"Help me," --Anne Bancroft in her genteel tragic fate before her invidious seduction of Dustin Hoffman
He gave me his cold. Sounds petulant, does it? Cerebral
Palsy is a condition, as opposed to a disease, a very common indicator of
biological trauma within the radicalization of obstetric mortality ratios. We
are not true quadriplegics, like Jason
Dorwart ventilating about Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston, which in itself
is a refutation of Jason’s resentment, the residual effects of critical
acclaim. Breaking Bad was eulogized for giving the city of Albuquerque a rather
juicy visual exposition, and it means, quite simply, that its starring actor
had every right to play pretend with spinal paralysis. Jason has the community
integration acolyte’s adherence down to the T-bone, without being able to
actualize the distinction that managing care doesn’t make that care a business,
and he’s also wrong about the industry’s predatory opportunism. Hollywood doesn’t
need wheelchair users, as opposed to character actors with exotic conditions, like Alopecia. Wheelchair users would also tell me I should have told the care giver not to come in, or to leave, or use a mask, prior to battle with volcanic mud slinky. For 48 hours, I feared the very real possibility of walking pneumonia, sweating with chills, flushed cheeks, my bronchitis in ascendancy. Jamboree man needs his home owner's insurance paid so badly killing the fattened goose is not, ironically, an issue. There are growing tensions between us, and I kept it to myself that I threatened Jevs Health & Human Services division within an inch of their lives, although I haven't yet weaseled a lawyer into seeing the liability of lucre.
Jevs HHS isn't Jevs HC.
Do you begin to see what a game this is, why I am attracted to quiet pockets like The Slender Thread? For Pollack's directorial debut, Thread is a taut, well executed game of cat and mouse in which LBJ might not have even existed. Inga's distress is handled according to the values which were instilled in Eisenhower's generation, despite the fact that it's a new age liberalism trying to reign in this woman's deceit. Pollack ends this film in such a way that he wants us to feel the impact of failure: Poitier, the rigid son of itinerant tomato farmers, fails to get the virtue of Inga's white privilege to see itself as paramount. The tack on rescue is merely a fairy tale ending to get past the willful censor of populism. You're free to disagree with an imperiled woman, but the script wasn't a sleeper success. Savalas and his medical humanism hits too close to home.
All this phrase making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.--Virginia Woolf
When I was all too briefly on Daniel's gmail group, I asked his clique what was the best movie on disability. I am not sure I saved their answers; I have my regrets about Schneider, though one look at his page says our personalities are too similar, which does not excuse the fact that I did not have to react, to him, or anyone. I could have just hit delete and hit delete and pulled on him or the clique when I thought it useful. Not sure what his complaint about Google Search means. With my colorful level of denigration I am lucky Blogger doesn't reinvent the wheel and blow me a kiss. I see nothing wrong with gay panic as a self defense, for example, since women have hit on me, four, five times. Aggression is justified when a firm no doesn't halt the behavior, and I am not a still virile Kevin Spacey gently disengaging Chris Cooper in American Beauty. The more I think about the edits made to this film due to screen testing, the less I like it, but American dysfunction and broken bodies are not quite the same.
The disability movement as it is recognized today started with the American Civil War, and in symbolic and actual terms, this fucking country always reenacts the conflict, so of course one of the most radicalized studio dares is the 1946 classic, which ends with its celebrated inclusion due to love. The double amputee lets his little woman on the inside. Aw. Love. One of Josie Byzek's favorite words of emphasis. The activists she profiles agitate against the able bodied world out of love. The thought occurs. If I log onto twitter and have a row with Hillary Clinton's account, then I'd possibly be in real trouble, and laugh silently due to my curious thought processes. An FBI dossier would get the right individuals to pay attention, and I'd launch the wheels of justice. This is probably why the poor utilize violence to resolve disputes.
Next I'd pick A Patch of Blue, so forbidden and sexually charged. It was a great influence on my desire to become (no, won't type it but I do think it) a black man's lover, which almost happened twice. The third time my father threatened my life, but that third time was a deliberate provocation on my part. I yelled at da last week "I am a throw back to Mussolini and now I am worse than you!" I guess I was trying to tell him he should have killed me. The man is now eighty and cares about absolutely nothing. Not me, his grandchildren, nothing. I am not including The Miracle Worker. All of these films carry Scott's "too schematic" charge, but this play turned movie about a favorite patron saint over does it. Beyond this there isn't much which isn't worth forgetting until we reach the present day. For me this starts in the nineties.
Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby makes the list as a backhanded compliment; the film is not about disability, which the rabid protesters either would not, or could not understand, and I defend its message without necessarily defending the actor's politics. The same entrapments closing over Swank's fighter are the ones I want out of as well.
Beyond this there are allegories, other titles, vulnerable wheelchair users, demonic wheelchair users, the *uplifting* biopic empowerment narratives that bore me in the same way a ritualized prey kill becomes a banal inconvenience, but nothing which reaches the magnitude of Orson Welles, and his ground breaking work, with the exception of Diving Bell, which Amazon finally bought for instant video. I may not view it till next month, depends.
Stories like this give me wicked, diabolical ideas, but with my luck I'd kill the worm after a fest of trots.
There are no easy choices when it comes to mortality; in one of my many Harrisburg conferences, under the old Pennsylvania Citizens Council, where I first met Josie, who even then was odd, owlish, non descript, a plain Jane who needs to wave Jesus I love pussy on her flagpole, (ah spastic, trolling, now now) there was a deaf dumb and blind minority, pretty woman, considering, who could not hear herself scream when a power chair ran over her foot in a beige pump, Anne Bancroft's majesty entirely absent. What choice does a woman like that have? This is what I asked myself at the time, even as the story of the Belgian twins saddens me. As much as we might need to be wary of Europe's move toward euthanasia, to the extent that I am still viable as a disabled American, one who does not want to die, but is suffering due to extraordinary marginalization, I cannot fault the decision these men made. Would you like me to display compassion toward Josie? Unlikely as it may be, but not impossible, that she and I will ever set eyes on each other again, I know her MS has told on her body, and that she is no longer passable as able. I also know, as you do, that I am a demanding figure, but let me tell you why I am so pissed off with her. She had the ability to recognize how lonely I was, had the ability to ascertain how Cecil's intelligence and perception captivated me, and then turned right around and destroyed any hope I had of building a relationship with him. Progressives who want to tell me this does not make all homosexuals vicious and untrustworthy may be factually correct, but with this kind of dirty laundry, no one needs what you feel you deserve in terms of your sexual activity, and your demands for marriage. What did I do to Josie to deserve this? Let's see. I talked to her in email, perhaps too facetious at times. I gave her daughter a Sherman Alexie collection for which I paid 24 dollars. That is what I did, to New Mobility's managing editor. So what do I want? I want activists to examine their consciences. I am still alone, in exactly the same location where this woman dragged her rancid body to sit near me on a fountain after I charged her with my power chair to grin wolfishly at her hand waving alarm. At the time I thought I meant it as a joke, and much as I have my choice of enemies between this activist mafia and the case management modalities with which they dance, Richard Conte is increasingly hemmed in by the syndicate men whom Kubik controls in Rico. As Eddie heads toward his little brother, Karlson has wardrobe dress everyone up as cowboys. Charming.
Johnny got out too, like the middle child, but apparently opted for a real frontier purity, overshadowed by Lamotta, and Eddie, racked by guilt, decides to fray his cufflinks and turn states evidence, and Alice gets the reward of a recommendation by the DA for the orphanage. I do not think Karlson meant for his viewers to be entirely at ease with this quick plaster happy ending. There seems to be an underlying uncertainty about the price of collusion, but I'll sharpen up my knives as I find the terminology, and the framework I seek.
"What did we do? Burn a few heretics, sell some indulgences? That was in the days when the Church was a ruling body, we let governments do those things today." -- Anne Bancroft, Agnes of God
Obviously, if you speak ill of a suddenly dead dead body guard for stereotypical reinforcing, you can wreak havoc with viruses on one end, and infection flamed genitalia, not knowing which end is which, playing a glass bead game within a fevered intellect, forcing yourself to move, to sit up on your busted mattress using a three dimensional point on a graph of space time, vision unable to be replicated, lost insight into points and reference to location, we last left The Brothers Rico with Larry Gates as a mildly trenchant, deceptively civil sociopath, appealing to his bond with Eddie's mother for taking the bullet meant for him, and then he sends Eddie off, like a bloodhound, while we are cued into this family doom with the near nicety of a deus ex machina, nothing graphic. Paul Picerni bound in a chair, taking a punch, gasping last words, his gel lock flopping. Then Karlson does something interesting with the scene cut to Mrs. Rico's apartment in New York. This is the clash of Old World Europe into the new, and Argentina Brunetti was obviously typecast for culture shock, for her juxtaposition against the American groomed Kubik and Hollywood sugar boy Conte, her English heavily accented, her personal iconography with the madonna captured with no small degree of emphasis, the little bit of Roman hierarchy she needs for her own solace, wary of what her middle child is wresting out of her. This portent is Eddie's second warning, and what does he do with it? Persuading his mother or himself that Kubik is only looking out for the family's best interests?
There are hints, before Conte heads into his central conflict with Lamotta, that he is anxious about the consequences of his actions, not that Karlson takes much opportunity to examine the willful blindness of self-interest, a charge which I doubt can be laid at Simenon's door.
The cream cheese on bread I managed to get to this morning was the best breakfast I had in my life, which is either spelling out mortality's signature, or signifying the extraordinary persistence of will, I intend to pay a visit to the woman's clinic, at least to explore the possibility that this is more than hormonal stress, early next week, as I doubt my ability to flag down a gynecologist any sooner than that.
