THE TOWN

Fuck atonement. It’s Yom Kippur, I’m hungover, Bill and I put away a brace of beers, you’re never supposed to say how it feels to be a Jew, it feels so amazingly great, that’s the big secret, though of course there’s kind of an edge to it too. Let my stumblings stand—if God wants to smite me, bring it on, I’m in Boston, I’m sitting in Fenway Park. Psych! The city whose biggest complaint seems to be, “You think you’re better than these people.” I wonder where Affleck’s track suit from Good Will Hunting spent the intervening years. The woman he takes hostage and then releases and then romances, when she finds out it was him all along, is super-mad, and there’s the problem (for us) of how beautiful, on her, that looks. The guy from The Hurt Locker goes out like Dillinger, near the end, and the problem is: the shit is cool.

The montage of montages would be, what, all the bundles of cash upon which we’ve ever, upon the screen, set our eyes. Don Draper we don’t buy as cop. Draper who, like any decent person, tries to sell his soul. But when he touches a commodity, there’s no helping it, it just turns into more life, he’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice when he parses language and desire and winds up negotiating all too much another riot, carnival, bender, passion, duel. The five o’clock shadow is his pavement busted up by leaves of grass. Not that he’s warm. He’s the rod in whose proximity we can’t behave. A grown-up, I suppose. I love ads.

Why does the guy live, at the end of The Hurt Locker? And how does Affleck get away? Sorry, were you going to see it? Are we admitting, at last, that the hero’s death is too easy a sell? I have to pee so bad it’s not a recognizable feeling anymore, it’s like a twinge occupies my seat, and beside me Bill’s become an exasperated writhe.

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (3D)

“Whether the soul is ruah, pneuma, anima, or breath, it is a continuous and unstoppable movement that can only acquire form through a slowing down.”—Arnaud Villani

Eileen Myles says poetry isn’t made of language but energy. I say the movies aren’t made of pictures but of dreams. And dreams are made of séances, collect calls to the dead. “Another night, another dream, but always you,” sings Real McCoy. And who is the “you” the movies try over and over again to reach? Houdini, Einstein, Kafka? Well, one of those hunger-artists for whom the crowd gathers, and will later inexorably disperse.

Field of long-abandoned light aircraft. Zombie cyberpunk girl from the vantage of falling Tokyo rain. Milla Jovovich (but imagine Ivana Fukalot) wields a gun in each hand in a stutter of slo-mo giving way to bursts of inhuman speed. She’s an Alice, dodging air-distorting bullets in tight leather in stark white rooms—we’re you-know-where, fighting the wire-fight of the virtually just. It’s worth saying, Neo and co. ostensibly want to destroy the Matrix, but of course they never would, since it’s within its permissions that they float, and flaunt. You never get dressed the same way again, once you’ve walked last at the runway show. Et in Arcadia ego.

The crazy-hard videogame on which it’s based is evoked when she mows her way through a limitless, gray zombie horde with a shotgun customized to shoot quarters, those shining stars arrayed forever in the firmament of the arcade Real. Post-apocalypse, a prison is a fort, a container ship is a haven, L.A. is exactly the same. If you need to pretend you’ve seen this film, discuss the overhead shots of the infection leaking, or the way the evil corporation trace her flight across a map. We sense already what we slowly grow to inhabit: the eyes of satellites.

MACHETE

The trash compactor scene in Star Wars is really an ars poetica—a straight-up movie-serial sequence functioning allegorically to suggest that “trash” can be “compacted,” i.e. collaged at high density, to yield, paradoxically, the most satisfying escape. As scions of that legacy, the Tarantino/Rodriguez dyad free it from piety first, and second from a totalizing mythos that insists on othering just about everyone. Still, how to parse the jam-packed result? What would be the optimal hermeneutic tool for that?

Machete! The blade of the grim regime. Danny Trejo calls his “the boss.” In a Mexico-set prologue kills everyone in the house to rescue a kidnap victim he finds stark-naked in the bedroom and grabs up only to watch her pull a cell phone from her twat and signal druglord Steven Seagal, whose side she’s joined, to slaughter Machete’s wife and daughter, but Machete himself survives to turn up three years later as a Texas day-laborer pressed into an assassination attempt on anti-immigration politician DeNiro, whose best trick is still that doubletake when someone crosses him, that face comes back frowning and enflamed and you know you’re done.

“We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.” Someone’s been reading Joe Wenderoth: “The poet is powerful…because she is able to thrive in the shadow of that horizon, that border [between oblivion and order], and is able to know that it will cross over her just as she crosses over it.” Michelle Rodriguez leads an underground illegal-immigrant network out of a taco truck: her Ché-like codename: Shé. After she beds Trejo its Lindsay Lohan’s turn, then Jessica Alba’s—O abs, O freckles, O lips. Every love poem is an autopsy, unless we swing the blade that un-cuts, the scalpel that somehow slices away the slice itself. In real life Trejo’s a no-joke ex-boxer and ex-con whose face says: put nothing aside. Love the way those lowriders chomp the air. The hydraulics originated as a way to hide the illegally low height of the cars—the flamboyance is the way that every true sort of hiding finally goes.

LEGENDARY

I’m alone in the theater, the unlikely abundance of our way of life is not lost on me. The dark cascades down: Baudelaire, “Her Hair”: “Pavilion, of blue-shadowed tresses spun,/You give me back the azure from afar;/And where the twisted locks are fringed with down/Lurk mingled odours I grow drunk upon/Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.” It can get a little bit funky in here.

Opera. Cal’s a skinny Oklahoma boy whose dead-in-a-car-crash dad and since-estranged brother were high-school wrestling heroes. He goes out for the team. Lithe 135-pound boys scuffling in the gymnasium—not Western culture’s afterthought but its core, those lightly-sweating boy-chests. Big bro John Cena, I’m told, is the main WWE guy, I can see why, a monster, alpha-silverback body, huge lion-face, he destroys a giant biker-type in a barfight, oh he’s mean. He takes some convincing before he’ll help out Cal. Well, monsters do, it’s not easy to tug on the tuxedo and work out the steps to Puttin’ on the Ritz. When he softens it’s unbearably great, what if this soulful hulk was your brother and you could make him smile and he trained you in an abandoned warehouse, God it would be so amazing. And everyone would know not to mess with you, and he’d give you his baseball glove, and after a violent rampage he’d let you stroke his forehead with a cool damp cloth…

Go Tornadoes! The movies teach this: if you train blindfolded, when you later shed the blindfold you cannot fail. Patricia Clarkson cannot deliver an unconvincing line, she’s totally in the moment as the mom. When she finally shows up at Cena’s grimy dump of an apartment he thinks, my mom thinks I’m a loser, and she kind of does, but she’s also his everloving mother, and she holds all this in her face, and I weep, I dampen the armrests with my wiped-away tears. “Dad made me feel invincible.” “When you show up, things happen—I know that’s what Dad would say.” Dad. Dad!

GOING THE DISTANCE

He lives in New York, she in San Francisco—whatever, it’s just a way of reminding us that nothing in this world may touch: no sign to referent, no concept to occasion, no hand to mouth, no translation to poem but also no poem to its original, you might try to approach some quality of feeling by pouring words over it, you could drizzle or drench it with language, but all that icky stuff does is slough off or pool in crevices or rage in cataracts of noise and blah blah blah, some patriarchal hang-up about possession and I’m sorry, who cares, who worries about this? Not this guy. And not Drew Barrymore, certainly not, least of all Drew Barrymore. And another who couldn’t care is Justin Long, the voice of Alvin, Alvin we miss you, remember when the Chipettes sang, “If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it.” And that “it” may be the most mischievous and miscreant pronoun ever squeaked, not to mention there’s no way anatomical or metonymical that the two “it”s they sing could even be the same “it”—and yet they are, as New York and San Francisco, though not, of course, the same place, both have people in them who regularly think, in regard to the people in the other, “They’re probably pretty cool.”

Cold town, I can imagine eating its somewhat unsatisfying food and drinking its good coffee, bundled on a balcony, writing foggy thoughts on page after page of blinding white copy paper.

Probably the first rom-com of its kind to include the line, “I want to come all over you” (during phone sex). And Drew, when they compare pop-cultural pasts, “If you even say ‘Marky Mark’ I’m gonna come right now.” Now is that any way for a “31-year-old” “graduate student” in “journalism” at “Stanford” to talk? Second scene this year (Step Up) at that diner on Wythe, the one across from Zebulon. He works at a “record label” and in one part leaves his car unattended in front of the JetBlue terminal at JFK. Applegate married to Gaffigan. My point: the movie toys with credulity at every turn because in doing so it dares us to question the central premise that resides not in it but in us: that we can have it all. Like, if you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it. Could Beyoncé be possessed, could Beyoncé be contained? Don’t tell me, “Jay-Z.” Because we are hardly privy to the fundamental ways in which Jay-Z would know better than ever even to try that.

PIRANHA (3D)

what is blood in the water?-----it is what we have expressed-----our words as they spool out-----into the clear fluid of the sayable-----call forth misapprehension & rejection & perversion-----to mow the flesh from our startled bodies-----a skeleton has nowhere to recoil-----how sensitive is bone-----the guy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt-----nods to me-----and I back-----are they desperate I wonder-----Jerry O’Connell Richard Dreyfuss Ving Rhames-----or Elisabeth Shue and Christopher Lloyd-----how did they face each other-----who last met on the set-----of Back to the Future II------and Back to the Future III-----(shot at the same time, remember)-----the piranha are from the past-----an earthquake opens a rift to a long-buried chamber-----primal justice flows into an amoral present-----spring break-----O’Connell a Girls Gone Wild-style video director-----for whom two pneumatic nymphs perform-----a girl-on-girl full-frontal swim-dance-----in eerie, lovely Esther Williams light-----seen on his monitor and our 3D-----and the piranha-cam (loud and fast)-----what we feast our eyes on-----they devour-----and the director they take from the waist down-----cut to his penis floating past-----and a piranha swims up and gulps it-----and burps it out again-----it works in context-----meanwhile at the dance party on the docks-----the fish attack in force-----from body shots to shots of bodies-----the carnage like a war zone-----violated human forms-----gaping wounds and severed limbs-----a bigger more collective guilt than brings the birds-----in The Birds----yet for all that somehow vague-----when Shue wields the taser-----I think what is the taser-----it must be the seizure-----“every sublime thought is accomplished”-----Baudelaire-----“by a more or less violent nervous shock”-----after which a calm descends-----after being rattled being receptive-----after being tense being talky-----after being sick being easy-----after being guilty being generous-----after having said being silent-----goodbye to summer-----cheated with the Walter Reade the other night-----perfection was in town-----I ask you-----is Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale not-----the most bittersweet fucking movie ever made?

THE LAST EXORCISM

September. Litia says Virgos, seemingly put-together types, all harbor a “secret mess.” I’ve been putting my foot in my mouth a lot, lately: me, of all people, the longtime straight-A student of affront. Shelley’s monster wants to “become linked to the chain of existence and events.” You can groan that again, brutha. At least if you’re possessed you’ve always got a friend. I’ve always been pretty shallow—it’s okay to say—but a devil in you, that’s depth, the kind that goes all the way down.

After the final shot the guy behind me turns to his buddy, “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” But the movie is great, so what’s he trying to pull? Is he just seizing as the moment for blasphemy the only part of a movie God watches, when the credits roll and his handiwork crawls up the screen? What’s all the fuss of always trying to insist a movie is a collaborative effort? As far as I see, it’s that many more people trying to get between me and what I care about seeing: the camera’s lunge for a face that, as it perceives the approach, commences to tremble. Cindy Sherman knows. The possessed girl steals a camera, at one point—the conceit is that it’s a documentary—and through its p.o.v. crosses the yard and enters the barn to trap the family cat and with a few savage blows stub out its life.

She’s a bit high-strung. The exorcist was groomed, as a kid, to perform faith, to with showmanship frenzy the flock. But now he’s faced with the worst task: be what he says he is. A printout taped to the lobby door says they’re looking for a full-time manager for this place. Isn’t possession just shorthand for the fib of control? And do they really expect us to think this place is managed? It’s so clearly dice-like, which is to say not managed but rolled.

THE AMERICAN

Q: How do you know you’re hanging out with poets in their thirties?

A: They’re all writing prose.

Let’s reject out of hand this panic over having “nothing to say.” Fuck that noise. You go to the computer lab, you sit down, the computer is frozen or perseverating on some weird alert you never get at home—what do you do? Exactly: get up and move to the next one over. Gmail, work mail, facebook, movie times. Mara and her sister are twenty minutes late to the show, which in retrospect delights me, though at the time they had Amy and I worried sick.

A cry for help. Spy stuff as allegory for Clooney’s grim, insistent bachelorhood. The Italy thing, he finds a working payphone in Rome (?!?), call it Skulk Glower Slay. And to test the rifle he spends the whole second act assembling he does what, shoots the tufts off pussywillows. He goes down on the prostitute, she bites her bottom lip, she’s totally sweating him, “You’re a good man but you have a secret.” Cold mountain-town puffs of breath—that scene in Michael Clayton with the horses is cheesy as hell but undeniably affecting, like James Wright, Mr. “I have wasted my life.” When he does die—sorry—the little white butterfly from the earlier scene goes fluttering straight up towards the sky.

The priest who tries to save his soul: “You’re American. You think you can escape history.” Above the theater, from across the traffic circle, one spies two beams of light striking low cloud-cover. There’s a new fall chill in the air, you want to get ultra-drunk. Of course there is no such thing as “the” American but always two, the one the world sees and the one who never forgets for a single moment his all-too-historicized birth. The crowded plane and the loaded gun. George, dude, it’s time to come back home.

LOTTERY TICKET

Here’s how dumb I am: I feel sure, as I watch, that Lil Bow Wow will ultimately lose the $370 million lottery ticket he purchased on a whim and which, over the course of a scorching Fourth of July weekend in the projects, he must protect from every manner of golddigger and thug. And in losing it realize that he never really needed it, that he can start that sneaker company anyway, and earn an honest fortune, and in so doing raise up the ‘hood.

And yet when he does in fact redeem it and uses the winnings to fund a community redevelopment project in the final scene I think, a-ha, this bleak tale has us constituted by luck, and the happy ending only reifies the institution as capricious and insane, unsmashable because it feints and floats like the boxer Ice Cube plays who was denied his shot at the big time by a mugging and yet still proclaims risk-taking, dream-following subjecthood worthwhile. And the hoochie, trying to get LBW to knock her up, gestures to her endowments: “This is my lottery ticket.” It’s the soul of The Wire, isn’t it, that if Mookie threw the garbage can through the pizzeria window in present-day Baltimore the next scene would be the councilman figuring out how to spin the whole event as political capital, or some other undercutting move. The senseless of smashing what's already transparent, yet doesn't reveal a thing.

But that’s still not it. Because here the hero is vessel to nothing but the random numbers that we sense swarming like insects to any flare of thought. So no wonder the villain (The Wire’s Chris) boasts as his signature violence the squeeze—he both hugged and in the process suffocated the lovers he took to his prison bed. When he fights the local crimelord he grabs the guy’s nuts and under his tightening fist we hear an audible pop: the wiping out of stories, all those non-acts that bolster, by their potentiality, the very one that transpires. I wasn’t ready to understand those fluttering random numbers as the reality towards which these organic singularities we embody must in fact aspire, because it is they, and they alone, who cannot be crushed.

VAMPIRES SUCK

I’ll name its genius straight off: it’s not a parody of the entire burgeoning vampire genre but only of Twilight, which it often mirrors shot for shot. And so its mockery is like the faintest protest against an adoration that approaches plagiarism or stalking, those cousin crimes that flirt with simply replacing oneself with an object so loved that to its superiority must be ceded the space one understands oneself to waste. Or think of Zizek’s explanation of our earnest postmodernity that can’t even realize that the quotes around a word like “love” were, in its coinage, already implied—we needn’t supply them, in the same way that this film is exquisitely redundant: they barely change the character names (but some get the Mad magazine treatment: Cullen becomes Sullen) or sometimes don’t at all. The tweens behind me go cuckoo-bananas with glee.

The leading actress does a pitch-perfect Kristen Stewart: eyes cast down and “twitchy,” she tucks her hair behind her ear and looks like she ate a bug if compelled to speak. She’s pelted and smacked, called frigid and boring, portrayed as dying for the sex the Edward character (“Edward”) withholds. At one point plucks the promise ring from his hand, pops it in her mouth, chews it up, and opens to reveal a new tongue piercing. When that doesn’t work she decides to seduce him by putting on a rubber Obama mask—now what do you make of that?

But they get it wrong when, to puncture her teen angst, they have her whine about unrequited love. Hold it—Bella and Edward are requited, just not consummated. “Requite”: to repay or avenge. Politics are useless but economics is everywhere you look. In case you couldn’t tell, I don’t think money is lifeblood. I think it is the parody of what we’re almost always too weak or afraid to say.

THE OTHER GUYS

Marky Mark is so smart, he’s so vulnerable and articulate in I Heart Huckabees you can’t stand it, but why’s he have to ruin it, producing douchebag Entourage? I wonder what he and Donnie were like as kids, what fantasies articulated themselves to his punk mind, NWA or something blaring in his ears, while he wrenched the 199^th and 200^th crunch from those compliant abs in the Wahlberg’s half-finished basement. If he could see beyond drugs and ass to the big stage before him, to the lifework. He’s the male, here, unaccountably angry, floridly homophobic, incapable of communicating without sowing strife. In frustration he pulls the Sony Vaio—they’re really ramping up their placement this year, good luck with that—loose from cords and desk and dashes it against the office floor. And in the movie’s most lyrical sequence takes naïve partner Will Ferrell out drinking, an escapade rendered as a series of increasingly outrageous tableaux vivant. I hate to say it, but Hot Tub’s got some competition.

Ferrell plays a police accountant reviled by all for being “feminine”—the other cops call his Prius “a vagina,” while he speaks politeness and decorum to their absurd aggression. But busts out sometimes, in a bad-cop hissy fit and a flashback to his college career as a pimp called Gator. When MM insists he floor it in the car, Ferrell shouts “America” and promptly crashes. He’s inseparable, still, from the George W. Bush impression, or really, we see Bush through Ferrell as one iteration of the American man, which the movies this year remind us is the most pitiful, and therefore dangerous, creature on earth.

Is that very man, in his darkest soul, not a john but a pimp? Enslaver, purveyor, caretaker, vessel, bodyguard, administrator, the one who, when action occurs, and so that it may occur, stands and guards the door? Not to indulge in pleasure but to dispatch it, manage it, and scrape from its inflated surface the ooze of exchange. The pimp’s cathectic dream: let the other guys do the wanting. As if those exhaustions could be mitigated or abridged.

THE SWITCH

Shitty Sunday, day-for-night skies and crashing rain, thunder like a slammed door.

A simple principle of the rom-com: through the essential nature of the supporting cast we shall discern the impediment to love. Juliette Lewis and Jeff Goldblum—so we’re too happy being odd. Over the seven-year course of the film (2003-2010) New York doesn’t change, Aniston and Jason Bateman don’t so much as cut their hair. Its potential for fizzy stasis is the profoundest hope and fear for this place, as the hypochondriac seeks by incessant naming to ward off forever the event.

Kiss the writer who made broker Bateman’s rival, Patrick Wilson (the sperm donor to braless biological-clock watcher Aniston), an “Assistant Professor of Feminist Literary Tradition at Columbia.” It’s true, they’re so full of shit—not feminists, obviously, but people at Columbia. When drunken, besotted Bateman swaps out his own sample for Wilson’s, it’s not an act of bio-possessiveness but a rescue—the insemination of her shampoo-fresh normalcy by straight-up neurosis rather than a gender critique that would threaten her very life. Though what is a child but a critique that cuts both ways?

The kid is so sweet. Gesture persists, it sutures performance to the spirit. Prickly, bullied, afraid for animals—I can’t imagine anyone who would identify with that. The third act reveals the lie; before one may love, always, one’s fraudulence must be violently stripped away, and forgiven. Loneliness montage (treadmill, park, computer screen-lit face in darkened office). His declaration interrupts her rival’s proposal—can you imagine speaking up like that? The switch. Some days you want to just reach right out and flip it.