Week 47 (12)
Barbara
Stanwyck.
Wednesday, 23:43
We just watched The Lady Eve.
Oh, Lordy. I’m in love.
(It’s okay. The Spouse is, too.)
I’m
not going to repeat myself.
Monday, 20:21
One more thing:
It’s a pair of goddamn pants, okay?
Not “a pant.” A pant is what your breath does when you run.
Get it right.
M’sieur Allen’s master class in oatmeal preparation is in session, but since he doesn’t easily archive his links, if you don’t go now (right now), you might have to scroll down to find it. (Horrors.) (Those who are feeling venturesome might scroll down at any rate and seek out the entry entitled “It Hurts.” —They might also want to think before flying off the handle, afterwards.)
Or, you could go read this, instead. It’s funny. It’s about Clint Eastwood. Sticky site? Who needs it. Go. Read something else already. I’m busy.
So. Forced to endure an episode of Special Unit 2 the other night (long story: laundry; laundromat; TV with no visible means of changing the channel, and anyway, the guy with the dirty blond dreads looked like he was enjoying it—okay, not so long a story). For those who have yet to experience this particular product of pop culture, I am able to provide a précis of its premise and situation—thanks to wooden, “sarcastic” dialogue that ladled up undigested chunks of exposition with all the élan of old-school Marvel comics: a secret unit of city cops in Chicago attempts to keep the normal world safe from “links,” or mythological beasties that have somehow survived into the modern age. Now, one could merely note that the show’s basic approach to that which is unusual, strange, magical, or transgressive is, basically, to hunt it down and kill it, but I want to delve a little more deeply into a particular scene that struck me as I was loading a batch of whites into the dryer.
See, our intrepid cops have cornered a snitch, a fire troll whom they suspect of knowing something about a recent paranormal fire. The scene is set in an alley, and plays out in the timeless rhythm of all cop shows. “You know what we want to know,” says Bad Cop, male. Or words to that effect.
“No, I don’t,” says the troll (the skell, the perp, the squealer). “And anyway, what’s it to you?” Or (yes, yes) words to that effect.
“I don’t believe you,” says Bad Cop, who then pulls out a bottle of fizzy water, shakes it up, and pops the top, spraying it on the troll. Who begins screeching.
Good Cop (female, naturally enough) wants to know why he did that, as the troll keeps yelling about how much that hurt. Bad Cop explains that, being a fire troll, water is really painful. It’s like acid, see? Spritz. Scream. “You know what we want to know.” “I’m telling you, I don’t.” Another spritz. More screaming. The troll, out of (perhaps) defiance, gets in a gratuitously sexist dig at Good Cop, who grabs the bottle from Bad Cop; spritz. Scream.
And of course the troll knew what they thought he knew, and of course they got it out of him, and kept the plot moving along. Chin-chin.
But stop the tape. Remove the fantastical setting from that scene. Replay it. Whaddaya got? (The fantastical setting is nothing but a metaphor, after all.) Or—hey—fuck it. Take the fantastical setting seriously, and parse the scene. Whaddaya got?
—An illegal alien being tortured by the police for information.
(What—his being a fire troll makes it okay? Why? He’s sentient. He’s got hopes and dreams and aspirations. Sure, fire trolls in general like to hang around big fires, and have a rep for committing arson to get their ya-yas, but did this one? —And if he did, you know, there’s a well-traveled road for stopping him and bringing him to what passes for justice. What makes it okay—funny, even—to torture him by spraying him with what is basically acid? The fact that he’s funny-looking? Physically different? Marginalized, outcast, cut off from normal society, unrepresented in the corridors of power?)
TV cops have always had little to no relationship with the real world, and how laws are enforced and crime is persecuted—but for the vast majority, those fictive morality plays are the only contact they have with this part of the world, these clauses of the social contract. Cops are basically mostly right and skells are always wrong (that’s why they’re skells, after all), and fuck all that shit about rights and innocent until proven guilty, y’know? If you’re really innocent, you don’t have anything to worry about, and hey—you’ve got to break a few eggs to make a goddamn omelet. Right? —It’s arrogant and its elitist of me, but it’s the only way I can come close to parsing the obscenity of a torture warrant.
They don’t know. They just don’t know. They haven’t thought it through. Otherwise—
nicholas urfé
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