Free will made the fickle will of man the basis of divine decrees; it made 'the great controller of the world a bare spectator'.-- Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, p5
The kiss that Alicia Witt plants on Daesha Lynn, playing Chaz Burke, newly pregnant wife of the half-brother in Brian Jun's Joint Body (11), is ambiguous, demonstrably more of a desperate outreach for sanctuary rather than a traumatic conversion, or repressed curiosity, but it doesn't save the dialogue between the two actors. An astute woman doesn't ask a wife and nascent parent to be "Why does Dean call you mommy?"
Nor would the wife deny that her man joins nurture and sexual need into an endearment that connotes an infantile lack from his past. Jun may have been attempting to convey elements of denial and lack of accurately assessing characters around us, but it fails, whether or not the ponderous fatalism that Pellegrino and Witt carry like an expressionist ball and chain is enough to save the film. Both Pellegrino and Witt look effectively shell shocked at the conclusion, Witt in a literal jail cell and Pellegrino hemmed in his small boat on a lake which seems claustrophobic. It packs a powerful punch in terms of its exposition, much as Mike Mulligan does in the 1972 classic, The Other. To this day, the Udarnoky brothers encapsulate something intrinsic about evil in a masquerade behind our best altruistic instincts. And Mulligan achieves this not simply through getting the boys to put heart and soul into performance, but through respect. Mulligan doesn't condescend to rural sensibility, but allows the community its dignity, disrupted by the subversive reverberation of pain, penetrating dignity like a lance, all the more effective for relying on atmosphere and sense of place, attention to detail, as opposed to being a slasher attempting to evoke terror.
I have little use for neuroscience; materialism abnegates what self-awareness deems a unique individualism, but the nursing students I lived with at Widener were probably right about me all along. Scolding myself in the dusk of Halloween's burgeoning party hours no longer has the same effect. I called my aunt, of whom I'm proud, but wish she would return to education; neither of us mentioned twitter, nor my housekeeping. Though I am dragging my feet, I am going to give my notice, soon, nothing more than an agonized outcry from a woman who's her father's daughter, and needs to work, needs ambulatory people to stop telling me I can't live alone, needs space, all she ever wanted was to be happy in her work, selfish in her man. Whatever the accuracy of observation about my emotional problems so many once attempted to alleviate, before I unwittingly imprisoned myself in the section 202 housing paradigm, I now have some form of post-traumatic stress, ground meat for the maggots who will eventually penetrate my coffin. I'm a fool, and should have never gone into case management, as I'll have little choice but to invariably die in Inglis House. I can't handle it, and perhaps I predetermined it rather early in my lousy self esteem and truant ideation tantrums.
I cannot accept the price, and will not allow myself to be forced back into that environment, and have to hold that conviction fast.
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