Ulee's Tributary

"I'd take that into consideration Mr. Bailey, if this was a democracy."-- William Shatner, now a wily spokesman for CPAC cleaners

Even before I started this account, I'd track certain actors, particularly if they expired of cirrhosis of the liver before their time, attempting to gain insight. Peter Fonda was not one of them. Like Michael Douglas after him, Fonda was a pretty face with a shag haircut, engaging in a valiant, dismissive struggle in Futureworld, where Yul Brynner manages to be a better robot in this fraying and cosmetic liberal decade which does indeed seem to have ended in 1978, than Brent Spiner manages to be an android in the Clinton era, and no, this is not a swipe at Data's endearing naivety, only a suspicion that a machine with consciousness may really not wind up in an ontological category which humans would necessarily find favorable, and Brynner perhaps captured just a little better the malevolence of circuits and diodes simulating a gunfighter whose liberty was a facade, an entrapment, and an evil which could be defined as such exactly because it lacked dynamic of the soul. I have no need to reiterate admiration brushed off in my more energetic archives, (nothing if not energetic), about Ulee's Gold. I remember the drug addiction led to the punk show of force upon which Fonda's character prevailed. Certainly not every nuance of this quiet film's local color, and it was a better film for its self-depreciation, but Fonda never fixated me, not like Cassavetes, and did Gena Rowlands consider their match lucky, fortuitous? Or did John's alcoholism rate him as just another more incisive greaseball, as all Italians are? His performance in Rosemary's Baby on those crutches only offers up mitigating hints. Nonetheless, even if I never sought these answers in Fonda's demeanor, his passing Friday morning elicited a mournful, instinctive yowl. Something felled, it clangs in my head in my desperation to get out from under the thumb of the sterile black psychosis unto which I continue to weaken, in every withered African frame the cry of Kurtz, "the horror, the horror!"
This scoring pain Medium's generation shall never understand, as I was busy last week buying into their paywall. Before I kill myself, or decide to try to, some of my posts here may become more ambitious columns there, as if agony actually transmutes.