Hancock Time

I saw the film "Hancock" last night.
During the period of ingesting food stuffs before the film, some of the crowd spoke of seeing the film "Contempt", which perked me up considerably, since I had seen it 2 years ago in Toronto. I may have written about it. Brigitte Bardot was in it, as well as Fritz Lang.

One viewer said that some reviewer or critic said that it was supposed to be some sort of parallel to Odysseus:  Odysseus= Bardot's husband and Penelope = Bardot herself, and the suitors of Penelope=Jack Palance as a film producer. Fritz Lang was- get this! - a surrogate for the Greek Chorus.

I did not remember this parallelism. I only remembered the fellow who embraced Bardot had hairy shoulders. I recalled "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou?" and said the parallelisms were a bit more obvious. The main thing I recalled from "Contempt" was
1. Brigitte Bardot, and
2. thinking how terribly bored I was by the end.

There were numerous shots of Greek statues and some classical mythic voguing, which was Godard's early way of nudging you in the side and asking whether you got the punch line.

Back to "Hancock". It jarred you at the beginning, lulled you into belief and interest by the middle, but by end game it's muse had become jaded from living too fast and the story frantically looked around for an escape route. It was, if anything in my life, the perfect summary of Sartre's "Huis Clos", or "No Exit", showing us that hell is Dali and Tanguey and Arp and DuChamp for an intial idea, Turner and Hooper and Benton for the development up to the mid-point, and a re-hash of Francis Bacon and a pale imitator of Tyree Guiton for the end.

However, this being said, it is time for heroes. The heroes are us. I saw pictures straight out of the 1930's of people in California moshing the front door of an IndyMac bank, having the police sicced on 'em by the heartless bankers. Well, I told you so. Last night, a friend said a wealth "mis"manager predicted the Dow to go to 10,500 as a low. Of course, I began braying like a donkey, telling the story of how I told my daughter what the Dow Industrial Average would go to in August, 2007; writing down "10,500" on a slip of paper and giving it to her.

Indeed, everything I have been writing about has come to pass. I am not quite sure what I am going to do with this blog. I can say that we are being called upon to be heroes. As soon as the mainstream media became aware to the extent of the damage, my outlook suddenly changed. I guess I am born and bred a contrarian.
Heroes do not tune in cable tv to watch foreign peoples being bombed by their "smart" bombs. Heroes do not lie about war, do not create false stories to create chances for death. Heroes do not ignore their responsibilities and allow all governmental regulation: financial, airline, EPA, investment, etc. to be ignored. Heroes don't lie. They don't cheat. They don't steal resources.

Heroes help the weak, the poor, the meek, the pure of heart. We have 2 possible branching paths: we step into the hero suit, like Hancock; we throw away our addictive lusts: greed, violence, sex, alcohol, drugs... and we become the heroes we should be. Else, we will spend eternity in a mosh pit in front of a Hadean IndyMac Bank where the demon master Mozilo wields the whip.

Angelo Mozilo giving the Vulcan sign for "Live Long In Debt Slavery!"

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