Largesse in Bed

...like The Mount, it has numerous rooms and a bewildering array of windows.    --Sandra M Gilbert, The Whirling Princess

I can understand why Sheldon Novick tossed out Alice James and her morbidity as a project for my morbidity, and I was always morbid, a horrible child, if that satisfies the mood swing advocates that I am in self-denial. I throw tantrums-- but let not my narcissism stray too far afield. As fond as I am of Dr. Novick's generous spirit, I would become impatient with Alice as a subject, a charge that bedevils Susan Sontag's output. I would prefer not to dismiss a project solely for the hope of money, though if I knew the invalid left a diary I had forgotten it, and remain curious, even in my apparent indulgence for forgiving bad metaphysical quests. Liam's After.Life (09) falls into the same category and is interesting despite itself. Natasha had not yet had her fatal accident at the time of filming, as far as dates go, but for all the intents and purposes of Deacon as character, Liam might have already been cocooned in morbid grief. I want to resist the story line's literalism that our morticians may indeed be serial killers, and for an actor of Neeson's caliber, the plot  might have offered up a more textured ambiguity on Western origin myths, but the premise is indeed interesting, as I mull.

There are lesbians and there are women who grow immeasurably weary of men, and I suspect Sontag had little internal anchor, as opposed to a preference for women's breasts. Her son is still out there, and would probably disabuse my ruminations if I had any name recognition, but I am having trouble remembering why Sontag had a public mantle in the first place. I'd like to read her work on AIDS as metaphor.

I will not hold my breath for audience support on acquiring a copy. 

Ethereality of Age

Not studied enough in shoot and capture, I am not sure what Goyer should have done to create an edgier sense of disembodiment for Chatwin and Levieva to play off, but what he chose to do to set off the intertwined juxtapositions of the life death cycle make The Invisible interesting if also a terribly bad film. Nick might have been attending his own funeral as much as a graduation party his tiger mother orchestrated for the opening sequence, and Annie might have also just as easily been shot on that dam crosswalk spanning water, and was dying on it, the subsequent narrative merely a shield to mask the banality of a fiercely troubled Judy Bloom girl bleeding out.

Presupposing a blind arbiter that indifferently balances the scales, even lacking anthropomorphized attributes, is still a fallacious comfort food, to be consumed because we want to believe that the evil we do buckles under its own weight. Is justice in and of itself an independent force? We instinctually intuit that evil exists in such a manner, whether personified through a Satan, or turned into a morality tale where hell is a repetitive experience that the human soul forgets to remember. This is what happens when we are trapped into reliving our pain; it is what makes Annie vicious as much as it makes Nick a troubled poet whose metaphors nevertheless are meant to touch its audience with a nimble veracity. It is what returns each of these characters to a frail and dying humanity, only temporarily caught back in hand in conclusion.

I'll leave this there for now. Next post we shall return to the present, and The Brothers Rico, leaving the unpolished gristle, as well, that might be too sharp. I am not proud of the fact that savagery is one of the few consolations of the dowager. I am not the last in the Qing line, however. Only equally obscure.

Comparative Interstice

The performances of The Invisible cast are stronger than the lazy adaptation of the Mark Davis screenplay, and I hope if I do ever chance on the Wahl novel, that the author deploys more credible imagination toward metaphysical need. Limbo may possibly have some foundation within verifiable science, because mind and body do not always die in synchronization, and the modern upgrades on medieval allegories in regard to "the inbetween," interest me, whether it is The Lovely Bones, or Terry Gilliam's use of escapism when those who wish to cease engaging in complicity are tortured to death via the demands of extraction.

This post is being scheduled in the back archive because Wahl drew an introspective mention on my earlier account. The hyperlink interlock ongoing, hopefully to return with more detail later on.