Thick Middle

"You saw me standing alone."-- Blue Moon

Let us go back, on a shoestring budget comparable to what the unfortunate Victor Garber deals with on Frequency, sure enough he titillated us more as Garner's father on Alias, even if that series was too heavily dosed by Dan Brown's badly deployed medieval fantasy, to remember that The Seventh Sign is a tasteless Demi Moore vehicle, exploiting an actor with Downs Syndrome-- even I shall concede Mongoloid is a harsh designation, exactly why I deign to recall it to you-- as an intoning seer of doom. But did the mentally retarded actor himself have the cognition to realize he was being stereotyped as a harbinger of the Apocalypse? 
This is how the casting scouts for The Exorcist wanted to use me and others when they found us at Rusk Institute. I would have been that much less destitute in the contemporary century had I stood up to the case management staff and at least met with the production crew on its fishing expedition, before the movie made such an indelible impact that it fatally palled the decade. The movie was one of the first I transfixed myself for on whatever computer, through a streaming provider, Prime, I believe, years ago, and would have no difficulty streaming it again. I believe my generation was cursed by the film, by the novel which preceded the film, by David Foster Wallace superimposing the film in his best Oblivion short story before David Foster Wallace hung himself leaving his sorry ass to rock the noose. Didn't he bother to consider what his wife would experience upon discovering his body? We'll let this sincere testament of dread answer for why I have kept my distance from the Fox revival, not a prequel, nor a sequel, but an offshoot. Though I am unforgiving of actors in general, Geena Davis (phew) is not a lead who ever really held my interest, even giving birth to larva in her Jeff Goldblum nightmare. But I will say I admire that this particular subset of horror, as a genre, tries valiantly to take evil seriously, as Wallace does, and I do too, which is why Wallace ended badly, and you can have no doubt I'm still shrieking, mindful of the line in the sand. I'm not the Virginia Tech Asian, but my broken life form nudges closer to that shooter's break, as Maigret would have put it, on a daily basis. I could use Callum's absorption technique for Horse. The anus is faster than the stomach. Real torture, such as we find in Lear, or the MGM version of Samson, makes most viewers flinch, so horror is usually married to camp, to ensure the audience has its shields. The lupine variety which subverts our expectations best, in a playful, but ruthlessly curt fashion, is An American Werewolf in London. I have not seen it in a long time, but its beat, its tracks, its satire, and its sad sharp shooting conclusion, makes us forgive Hollywood every so often. Naughton doesn't seem to have aged well.

Corman's Austerity Complex

Rebecca is a grim anatomy of wifehood. -- Nina Auerbach

What conceits does Ray Milland bring to bear on patriarchal assurance? An underlying unease, doubt, and a splintering breakage as doom closes in or threatens to overtake him. He sacrifices the blond goddess in much the same way Jon Avnet seems to be having a dialectical argument with himself over the torture and asphyxiation of Asian women. Avnet needs to cease directing films; his repugnance is different in kind from the cult affections we reserve for Roger Corman. Why do we harbor them? Corman knew how to use the anxiety of our mastery, unlike Nita Farahany, who believes we can regulate our genomic modifications to ourselves. Now now. Dr. Farahany holds her own with the boys and their age old junk swagger, knows her science, and can unravel a red herring, or two, but if we accept the science of Carbon 14 dating and other empirical measures of time, life on Earth is roughly a billion years into existence, and may have died and started again under many big bangs and impactions, not to imitate Liu Xing, so it may not be all that precious in evolutionary terms, but any species ought to be cautious over Utopian manipulation.

Corman takes Milland on jump cuts that Jeff Goldblum would not dream of in remakes of old classics, (though women risk it all for the tight wad and the naughty Jewish lad gone astray for nearly the same reason) and I think it would be difficult for any madman to gouge out his own eyes, but X is the cracker jack at the dawn of medical model hygiene as a police state, and anticipates our own dismantling through magnetic resonance imagining, at least through indirection.

The dilemma for radical libertarianism is that as a philosophy it is already and quite fatally doomed. Google may be a quite playful giant, and it has allowed me to skirt the edges of some not so trollish sentiments. Amazon is just a huge retailer that gets its innovations and conveniences down, though how good it is for complex thinkers is an open question. NSA perishes with American power, regardless of what future interest builds on its technical prowess, but Mitchell's world of corporate holocaust down to the last resort is already here, and it will take over, regardless of Snowden, or the fact that Bradley Manning is an enemy of state because he wants a vagina.