SALT

Alex must’ve given us a quality joint, since the name of the candy we bought is making me smile. “Spree”—we’re on one. And Carley keeps telling me how much sodium chloride she’s sprinkled on the popcorn, though of course she’s using its common name, and finally I’m like, “Are you fucking with me?” And she: “What are you talking about.” And me: “Salt! Salt! Salt!” We’ve been following the Angelina Jolie cover stories, and a guy on the ticket line chats me up: “I said to my son in law, when he said ‘Who else is in it?’ I said to him, ‘Does it matter?’” Grandpa’s hot for America’s anti-sweetheart. But son-in-law, check out bit player Zoe Lister-Jones’s work in Stuck Between Stations, it’s great.

Cold war nostalgia feels so good, with a Wargames-style climax and Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination restaged. The young mole grows up watching The Brady Bunch to learn American ideology, graduates Princeton, and winds up working at an oil company that’s a CIA front. North Korea, Mecca, Tehran, a waterboarding scene—hey, why are leftist intellectuals so fond of saying their work “interrogates” some position or institution or text? The word choice interests me. Do they secretly long to wield the taser or rubber hose? Why not swing wide the gate of meaning’s prison, and let it go?

So spying is acting—you’re not yourself. She’s exposed on the blind side of a one-way mirror, and later fires off a submachine clip trying to break through a bulletproof screen on whose far side Live Schreiber tells her, “You’re about to become famous.” And at another point covers a security camera with her panties, and dyes her hair a witchy black. How one woman’s abandonment issues swallowed the whole wide world. Salt: the spice of life, but also a way to kill a fertile field. She always threatens to quit the biz. She doesn’t need to do anything but be geopolitics. God, she scares the shit out of me…I guess I love her, too.