While
bedridden, and technically this is still my condition, I changed my AT&T
plan so I could stream on my poor old phone, and believed the 22G Unlimited
would be enough per billing period. Before the October blow to my fortunes it
would have been, but I ate a great deal of data whetting my appetite with
sometimes dubious ventures. I do not know what to make of USA’s Mr. Robot.
Though its points are obvious, some of the threads seem tenuous, some scenes
too brittle, too tense, and why writers had to harken back to Alf to remind us
of the material world which we once knew before the digital age seems flimsy;
this flimsiness is comparable, while my bad leg flexes in taut discomfort, to
the obscure intent of The
Lobster. My initial reaction to the movie, viewed in the pre-dawn dusk,
very similar to my current hour, was confusion, and a sense the direction was
belabored, forced. I caught the fabulism on my own, and might have realized
this effort was from the European left. Had I known anything about Yorgos Lanthimos
I might have been better prepared for what to expect. Tasha’s review, obviously
sympathetic, was helpful, Brody's
less so. Why does everything have to fall under the category of agitprop
for New Yorker critics? Exclaiming to
myself, “I had my trash quotient for the day,” I closed my Prime app and moved
on, but now find myself unsettled, and may try the film again at a later time
with my ear plugs less used than my others. Lanthimos’ opening scene exposes us
to a woman driving intently in the rain. She stops in a pasture in the middle
of nowhere, leaves her car, shoots a horse with what appears to be a Colt 45
revolver, and then we jump to David in his apartment, with his dog/brother. Was
the opening the ex-wife, executing chivalry? The atmosphere of this film is
deliberately heavy, as if the very oxygen we breathe was shackled, and everyone’s
diction, but for David’s cadence, on occasion, is over accentuated and cutting,
as if to drag Ovid into Orwell’s world, merging the totem aspect of Metamorphosis
with a regulatory authority dictating your every move, relaxed only in bondage
to the opposite sex so that you can gouge your own eyeballs out with a generic
steak knife, or at least make the effort to do so, in order to be complimentary
to an equally terse, stilted partner. This is the denouement, where David and Short
Sighted Woman evade the Hotel and authority altogether, and find themselves in
a restaurant which smacks of a fleeting 2016 realism, open ended, disturbing.
Weisz’s abstract character, deceived into compliance, was blinded by the rebel
leader during a city visit to a chamber orchestra where the couple, with
glaring incaution, make no effort to hide the fact that they’re on their way to
third base. The Leader not only broke the heavy petting kiss with a scolding,
but exacted an irreversible penalty. Farrell, in the eatery’s bathroom,
transforms himself into the invertebrate he suggested to the Manager, and Weisz
no longer has the ability to discern this as a waiter fills her glass with
water: this is how we always see lobsters when we dine, in a small tank, claws
taped. Part of my reconsideration for Lanthimos’ intentions is a certain quixotic
preoccupation with imperfection which still manages to permeate in some way, part
of it is about modern isolation, and how digital interaction binds and wards us
off at the same time. (This does not mean to imply I read it the same way as
Robinson with “Facebook relationship status messages,” but I can see where she
gets the interpolation.)
There are few
pleasures I can point to in this hard life where I have defied or evaded death
so often: my work in DC, my somewhat incendiary affairs with married men, on
which I shall not dwell, my poetry reading in Pittsburgh, less for the poets,
tepid aging beatniks, some dead, more for the fact I did it all by myself, this
87 adventure from eastern to western inner city; my cats, some of my bylines.
But this is it, I don’t have people so much as passive indignation towards
mamma’s family on Facebook, all being usurped, inflamed tendons furling Great
Expectations into ash. Whatever the error of my choices, fomented by lack of
fulfillment, I was never quite dispassionate enough to extract myself from
them, and even today, on occasion, I recast my own version of Cinderella, with
a gallant to sweep me off my feet—not quite so harmless an escape.
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