"Sleep tight sucker!"-- Chuck Norris in a propaganda campaign which Trump apparently appreciated
Late
Thursday evening, just sitting, burrowing inward, while a film like Delta Force plays on low volume,
because this is how the black technician needs to leave the patient, agitated
and wound like a Yo-yo, with one appreciable difference: the shock of
recognizing Robert Forster as Abdul, a fanatic for the Reagan era teletype of
what would become Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. As a serial viewer of weak
broadcast signals the FCC parcels out to local UHF stations, which in the
digital century, mimic cable subscription, Delta Force has been played on
television enough to be too familiar, Chuck Norris somewhat antithetical to one’s
taste, which means what? The spastic dowager has often written with conviction
that enemies need to be defined and caricatured for the sake of a Western
civilization now intent on unravelling, and Delta Force does exactly that. The
Lebanese depicted in this political action thriller are little more than two dimensional
paramilitary rogues who have made Beirut synonymous with urban horror, or an
extreme form of what we mean when we use “urban jungle” to heighten the terror
of survival in our environmentally adaptive cities. I didn’t even come to appreciate
Forster’s abilities until Tarantino gave the late, and financially strapped,
character actor room to breathe. The same could be said, in a different
context, for Pam Grier, not that I didn’t know she was chocolate glory mama
before, in the vibrant vigor of the seventies as oversexed with visual cues,
for white or black action figures, but Tarantino gave her a bit more to work
with in a thickened middle age playing it against the swirling vortex of all
that male ego. (I have also seen Grier
as truly aged in BEA style pictures not meant to be cross-over vehicles; she is
too old now to play spin the bottle with grifter and sheriff transference
figurines, economics of being an ostensible trail blazer aside.) It brings up
the issue of why Tarantino is able to do so much with dramatic irony as opposed
to those who direct Norris. Norris is linear figure, a quasi martial arts can
do it all flesh wound guy, and Forster doesn’t look happy being the zealot who
kills Greek Orthodox priests. He is sweaty and oily and desperate enough, and I
have seen his key scenes often enough that it’s beneficial that his effort
doesn’t register too closely, but it seems Forster would have preferred something
else before he shrivels into the old man of even more androids are people too
entries. Why do I feel a sense of loss about Forster and those like him only
after conscious appreciation occurs late in the game?
