51/50, Aftermaths Up The Creek

It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.-- Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Even with repeated viewings, a film such as Jacob’s Ladder opens with too ponderous and heavy a thud. It is neither a fair representation of the Vietnam experience—most films aren’t—although a vehicle like Rolling Thunder (77) excavates a POW’s psychic duress with devastating impact—nor a fair representation of horror merged in synchronization with its back story. Yes, Danny Aiello provides us with an epigram from Meister Eckhart as a justification for the demonic sequences towards the angelic sensibility of reunification, but Lyne’s direction has too many incongruities to be a good afterlife experience, indicting the Department of Defense through a metaphysical backlash rather than thorough investigation. Why a dying medic dreams himself through a wife and mistress as a postal employee with a deceased Dr. Carson at a veteran’s clinic is anyone’s guess. There are better films out there to touch upon the transcendent, including Vanilla Sky.  At the very least, the writer we have to thank for this enduring template, Ambrose Bierce, manages a seamless tale with An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, in contrast to Lyne’s camera transitions. Politically, the Civil War emasculated Bierce; stylistically, he is too translucent for my taste, akin to Edgar Allan Poe on methadone, but every writer builds up to the point where we, writers, have the breakout moment of our best pieces, and one sees this in Owl Creek, which resonated with me too upon the obligatory anthology reading. In other words, in an eagerness to relax and actually use the data I’m paying for, I unwittingly selected a film bad enough to have been syndicated numerous times. I may feel that Lyne is a pretentious Carpenter rip off, and feel some pity for the aspirations of Bill Rubin’s original script, but ironically, something clicked in yet this latest perusal of a Tim Robbins’ youthful performance.

His niche, to the extent he has one, is to play the man with whom we identify who is out of his depth. It is evident even in the neo-vigilante apologia narrative of Mystic River, in which Sean Penn fabulously murders the wrong culprit, and it is more than blatantly obvious in Code 23, one of my speculative favorites. Even in Majorie Prime, where the holograms and the human actors alike are dependent on his character, the only one not recreated as a synthetic personality, he is still out of his depth against computer science turning life experience into unwitting travesty. Perhaps, if we pause long enough, it won’t amount to the best we can offer the future.

Gates on the Cutting Floor

"Stop complaining about your on site visits." The former Linda Richman, failing to consider my future rate of attrition.

Hollywood has so commercialized the process of dying it is easy to forget how radicalized the ritual has become since the human animal invented cultural memories. Death through aging or illness used to be an unfortunate but expected communal reality. The invention of theatrical role playing as a form of didactic social instruction reflects this, (setting aside totem transformations). The tragedy of Hamlet is camped today, but in Renaissance Europe, a dead king convulsed the state. Medicalization robs us of communal sobriety and the sharing of grief. It is palliative care, family grouped around a bed, patient set apart by monitors, intravenous feeds, hospice, morphine, barbiturate saturation. We still have sudden death, the shock, handling a dead pet we could not save, losing a husband at the race track to thrombosis, mechanized destruction of our flesh by machine, these days even more chilling since a joystick can deliver it, but the sanitation of death is reflected back via media norms on an ever shifting landscape. The 21st century insists we process the dying as a psychodrama with its own rules. I have dealt with a few of these films, one that eludes me at the moment but it is either still on my other account or buried in here and will come round again, but more important is the modern death as a jigsaw puzzle is a common directorial scheme, good or bad. Darkness, Jacob's Ladder, the poorly made I Inside, Identity. All of these jump cut, keep us guessing, want the viewer to feed on uncertainty.

Fascinating, therefore, that E. G. Robinson would use it, the dying itself, to force Charlton to live energetically in his lead in Soylent Green. I researched this uncited Wiki passage, and dissatisfied, changed it to what traceable sources assert.

This doesn't mean Robinson, who carried Hollywood through the golden age, did not manipulate Heston, shocking the younger man into a raw integrity within a dystopian landscape, already creeping upon us, despite our billions in number. MRSA now eats people because of western healthcare's brutal success. For those of us not species optimists, that spaceship lottery will no doubt be a dicey proposition.