Carley and I see the movie about surviving a post-apocalyptic wasteland of killer gangs and paltry resources and afterwards conduct a seemingly unrelated conversation about New York real estate.
The plot is: We Love Books! And in the plot the man with restless lips (Denzel) and that gait that made Glory hurt carries a book, the crisp milk of the bound actual, to Silicon Valley, losing the book along the way but keeping the book on tape within him, reading it later through his battered lips into the record to be kept in a museum (Alcatraz). And then the girl character leaves the museum-prison or prison-museum wearing fatigue pants (cataclysm chic) and an iPod that’s somehow wearing her.
A movie not from but of the book. And yet, a movie to its core. Whose strange project is always to say, this is what we mourn, in this case the earth nearly emptied of our stuff. So build a set, hire extras, screw a dreary filter on the lens. Together they embody the mourned thing. Then the star—our radically particularized proxy—takes a gun or sword to kill the loss over and over, while the cameras roll. Not, then, to mourn, but to slay mourning, to be rid of it, to be released—if a bit frightened that in one’s own time the same merciless abbreviation will be applied.
The promise of bed, the pillow. At my age one frankly understands what it is to close one’s eyes and go to the happy place.
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