SHUTTER ISLAND

I’m finally reading The Basketball Diaries, and here’s Leo who’s played Carroll (Jim, not Lewis) and Rimbaud, too—what about him once screamed “hot little visionary”? Those wanton cheeks? That apple-shaped head, soft shoulders, intense eyes with a speck of neither anxiety nor evasiveness but out-and-out fear? It was in Heath Ledger, too, but he took too long to set it free and it overwhelmed him too fast. Leo the survivor. The widow Ledger is in this thing, doing a solid crazy. Spoiler alert: denial is a sieve, and it’s raining through. What we push down subterranean chutes out into nature rises up malevolent wearing the rictus of our sin. Birnam Wood, the Witches. There’s a reference, as in The Wolfman, to the practice of submerging the criminally insane in ice water. Recall that ice water, borne beyond bearing, burns like love. Delia watches half the show through peekaboo fingers. Why are movies so violent? Look around. We should wear our own R rating, a big red R on every shirt. The Wolfman was rated R for quote Bloody Violence Horror and Gore. One cannot dispute that fortune has smiled on Leo. Has it made him guilty? Sensitized him into a depth over which he teeters? I wonder, if I listened hard enough, if I could hear the movies playing in the other theaters. What detail we take in: it storms plausibly in our dreams. The multitudinous seas incarnadine. “You are the man that ruined the world.” The H-bomb century, the Dachau century. The self portrait stashed in the closet is a metaphor not for depravity’s true effect but to register confusion at how we can do terrible stuff all day and still not show it all that much. Gandhi and the knight from The Seventh Seal are in cahoots. I’ve never seen such beautiful cliffs. Bluffs. Beautiful blue rain—god bless the camera machine and its flapping aperture. Shutter Island is where we live.