Sunday, June 26, 2011

Random Barking

I recently had a conversation which echoed a remark made to me thirty-seven years ago by a then M.D.-friend: America has a gigantic karmic debt to pay, and our talking about how that would play out -- on an individual, as well as a national, scale.

Thinking about the topic reminded me of a scene from Terry Gilliam's film (as Director, not as Writer), The Fisher King (1991), one that keeps playing in my head, more these days than before:

Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges) is a narcissistic talk radio personality whose career -- just about to move into television comedy and Hollywood -- crashed and burned after his telling a regular caller that Yuppies needed "to be stopped; it's us or them!" The caller, depressed and deranged, took a shotgun to a Yuppie watering hole and gunned down a number of people, before turning the weapon on himself.

Two years later, Lucas is the live-in boyfriend of the owner of a small video rental store (Mercedes Ruehl, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role). After an argument, Lucas stumbles out into the Manhattan night with a bottle of Jack Daniels; is handed a wooden Pinocchio doll by a small boy ("Here, Mister Bum"); and ends up continuing to drink, still holding the doll, at the base of Augustus St. Gaudens' equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman at the southeast corner of Central Park.
LUCAS: [Drunk, talking to the Pinocchio doll] You ever read any Nietzsche? [He] says there's two kinds of people in the world: People who are destined for greatness, like -- Walt Disney. And Hitler.

Then, there's the rest of us -- he called us, "The bungled and the botched." We're the expendable masses; who sometimes get close to greatness, but we never get there... We get teased; we get pushed in front of trains; we take poison aspirin; get gunned down in Dairy Queens...

...ever get the feeling -- that we're being punished for our sins?


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