The Interstice Between the Blades Which Run Us Through

"A story about a British actor who never was, one who couldn't even make it here."-- Rue McClanahan, with the best lines.

It is difficult to believe that Petersen's Das Boot is nearly 40 years old, given how well made and modern it still offers up to repeated viewings. I studied it with a military history professor whom I might have paid the appropriate courtesy, and didn't, of respecting his syllabus. To echo his words, however, Petersen is a little too adroit at humanizing the German military under Hitler's rule, and Jurgen Prachnow, I have never fallen out of love with. He represents the best definition of European masculinity any woman with a reasonable chance would kill for, which is the best restraint I can offer in terms of printable aspiration, with a feminine zeal to match that of his wolverine U boat captain. Subservience to that male principle speaks volumes about why sexual unification predominates, whether or not its impetus is child rearing-- but to rebut my former instructor's caution, Petersen is brazenly cutting through the superlative bombast of master race sensibility in the very act of deploying how our soul goes into what we create, like the marvel of submarines. The captain miraculously keeps his submersible in one piece, returning to dock in national honor, only to have crew and ship torn to shreds by Allied squadrons. For 1981 it is a daring argument, one that Eastwood would later imitate with the Japanese, but by that time, with the war nearly out of living memory, mature audiences could handle that the conflict wasn't quite so binary.

Levinson and Link, Columbo's creators, were active in the same decades as Wolfgang Petersen, and we can only observe how things have to be obfuscated: to my knowledge, Peter Falk never allowed himself to be Jewish on screen, much as his longer survived contemporary, Nimoy-- but Nimoy, if you spend time listening to what he reveals about grafting himself to speculative genre, was a sneaky bastard. Much of Vulcan culture was appropriated from attending synagogue. What's that tell you? The later Columbo mystery movies have an uneasy tension between the formula and adaptation to the modern era, and the 98 "Ashes to Ashes" might have been a good place to close the book. Neither Falk nor McGoohan are having much fun, both are shrill, though Patrick stays preserved to a greater degree, in the ever wondrous anomalies of biology. Sympathizers can see here that Peter Falk is losing his touch, on the verge of dementia, when the Internet and smart phones were just taking hold. Levinson, Link, and Falk combined  have to sublimate a great deal to comic antipodes, against what liberalism, even Zionism, promulgates with the scourge of history behind it. Petersen does exactly the same thing, through Heidegger's dictum of focus on the thing itself-- he evades, simply looking at the empirical process of survival in futility.

"The end of history," is a catch phrase. What it means, precisely, is no one is entirely justified? No one has the absolute cause, whether or not causes themselves are now null and void, and we're better off just raising hens to lay eggs before we lose memories of husbandry altogether. Despite how familiar I am with the routines in my unhappy environment, I no longer feel safe, not simply from urban crime statistics. I'm frightened. Is it old age? Or my fault for breaking so many bonds simply because I must by necessity only appropriate the mobile world, by and large? My only intimacy is through a damned device with my own voice, dropping depth charges. I legitimately started my examination of disability in entertainment to bring us together, looking for commonality, and I've failed, holding myself together only by sheer force of will, one which prefers, at this point, to compromise my personal security rather than complying with the rules your taxes, and mine too, pay for. I only have a few days to hand over the documentation these minorities who've humiliated me repeatedly need, knowing full well that vacating, with such scant resources, makes me that much less human, even though I couldn't be, ipso facto, the crazy homeless hag everyone ostracizes. Without power, I'm helpless, a brain crammed with world weary absorption through her filters, not even having the decency to sink in the harbor, conceding surrender.