Scales to Skin, Anthropogenic?

"I thought you might like to have it back."-- Dustin Hoffman

There are two films in American distribution entitled Heaven. Blanchett's pre-Babel dramatic allegory, and the earlier Scott Reynolds construct, where Martin Donovan is coyly etched with attractive facial lines, and Danny Edwards does a good job at being a Cosmo coca exotic lure. Both films pit metaphysical conceits with no real world veracity against Western materialism-- in the case of Reynolds a gritty and colorful American materialism-- and in each narrative-- materialism loses. In the 98 film, the loss goes to a transgendered minority with second sight, and in the 02 film, corruption and greed fail to swallow the self-righteous, as encapsulated by Blanchett and Ribisi, barely male and female in their sexual division of the name Philip.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, purposely archived in 2013, Ebert is unhappy with Tykwer's denouement for his poignant morality play, but I am less sanguine that the escape via helicopter was meant to be happy. The fugitive couple vanish like pin pricks in a particle wave as if they never existed in the first place.

Hollywood loves tantalizing audiences with the prospect of the sordid glamorized on screen. Black victimization, cross-dressed in the minstrel tradition, that's entertainment! In real life, inner city sexual practices in the closet veer toward the slovenly, slothful repugnance, thirty second news clip, cousin of so and so from the block raping a five year old, or my *agency* attendant throwing herself on top of me. Dirty, in this context, doesn't mean sexually naughty. It means soiled, just as Phillippa's self-made bomb, in a real city environment, has a grotesque sputum streak about it, even if the terrorist cause has legitimate grievance. Sometimes it does.

Gay marriage will not elevate all homosexual activity on an equal playing field with sexual expressions of love between a man and a woman as representative of a celebration of life. This is just progressive wishful thinking, and won't mitigate corruption that Hollywood does correctly associate between queer lifestyles and criminal illegality. I have had too much real world experience . Where activists and people on the fringes congregate, unethical behavior and corruption usually have a thriving nest. Stability comes with a price, and that is affluence, which itself is not self-sustaining for very long periods of time. Even in a film like Tootsie, probably one of the last of its kind, the script had the courage to illustrate that sexual deception can, does, have negative consequences. Durning's character fell for an exaggerated variation of a drag queen, but that character, the butt of audience laughter while the cat was in the bag, wasn't so funny, humiliated, when Hoffman's character gave up the game.