MY SOUL TO TAKE (3D)

It just feels weird, wearing a crewneck sweatshirt over a v-neck t-shirt. Whereas a v-neck sweater over a crewneck tee is a classic look. I suppose the sacred triangle, once evoked, ought to be maintained, and one feels this. Someone’s graffitied “FUCK NEW MOVIES” on a construction site barrier nearby. But every movie was new, once. The life cycle is complex: the marketing campaign stokes an excitement that peaks when it’s announced, the Wednesday before, that the movie opens Friday. The watching itself is a non-event, a kernel of necessity around which ordinary feeling can only be a husk. The period beginning two weeks later and lasting three-five years from then is the time when the very title cannot be said aloud without triggering an almost physical disgust. Following which the true beauty of the thing is at last and forever revealed. Not that it was beautiful all along but that it is now beautiful, now somehow become the self it couldn’t formerly be, recognizable in all its florid particularity, its all-too-arbitrary organization of its given heap of incoherence. Is this banal—commodity culture’s tireless cresting/crashing wave and smoothed-out beach? One’s inevitably a bit tart on a fall day warm in the sun, cold in the shade.

Those recently-popular soft, ballet-style women’s shoes turn out to be particularly impractical for outrunning a homicidal maniac in the woods. The original killer, in flashback, harbors multiple personalities that migrate, on the day of his death, into the bodies of seven children born that same day, one of whom is now (they’re teenagers) murdering the rest. The hero watches The Birds, but they’re called forth by guilt, whereas here a strangely calm, almost natural cycle plays out in the spirit of the carrion-fed condor, who “eats death for breakfast.” And the movie’s mirror-obsessed. They’re terrifying, right? Take a look in mine, sometime. Two of the kids do the routine from Duck Soup, going gesture for gesture—how does Harpo know what Groucho will do next? Because there is no time in the unconscious; there is no “next.” And the other famous one, obviously, is the taxi driver practicing with his pistol, taking aim at his own subjectivity, “You talkin’ to me?” The talking that never stops. He gets that pistol-draw down cold. It’s important, I was recently told, to visualize success.