The lost girl who doesn’t drink, take drugs, swear, put out, or shoplift must be furious at nothing so much as her own righteousness. Antigone, Antigone, it’s your story we Romantics fear most. Carved on the wooden counter inside the ticket booth: “Drug Free Staff.” And just below: “Ha! Yeah, Right.”
What I learn about dad vs. daughter: even if he buys a buff-gray beach house on the Georgia shore in which Hannah Montana might languish to her heart’s content, he must still compete against some local douche in cargo shorts who has applied to, and is waiting to hear from, “Columbia” (read: NYU). But Kinnear plays his ace: lung cancer—the real, ashen-faced, doorjamb-sagging-against, two-day-stubble-sporting article. He ascends, by dying, from the hospice of her adoration to pure superego, a ray of light through the stained-glass window he built for the church where at his funeral she finally plays the song he wrote for her hands. She’s a virtuoso, a fact proven more, not less, by the insistence with which the camera cuts from deft fingers to concentrating face. Fingers, face, fingers, face. “The cut, or interstice, between two series of images,” says Deleuze, “no longer forms part of either of the two series: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non-commensurable relations between images.” A “pure locus of the possible”—we play, and are played. A piano is a nervous system as surely as drums are lungs.
Water is the element. Baby sea turtles, run. The verge of tears. The douche, the sluice, the dad who though his eye watches blazing from all the sky may be disobeyed anytime it rains, and all night long. Spring-sick. The pear blossoms drift in the gutters like someone dumped out the reservoir of an industrial three-hole punch.
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