Fossilized Valor

Looking For Mr. Goodbar has to be studied when it is passed around on the small screen, as there is little other way to view it in the present tense. I cannot compete with Ebert's pique at Richard Brooks. I was too young, and though my mother let me into a hedonistic and disturbingly subversive world as a tantrum throwing evil coming of age tyrant I was (Milkman and his passive mother in Morrison's daddy novel imprinted on my psyche in a bad way: I was too young for Solomon even though my rereading of the novel was immediate and intense as an upperclassman), she kept the gate closed on Judith Rossner, with good reason, as I am now haunted by Theresa Dunn, I knew Goodbar as a cultural marker in my younger days, but wasn't literate as to what these markers truly entailed, and now that I am, I have to go back and read the novel. Brooks may have distorted Rossner's story, but the masochistic elements remain, a rotten egg transliterating anger into bad behavior, even if Keaton does obscure Theresa's more destructive triggers: Did I self-consciously want to die when I defied my father and Jerry, my surrogate authority figure who abandoned me (!), according to my inner child (I knew he didn't but my solution to this emotional need to cleave to this Irish Shakespearean was to flee, and no, I am not over it, though he looks like Gandalf today and I am Roseanne Barr who cannot afford veneers) and moved into the inner city?

I almost succeeded. And it takes a great deal of courage to look as closely and boldly as Rossner did in her investigation. She opened the flood gates, with nary a closure in sight. For myself, I may have the courage, but was never a long form fiction writer. My story that fictionalizes my assault is stark, and highly prejudicial. A former farmer friend named Jack suggested "I tone it down," and did, but I let the main character have my anger, and run with it. My conceptualization of its arc is the most difficult literary motif I've ever envisioned.

Culture Shock Hair

I had to think for a moment to recall Eye of the Needle, which I knocked about in a paragraph when I first conceived of this project, but Sutherland seems to simply roll in and roll out of his parts after this war thriller. I can't think of any film I know of after that where he is not playing Liberal Conscience With Boof Shag; this includes Kienzle's whodunit. It is not that I do not respond to him as an actor; he projects comfort, sometimes balanced compassion, and when he dons the diabolical psychopath, audiences involve their feelings because they see the humane within the menace, but somehow it doesn't quite carry him as a clerical sleuth, not that this doesn't have its own conceits in solving mysteries. Derek Jacobi seems tailor made for his medieval monk. Alec Guinness has Father Brown, which also served him in being George Smiley better than anyone else, but Sutherland doesn't quite carry the dichotomy of the humanist holy man about him, and this is the first problem with the film; it has a subtext that the movie doesn't quite flesh out in the fact that our protagonist is weary with obedience. I am not objecting to this weariness in and of itself, but it drags on the narrative that propels the movie, instead of serving it. Koesler's platonic relationship with the journalist Pat Lennon, which I fully understand is integrated with Kienzle's personal experience of breaking his vows, is a loose strand left to hang, rather than engaging the viewer.

Incest between father and daughter is the primary trigger for the serial killing spree that opens with a nun about to go secular. I am not quite clear how Koesler works out the killer's twisted logic towards the climax, but the killer, Javison, assigns blame for not being stopped, and this is the juxtaposition that interests me about the film. It handles nearly the same problem as Shanley's Doubt, about whether evil is subsumed in the very institution that tries to torture it out of our flesh, if possible, handles it poorly, with all the thud of Medea's deus ex machina; my sensibility is that of implicit seepage.

See the last section on good and evil acts on this Vatican Catechism page:

The issue of moral guilt is doled out like so many eucharist wafers. Of course Javison is a monster, much like my mother's second husband, (and I give credit here to my then parish in Chester for helping me survive Stuart Lone, who I hope is dead, or will die as painfully as he treated my family) but his daughter's school is guilty, for not believing the girl about the abuse. Durning's staunch pastor is guilty, even Koesler has to carry that balance between penitent and pain that simply decelerates into slaughter.

Medical models, creating their own apologia for the mechanisms of psychopathy, do not really resolve the capacity for human anguish, anymore than the silence of bishops, for the sake of preserving the institution. Sound familiar?