Costner's Blessing

"I don't want to get on your bad side!"-- the black adder, now burdened with complications of appeasement

Despite its subject matter, Mr. Brooks is not about the impact of psychological pathology on the American scene, unlike ABC's new Wicked City, which is a bit of a toss up-- and in a brevity of an aside-- this spastic's young adulthood wasn't populated with the discothèque remembrance the show attempts to evoke with nonchalance. Reviewers noted certain things about Brooks: Costner loosens up playing against William Hurt, who in the right context is every woman's prime capture if she has ambition toward a fulfilled life, and the director Evans suggests, subversively, that a successful businessman is analogous to being a serial murderer, but there are vectors in this film which come together like blades in a jigsaw, actually sending up celebrity, notoriety, their hanger's on, and what goes on beneath the surface of successful appearances. Demi Moore says something about her tabloid rep encapsulating her brass balls detective who defeats the spree menace of the Hangman killer and his badass girl, offering viewers, perhaps her fans, a sense of the cutthroat approach necessary to say on top. The fact that her cop, Atwood, is insulated by wealth in an estranged familial environment is also a veiled reference, but to what exactly? Pimping to the market is no guarantee? Photographs of women almost nude in revealing pregnancy no longer generate the chatter they did when Demi was still young, before she spent small fortunes on her plastic surgeries, and what Brooks reads in the aberrant behavior of the daughter is a third person limited narration. As an audience, we aren't offered an alternative viewpoint, loose threads to fall where they may. The police may be smart enough to figure that someone was trying to throw suspicion off the daughter, for instance, or, if she killed her father as an eventuality, how would she have planned to get away with it.

The difficulty with Brooks lies in its substrata toward the ironic, confusing us with the reflections breaking off like shards, despite Costner's diabolical pleasure with himself. Brooks neither quite succeeds as a parable about undercurrents, nor as a truism about the urban underclass, such as we are invited to wince away in Henry, portrait of a serial killer, which itself lost its nerve for the sake of its rating. I have not lost mine, I am simply so beset with inevitable unraveling that my caustic invective threatening Google's pecuniary market interests wouldn't help even if I freaked out other somewhat troubled lone wolves, and no, I do not mean I want to rant death on the heads of my perceived tormentors either. I am a failed writer, but my own acuity denies frothing, if not a hideous temper. Another way to say this is Mr. Brooks examines macro-aggression in a microscopic context, and does so unsure of its balance. To hint, with slight mystery to the nuance, why able-bodied individuals destroy themselves against the biographies of quadriplegics who've been beaten, regardless of precocious sensibilities, is unfathomable. Alcoholics can walk, and yet disease themselves into the dependence of mass material victimhood, as do addicts, and the demographics of Caucasian suicides in my age group. PBS had a seven minute segment on whites my age killing themselves due to disenfranchisement, and nothing is as bad as a cripple who has seen the institutional hell she refuses to return to, without being able to find a pathway to safety. If you can walk and drive a car, count your blessings. I am certainly past the ability of spontaneous pleasure when architecture and poverty defeat it. Then again, maybe I can write some lyrics for Louy Fierce, an intriguing possibility between ableism and reconciliation with ferocity of chronic impairment denial of wholeness.

Why did he decide to follow me? The inner voice need not be sated on that puzzling note.