JONAH HEX

Today the marquee announced six new titles: made-up movies, on closer inspection, ready to play in the world of some other movie now shooting a scene for which our theater serves as set. What should one feel? I was neither jealous nor thrilled nor betrayed. I felt that same small but exquisite displacement that occurred the first time I saw a rock song I knew from the radio parsed and printed on a piece of sheet music. And thought, oh God, it can see me, as plainly as I can see it. I’d thought the gasket airtight, but here was recognition rushing back at me like chill air from those AC vents in my car, which I always arrange to blow directly in my face.

Not one but two people have expressed dismay, to me, how handsome actor Josh Brolin could be made to play disfigured super-cowboy Jonah Hex. But of course: an Aquarius: “likes change for its own sake,” “dislikes being pinned down,” “can be perverse and unpredictable.” The cursed Confederate vet with the cow-catcher mouth wanders the frontier wreaking objectless vengeance until it turns out his nemesis is still alive and planning to use an ironclad ship to launch a terrorist attack—using Eli Whitney-designed warheads—on half-built centennial Washington D.C. In dreams Hex stalks a red-earth stage. Rescued from near-death by the Crow tribe, he wields a tomahawk and can interrogate the dead by touching their corpses—they spring to life and snitch. When Odysseus finds the shade of Achilles, the greatest of heroes says that for all the good his glory does him he’d change places in an instant with any slave. To be alive, to feel one’s stomach-lining ache after a long sleep. I wonder: Do we believe him?

The supporters: Megan Fox, and the uncredited guy who mists her bosom with a spray bottle between takes. Malkovich the villain. The man’s played Valmont, Ripley, Charlus—a gallery of seductive dissemblers. He must be what they call a good listener. Aidan Quinn as Ulysses Grant. Whoever has my copy of Blood Meridian, I need it back. Science question: how come the man in the moon is always right side up? Metaphysical question: how the fuck is there a man in the moon?