Also, while you watch please cast your mind to that scene in Miller’s Crossing.

Misty felt that life was a battle. You had to fight and think. You had to hack your way through life with your intelligence as a machete cutting down what obstacles you could. You were born knowing nothing: you had to fight for what you knew.

- from Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time

I’m amused that nobody seems at all to hear the voiceover commenting on manufactured vs. organic intrigue. I think that says it all about what passes for style these days, doesn’t it.

(via Beach Black)

The point is, I saw two popcorn movies this past weekend. Big end-of-summer jams, District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. The ham fist of that excruciatingly inept alien allegory knocked me into some hard existential mourning. I walked out around 20 minutes in, waited for my family in the lobby. It failed not only because it was obviously written by a mediocre mind, but it had an agenda. It had the pretense of an “indie” production when it was no such thing at all. It wanted to make some point, except the only point I could see was that the capacity for human cruelty is so heartbreaking and endemic, bring on the exterminators. That’s cute, the whole apartheid/xenophobia angle, but the fact remains that no aliens have yet come, and it is just us, mostly without grace, blindly righteous and blithely ruthless. What a bummer.

I prefer the universes Tarantino creates. His characters are not without brutality, but they have grace. And I do mean that in the theological sense. I think maybe the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Miss Alabama Whirley do a fine job of showing you what I mean. I could not count how many times I’ve watched this film. When I think of being in love, of beauty in the world in spite of…, I think of this right here:

I mean who, with any taste at all, does not share this thing?

Sellers was the king of self-erasure.  He would become entirely who he was directed to be for his audience.  When the audience was not sufficiently large enough–say, family, women, his children, friends–he would feel he was no one, nothing, someone with out self.  But that was what he wished was true, what he wanted to be true.  He wanted to be tragic, misunderstood, hollow so when you tried to aim your finger at the monster, there was nothing.  Just shadow.

He hated himself.  So he inhabited others. 

He said, “Me?  There is no me.”  Here, you can see him confess this himself.  To Kermit the Frog.  In a Viking’s helmet.  It’s the truest thing he’s ever imagined so he tells it to a puppet.  Even the puppet wants to change the subject.

Follow that public confession with Richard the III’s soliloquy accompanied by musically tuned chickens, however, and top it off with “Shave and a Haircut”? Well that is just genius.  The liminal gray space between comedy and tragedy, the truest of the true. So there’s a conflict of interest here, isn’t there? “It’s all part of life’s rich pageantry,” isn’t it?

I wonder how much of it is, about the self.  When he was swaying between lucid and senile moments just before his death, he often would confuse himself with Chase.  He fought to make that film, he loved it fiercely, it was like his epitaph.  One whose name was writ in water, yet again.

An Iranian woman in support of Mousavi (more here). It reminds me of the painting which has become stock imagery in my brain when facing struggle. Also, it’s on the cover of a Melvin’s record.