COP OUT

I love irony. A two-for-one deal, and in this economy. The best game of peekaboo is the one in which you peek through your fingers even during the hiding part, the better to savor your opponent’s appropriate consternation at your disappearance. And then to watch, also, once you are revealed, his perfect relief. Poison is on the soundtrack: “Every cowboy sings a sad, sad song”—it’s that second “sad,” the one that fills out the meter, that calls everything into question. The casual misogyny, affectless violence, and recycled one-liners of this seeming tired black-cop/white-cop buddy movie should not distract us from the presence of Authority that mounds up such residue to obfuscate its immanence. Never turn your back on an adjective. Could you have an ironic dream?

We know Bruce Willis is an old white guy because nothing that happens is his fault. He was the hero who crossed into my nightmares, to save me. Of course he isn’t “dead all along” in The Sixth Sense. He is, rather, a therapist of such skill that, the therapy over, it is as if he had simply never existed. You’ve forgotten those who aided you the most, if aid you they did.

Tracy Morgan is the analysand par excellence—“When the patient is at his most regressed in the transference he is like a baby who can talk” (Donald Meltzer). And Jason Lee, from Alvin, has turned evil, and the drug dealer from Weeds plays a drug dealer. He’s buttoning his top button for a living, I guess. “No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn,” the Williamsburg Bridge, a Q stop, Spumoni Gardens. Though I sincerely doubt, Kevin Pollak, that a Brooklyn cop would go there and not order the square.