Heron Shrike

Our system is designed to achieve justice, not vengeance. Robby Soave of Reason

 Wechsler's Altered Minds, like Poyart’s Solace, is an exhausted collapse of three dimensional space onto video projection of the same, and they in fact feel like exactly the same film in their genres. It isn’t simply that they are bad films with loosely suggested alternative pathways. You could throw in an interesting revision like Closer To God, a feminine wet dream like Into The Forest, which is a girl power fantasy couched in patented nonsense, and still come away feeling like you’ve seen the same film five times. A Slate contributor with better access than I was onto this years ago. Much like the encroaching mono culture surrounding our vegetable and food crops, your standard movie is synchronized according to the same beats in the script, making it all into mediocre content which doesn’t even shoot for a distinctive sensibility, let alone feel memorable. We still discuss Ordinary People because it took the types evolved within its ensemble and made them frightening, and in some ways unforgettable, something on which the title capitalizes, branded through our skin by Mary Tyler Moore. Hirsch suffers by comparison in this throwaway excuse for suspense, but it is more than that. To reverse the pyramid, since I don’t give a flying fuck about not spoiling it, Hirsch’s character once played Manchurian Candidate games for the American government, so it therefore logically follows that a Vietnam veteran who snapped stalks and tortures the children of his therapist, and a sad dying man reveals all so that recovered memories don’t create another Amityville Horror sequel. Wechsler has no excuse for his story, not even the consequences of napalm. All the guild does in this film is intimate that Authority’s folly reverberates for cheap thrills through the generations. It is a shame, because within his pseudo-intellectualism, Hirsch seems to wish to convey that liberalism without boundaries is lost in a fog. He has done this before in short dramatic roles: an obstetrician diagnosing Tay-Sachs disease, or a newspaper publisher paying lip service to diversity without looking too closely at the familial ugliness beneath. In various ways, Hirsch is a more subtle Woody Allen, taking a piercing, critical look, at the much vaunted Jewish secular liberalism. As experienced through VNA’s Nancy Lotz, Jewish secular liberalism annihilates all in its path, and does so regardless of the fact that the dowager gave as good as she got. These women are impossible, and I mean fucking impossible, willing to carve my flesh into cannibalistic shares for the doorsteps of the Program, only to discover, when the dust of the Sinai clears, that we want the same goals. I had a job offer in October before these technical catastrophes, and now a West African disposes of my fecal puss daily, like a large wildebeest female stricken by parasitic brain spores the dowager has to shoulder without an exotic animal license. I think anyone in reasonable health would have imploded by now, hit the destruct button, though we’re never told why Farrell gets to play survival of the fittest against a rather weary Hopkins. Poyart makes an equally cheap point about euthanasia, hoping his audience will remain perplexed. I am, as I’ve written repeatedly, sympathetic to mercy killing; for those who’ve had enough I believe in its legality. Poyart seems to think those gifted with precognition will settle the matter. The FBI will be just fine with that.

Sterile Saturation

"And still somehow, it's life's illusions I recall..."-- folk lyric

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.