American Paladin, a closer look

"He is a man who cannot be rejected."-- Charlie Rose

Not having a phone is a rather radical act of self-assurance for Dinklage's  Finbar, an ascendant insularity that really isn't punctuated by the insistent overtures of the Cuban food vendor, and it is in this sense that I'd argue that McCarthy reverses the polarity of the pro-forma progressive paradigm of The Station Agent into something more unwittingly tragic, not that McCarthy denies Dinklage a human range. Much like Garcia's deployment of the dwarf actor in Things, both these directors go against the theatrical absurdity of type, and Finbar is a person, whom, according to interpretation, is yanked out of his shell by the disruptions of the fallible beings around him, but what do we know at the end of the day, about the train aficionado, aside from the fixation repressed persons without other outlets develop for objects of technological condensation?

We know he had an implied intimacy with the deceased Henry, through affinity and shared interest. We know he's had sex, this through Joe's inquiry, and McCarthy's adept poke in the eye of tiresome ambulatory curiosity, we see a regressive boyhood within the adult whose interior rage dares a suicide but pulls back. We see him chastened into empathy for Clarkson as the inconsolable mother who uses her grief for the loss of her son to feed off Finbar's stoicism; no needy cripple here, only selfish ambulatory grifters, and though McCarthy happily resolves his film into the usual bromides of acceptance within loss while life still moves forward, even chilling with beers on the porch, that is about it. The jester lets down his shield, not performing on demand for the court, as was superimposed on viewers for most of the 20th century. Dwarfs were macabre signatures, from the wizard of oz through the Michael Dunn of Porter's Ship of Fools. Of course, the dwarf in Porter's character study fills the role of the chorus, and is allowed to be a mature persona too wise in the folly of life, but he is still a device, which is exactly what Dinklage remains in McCarthy's world of what's possible: the form of the shrunken human body is a mask, a mask to disguise, cover hideousness that may hide an ideally brutalized heart, in one of Peter Laurie's less typecast roles, straight through Mickey Rourke picking up the time honored conceit in Johnny Handsome.

Dinklage, much like Garcia's Albert, is actually more relevatory in Death at a Funeral as the hyped up prostitute for the secretly gay family man, conveying more in the stereotypical fetish than he does attempting to fully flesh out McCarthy's libertarian, somewhat self-hating freak.

Shoestring budget or not, Clarkson does a disservice to the taxing culture of mental illness, waltzing down the hospital corridor in scrubs, a my bad smile on her face after being the pill popping drama queen. Attempted suicides rolling back the emotional pain which reverberates on all those around them doesn't lend itself to that level of resolution.

Diving Bells

"You aren't welfare trash. You have your writing. You're intelligent." --Frank, whose unspeakable crime was attempting to make spastic_dowager his wife.

I cannot handle it when I visit Frank in his unit. He is not in a nursing home, but he lives within the community in name only. His studio looks like a hospital ward in precisely the relation that my studio looks like a train depot. He lies in a hospital bed surrounded by steel frames, pulleys, life alert buttons, and I did not enjoy anal sex on the end of his fist; he admired the lubricated intensity of my climax, however, and this, our creation of a third gender, one that I destroyed in horror, with the realization that the lead car was about to flatten me, has nothing on the failed queer intimacy between John Marcher and May Bartram. I have interacted with some of these scholars Tate refers to for years, and the best they can do is assert that homoerotic impetus subverts traditional Victorian bonds, and remain fixated there.

I think there is more to it than that, whatever the erosion of lesbianism's epistemological force, as if there is truly an erasure of the value of the breast as a container because same gender attraction to her own vessel was eradicated via the rise of Semitic monotheism. Literary scholars sometimes forget to stop making love and assuaging each other's ego. There is a third way into James that doesn't necessarily involve his orientation, whether he actively ejaculated into it, or not.

Simulation, and I think this is what has keep me fixated to the mastery of James, beyond my dead academic advisor giving me a lifelong quest, or my now very pained sexual security, which must, after all, have some bisexual proclivity, since I kept my distance from Alexandra but was impacted by the knowledge of her absence upon her decease, or my cling to Michael's memory itself. My own little plot for a divorced professor with two children, his younger daughter named for Emily, of course. I was there for his happiness when she was born, but this is simulation, just as Frank and I, had I married him,would have been an imitation of viability as husband and wife, and yet I am not finally surrendering, in the classical right wing trigger dynamic, to confess to self sanctified faggots that I am truly one of you, and that my depressive episode with Linda was a near lethal dose of gay panic and wallowing in maudlin strings, I loved her as an imprint of how I saw myself in her psychopathy, though I believed this for a number of years after our near deadly altercation with each other, my obsessively referenced supervisor. I believed that her conduct must have cracked me because I am a repressed switch hitter, but this is an error, at least in terms of self-realization, though I share many of her attributes: cold, analytical, lacking in empathy unless it is an extraordinary tragedy, like Newtown. She is a praying mantis in physique, which I would have preferred over my florid cellulose, but those are genetics.

Henry James penetrates the horror of simulated intimacy, even while Marcher acknowledges how this diminishes us in its very grasp, makes us perfect asses. I did not work at all Saturday, but I have the data I need to reconstruct my political representative contacts, as I need to get away from the dying doctor transvestite, before my anger at this figure overcomes my developmental condition in a miraculous display of strength; this is why I visited Frank, to spew the poison of Erik von Schmetterling out of my mouth.