So my hub-sand watched "Jacob's Ladder" the other night, and I wandered
in and out while he was watching. We rewound to the scene at the dance
party ("voulez-vous coucher avec moi?") and went (as best we could, with
a cheap VCR) frame-by-frame through the snapping- wolf-jaw
writhing-tentacle bleeding-bat-wings-&-claws sequence. Good stuff!
Almost pulled off a subliminal there, I would say.
What I said to my hub-sand: "Now that Adrian Lyne has squished
absolutely everything that Americans have been obsessed with for the
past 10-15 years into one movie -- Viet Nam, New York City, subway
violence, devils, angels, tentacles, goat heads, fortune-tellin' women,
blacks & whites, government conspiracies, secret experiments, drugs,
psychiatrists, institutional insensitivity, anxious men in those
wood-n-glass cop-shop cubicles, dark-haired jezebels with great thighs,
preppie ex-wives, cute kids w/ bikes and bunkbeds, sex in the shower,
books with creepy engravings in them, identity crises because they lost
your file, funerals, black umbrellas in the rain, drinking after
funerals, old places with dim light and dark wooden stairways,
raw-looking flesh, sinister surgeons, hospital gowns, surgical masks,
hospital gurneys, first-aid stretchers, fucked-up metal wheels on carts,
weird-looking trash, miscellaneous body parts, black women who wear
out-of-style coats and sing offkey in the streets and are so real and
heart-warming you just hafta love 'em, male bonding, lawyers, court
rooms, phones, civil suits, men in suits who shove you into cars, baby
dolls, baby carriages, babies crying, men who tell you to keep your big
fat mouth shut or else, cars out of control, men in uniform, oh no lost
my glasses, dirt, hostile birds flapping their wings so you can't see
what's going on, we can't talk here because it's not safe, cops cruising
by in cop cars, and by all means we have to include moving upward into
the beatific white light as you die -- now that all of that's been put
in one movie, would someone puh-leeeeeze -- OOPS -- I forgot about
homeless people, the problem of evil, survivor guilt, 60's burnout
guilt, bad drugs, peace signs, pentacles, ugly things that happen in
bathrooms, rock music, alcohol, marijuana, helicopters with blades going
whirr-whirr or whack-whack, cars chasing people, cars crushing people,
cars exploding in balls of flames, cars in those weird non-road places
they have in some cities, people who stand by and look glazed while
strangers are being abducted,
anyway--
now that Adrian Lyne has given us all THAT in a mere two hours, will
someone puh-leeeeeze (pretty please) make a movie about SOMETHING ELSE?"
[...]
- Joe
Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://research.microsoft.com/~joebar
Phone, Office: (415) 778-8227; Cellular: (415) 601-3719; Home: (415)
588-4801