Emancipation of the Flesh

"What do I have to do?"--Franka Potente

What can be added to Ebert's review of Run Lola Run is Tykwer's captures of German physiognomy is subversively disturbing, and his Berlin of 20 odd years ago unpleasant, irregardless of meta insular playfulness. Post Nazi Germans cast here look like African albino marionettes. Phew. Holding one's nose, the father's relation to the mistress has the same torpor as any over familiar relation. In Unfaithful, we're drawn into a titillating, irresistible compulsion which in turn leads to irresistible brutality. This is the way cinema dishes it up. No one is immune these days to the hypersexuality of augmentation. The reality is anything but, barring those rare moments of young love.

I have hinted at my affairs, but censored myself out of caution as well as delicacy. I was caught once and the ex-wife was civil, but I prefer not to go through it again. Next to my fabled dog fight with Linda Dezenski, that conversation, rippling from Montreal to my ghetto, is the searing sin of muted conscience, but it was the sin of relatively inconvenient fluids and farcical flopping about. I am not much for bragging with enthusiasm category, and maybe it is sad, too old, vaginally drying out now, for any real hormonal productive liberation to find its way back to the future, and the deceased Frank Versanti's weight was repugnant. He and I couldn't have intercourse, didn't, but his body was a graphic horror novel writing itself. I'd be facetious, tongue in check, and aim a barb at traumatic conversions, but naked women provide their own inhibited repulsions-- and yet, our ability to desire perfect form and design did not start with cinema.
A simple philosophical syllogism intimates a proof for God in this way: if we can conceive the possibility of its existence, then it can exist, ergo, perfection, since we conceive of it, is possible. We fail. Bendrix's sex life too, is merely the tension between the illusive security and comfort of the hearth being disrupted in the analytical British attitude toward a happy shag and the frustrations of obsession: Greene has as much an unerring way with protagonists who have their view blocked by possession, as much as I do with the masochism of longing: I literally have no idea why meeting a Shakespearean named Jerry McGuire when I was a 19 year old entering freshman of English literature in my father's living room, why this coincidence was so overpowering I fucked myself royally. I do not know. There were other instructors, but under Jerry's awning I was a wildly rotating dwarf star who fell very badly for the Italian antithesis of the angry veteran of Suny. Ashes to ashes, god's joke was to give me a buffoon as a stand in who in part let himself die because my contempt made a genuine bond of affection impossible. Unfaithful, locks Gere in to something that ultimately will destroy the marriage he committed murder to reset, and if I take the night of the Munich attack, being streamed live, as an indicator of the corrosion of monoculture, the only difference between a bus stop in Germany after hours and the bus stop at Darby, in my wheelchair, is cleanliness, the lack of drunk black hustlers perceived as a threat.

Corrosive Postures

"It becomes just what it should not be, the story of an escape."

Roger Ebert should have never appeared on television nor gained the international recognition he did, nor made his saliva gland cancer a documentary special. He debased his critical acuity by becoming a buffoon, even if this is in part my resentment at my own lack of recognition, it is still more than that, because one thing that is gone forever, outside of the studio make-up room, is public deportment-- and I hear at least 10,000 bloggers stampede on my skull. "What about you?" My "public behavior," which would lead to Google's sanction if I had the money or the acumen for advertisement, is merely symptomatic of the disease: We only look "our best," to use fat man's phrase, in front of the camera.

Heaven surprised me because I knew nothing about it; had I seen it before I saw Babel perhaps Inarritu would not have traumatized me so forcefully, despite the fact that I cannot give the man his leftist victory, leaving it at that-- which is not to imply I want to argue against his movie-- far from it. Every director needs to care as much, even with lighter fare. 

The question, unresolved, is whether Tykwer cares as much as Alejandro, and I am absolutely undecided, because the escape to which Ebert refers may be one of forgiving grace, but it also may be one of consequence. The opening with Blanchett engaging in her violence made me think yet another political thriller along the lines of The French Connection, and I was entirely unprepared for the fact that it transforms into a secular Christian allegory with a touch of genocidal overtures to its lighting and costume. A hardened ideologue would not be imbued with Blanchett's vengeful remorse.