The View From Scranton

Betwixt the Between

Sunday morning coming down. Way down. Down to the last drop. Gone. The sun rises, high and bright, but still just enough to bright the bitter, to highlight the slippery spots. That‘s all the muscle it‘s got. I know how that old sun feels: Too distant for warmth, too seldom for belief, a cruel joke on a cold, cold heart.

The folk in these hills care for no such sun, for no sun at all. The few times it has shone of late they’ve cowered for cover beneath any available shadow. I expect today’s shining will provoke similar retreats. The frigid won’t help. Maybe these folk get their warmth elsewhere, or maybe, just maybe, they’re afraid of what a little illumination might wring.

Like in Polanski’s The Lamp, one of his beautifully shadowed shorts shot while at the State Film School at Lodz. An old man in an old shop with some old dolls. Digging in their skulls, tweaking their limbs, remaking the remodels, all by lamplight.

Then comes electricity, in with the illuminated new. So-called progress. The mysteries reveal themselves, ugly and dangerous and in no need of man-made illumination.

Careful what you shine the light on.

Preceded by the quick little kill of Murder, Teeth Smile, a study in peepology, Break Up the Dance, with its Derenesque frenzy, Two Men and a Wardrobe, which nods to Chaplin and Lloyd, and When Angels Fall, his thesis, and the inner life of an invisible

Post grad comes keen with The Fat and the Lean. Things can always be worse. Then
Mammals slaps ticklish, and leads sway to…

Knife in the Water, a concoction of character and claustrophobia, where the pesky Pole leaves the Great Dane Dreyer and puts Hitchcock in a threesome. Or something. Else. Man against man, and the woman knows all.

But of course.

posted by John Hood. @ 1:06 PM