Based on a video game. Whose genre’s ontology has it that one purchases a System on which to play a game that always gives you the option to “Continue.” But can you recall the far different structure of the early, brutal arcade: a quarter for three lives. This says more—said more, to a ten-year-old—than just Time is Money, or Three Strikes You’re Out. Rather, it narrows experience to the fundaments of sacrifice and ritual, to the unforgiving arrangement by which we offer payment for the chance—a chance we’ll fail to realize—to coincide exactly with our own Being.
Gyllenhaal’s a beautiful guy: liquid brown eyes, lively monkey-face. I’m sure I used to dislike him but who can remember why. The ark he’s raiding, the stone he’s romancing is that nice young lady who played Io in Clash of the Titans. At the peak of their seduction she gives him a snakey kiss, all upper lip over his lips. She wants his dagger, y’know? Of course a cock is outside of time, but can it turn time back? Their courtship gets erased, he has to start from scratch, though wiser: he hands it over straight off.
Invasion under false pretext, a running WMD reference—oh, right: Persia. And all the while we sit here, oil spills into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s ill-drilled hole. When the Prince activates the special dagger the film runs backward, but the video that shows the undersea oil leak won’t rewind—the gunk blowing out in a tireless roaring plume is the image of time itself, pressurized force desperate to flow ever faster, jostling madly through its fissure, and that’s exactly how it feels in us, it rips through us from the deep cavern of the past and dissipates into, even as it befouls, those vast slack waters called the future.
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