Proper Totem

Halle Berry's carefully preserved physique is another reason I avoid her new series. Her beauty, like any real beauty, was once a passport into a realm of privilege no homily woman could attain without some form of extraordinary circumstance, one of the subtexts of Catwoman, one of the worst comic book revivals on record. In Gothika, too -- a movie I meant to apply to but forget why (it is coming back but we'll leave it for a momentary resilience) but in Extant she exhibits the braggadocio of surgical vanity, the curse of the nascent has been, no longer the red swimsuit sensation in a witty homage to the high tech Fleming fantasy which seems as far removed from our times as we are to Nicolas le Floch.

Perhaps her father was a lust fuck for the mother. I could go right back in my 22 year old body, despite everything, even my softly hardening racial prejudice, and fuck Michael Washington, my first apartment manager, til the cats yowled. His sexual heat radiated with such force that he could have swooned any woman alive, and those busy covalent bonds undoubtedly made Halle that rare female who parts the sea, not that she is necessarily conscious of this, but for all its conspiratorial overtones, in Extant she is parting with her fecund exceptionalism, that, similar to Obama, frees her from black identity. She may tell herself psychologically that she's black, but this isn't really the case. Oprah is black.

Halle is neither one race nor the other, and many of her films presage this, including Catwoman, but the series cannot revitalize her former dazzling, rarefied radiance. My eyes need to look away.

Cell 2455

The difficulty represented by films like The Hunted (2003), however unfair to its real life tracker Tom Brown, is we've seen the American lone wolf engage in countless expiations of this sort. Tommy Lee Jones channels Clint Eastwood, hounded by, hounding rogues. None of these films ever go far enough in implicating the American circumvention of its Enlightenment ideal. They indemnify themselves with the deceleration of the contest. The real secret service agents who lost JFK commit suicide. Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich simply replay Homer's Iliad. Yet the inferences to draw from Friedkin's direction are a little more subtle. What isn't indicted in the script is implied in the combat, the sheer brutality of Benicio del Toro, the wilderness in which Jones isolates himself, speak volumes about intervention over our current retrenchment of engagement-- in this sense, the synthesis of our visual entertainments replaying the same themes over and over is unfortunate. I do not need to be rich enough for cable to know that our serials beat to the same rhythms. Halle Berry is reclaiming ABC's failures to commit to near term space opera fictions with Ron Livingston. Alien Terra-forming of the human animal is representative only of our doubts about our own unraveling.