Pricks to the price of loyalty

"He was a man of small stature, with hair blanched rather by suffering and sorrow than by age." -- Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo, digital location 2116

A short message thread with John Murphy posed an interrogative "Have you heard of Tony Stiles?" The apparently attractive young man is looking for acolytes to join in Tony's campaign against human trafficking, a rather noble, if daunting sentiment. Mr. Murphy benefits from the price of loyalty, and indicated Mr. Stiles had the humane decency most of us profess to have, as altruism is deemed beneficial. Murphy followed me a short time, then ceased, my failure to hold his interest a metric of some sort, perhaps that I alternately flirt with libertarian ideas, then turn and critique them, or maybe I'm just a downer, and he is a more upbeat promoter for his employer, one who hasn't eviscerated him. 

Such evisceration, a knife to the heart carried as an entrapment, taken to its logical conclusion, often leads to the emotional implosion of Kenneth Halliwell, the prototype of homosexual rage against itself. Prick Up Your Ears was about abandonment against the growth of a dead playwright's horizon. Fusing that with an agenda to send a message to reform a paradigm leads to the same interior crawlspace. If the inability to let go, and the blunt force trauma of destitution moves in the direction of vengeance, the trigger for it eliminated, there is an emotional recoil against the punishment inflicted, and escaping Halliwell's fate becomes an odds game: accepting a bad act that removes you from your innocence, however inflicted with injustice, and then beating the law, which is achievable, but rarely successful.

The emotional investment of a good lieutenant is not the same as a homoerotic set of coordinates exposed and deemed unacceptable, although emotional fraying can conflate the two, but I was John Murphy 23 years ago, motivated by a leadership I wanted to promote, to elevate, to see it as a public conduit, and misjudged that of which it was capable. Not that the scar remains fresh, nor even palpable, as the 23 years have beaten against the brute strength, now swimming with oblivion, waiting to see if there is enough left for the veracity of vindication, or if I fade past midnight like so many quadriplegics looking at a sixtieth decade like a death warrant, or a veritable concentration camp.

Come spring I need to give my notice, another daunting endeavor, but a necessary therapeutic tool; I'll need to trust someone's transitory generosity on the heels of this event. We'll see, but I couldn't give Mr. Styles the personal loyalty which she once had at her disposal. The price of grief, and blow after blow after blow. Impotent even to support my immediate family.

Pruitt's Carrot, Body's Stick

the artist's young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. -- David Foster Wallace, "The Suffering Channel", loc. 3973

Everyone remembers Pruitt Vince. The involuntary eye movement, his weight, pasty face. The unique signature of his character makes him easy to recall. The obscenely heavy foil in House, the one submissive john in Monster spared by Aileen Wuornous. Pruitt's part was small but crucial because the tables had turned. The trick was vulnerable and the hard luck bitch minimized herself for the few moments it took to bring on ejaculation. Harsh scene. With the right casting director Pruitt does the good guy, the bad guy, and the acerbic Manichean in the middle. In Identity Mangold makes an interesting choice to pit Molina against Vince, suggesting over-classification of mental defect and the loss of our own agency to it are two sides of the same coin. Molina's countenance also leaves viewers uneasy-- not quite one type or another, almost Byzantine. The ying and the yang meta-fictional reality book end the formulaic red shirt elimination plot so popularized by Agatha Christie. Cleverly done, where even the sanest parts of Malcolm Rivers are corrupted.

Dissociative identity disorder, however, may not be a real mental illness, and it is not so sweet or succinct as famously brought on by the author of Sybil. This has not prevented the industry from mythologizing it, conflating it as a fascinating morality play, and it will no doubt stay that way until a pupil of Aaron Eckhart deconstructs it just as Eckhart deconstructs the dark side of secular liberalism with ruthless, painfully funny, veracity. Pruitt Vince will always have work due to his mild yet egregious condition. Would there ever be a day where he'd get lead billing?