Her face is meditative, solemn, almost august, as she commences the lascivious dance that will awaken the slumbering senses of old Herod. Diamonds scintillate against her glistening skin.--Against the Grain, Chapter 6
Kafka may have been skeptical of the midrash, but he succeeded in becoming a canonical author because biblical guilt carries over in his work. Scripture is two dimensional; Kafka is absurdly abstract in his cockroach as an extended metaphor of patriarchal judgment. Spastic has not read her St. Joseph's edition in a very long time, but remembers enough to know the Gospel of Mark presents Salmone as a collusionist to her mother's will. The queen wants the Baptist silenced, tells Salmone, less a figure of peace, more a hedonistic nullification, to dance for Herod. The rest gives way to Hollywood's variation on Apocrypha which is a disservice in the conflict between faith and rational progression.
In comparison to what we're beset with today, 1953 revisionists were a placid bunch, but the critics should have castigated Dieterle for casting Rita Hayworth as a clean run girl whose innocence is duped in an era of Gnostic flowering which created the second branch of monotheism. Getting a script past the censors is one thing. Transforming Semitic deviance into an American chorus line erases what the metaphysical conflict seeks to teach. Sexual gluttony perverts the gift of duty to a higher purpose, and Salmone, at least in the Baptist thread, seeks to subvert the coming of the Incarnate through offering appeasement to insatiable appetite. The Silent Generation as represented by mio padre may be dying off, but one thing which hasn't changed in all these years, keeping tempo on the American scene, is how shallow we are as a nation. Huysmans may be cloying, and claustrophobic, but he doesn't walk away from the threat of annihilation which sensory fulfillment poses, and narratives from a camera should never be the last word.
Hayworth had a troubled life in her later years, and if lacking depth is a flaw, her tormented alcoholic rages seem amply deserved.
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