Carter's Bell Curve

The interview O'Neal does with Smiley, which I highlighted in the spring of 2012, remains interesting because the normal studio promotion mesh falters, grinds to a halt, and the actor with his cancer, disabled son, and his tinsel worship of Farrah seems shallow and incongruous. Overlay this on a method film like The Driver, and an interesting language develops. Bruce Dern, always the prickly pear, has continued on in old age with strong supporting roles, but O'Neal is an echo of the smooth seventies lead, smooth, but intense in investment, nothing but a polite fiction of constraint, ushering in the modern age in which Carter himself is an animated mummy, religious in his humble ex-President striving to save all of West Africa, and though The Driver hasn't a word to say about politics it speaks volumes about Carter era liberalism fallen flat on its face. This was the period of my youth, when the car chase was the studio technological meme, speed rubber asphalt and cool, these the delineated weapons, the process had its own goals toward affluent living on the graft-- crack wasn't yet the new boogie man but the me decade was ripe for it, in their wing tips and thin suits-- all that sturm and drang with its polite codes-- today's police would laugh at Dern's honor system, and Ryan's character could have been arrested for intent even with the empty attache case which closes the film.

The brutality here isn't about much, other than a breach, which, nearly 35 years after the fact, is nearly laudable by contemporary standards. Everything digitized, with GPS, skills with an engine on wheels has been relegated. We watch people in space suits go very fast on tracks with sponsors, helmets, sometimes watching drivers die anyway, fully insured for the risks, the emptiness in excelling at something for nothing, bound by a nearly Victorian entrapment, if not the money, or the law itself, then, simply giving the finger, a gesture of defiance. Intriguing, what it does to people. O'Neal, quieter than others I've mentioned, was a shaper of my era, but if I met him, I'd be uncomfortable, having perceived a little too much about him, not caring for his aura of unpleasantness.

Recognition is strange and intangible in that way, because with a very few, and in my case it would be that, a few select, I'd behave like a fan-- but not with O'Neal. Odd. I may revisit this, not satisfied. but intuitive to a fact that I'm onto the scent of a thesis.