Halle Berry's carefully preserved physique is another reason I avoid her new series. Her beauty, like any real beauty, was once a passport into a realm of privilege no homily woman could attain without some form of extraordinary circumstance, one of the subtexts of Catwoman, one of the worst comic book revivals on record. In Gothika, too -- a movie I meant to apply to but forget why (it is coming back but we'll leave it for a momentary resilience) but in Extant she exhibits the braggadocio of surgical vanity, the curse of the nascent has been, no longer the red swimsuit sensation in a witty homage to the high tech Fleming fantasy which seems as far removed from our times as we are to Nicolas le Floch.
Perhaps her father was a lust fuck for the mother. I could go right back in my 22 year old body, despite everything, even my softly hardening racial prejudice, and fuck Michael Washington, my first apartment manager, til the cats yowled. His sexual heat radiated with such force that he could have swooned any woman alive, and those busy covalent bonds undoubtedly made Halle that rare female who parts the sea, not that she is necessarily conscious of this, but for all its conspiratorial overtones, in Extant she is parting with her fecund exceptionalism, that, similar to Obama, frees her from black identity. She may tell herself psychologically that she's black, but this isn't really the case. Oprah is black.
Halle is neither one race nor the other, and many of her films presage this, including Catwoman, but the series cannot revitalize her former dazzling, rarefied radiance. My eyes need to look away.
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