do not usually dream of earthquakes that aren't actually happening.

I did last week. Maybe it was just the memory of the plate aftershock a few years ago; maybe that and the damn train, but it is not a good sign.

Double Indemnity is a perfect example of where movies and texts fail each other, if I want to add an afterthought. Cain's ending in his novel is preposterous, yet significantly different in tenor from how MacMurray and Stanwyck doom each other.via the studio system.