LET ME IN

Why won’t you? It’s thrilling to travel that strange scrubby country out beyond one’s own exhaustion. In October the idea of being at the same time dead and starving makes perfect sense. In my experience, people who talk through the previews are going to talk the entire time.

Set in Los Alamos, the site of sites, unleashing-place through whose ripped-open portal we can never return. Delicious and dizzy, those nuclear fears. In the 80’s, one’s sense of oneself, in oneself, was inevitably of missile in silo, someday to be launched. Decade of Reagan, divorce, Rubik’s Cube, Ms. Pac-Man, “It’s 10 pm do you know where your children are?”, Suzanne Vega’s “Luka”—I had a mild freak-out when it shuffled to the surface of my iPod the other day, it’s always made me uncomfortable, the ethics of identification confuse and unnerve me, the difference between persona and ventriloquism is, significantly, a fist up the ass. One should really ask, first.

Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass) is a vampire but the subtext makes you squirm. Since her father turns out to be not her father but her lover, aged because still mortal. It’s her desire that drives them on, he finds her victims, and when she eats a Now and Later—to please the 12-year-old neighbor boy who likes her—she throws it up. “I’m not a girl. I’m nothing.” When all her monstrosity is revealed, when we understand she will enslave the boy, still we hope the detective will fail, still we play her guardian in our hearts. Because she rescued the boy from his bullies? “You have to hit back harder than you dare—then they’ll stop.”

Hushed moments in the eerie streetlit yard, silence of the deep desert cold. A victim discovered in the ice. In such desolation, time feels most cruel, subject far less than we’d wish to the weak tricks by which we try to make it seem elastic. See it as it is: absolute, not woven into the fabric of things but apart, and huge above. What torture, to be twelve. And yet that, that, that one, then, awkward and gleaming, that was no stage along the way, no, yes, that that that was your truest face.