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The decision to cast Pam Anderson as Beth Davenport the sister of a murder victim breaks down the fourth wall. Anderson’s supposedly stolen marriage video in which she’s shown avariciously fellating Tommy Lee, during their honeymoon (1998) augured in the era of reality television. "The Celebrity Wives of Deep Throat" should have been the title of the pirated video which rivals Chloe Sevigny’s memorable performance in Brown Bunny. But Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun which stars Liam Neeson in the role popularized by Leslie Nielsen is "surreality reality TV" in film form. Un Chien Andalou (1929) challenged the conventions of cinema when a razor cut an eyeball. Here the films Top Gun literally punches open the screen after he’s also bent apart the film’s credit sequence. The verbal pyroteomics derive from another master of surrealism Groucho Marx. When Pam Anderson is asked “did you see LA?” she blithely says she’s an alumnus (of UCLA). It’s all up hill, down hill and sideways from there.
"Even a broken clock is right twice a day," reads the old saw. But there are brief remissions where time seems to slow down and you don’t feel like a rat on treadmill. Quotidian reality is a double whammy. You're getting nowhere with a built in loss factor. In fact if you are loss averse life isn’t for you. But oases can be found in the most unexpected places. Go to one of those malls in the middle of nowhere and enter the CVS whose stores are made from a template, all with similar footprints. Your past melds with the present and suddenly you are not living in the wreckage of your future. Whoever thought you’d quote Eliot in a real wasteland? "Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future..." (Burnt Norton) The chains that link are the same ones that bind.
Within the mythology created by American Film, beaufiful young women are attracted to guys who flirt with danger. James Dean was the prototype and Rebel Without a Cause, the film. Life mirrored art since Dean himself met an early and tragic end in a car crash. One could hardly describe the current administration as swashbuckling thought they certainly flirt with danger, DJT is a little like Popeye flexing his muscles into rubber bands that snap right back in his face. Some poker players insouciantly up the ante and get wiped out. But is China actually the poker-faced dealer in the current tariff wars. Remember there’s an Adrenalin high to gambling, but when all is said and done, the house is the winner. (Edit note: could there be any better name for a Las Vegas mogul than Steve Wynn?)
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| Henri Bergson |
Does the past seem closer today than it did 10 years ago? Is the sense of pastness inversely proportional to the length of time that’s transpired from the incident or event being remembered? Do you have trouble remembering what you did, what you ate and who you saw yesterday while it feels you have just gotten off the phone with a lost love fifty years back? Remember the old wooden booth with the black rotary pay phones? You’d can almost hear the coins clink as they drop, first a dime for 3 minutes, then a quarter, until suddenly you were in the orbit of the cell? How to name this property of time?
James Gunn's Superman (David Corenswet) is the ultimate immigrant--a visitor from another planet. Like many illegal immigrants, he's forced to veil his identity.The resultant disguise is an ingenious way of looking at one of comic book history's famous doppelgängers, Clark Kent. Gunn's Superman is an almost too obvious political allegory with Boravia (Russia) and Jarhanpur (Ukraine) in a conflict engineered by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). But it's the virtual reality graphics that tell the story. Superman is a computer game in a surrealist Dali landscape. Note Metamorpho's floating head. Is this hyperactive Krypto, Un Chien Andalou (1929)? In his latest iteration, Superman is in danger of losing his DACA status until the Justice Gang, The Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Terrific Man Ed Gathegi) and Hawkgirl (Isabella Merced) intervene. Dream on. (edit note: what constitutes the modernity of the movie is not the advanced computer simulations, rather the ambivalence of the relation between Clark and Lois).
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| Russel Vought |
The movie Zone of Interest epitomizes being in a bubble. Can people live a normal existence in the face of atrocity. Day after day the pillars of democracy have fallen. Rome’s ruins exude the sublimity of Tintern Abby. You marvel at the emotion without remembering the title of a famous tomeThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Trump announces dicta willy nilly. No president has ever done x y or z and there is no legal precedent. In an unprecedented act Ghislaine Maxwell, a sex offender, is transferred to a minimum security prison. “The unified executive” trumpeted by Russell Vought, is the ideology (Project 2025). In the meanwhile you find yourself commuting from one biosphere, the Upper East Side to another East Hampton with no thought of the Gilgo Beach murders and the bodies of tortured prostitutes buried by Rex Heuermann along Route 110 in Manorville, linking the LIE with Route 27. Compartmentalization facilitates survival and murder.
Old standbys are like people. You go back to them thinking you will retrieve the past but they have aged too. Have you ever seen someone who looks vaguely familiar? You can’t place them until the face emerges from the flesh. The next time you recognize Tom or Julie right away. The preconception established in memory trumps the realities of the present. You are back there. It’s not the Proustian Madeleine with its mesmerizing smell rather a blast from the past.
