Gravity Tends to Pool

I live on a big blue ball--Waylon Jennings, whaler on the belt

Just how Lawrence Schiller managed to draw such an illicit expression from Tommy Lee in that parking lot, during the filming of Mailer's obsession with Gary Gilmore, is nothing short of miraculous. We've all seen movies about psychopathy in one form or another, and Jones has been around a very long time, but that turn on his face as he is walking into the gas station, resolved upon his own damnation, is as terrifying as Henry Lee Lucas, in his own words, is inadvertently ironic.

In 1979, Mailer turned Gilmore into a cause celebre, that much was impressed upon as an anecdote logged onto youthful synapses, but the teleplay never made it into consciousness. There is no liberal argument for that level of malevolence in the human animal; it is, in fact, a mystery to me how an actor we've been so familiar with in his various hunting modes could, for a few precious moments, depict evil with such transcendent energy that the recoil was visceral. Wolf's team hacked the outer framework to have an ethical debate about human potential which perhaps was arbitrarily hollow. Screen writers cannot hit it out of the park all the time. Whether by design, or not, Schiller and Jones simply turn liberalism on its head with this more canonical adaptation of Mailer's moral wrestling contest. The damnation writ large on Tommy Lee's face is beyond any form of redemption humanity's metaphysical struggle can bring to bear on it. This was a made for television movie circa 1982. It puts any number of composite formula films to shame, in small, telling sequences, in its attempt to inhabit cyclical American tragedies that make our violent propensities an international brand, lapping up our ruthlessness.

As difficult and gruesome as it was to absorb Michael Rooker as Henry, a few grades down on the level of depravity even for my turbulent instances of domestic discord, Jones, as Gilmore gone bad, might have scared me straight if there was any real optimism left to save.