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.
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