Kingdoms Come

Self-interest is a rather condemning insulator. The children of celebrities either survive through imitation, like Ivanka Trump, or die in a drug overdose while in a grotesque imitation, like Bobbi Brown. I just remembered my pitch about Bobbi, and would probably have to hold my nose and open a Facebook account to get at my sources. I have no desire to get penalized and banned on the social networking giant, none, whatsoever, but like Ann Coulter, I may have to succumb, at least as a practical matter, but for the life of me can only barely fathom why Peck's son checked himself out. I am starving to death, doomed, spent a life long battle believing what liberals spoon fed me about success and disability, and the obituaries hang little pork chops on a string. Jonathan committed suicide, because of, or despite Father Chisholm's insufferable stridency? In Old Gringo, nearly one of Peck's last supporting roles, the actor mitigates his infallible conviction, since he is portraying Bierce, middlebrow hack, whose legacy mine might one day be reasonably compared to, but it was distasteful, badly done. We're used to the striated laces with which the old lion roars

Though I am not fully ready to take aim at Hollywood and Catholic pageantry, Peck's priggishness is another matter, and as old as Gentleman's Agreement is, I rooted for the realists, thank you very much, though I have never used "kike" as an epithet. I have no idea what it means. For its time, the 47 film was more honest than it had to be, but this was due to the war. Too many Europeans died in that conflict, in addition to the 6 million in the camps. Chisholm was aged, at the end of The Keys to the Kingdom, with its adamant lessons about tolerance and hypocrites, (I had forgotten Vincent Price and he was a breath of fresh air) to look like a Scottish saint. Compare this to his devil may care countenance in 89, against Fonda and Smitts. The elderly, eventually, are drawn to caviler libertarian defiance, even Peck, who probably would have been sworn into office by acclamation, if he had given his handlers the go. It is so much more convenient, merging celebrity and monarchy. The early 20th century Edwardians knew it, or Gambon had some fun with it, if the story of Elizabeth's father has any genealogical accuracy.

Complicity, Clintons and Pecking Order

"I find the word 'cured' to be very difficult to define." --Julie Andrews

I am not going to dissect Arlington Road in the same manner that I attempted to flake from the mica of The Brothers Rico as a film; this is in part due to the fact that the agenda of Pellington and Kruger speaks for itself  in the more contemporary narrative. The threat is from within, that the American self-reliant frontier mindset is its own cancer, perhaps a crab incurable, and as dark as any ultra right wing mentality with which it might be compared. Pellington also offers Easter eggs for the flavor of any ideologue.

These are my main points of complicit ambiguity, however, with the understanding, on your part, that I do not have access to the full technical issues surrounding the making of the movie:

1. Was the child Brady a deliberate lure, whether or not Fenimore was switch hitting on bringing Faraday in, or was intent on framing and sacrificing Faraday from the opening frame?

2. Was Hope Davis used in a dual role as girlfriend / operative to suggest that no one can be trusted? Towards the close of the film there is a student, a plant from Fenimore's apparently huge resistance to the federal, progressive sensibility. I cannot tell from the credits whether this woman is an extra cast because she looks like Davis, or she is Davis in a game of masquerade, but the implication is the same.

3. What were Pellington and Kruger implying when Robbins ends the film by telling Cusack "They'll let us know."?

Perhaps homo sapiens is limited and self-deluded by First Cause entrapments in politics and physics alike.

The cult of the icon, however, is the least plausible when it comes to the validity of fronts, props, and powers behind the throne. Are the Clintons, for instance, part of a left centrist snow job? No, not in the Machiavellian sense. Hillary did not drive Vince to his death. She and her husband have a passive aggressive self-justification that was perhaps not the best thing for the US at the time, but they did not run around DC saying "Kill the bastards."

I am not in the Hillary glee club, however, and I never liked her in any of her incarnations, though she receives a passing grade for getting out of State without causing riots in Montana. Marooned taps into the psychic scar tissues that the modern autocracy makes us pay, exacerbating them. Gregory is all too convincing as the operative who has to keep the government safe from its own fallibility, and this makes it more than a movie and closer to a crumbling edifice about the price we pay for the right stuff, how the feminine is hated even in stock objectification. That no one would raise a hand to the mechanized astronaut's wife doesn't mean she isn't discarded because it is necessary, and she knows that she is complicit in the deception thrust upon her.

In Rico the government is like a binary switch. On or off, dismissed until it is a necessary last resort. In Marooned, personified in the abstract of NASA, it is the new secular religion, and in Arlington, it is a duped and impotent eunuch.