The Wail

Fucking Aronofsky. Why do I keep watching movies by him? "Requiem for a Dream." "The Wrestler." And now. . . "The Whale."

Because I know these people. Because his films are so atrociously true.

Because, you know. . . I am Quasimodo.  

I wasn't right for about a year after watching "The Elephant Man."  I couldn't shake it.  In my classrooms at the factory, I announced, "I am the Elephant Man.  How many of you?  You don't need to raise your hands.  But think about it.  How many of you feel that the person you are is betrayed by your physicality?"

You are correct if you think this was an indecent thing to do.  People need their illusions.  Just watch "The Iceman Cometh" if you need convincing.  People are destroyed without their illusions to sustain them.  

Charlie is a man who has been stripped of his illusions, and their absence is killing him.  

"I'm sorry," is his constant refrain.  

Of course I watched the movie.  Everyone was pulling for Brendan Fraser.  And he won. Just like Mickey Rourke.  Maybe he deserved it.  I don't know.  I haven't watched any of the other movies whose actors were nominated for "Best Actor."  I just looked that up. Yes I did.  I saw "Banshees."  Fraser was better than Farrell.  But without seeing any other films at all, I can say without reservation that Sadie Sink was robbed.  She didn't even get a nomination.  WTF?  She should have gotten an Oscar.  I don't need to see any of the other movies to know that.  She was unbelievable.  

O.K.  That was not much of a critical review.  Here's my recommendation.  Do not watch the film.  I am not recommending it.  It will not make you feel good.  It will do worse than that.  It is not a tragic film.  It is hardly pathetic.  It is something much worse than that. It is in a category alone.  

I will not be right for a long, long while.  

Maybe I should watch "Everything Everywhere" now just to put things in perspective.  As I have opined, I don't think I would like the movie, but I could be wrong.  I might feel something for the characters.  I don't know.  I am, though, a feeling sort of person, and I need to feel something other than what I have been left with after "The Whale."  Oh. . . I cried three times during the film.  Three times in three lines.  Maybe there is something wrong with me. 

I'd prefer to feel something other than what I am feeling now.  Too many sad things.  Too many tears.  

Can you recommend a good comedy?  The Greeks knew.  What was the formula? Three tragedies to one comedy?  Or was it 2:1?  C.C. will inform me.  But the ancients knew that the emotions must be reordered and restored, returned to something bearable.  Tragedies are supposed to be cathartic.  There was no catharsis for me in "The Whale."  It just dragged me down. 

"Comedy is a representation of laughable people and involves some kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or disaster."

That is what I need now.  Something that does not cause pain or disaster.  Yes.  Hurry me to that one.  

But it seems that is not the world in which I live at present.  I want to sit and watch something inane, a romcom, with My Own True Love.  In lieu of that, I may, perhaps, turn to whatever popular magazines that are left.  You know--Vanity Fair style.  Which reminds me--when is Season Three of "White Lotus"?  that would be good.  It is a Vanity Fair style comedy, right?  Light and bright and shiny?  A disaster of the un-relatable?  Yes, that would be good, something blithely mindless.  

As our world collapses, we are ready to people space.  I hate that.  Space is what the oceans once were.  We have already polluted it.  It had always been a wonderfully empty mystery devoid of petty human emotion, a blanket of existential void.  The moon, once melancholy, has been desecrated.  Now Mars.  We've put cameras beyond our solar system, or nearly.  We're sure to fuck up what was once "The Last Frontier."