Whether we desire to see it as to his credit or detriment, Otto Preminger creates an ugly scenario in the Joan Crawford vehicle, Daisy Kenyon, and he creates it in the standard conceit of patriarchal dominion we all know, a married lawyer discontent with trivial familiar discord who manages to worm his way into an independent career woman's affections. You would think Crawford's Daisy would be smarter than that, and to some extent she is, weary, even in 1947, of being icing on a layered cake, from the opening. So she marries her date, here a loquacious Henry Fonda being as nearly bohemian as I've ever seen him on screen, a World War Two veteran with PTSD and a dead wife in the closet. She unifies herself to this damage, much as she kills for the sake of the Helen Keller knock off in the roman de clef Esther Costello, ten years later, and then she essentially becomes a bean bag between Dana Andrews' Dan, the antagonist lover who cannot let go, and Fonda's passivity in the face of doubt. Beneath the surface hair gel and aerosol, Preminger extracts a good deal from his matinee idols with their linear one note line readings. Dana Andrews has the second rate affectation for a migraine mastered, as, when men were men, they displayed suffering by rubbing the bridge of their nose. Fonda, being the father of Jane, who isn't dead yet, and should be, is the only human on the set. Yet Crawford, loved by the camera even in grandiose derangement, something shared with Bette Davis as their glamour withered before our eyes, does a decent bit of work here as the permissive mistress torn between being needed, desiring to heal a damaged soldier, and having her reputation torn to shreds while we're waltzed through sanitized variations of child abuse and domestic violence. However stylized Preminger's direction is, this film isn't all that much different from the sheer comic unpleasantness of Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney scarring their boys in The Squid and The Whale, two selfish, narcissistic Protestants who rebel against the limitations of middle age. Are we really any better off for the exorbitant rise in case management as a result of Otto's negative exposures of what we still never see until a beat reporter back drafts some tragic saga of a schizophrenic delusion unchecked until a family is destroyed? My vehemence toward Krugman with his word choice of "serfdom" and employment flexibility in Iowa was not an act. The controversial economist, with his aggregate flag waving for rationed state model systems, never really looks at how hard it is to navigate the bureaucracy of poverty. For all the tons of paper Pennsylvania wastes keeping me poor, Medicaid is now essentially useless to me. In the nineties, at a minimum, at least it got me repairs, dental treatment. I have not had a primary medical practice to help me in well over 24 months, and never see anyone but some half assed Asian resident who knows nothing. This is my health insurance, which is why I rarely pay attention to deadlines. I can't even get anywhere to be evaluated for a new power chair. What does Paul, the obnoxious gold shitter, know about spending a lifetime fighting over medical equipment and wait times, due to his blessed rationing? I am happy to see age wearing down the prodigiously read professor with his self sanctified halo.
Whether I write illegal threats or not, and I came close Sunday to seriously giving my audience a frightening dose of sadism, it should not be this difficult to fast track spastic quadriplegic vulnerability, to have some certified loan system available that doesn't require so many back stops. My poor mind has simply moved from one generic environment to another: Dixon Hall with my best friend's sister Carol Davison, Marie's row home, tossing my own commode waste on her stoop, Diamond Park, which turned me into Fonda's character with his cold sweats, and Riverside isn't even accessibly designed, this heartless, impoverished studio, shriveling my strength. I am having a harder and harder moral struggle every day: I might have had a decent excursion had I planned ahead and attended the American Revolution museum with LOTR, but knew I'd be impacted, focused, concentric on beating disaster in the bathroom, so couldn't engage even this venture, but as usual, had I tried, always by myself. If I succeed in shortening all this, some of you will feel sorry about it. If I cross any other line, then I am just another brand of American psychopathy. But like Andrews lawyer, there is no trump card in being the relegated scapegoat, a denouement of recrimination for those who fool themselves about trade offs.
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