The Day Would Be A Lot of Highway

The feud kicked off after Carrey posted an original that he made, depicting the execution of Mussolini alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci.

Caption rightfully goes to Northam's repository of equally stark satirical interludes.

Before I go on with more integral matters, let me buttress a wound licking moment and yowl that I lost a potential novelist online friend, Shayna Grissom, because I engaged in my usual delight of contention braggadocio in the discovery that Alessandra Mussolini was a living facet of history, and I almost couldn’t not defend her against a farcical jackass like Jim Carrey. To me this is fascinating, that while I’m here on Blogger pondering the many roots and branches of Italy’s indispensable cultural legacies, Mussolini’s granddaughter is actually live on social media! I very nearly groveled and decided this would amount to little more than an irritant, and so went after Carrey, whom none of us like, for his hard joke about Benito’s death. It was lacking in tact, his cartoon, contributing nothing to anti-statist tensions. I only really use Facebook as an outlet, or for a question, but Shayna cut me off, and yes, I felt it, one again reaching for tentative rapport. She did a shout out for a volunteer to review her agent letters, I offered to help, was happy for her novel, and here we are, after following each other perhaps less than a year. Fragile suburban housewives, I am on my last legs, and get shafted by her neediness and insecurity, and none of this had anything to do with her, her husband, or the death of her sister-in-law. That tweet, if hers, may have been when I first paid her individuality any notice. I’d really like not to be dying by myself and get a hug by someone other than a jamboree jigger getting paid to serenade me into the Twilight Zone. I invested in Shayna’s validation, and now, I’ve paid, but if Alessandra allows me to stay on her feed, maybe I can get a nice essay out of it; I am not sure how much I can assume about my strength, taxed as it is. There is no giving up, mind you. A home for cripples would simply torture me. I either can take it on my own, figure out a foolproof exit valve, or take an institutional technician’s abuse. Those, as it stands, are my options, as my bridge to via support caved in a while back. The current caregiver, ever helpful, suggested I ask Shayna for a token fee, the same Shayna who raised her voice against censoring YA novelists. Uh huh. Any reason why I should try to keep placating this tyranny of female centric herd dynamic?

Zero Theorem

In terms of dramaturgical import, Tilda Swinton's collapse to the floor is a repeat pattern maneuver with Dionysian potential. In The Beach, it has no relevance within an already fragmented and contradictory climax, not as a signifier of colonial conquest  and its destruction which fomented the anger of Achebe's productive years; it rings hollow as an expressive gesture, and yet it hearkens back to Michael Clayton, much starker, bleaker, an existential implosion where all one can do is drop to your knees and pound the carpet. It is a distinctive motion, a signature only Swinton can enact, learned in the rough on the set of Orlando, which itself is less a responsible to Woolf's satirical aim and more pastiche, aping the farce masculinity in the loss of her Russian lover, because our fool proof procedures turn out to be flawed after all. This is why she is amply suited when cast as the foil against individual identity in our futurist speculations, a modern Medea melded within the characteristics of a rodent-like opportunism, utilitarian, grasping for power.

Clayton was a slap in the face to those who believe in due process. We're exposed, the audience, to how things truly operate in the alpha world. As in house counsel, Swinton is the lawyer who thinks corporate insulation will allow her to override the annoyances of victimization, disavowing personal loyalties over lapsed ethics. In The Beach, muddled as it is, she is a comical version of Conrad's Kurtz who cannot seem to grasp that agrarian harmony is contingent on the metropolis, and it is the city, invariably, which leads to the anxiety of transhumanism. It may be resisted by self-determination, but the city state is the collective power of human intelligence, as well as our downfall, the mechanization of rote efficiency, but that collapse brings us back to the mythos of origin, snake like, hubris buckling in upon itself toward the Oedipal pathos of dramatic exaggeration, with the chorus in the background beating its breast as triumph fractures. We either abandon it or put it under lock and key.