UNSTOPPABLE

The only true genre—train movie—The General, Runaway Train, Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. And The Train, with Burt Lancaster, in which the flower of French art is loaded onto train cars by the Nazis and Burt has to stop it leaving France until the Allies arrive to save the day. All the while asking, are these paintings and stuff worth losing lives? With the implied, more pressing question, is anybody’s life worth as much as these artworks? “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was always really about the aura of persons more than paintings. I caught Burt on TCM the other night, this time in The Swimmer, based on Cheever’s overwrought story of a man crossing the suburban landscape of his corruption and failure by going from pool to neighbor’s pool. Interrogating his soul along the way, or having it flayed for him by everyone he encounters. Swimming pools—shimmering, silvery rectangles, placed at intervals, into which he plunges in succession. Still a little ways to go.

If Train 777 leaves Fuller yard in northern Pennsylvania at 6 am, and travels south at 70 mph, then how long before it etc. Set rolling unmanned, by every mischance, the behemoth surges to its fate, or it’s better to say, brings fate like so much hazardous cargo to where it’s preordained. Rust red, steel gray, blue-collar blue, swing-state dun. So what’s unstoppable? The climate-change those coal cars evoke? Or Chris Pine’s temper—he’s got a restraining order keeping him from his wife. Or is it the working-man’s will of Denzel (The Book of Eli)? He’s just been laid-off—our ruin, too, rolls merrily along. I remember one night Aaron and I were totally baked, and he swayed over to ask me what was clearly going to be a big question: “Dude, do you think Whitman was smart?” Jeez, admit you’re turned on by power and people will forever question your brains. Chill out, dude, and relax, Eliot, and back off, Sontag. I’m sorry it’s too late to give Susan Sontag a big, reassuring hug.