I’m on a bit of a bender myself. Not to lose myself, anymore—that’s trickier these days—but to keep my nerves in shape. My friend Neil’s story about tripping: a guy they meet asks “Do you want to see me spit fire?” “Are you joking?—Fuck yeah!” I feel a similar luck in taking in the theatrical version of what some cynic clearly developed as content for mobile phones. Director Shyamalan fills his cheeks with the lighter fluid of Failure and breathes out a radiant plume of Waste.
Based on a cartoon called Avatar, with Matrix-paced fighting and Lord of the Rings sets dressed in a free-floating orientalism—all tai chi and persecuted Tibetan monks. The Fire Nation—fossil-fuel types—step to the kid whose head tattoo is an arrow pointing straight down at himself all the time. C’mon, you know what that’s like. Feelings always arise when on the brink of a dangerous adventure the sidekick or potential love interest insists: “I’m going with you.” It’s nice to have company, but it also means bringing along a witness whose presence coerces courage, who might not get how disgrace lets the world end so that it may crucially re-begin. Which in retrospect looks heroic, the same way one must re-project, in one’s mind’s eye, on the car ride home, the entirety of The Sixth Sense.
If 2012 really is the apocalypse, at least we’re in the home stretch. So why all this fuss, this late in the game, to dissolve the dimension-bound screen? Luckily the frame’s built strong, legacy of a doomed but prescient age. They knew: sacrifice is the root of all culture because one thing stands in for another. So to maintain the screen is a final gambit to see its denizens taken, when the taking-time draws nigh, in our place. What would Jesus watch? Exactly: Working Girl and A Few Good Men. On Lifetime and Spike TV.
No comments:
Post a Comment