Competing Transformations

 "I am not the person I was. Everybody fades Martha."-- Tcheky Karyo

Just before the nearly non-advent of the winter holidays, as I violently convulse myself into the new year of 22, one of my followers liked a younger woman’s request, raven-haired if my scant view of her thumbnail was accurate, for depressing movies, and the usual pop culture cohesion thread began on video Twitter verse. Lars von Trier's Melancholia made the rounds, and although I am not going to scroll back through weeks worth of tweets to indicate a correction on my part in the stagnate world of my social media interactions, I do indeed stand corrected. Von Trier conceived the idea for the end of the world as metaphor in a therapy session. I streamed it on Prime once, and X-ray cued me in on important allusions made to painters active when German Romanticism was at its height, and I know a majestic homage to Stanislaw Lem is involved in Trier’s dense compression of emotional fatalism, but haven’t we digressed enough already? Melancholia has at best a tangential relationship to cloning as a way of life in the Western Hemisphere, and another one of my followers whom I’ve mentioned before on this account, (gee, don’t you want to know who he is?)  brought up his distaste for the very British Never Let Me Go,  a film faithfully based on the very British Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. The film’s stark reality about knowing how the end of your life is going to go, just as I know how the end of mine is coming along, is very comforting, and rather neo-imperialist, which is comprehensible. Britain was one of the last modern empires civilization could recognize  in the 20^th century, and so was Japan. Hence Ishiguro’s rather dynamic, brilliant, at times, immersion into Western sympathies. It is also interesting to note The Island came out as a box office disappointment around 2005, on or about the year Ishiguro went to press, and this latter film takes the Rip Van Winkle approach: knowledge is power, and by dint of sheer luck, the American clones destroy the institutional harvesting built around them, deceiving them with notions of paradise, when in reality, they were no more than livestock for their wealthy hosts. Ishiguro’s plot takes a more egalitarian approach, with only hints about why the students brought up in these schools didn’t rebel, like the V-chips inserted in their wrists. It amazes me that Romanek creates the culture shock of an alternate universe far superior to that of Michael Bay, simply by placing the doomed in a recognizable landscape long imprinted on our visual cortex as familiar, like Masterpiece theater,

Ishiguro's Metabolic Fusion

"People let me tell you about my best friend."-- Harry Nilsson

Clifton Collins is a one armed man in the 09 Sunshine Cleaning because he is supposed to stand out as an expert in the peculiar waste management niche Amy Adams' character Rose finds herself, a kind of modern Virgil and ambiguous scarecrow rolled into one, the Winston of empathy and expertise whose knowledge isn't enough to blunt the folly of American dysfunctional narcissism, as it is embodied in Emily Blunt's Norah. As divergent as they are in their respective use of formats, however, scriptwriter and brilliant novelist, Megan Holley and Kazuo Ishiguro are both saying something about the demands of expertise, efficiency, and the negotiation of personal interaction. The 93 adaptation of The Remains of the Day has a komikaze subtextual ruthlessness, absorbed at a cost difficult to take, that the Anthony Hopkins we see twenty years before in Stevens is shallow, somewhat vapid, salvaged by the colonial mercy of gilded age power embodied by Christopher Reeve.

"And I slammed him, this most famous American in his reverberating helplessness."

We all tend to have innocuous thoughts like these running in our minds, even while reflecting on the aesthetic importance of casting. This supporting role as Congressman Lewis was the best acting Reeve ever did, even if Christine Jeffs as a director leads us to fend for ourselves over why the modern moneyed class would preserve an anachronism like a first rate butler.

My body is not as immobile as Reeve's became, and of course I cannot know how he coped internally with the fact that his body was lifeless. All he had left was the salvage of his mind, for a time. He did not have the luxury of my anonymity to be livid, and used the hope of scientific advance as an escape valve. Ambulation was a loss. Other minds simply cannot conceive bipedal locomotion, and those are the cautionary tales.