"The reality of her terror is made palpable by our shared experience. The audience is given insight into her deteriorating world and cannot help but identify with her."--Julia Ain-Krupa, Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile, p.41
There are very few films which actually deal with tenement predicaments as a central motif, and Polanski only succeeded at it, in his attempts, by making his movies into a horror trilogy. When I am well enough, if the dowager has any true resurgence left, nursing a head cold in these leonine winds, a head cold apparently days in the making, I'll buy The Tenant, if necessary, and then bread my meats in a shake-n-bake. I saw the film many times, and know that, as the last in his series, it was about a man desperately attempting to warn himself about losing who he thought he was, after skirting the edges of where he shouldn't have ventured, but I can't remember the entire narrative, just the nail polish scene, the body cast (and don't we know a thing or two about skin yellowing after a year in plaster paris) and Shelley Winters behaving like a fatalistic concierge, which leads us to the issue of gentrification and a basic liberal anger.
Sure, I have the rage of many a disabled activist; I wrote as much in earlier posts, but an overweening level of classification is as evil as too much austerity on the other end of the spectrum, which is why Congress needs to revisit public housing. Like many other Americans, once I was screwed over by former supervisors and a paradigm into which I was indoctrinated with contradictory platitudes, I faced the same problems as the rest of you who lose jobs: harassment by debt collectors, particularly after default, the breakdown of my medical equipment, and months, literally months, of what felt like hostile captivity. Between 99 and 08 my life was almost a living hell, excepting my wedding plans, and now, eight years later, how in god's name am I supposed to find the strength of will to remain competitive, returning to substantial gainful activity? I can't ignore it. Federal law is punitive, regardless of my age and symptoms, and Treasury will, eventually, garnish what little I subsist on. This is why my fury is enough to dissuade Councilmen, even those designated as "special needs," because we do end up feeling like Catherine in Repulsion, protecting our body from scavengers of our innocence, or Mia and Roman overwhelmed by an entrapment conspiracy. We may not have the solution to the problem of stacking ourselves up on top of one another, a plate of pancakes, but it is a living hell when we're shackled to confinement against our will. It did not cost Presbyterian Homes anything to allow me to change my mind, leaving the unit in Diamond Park, right off Temple University's campus, for Riverside's internecine back bite, but it cost me; a career, an extension of a hostile environment, my confidence, self esteem. Any public housing lawyer would say how lucky that is. Yep.
The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell. My mother fights it continually; bathing her, changing her sheets, carrying her to the bathroom so the smell can be contained and flushed away. --Jayne Anne Phillips, "Home"
I am not sure why Jerry recommended that I read Phillips. I remember nearly next to nothing about her collection "Black Tickets," but I consumed it as if attempting copulation with the recommendation as a sort of compensation, not being able to abase myself over the penis of the master. I wrote Phillips a poorly expressed letter from the inner city. Why? I wanted to feed off her confidence, imitate her vigorous sexual skills, if possible. I cut her picture out of a Poets & Writers article and published a poem about the fantasy of her competitive literary companionship in Metis, a local Jersey Xerox and staple effort. Admiration, as I have written, can be a dangerous attribute to those with low self-esteem.
Never heard from her, and she doesn't have the sustaining power needed for her novels. Her arc has passed its zenith, but she is at Rutgers, her look suggestive, even conspiratorial, exciting only insofar as if I could reach out and penetrate her shield, then I get to hold onto how Jerry at least enabled me to stay alive. I have weighed it once again, contacting her, in the time it has taken me to write this post, but I haven't read her work in years, and her voice, somewhat ponderous, bowed perhaps by an agrarian weight, has been surpassed; she does represent a sexual charge, not for herself necessarily, but the eroticism is inescapable: "I should have been Jayne Anne Phillips and I am not. I am a broken and pathetic--" a whine a whine. Moth to the flame, but moths are silent, not particularly aggressive and I did not enjoy her later novel Machine Dreams. Again, what is it I would want from her? What could her faded reputation offer me, scarred on so many levels as I am? What could Dr. Phillips heal that Bowie's predation in The Hunger offers in the recognition of insatiable appetite?
When I first saw this film the pace of Bowie's spectacular disintegration made an indelible impact, and offered exactly the kind of dangerous sexual foreplay I have always wanted with a man, one that impinges on the trauma of violation, with the elegance of cool. A local literary instructor, whose name escapes me for the moment, said on Fresh Air that vampirism is the most overused literary conceit. I agree with her, except for where it turns in interesting ways. The Hunger is a precursor to the terror we feel about being consumed, wasted from the inside out by viral flavors of the season: avian influenza, AIDS, ebola, and that wasting, in turn, make us focus on that one sole desire, which is the very damnation of its heat. It still contains something of the romantic in Gothic horror, and the danger of seduction that goes too far, lesbian or otherwise, but it is also a precursor film to the rise of retro-fitted zombie genres, like 28 Days Later, 30 Days of Night.
As a selfish outreach, I regret trying to make a connection with Phillips, but perhaps not the poem which is a preserved scrapbook tribute of a sort, saying, in effect, I wanted to be pretty like you, to have accomplished like you, to share gratifications which you seem to convey are in the realm of your experience. I toyed with viewing the film again on Saturday evening, but senile aunts, spoiled felines mewing, the usual things of poverty in tandem with broken bodies making nothing ever go right.
Bad day, but found an unexpected network opportunity, if a summary skim of my post intensity doesn't kill it.
