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.

Complicity Bounding

"I meant it in the sense that we were conspirators."-- Linda C Dezenski, defending her descriptions of her climaxes with her husband. quizzically riding on the heels of their divorce.

For all the efforts taken to circumvent Netflix, and the inconvenience of a DVD collection, sometimes streaming video denies us instant gratification. It was on the ABC affliate, the aforementioned chronicle, but weak signal and laborous transfer provided only glimpses of a vehicle that is possibly intriguing. Just blanked out in blinding white panic on telephone number; synapses assured by last summer's paper bill. If Alzheimer's is in my future more than likely I will be beaten to death by a caretaker, in the sense that verbal ferocity invites provocation. You've glimpsed my Iago already, the interior provocateur of a facile sophist. With that being the opening lead of a future preponderance, the kindle paperwhite yet another catalyst in knock offs to a weakened, weakening stride, let's return to the avenues opened by Paula Broadwell and Arlington Road, though I cannot pull a rabbit out of the hat into the immediacy of revelation, there is something larger here, an overarching issue worthy of grasping, like the proverbial tiger who will maul out my innards unless I unravel the maze. It is a difficult one, but the real life event, the sexual license which seems to go hand in hand with state secrets, keeping and uncovering them, ties into what the studio reflects back. Pellington's fin de siecle is dangerous because it suggests what cannot be said in the mainstream, that everything we think we know is a front for facts not in evidence, that McVeigh may not have been an implicitly independent actor, that federal agents misdirect themselves and miss real threats that might have been caught otherwise. Clinton's sexual misbehavior, for instance, may have exhausted our energy, not leaving us alert to pay attention to Osama, though the right bears blame here too, given that Kenneth Starr suddenly elected himself the American prelate (much as I am doing by airing out the dirty laundry within the homosexual community, by the way-- I have not dug into this, yet, but can assure Blogger that spastic's probing may hit a nerve, and won't we have fun! Do we ban this disabled woman, or what, damn it, we're about efficiency, not defamatory speech! Why us?) -- and while Wiki does a good job describing Kruger's taunt script,  Pellington's texture complicates things, like his jump cut to a Hope Davis replica after her supposed elimination by Robbins' charmingly superlative, and thereby incredulous, glee club, suggesting that Bridges' Faraday was so out of his depth that the only way he could have won was to join the conspiracy, vanish into it. This is partly where Gilliam leads his protagonist in Brazil, who is doomed simply because he tries to be decent, and longs for a kind of purity, that, due to its impossibility, leads to expiration. As phantasmagoric as Brazil is, it leaves Gilliam's fans uneasy, and exhausted Terry's output. 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, though competent, lack the same force. The third film that binds all this together, surprisingly, is, The Brothers Rico, and this is not simply due to economic pressure. Then again, fans of Simenon understand that we are all complicit in the damage of corrupting and collusionary impetus. I'll take a break, pick it up next post.

Arlington's Dialectic

I do not know if Mark Pellington earned his directorial skills on Oliver Stone's knee, but his transitional Arlington Road is a dangerous film in ways that have nothing to do with the orchestrated plausibility of collusion. It opens with a riveting bracket of Mason Gamble as a child, hobbling along the road, minimally lucid, with voice overs by the scout troop Robbins and Cusack use for indoctrination that seem to suggest the Fenimore's were going to sacrifice the boy as collateral damage, or that the boy got caught in the explosion of a terrorist act. Pellington may have wanted to depict Brady as an evocative Holocaust victim, or he may have wanted to reclaim traumatic war images, for those of us with long memories. The burn injury to the arm suggests as much. When it comes to Ruby Ridge, my memory is as obligatory as the next, and whitewashed the tragic turn of events, though the congressional inquisition that litigated the event was as much strum and drag as any other congressional inquisition before or since: the impeachment over an ejaculation stain, the sexual harassment allegations of Anita Hill, the deposing of Oliver North, and now, the latest boffing of David Petraeus may have led to compromised intelligence. Well, hello Dolly. I do remember Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh vividly, and Bridges' character is damaged by the consequences of federal overreach, then destabilized by conspirators more proficient than the federal agents trained to police such reactionaries, and then he was sacrificed to the truth, and both Pellington and Phoebe Hoban, writing about Mia and Woody, intimate this truth can elude the most rigorous public exposure. Do I believe in the Tim Robbins character? Not for a second; if he was that good, why not just run for office and put tea party conservatives in charge, but I do believe in Pellington's contention that human ineptitude leads to institutional burrowing. I do not believe in Petraeus. He salvaged, rather than saved, a war in Iraq that should never have been fought, and despite the fact that he is probably a competent manager modeled on Eisenhower, we all know Afghanistan will wind up as a travesty of blood and treasure. In hyperbolic mode in the first year on my other account, I suggested this sorry excuse of a country be nuked, but in more brutalist fashion, if you really want to pacify a territory, then you not only occupy it, but divide and govern it, much like fascist Germany became East and West until the collapse of Stalinism. W43, the cowboy cheese puff, wasn't going to waltz that bride to the altar, and Obama underestimates the tenacity of zealots. Extremists put Afghan girls in my high school class in the latter days of the Carter Administration in 79. By 2020 my sister's younger children will be spoon fed the same refugee dosage, because we have lost the stomach for ruthlessness. Paula Broadwell seemingly put all her passion into a belief, and much as I did thirteen years ago, lost her composure when that idealist bubble seemed about to be pierced. I am sitting here laughing because not 72 hours after Messiah Obama seals his legacy, his new term is rocked by a cat fight over who possesses the rights to sexually feast the American Achilles.

Earlier in the summer, I reacted to Greg Zacharias admonishing me on the James list when I was trying to be witty about spam. He wrote, in context, that the spam filter was not a conspiracy against me, most likely because I used the phrase "collusion of peers" in factual innocence, but the subtext in the public transmission between us was this: I was riffing the man, playfully, subversively perhaps, to suggest, "well, I am a Jamesian and belong in this club". And the subtext of his retort, that what I wrote was silly, was, "no you don't; you forget your place." My brother used the same rebuff, that the family was in a conspiracy against me, because I saw a united front, uncle aunt, sister and grandmother, telling me I belong in a home, as something from which I needed legal protection, and much like the stalwart Bridges in the film, I am damaged, but I am not wrong. If I stop fighting, if I lay down my head and do not force Liberty to accept responsibility for bad acts, and some denial, as well, I'll be as burned as this besotted woman, who is evidently about to be torched, but I also want centers like Liberty eliminated. They waste your time and your money. You don't have to trust me on that, simply look at the evidence. Romney may have been a poor candidate, a shoddy conservative, but liberalism is just as eroded. How inflammatory do I have to be for the FBI to give me a file? Thrilling notion, isn't it?