Per Vias Rectas

Note to George Will :That battle ended a long time ago. The minute centers like these borrowed the rhetoric of our Enlightened Founding Fathers, the experiment that was the United States came to an end. It is now in a persistent vegetative state, and my ability to discuss it with you across the aisle, one starving freelancer who will odds on die in permanent orbit, hanging at the mercy of the welfare state, to an economically secure libertarian, is guided not by the First Amendment, but by terms of service standards of civility. Manners may help us co-exist as ineffectual primates, but it is used to police both oral and written speech since Cervantes created the novel, at least. Best of luck old man.

I once believed in America, the America in which my father secured for his family the most beautiful rancher one could lay eyes on, and now I am nearly as much a product of urban ghettoization as the sanitation workers for whom King agitated just prior to his assassination. We may not yet be a fully socialist state, but independence no longer exists.

Bedlam Proofs

I wonder if I should give myself a lone gesture, like Catherine in the opening of the film, and make a toast with my coffee to auspicious beginnings. Proof is not solely an agenda film, of course, and it is charmingly plagued by the romantic vision of mental illness that the West has held since Goethe bequeathed young Werther to an equally young Europe of the eighteenth century. Catherine may stick it in the face of Robert's mourners in the Rockefeller Chapel, but the film can still be viewed as a romantic metaphor, asking the questions I raised in my last post, and yet only touching on the real grit and hardship that comes with handling diseased brains and bodies: Robert stank? Try dealing with incontinence on a daily basis and not come out of that with some degree of belligerence to the ableist majority around you and not get ambushed for it.

I did, and in fact do get subjected to ambushes daily: my building managers, case managers from providers of one sort or another; my career, in fact, when I had it, was based on my ability to case manage those as marginalized as myself, based on my knowledge of the system. The gloriously modern notion of making sure we fit everyone in the right modality, and in turn fitting those into the right paradigm and expecting *compliance*.

The movie resists this aspect of modern society even while acknowledging it, especially in the flashback where Catherine finds Robert sitting at the table outside the house during an evening snowfall, believing that his machinery (mind) had come back to life. The scene might have been taken right out of a Bing Crosby performance of Silver Bells. In some ways the film can even be seen as a meta-accolade to Hopkins himself, for being the Lawrence Olivier of our generation.

I was less enthralled with Jake Gyllenhaal as Hal Dobbs, the former student of Robert's and would be lover of Catherine. He looks and acts like a muppet on steroids in playing his part, and was somewhat better cast as the cartoonist in The Zodiac Killer. Still, he and Paltrow both exhibit a refreshing fragility in a film that challenges us to think without getting sanctimonious about which version of the truth its audience should best believe.