The Vertigo of Popeye Doyle

This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all in terror, seemed a city taken by storm.-- Thomas Carlyle, The Death of Louis XV

Alain Delon's stagger in his take on the procedural, Frank Riva, is meant to echo the chic swagger of youthful virility. His sang froid serving to explain why every woman in six hours worth of video forgives his abandonment of them is the tired apologia of European cinema. His nemesis, Jacques Perrin, has an interesting ambidextrous hovering over the playing field for 90 minutes,  only then to devolve Xavier into a monotone of unipolar spite which is too strident to hold any further viewing interest, but the series plays Gene Hackman on his deathbed, still playing the French Connection on an intravenous line. People who should be dead relics are only playing possum, and everyone is compromised in some way, caught in the scars which last lifetimes, well into a fourth generation. Maxime Loggia takes quite a beating, and then, in an anachronistic absurdity, gets thrown out of his ruthless uncle's jet. 

But why do French dramatists feel beholden to a film, nearly a half century old, where American cowboys made a dent but never got their man? Is this something European weariness is projecting? It's own antiquity? In Nicolas Le Floch it is a dynamic antiquity, a little too smooth, but not incorrect in the assertion that this is where the modern world begins, in the compassionate savagery of the Enlightenment, just as Rai gets the pathos in De Luca just right: This is my Italy, the post Mussolini world that created my twilight, my tenement demise in a provincial backwater created and landscaped by Quakers, their utopia little more than nigger bling. It is not a block, as per twitter's sugared enthusiasm, only a cripple's death, buffeted by one form of brutality after another. 

Stardust Once Removed

The woman weighs no more than a child. She has a smell. My mother fights it continually; bathing her, changing her sheets, carrying her to the bathroom so the smell can be contained and flushed away. --Jayne Anne Phillips, "Home"

I am not sure why Jerry recommended that I read Phillips. I remember nearly next to nothing about her collection "Black Tickets," but I consumed it as if attempting copulation with the recommendation as a sort of compensation, not being able to abase myself over the penis of the master. I wrote Phillips a poorly expressed letter from the inner city. Why? I wanted to feed off her confidence, imitate her vigorous sexual skills, if possible. I cut her picture out of a Poets & Writers article and published a poem about the fantasy of her competitive literary companionship in Metis, a local Jersey Xerox and staple effort. Admiration, as I have written, can be a dangerous attribute to those with low self-esteem.

Never heard from her, and she doesn't have the sustaining power needed for her novels. Her arc has passed its zenith, but she is at Rutgers, her look suggestive, even conspiratorial, exciting only insofar as if I could reach out and penetrate her shield, then I get to hold onto how Jerry at least enabled me to stay alive. I have weighed it once again, contacting her, in the time it has taken me to write this post, but I haven't read her work in years, and her voice, somewhat ponderous, bowed perhaps by an agrarian weight, has been surpassed; she does represent a sexual charge, not for herself necessarily, but the eroticism is inescapable: "I should have been Jayne Anne Phillips and I am not. I am a broken and pathetic--" a whine a whine. Moth to the flame, but moths are silent, not particularly aggressive and I did not enjoy her later novel Machine Dreams. Again, what is it I would want from her? What could her faded reputation offer me, scarred on so many levels as I am? What could Dr. Phillips heal that Bowie's predation in The Hunger offers in the recognition of insatiable appetite?

When I first saw this film the pace of Bowie's spectacular disintegration made an indelible impact, and offered exactly the kind of dangerous sexual foreplay I have always wanted with a man, one that impinges on the trauma of violation, with the elegance of cool. A local literary instructor, whose name escapes me for the moment, said on Fresh Air that vampirism is the most overused literary conceit. I agree with her, except for where it turns in interesting ways. The Hunger is a precursor to the terror we feel about being consumed, wasted from the inside out by viral flavors of the season: avian influenza, AIDS, ebola, and that wasting, in turn, make us focus on that one sole desire, which is the very damnation of its heat. It still contains something of the romantic in Gothic horror, and the danger of seduction that goes too far, lesbian or otherwise,  but it is also a precursor film to the rise of  retro-fitted zombie genres, like 28 Days Later, 30 Days of Night.

As a selfish outreach, I regret trying to make a connection with Phillips, but perhaps not the poem which is a preserved scrapbook tribute of a sort, saying, in effect, I wanted to be pretty like you, to have accomplished like you, to share gratifications which you seem to convey are in the realm of your experience. I toyed with viewing the film again on Saturday evening, but senile aunts, spoiled felines mewing, the usual things of poverty in tandem with broken bodies making nothing ever go right. 

Bad day, but found an unexpected network opportunity, if a summary skim of my post intensity doesn't kill it.