Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, a laptop on your desk, the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone) or car (DVD player above the dash); screens at home, the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't many left. 

With their action figure and video game readiness, their graphic novel and teenage sci fi novel roots, a batch of films recently regurgitated up onto blu-ray and prove, to my 'grown-up' eyes, to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation, which is to say using the trappings of subversion in service of the institutions you're subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Budweiser label: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."). I saw them all over the weekend so I feel, however falsely, plugged into product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America and all the synergy and branding that implies! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Powers Activate! Form of Coors Lite Ice! 

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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life, but if that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth bless, because if like me you loathe the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2: "Casualties Zero"), then its very realistic damage done to property, life, and limb makes KICK-ASS a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to kill, pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a childhood (where the hell did he grow up, Shangri-La? Normal suburban life is about the worst thing you can inflict on a fifteen year-old!) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin, just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. Parents are clueless. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kids drawers for drugs seems to be the in thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search the drawers. So hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have, even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading), but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie hypocrisy. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Though Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff, she's subjected to a strange rape gag, which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog!!

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist way or just unconsciously it doesn't matter. In short, I dig the cut of Hit Girl's jib. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. She's alive, and an artist, which means (in the movies) not being squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with your teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intendeth!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, but we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) in order to nail down the nerve-shredding implications of 24/7 media coverage, wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre for the cameras or failure to adequately pretend to be in love with some short dude is enough to ensure your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its dystopia with the ceaseless flash of paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits endless award shows, and high pressure to be smile that is the grueling regimen of our modern starlets. I can only think of three other films to explore this: the slow torture of a dance marathon in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY (1969)- here; the sexual enslavement in a neoconservative dystopia of 1990's A HANDMAID'S TALE) and the very similar to HUNGER GAMES, (almost too similar) the Japanese BATTLE ROYALE (2000).

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzed make-up to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would get too much to bear without some of her old spark, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, the Night Bitch if you will, of one of the other districts. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood. While Lawrence sulks in her gold pancake make-up, Katniss schemes and writhes and comes onto the big-jawed lap dog whose supposed to be Katniss' boyfriend.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, whose failure to grasp fundamental tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film, since he genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. A man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda should know enough to mass produce that verboten mockingjay symbol as a keychain, and have his jackass TV host (played by Stanley Tucci) greet the TV audience with it (in short, comrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolution --it all but ensures it. And so it is the evil Sutherland's preference for bloodthirsty draconian brutality is off-kilter, as if he's trying to throw us off the scent of the film's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his obliviousness towards such a practice, for I have no doubt those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21, and if the evil emperor endorses them to help pacify the gum-chewing masses, real-time sales might drop.

Other signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi, thank god. With their frills and pouffiness drawing obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos up top and the peasants starving and flogged below to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seems subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act other than as a shrill mouthpiece for plot exposition.

Then there's a rare treat lacking in the other films discussed, a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, he also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things than validating Katniss' useless sulking. Another priceless factor is bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, and how his being so sweet and staid and supportive only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him only shows there's still hope for short guys and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is a little removed from the love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bug exactly right. And Asa Butterfield as Ender is himself is a kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lector-for-good recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' though I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP because we were supposed to think of them as delusional caricatures, not 'ourselves' not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen a normal suburban kid in 30 years. Ender is different, he can defend himself and underneath his nervous ecotmorphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens, in other words, what the military is doing right now! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like them in a sci fi movie.
We go to sci fi to get AWAY from ourselves!

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but... you know -- it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do.

I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzans and Carson of Venus, Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Bookswap!

The best part about all of those books? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill the oppressors of their conscience without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible!

We must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths their glorification of 'being a kid.' Already the Chestnuts in Hollywood have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing, from our cinema heritage. The Chestnut is out of control and he will not stop until everyone wears safety helmets even to bed. Stop him before he jabs his safety-first overhead florescent light even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred heart. Because you know he intends to try. I say roast him on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain! Now which way to Forever 21?

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They Shoot Horsemen: HUNGER GAMES

The idea of obtaining instant celebrity is a fantasy we all share, especially in the 'blogosphere' --and why not? It comes true for random people who don't deserve it, like viral video stars, and it's this fantasy that's explored in The Hunger Games. If idiots can win it all, then why not we? Killing people to get there? No problem.

 This fantasy is dramatically different than the usual hook of teen franchises like Twlight and Harry Potter, which offer a return to a pre-egoic sense of safety in cozy confines with numerous friends and attractive protectors, i.e. Hogwarts or the Cullen house, or the Starship Enterprise. In Games there is no safety, no 'base' in the future's lifelong game of tag. The only way to find any kind of fantasy fulfillment with Hunger is through unease, and the idea that one day a whole world will see you, on TV, all the time. Your very lack of a secure space is the fantasy. Omnipresent cameras depict your struggle for survival as you navigate the bully-strewn way to gym class. In Games there's not even a Coney Island to bop all the way back to and say "We fought all night to come back to this?" There's just a frail little sister who's lost without you, producing the very opposite of 'security' in your anguished teen heart.

Imagine though, knowing every time you smiled into a mirror and raised a punk rock salute a million viewers burst into unheard applause? The pain of Truman was that he was unaware he was adored by the unseen masses. The triumph of Jennifer Lawrence is that she knows... and she learns fast how to milk it.

Over on Bright Lights, C. Jerry Kutner has dropped an awesome post about Hunger Games' science fiction ancestors, including: Battle Royale, the 10th Victim, The Year of the Sex Olympics and an Outer Limits ep, which he presents in its entirety. I would also add Series 7: The Contender, a well-received but ultimately ignored 2001 indie of which I saw the first 2/3, but had to stop when the last two survivors, one of whom is the other's ex-boyfriend who is dying of cancer. Ooops, did I spoil Series 7? No, of course not, every one of these movies ends that way. And I don't actually know how they resolved it because I stopped watching, in disgust!

Series 7: The Contenders

Kill like a woman, Contender! It's your one big chance for immortality vs. eternal pussydom, and if your wounded boyfriend wants  you to win, and puts your gun to his temple, just press the trigger! After all, they shoot horses don't they? I say that when you let civilized decency stop you from pulling that trigger when the ratings demand it, then the terrorists win.

What some detractors decry about the Games, and those in the know appreciate, is Lawrence's character's relative moral aloofness (she makes Bella Swan seem bubbly) and her ability to feign love and caring to gain sponsors, to the point where even she no longer seems to know if she's sincere. Certainly we at home or in the theater don't ever learn whether her romance with her short guy partner in the games is something she genuinely wants to happen, and I like that ambiguity. It's classy. Detractors probably resent it because they don't want to admit they feign their own lives for an invisible audience too. What if Jennifer only pretended to like, for example, us?

And on that level Lawrence's characterization is a sublime modern metatextualization, illuminating the way actors pretending to love one another onscreen are no different than those 'in love' in the 'real' world. Each believes with vengeance what they know deep down not to be true. What Fleetwood Mac forgot was that players believe they love you when they're playin' -- only in the deep, deep down can admit they it's all just Liaisons Dangereuses-style seductions undertaken to impress our Marquise de Mateuil-du jour. Only later does it dawn on them that the Marquise was playing them, too, the whole time.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959)

If you ever want to break free of the chain of love-starved idiots chasing each other through the enchanted Summer Night's fairlyland woods though, then start actually loving people you pretend to love. Don't just believe your own lies, make them come true. Those who hold out for the one perfect love rather than loving the one they're with eventually fall into the Groucho club membership abyss (1) and never recognize when the right person finally comes along. Meanwhile trauma, fear, fighting, and loneliness transcend the notion of emotional truth-- just ask anyone who's ever had Stockholm syndrome. So is love really a reliable goal? Shouldn't it rather be a practice?

At the same time, pretending to love someone gives you tons of power over them, presuming they love you more; pretending not to care about someone you do love gives you a better chance at not scaring them off with your needy longing. Sometimes you can avoid the fear/lonely/trauma altogether and never change your mind for anyone, but rarely because our minds change all the time whether we want them to or not. Fuck the world if they think you should act in some other way than pretense. In Falsum Veritas! When the world around you has proven it can't be trusted, only a fool ever feels secure. It's this aspect of Lawrence's character that resonates with writers such as Laura Bogart:

These books illustrate why PTSD is—as my former shrink once put it—the gift that keeps on giving: Nobody will be trustworthy, not entirely. Not when our parents and our governments, the very people who were supposed to protect us (or at least not cause us harm) are the ones who’ve thrown us in the midst of swinging fists and tracker jacker stings. How can we ever believe in anyone, even when we know (intellectually, at least) that we should? And if we can’t believe in anyone, why should we be anyone worth believing in?  The Hunger Games trilogy gives an arrow-strike of a pulse to what Genet called “the irreducibility of terror.”.  (The Nervous Breakdown, 3/12)

This level of absolute failure of trust in authority makes Games more than a metaphor for Vietnam and/or school bullying. When I first heard about Hunger Games I instantly got mad that something could get so popular without me knowing about it beforehand, and also I thought it was a ripoff of Battle Royale, but in the end I'm okay with all that, because what the film's endurance test grind most reminded me of while I was watching it was Sydney Pollack's existential period pain-a-thon, They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969, an earlier post on it here).

Like Hunger Games, Horses involves average, starving, broke ass poor citizens entering a grueling but possibly lucrative competition as couples, two by two, as if upon a massive, hellish ark. The film records their signing in, health check-ups, coaching, etc, before the competition begins so by the time it starts we're already antsy. As the cruel hours of the competition drag on, sponsors are courted from amongst the gathered gawkers. In Games, Jennifer Lawrence feigns reciprocation for her less agile fellow entrant Josh Hutcherson because the rubes love a romance, and in Horses Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin even get married right on the dance floor, even though at that point they no longer even like each other, just for presents from the rubes, pots and pans they can hock once the contest ends. In both films, after many torturous days and nights the final survivors are so exhausted they're barely recognizable to themselves, and of course that's just what the ghoulish audience loves to gawk at... in both worlds.

As in Hunger Games, Horses is keen on issues of food and starvation and the ample servings available to the participants vs. the starving cheap seat audience. Hunger's blue-haired (ugh) emcee (Stanley Tucci) compares well with Gig Young's award-winning performance as the 'caring' emcee of the dance marathon in Horses, both don't really end so much as drift away from us, carrying the sense our hero is just heading off into the next nerve-wracking scenario. In short, fellow kids, if you're looking for something cool and weird that will illustrate your own life anxiety in a profound and sexy way, something that fits the dog eat cat mentality of Hunger Games, Netflix the '69 Horses, and ponder the eerie similarity.... to our own goddamn country.

(1) Groucho's famous telegram to Friar's Club: "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

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Beards of Bleak: THE ROAD (2009) and WINTER'S BONE (2010)

Look at these two fine, bearded gentlemen above: Viggo Mortenson (left), billed only as 'the man' -- a grizzled survivor of an unspecified global holocaust, traveling with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in John Hilcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD; John Hawkes (right) as 'Teardrop'--a grizzled meth head slightly of a mind to protect his niece (Jennifer Lawrence) in Debra Granik's WINTER'S BONE. The two films have much in common: ravaged rural starkness, fatherly anxiety, and man-oh-manly beards pointing and twisting under straight noses. Teardrop and the Man are the cinema's 2009-10 beard combo (1), the best such combo since Moss and Plainview in 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (another Cormac adaptation), and this time, there's fewer words in the titles, even fewer in the scripts.

There's an awful responsibility that overtakes us, cinema do declare, when raising kids in a land rife with scorched earthiness, meth availability, limb-hacking, and squirrel skinning. Kids in horror and sci fi used to be possessed by demons. In the 1980s it was boys and long-fingered alien pedophiles. Now kids have fallen from their endangered pedestal as darling beacons of Spielbergian light and become luggage, screaming cargo that must be protected from the C.H.U.D.S, hillbilly paranoids, cannibalistic pedophile priests, and zombies. All one really wants to do is shoot, smoke, sniff, and sail away from life's burdens, but they have kids.

BONE is the sleeper indie award winner this year, though first glances might make you sigh a BASTARD OUT OF GEORGIA RULE HOUNDDOG'S SWING BLADE RURAL JUROR poetic realism on the cheap kind of 'here we go again, faux-Faulkner' rote harmonicas and steel guitar indie sigh. But, as I explained to my sentimentalism-wary lady friend when we watched it, even if all the signposts are the same that don't mean it's the same road. That's the mistake that made so many film scholars overlook Douglas Sirk! Underneath all that soap was a very dirty boy. 

I'm sure by now you don't need me to tell you that WINTER'S BONE is beautifully photographed. Every image a full color version of those lovely dust bowl portraits by Dorothea Lange, but in color and thrift shop winter couture, rainspouts, horses, eerie drones and impeccable foley periphery shrub rustling. The story itself is interesting, proving as did in DOMINO and JACKIE BROWN that bail bondsmanship is a fertile, relatively under-explored film subject. Dee (Lawence) has to forfeit her house if her meth cooker dad doesn't show in court so down the trail she treads, to ask tough questions of her hostile, whacked-out kinsfolk. As she's met by slammed doors and threats Dee begins to resemble the Phillip Marlowe of Tobacco Road, bravely digging where no one wants her to dig, taking a beating without flinching, hallucinating under quality pain killers, relentlessly traversing a mise en scene of desolate winter landscapes and druggy evasiveness. The men hide behind smoke and yellowed curtains, guns at the ready, hallucinating police cars in the thumbprints on the windows. Where male detectives in 40s noir found Venus flytrap allure waiting to confuse their senses, Lawrence finds tough, inscrutable men, all relatives to some degree or other, their brains half-fried, violent tempers, coiled postures. If they have information to share, she must suss it out but that takes time and their wives are listening in the next room with a shotgun under their aprons. Her knight errant eventually emerges from Teardrop's twitchy shell, kinda... but drug users are notoriously slippery when it comes to metamorphoses.

'The Man' in THE ROAD, meanwhile, never doubts his princeliness, but he sure doubts the world's. He saves his last bullet to use on his son if they should ever fall into cannibal hands. Several times the kid has the gun pressed up against his head while danger looms, and one can't help but think of John Ford's STAGECOACH climax, with John Carradine's last shot aimed at the 'lady' as the Apaches draw closer. Fear for the virginity of your young 'uns and maidens can make you brave or make you weak and in the final bullet moment it's impossible to tell which is which. It's one thing to be courageous for yourself, another to be courageous with the life of a charge, a child. Viggo refuses to let his son risk his life in order to make friends, thus dragging the 'helicopter parent' principle into the post-apocalypse wasteland.

The main difference between Teardrop and the Man seems to lie in this approach. Still like a cobra, eyes cast low in a thousand yard stare, Teardrop's superiority lies in the cool uncle position. When he finds a stray strand of nurturing in his soul's muddy weave and a banjo is introduced you practically cry to see this man finally engage in something that's not potentially deadly or destructive. At that moment, you know Howard Hawks would have loved him.

So, without a reliable social order in place in either dirty outdoors film, the thematic question seems to be, when is life 'safe' for little children to frolic? Dee proves it never is, so fuck it, frolic anyhow. The Man thinks it will be safe 'later' - so 'the boy' gets carried hither and yon, like America getting the paranoid treatment from a stand-down military, like the boy is George Bush and Viggo is Dick Cheney, creating all sorts of problems with his paranoia and access to the inner ear of power. 

 

As trends in fathering in our modern society make clear, dads don't often feel the need to stick around. What makes Teardrop, in his deep sympathy with the shadows and evils of the world, a better dad than 'the Man'? Teardrop knows how to come at a room full of meth-addled hick gangsters; he knows when to shrink into the shadows and when to refuse to step out the car and put his hands on the hood. He's not afraid of dying and that's what enables him to better help out. Like most of the men in either film he can't wrap his head around a woman un-cowed by the threat of death and physical violence. He has no choice but to be impressed. Viggo's problem is that he doesn't respect bravery, since he has none, and so his son's fearlessness or his wife's (Theron, below, looking straight out of BONE), is dismissed by him as foolhardiness, while he cowers in the shrubs.

I know I'm not alone in being grateful that WINTER'S BONE chooses to forgo the threat of sexual assault that seems to dominate most other hillbilly franchises. We don't get much of it in THE ROAD either, but the threat is always there (along with OS screaming), putting an uneasy Kung Fu grip on your throat. A similar heavy threat hangs all over BONE, but the whole sexual assault as worse than death thing doesn't factor, and I'm glad. As I've written on BL, I think we're reaching an ugly saturation point in that regard: it's become cheap shorthand to get the audience deeply disturbed and emotionally involved, but at what cost?

Another thing I'm glad BONE forgoes is sentimentalizing childhood innocence. Funny how the two things go hand in hand, as if innocence itself was a side effect of corruption rather than vice versa.  Both films examine the nature of emotional involvement, and of parenting and responsibility, and while both films tug at issues of bare life survival vs. the sweet joy of giving up, only BONE knows how to harness the beard, the wild man energy of the masculine.  THE ROAD paves the way, perhaps, in subtextually condemning the conservative 'my family uber alles' ethos, but only BONE takes that message all the way to the bottom of the family swamp, where the wild man lies, and dredges that deep man up.

As Robert Bly once wrote in IRON JOHN:

But going down through the water to touch the wild man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and he seems even more so now, when corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless shallow man (2)

That's poor Viggo in THE ROAD, a sanitized man, re-bearded, trying to be wild in a wild land, learning the role of the deep, dark masculine and getting it incorrect. No reflection on Viggo, of course, who showed he can bring that shit hardcore in the RINGS and the VIOLENCE. It's more I think the head-on craftsmanshippy approach to the McCarthy novel --it gets it too right, maybe, to work. Teardrop on the other hand is the truly untamed wild man, the kind of guy that creeps you out at first but then somewhere along the way, not sure when, you start to admire him. Isn't that so much better, children, than the other way around? 

NOTES
1. Yeah, THE ROAD came out in 2009, but I didn't see it til last week, so what?
2. Vintage Books, NY, 1990 - Page 6

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