From The Mouth of Ashley Judd's Assassin

"You think I pushed Cheryl too hard?", Stephanie March, SVU incarnation

Hilary Swank and Jennifer Garner have the nearly exact corresponding genotype in the eye of a casting director. They are both reasonably attractive tom boy brunettes with well defined cheekbones, with complexions comparable to a glass of milk; not great beauties, but wholesome American girls with thick African defined lips in a darker contrast to their Caucasian skin tone, at least with lavender colored lipstick, with equally equivalent range and talent, the only real difference between the two of them is Swank attained elevation against Eastwood and then went poof, both women having trouble maintaining their first billing leads on screen, with Garner more tangible to television. Wait another ten years lady. At 44 you think your body will hold the assembly line, mature but sturdy. By 55 those martial arts moves you've perfected as Supergirl in a technocratic age will require performance enhancing drugs.

It is easy to believe as brunettes, we are all Hilary and Jennifer, this is why the studio selects them. Girls just like us who marry the reasonably hip boy next store Affleck, but none of are truly like this, on closer examination, the athletic naivety which muddles its way through rural trash family exploitation and betrayals of trust, landing on our feet with a chance at second love, or the true father figure riding to the rescue on a mercy mission which concedes that our determination and strength as overwhelmed, shielded, as always, by the Hollywood marriage, an inexplicable anachronism in the modern age, much like Foucault's fascination with the royal body of the sovereign as a living embodiment of the body politic. Michel's queer intellectual rigor wasn't in error, as the still relatively undefined AIDS virus destroyed his body due to his inability to stave off unsafe anal penetration and direct his energies elsewhere, (though in fairness, in 84 ,  Fauci's carefully proscribed phrases about "unsafe sexual practices" weren't current in liberal lexicography). The health of the sovereign does reflect the health of a national power. The real problem, as we hurl four years ahead, where the dowager logged on to research temporary political jobs, isn't the pneumonia, but the clots, the concussions, bad temperaments tailgating fading relevance, on both ends of the political spectrum. More on this in more demanding thought processes later; this post was borne out of an annoyance, desiring some quiet evening reading. The dowager failed, volume and video the only things to penetrate a sterile evening, loneliness, fear, sore epidermis, stressed digestion.

Invidious Distinctions

When I write in Quarantine that Russell Crowe is too generic, another way to frame my contention is to bracket it in terms of over-exposure. He gets the organic nature of paranoid schizophrenia right in A Beautiful Mind, in terms of John Nash's transition from promising scholar to a man beset with illness, and it also felt like an Ike and Churchill rendition era film for modern consumption. Beyond this the star underwhelms, and does nothing to reconcile me to Australia. One of Tatyana's characters felt the same way in her early collection of stories, yanking the land mass out of the ocean like a diseased molar. A film like On The Beach exempts itself, simply by virtue of being early nuclear porn, as we call it today. It is not a fair comparison, but we do see a certain difference in handling impairments, however: the Rhonda of Muriel's Wedding adapts to her cursory paralysis, whereas here in the States, Swank's Maggie and her choice causes reactionary protests.

I happen to be on the character's side. Being a writer is an insulating process, by the nature of the beast, but when it has been your life for half a century, and essentially failed you, even if you always know you can never do anything else, sick now, broken, as well as crippled, making a choice to let go does not seem so threatening. The activists I knew, at least those who aren't dead, have nothing to say to me, and won't, obviously, since I haven't been nice, and on angry days, ah, well, some of you have seen the same diabolical villain films as I have, and can use your own imagination about what I do with a slowly dying vengeance, biodegrading; the very awareness of the fact that I am fragile fuels my urgency to get away, the ever omnipresent American impetus. Migrate. East to west, west to east, or be Hemingway in Paris.

I am running out of time. I am probably not going to make it, and neither stoicism nor protest is entirely satisfactory.