...In Fair Marvelverse Where We Lay Our Scene: Hulk, More Or Less

I intended to write this closer to the "first half", but, well, I didn't.

My impulse as ever is to follow every digressive thread down the line to its logical conclusion, but I'll try to keep it to just one, this time, and have more focused posts on those other topics, tangential to the movie(s) at hand, when I have some other occasion. And, extra special benefit, I'll put my digression right up front. A preamble, more like.

In the other post I refer to The Incredible Hulk (that's the one with Edward Norton) presenting it's revamped origin story "quite artfully". By revamped I actually mean "more faithful to the comic," but I'll come to that later. It takes place entirely over the opening credits, lasts no more than a few minutes, and basically tells us what we need to know - in the unlikely event that anyone walking into that movie didn't know what it was about. There's a mania in the latest run, at least, of superhero movies to do the origin story; every hero has to have their origin laid out for us on film, and every villain needs to have the same, in somewhat less time, but preferably entertwined with the hero for maximum cinematic and thematic impact. Thus Sandman (not the DC character, or the other DC character, or, actually, the other DC character, by that name, but rather the Marvel character) turns into the guy who, pre-Sandman, killed Uncle Ben in Spider-Man 3 and the Joker is turned into the guy who, pre-Joker, killed Mr. and Mrs. Wayne in Batman (the Tim Burton / Michael Keaton film), neither of which is true to the comics. There are exceptions - the X-Men films have a cast much too large to give this treatment to uniformly, but the first one is about how Logan and Rogue come to join the team, and the second one is in part about exploring Logan's origins (plus one of the films offers a glimpse of young Magneto). This is actually all pretty true to the comic, in that one of the essences of the X-Men is that there's a lot of mutants, more are always being found, and they need to be helped/recruited/saved or what-have you. (Although I note with some wryness that the reason the original X-Men [Professor X, Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Iceman, and Jean Grey] were a team of mutants because Stan Lee figured making them mutants would free him from having to come up with clever ways for each of them to get exposed to gamma radiation.) Batman Begins is entirely origin story, and finds its justification in the fact that no portrayal in any medium had previously covered the period prior to Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham as a young man, so the story of how he determined to become Batman was actually completely fresh. (There are, actually, flashbacks scattered around the DC continuity that show him getting trained here or there, but I believe this is right.) The second half of the film draws heavily from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, which also filled a gap by covering the period directly after Wayne returned to Gotham and his first adventures as Batman; the elements of the mob and the city-wide corruption are drawn from this canonical source, with the roles of the Scarecrow and R'as al Ghul being interpolations. But what I'm driving at is that these films are all taken up with origins and for the most part it's unnecessary. How the Hulk got to be the Hulk isn't important in any way for telling a story about him; the same goes for lots of characters. I haven't seen either Fantastic Four movie, but I know the first one takes the time to get through the origin onscreen, when all you need to know to get the necessary dramatic resonance is that: Reed Richards feels guilty for causing his friends' changes, and (optional but probably a good idea) Reed can be an overconfident and conceited dick (which is why he's guilty for his friends' changes). Unless there's something specially compelling about an origin (whether you show it literally or not, you can't get away from the murder of the Waynes or that of Uncle Ben), the audience, largely composed of people who basically know who these characters are anyway, is capable of picking up the explanatory history as you sprinkle it artfully through the actual story you're trying to tell. Triple goes for the villains; the obsession with not being able to throw a major super-character out unless he's gotten at least fifteen minutes of screen time to show us how he got to be super winds up reading to me like studio contempts for the audience's intelligence.

Hulk is the poster-child here; it's positively steeped in origin. Probably ten minutes go by before we see the adult Bruce Banner, let alone the Hulk (who shows up somewhere around the forty minute mark, if i recall). Moreover, the origin is drastically altered so that Bruce Banner's father plays a huge role in the story, both of how Banner came to be the Hulk, and by eventually become the film's final antagonist. This is one of the central problems with the film; there's a lot to be said, and I won't say it here, about the push and pull between people who want comics to be serious or not, "realistic" or not, and so forth. I don't think trying to make a comic "realistic" is the same thing as trying to make a comic that "takes itself seriously" (and taking itself seriously has nothing to do with how funny or dull it is), but the Hulk script confuses taking the idea of the Hulk seriously for trying to make a self-consciously serious movie. Therefore it's not enough to explore the rage that drives the Hulk - and by implication the rage that's in Banner - and take seriously Banner's feelings about who he is and why. An Oedipal (in the father-killing, not the mother-fucking, sense) dimension is added for Serious Dramatic Heft. Now, Bruce's dad is, canonically, an abusive asshole and he did kill Bruce's mom, and he was a genetic researcher who believed (the film makes clear he's correct, which I believe the comics do not) that his experiments had infected his son, but he never becomes a supervillain as Nolte's character - named in the credits only as "The Father" [eyeroll] - does at the end of the film. (On the other hand, before the final battle Nolte provides the most interesting acting moment in either Hulk film, when he mocks Bruce by making a face at him, going "nyaaehe," and stomping his feet like a petulant child. It's a weird and arresting choice that almost redeems a lot.) It's not enough for Bruce Banner to be an angry guy, and it's not enough for him to be angry because his dad was a horrible person, he has to literally fight and kill his dad, who made him not only as Bruce Banner but also made it possible for him to be made as the Hulk.

Okay, to be fair I'm reaching a little bit because Bruce Banner, in comics, does kill his dad, accidentally, during a fight at the late Mrs. Banner's grave. The point isn't to deny that Bruce's dad was a major asshole who played, in the end, a major role in shaping Bruce's personality, the point is that this was something that came out over a long time in a comic that's been running for forty years, and it isn't one of the dozen most important things to know about the character of the Hulk. The canonical conflict between Bruce and pére must be inflated and elevated to operatic heights for the movie to become "serious." This is no better an aspiration than The Incredible Hulk's desire to be completely lightweight; neither film is content to take the character and his story in his/its own terms and play them honestly and true.

What makes Hulk a much more interesting movie than its non-sequel is its technical and formal ambition. Not the ambition of the script, which confuses dramatic heft for added ponderance, but the ambition of the camerawork and the editing. This is why I think Hulk is worth watching, for the most creative and ambitious use of the camera I've ever seen in a comic book movie. It almost doesn't matter that the ambition fails and falls flat. I'm not a particular fan (or non-fan) of Ang Lee as a director, but Hulk reminds me of something I often say about Spike Lee, which is that even in the movies of his that I can't stand (Mo' Better Blues, e.g.), I'm captivated and feel my time was well spent, because Spike Lee's failures are braver and more interesting than most director's successes. What Hulk tries to do, with a variety of focus tricks, cutting tricks, split-screen montages, and so forth is replicate the panel structure of a comic book. It's a brave and clever idea and I'm honestly surprised no one ever tried it before - at least, never to such an obvious degree. It's fascinating stuff and a lot of the technique Lee developed here could surely be put to good use in a more successful film, more moderately. Because the problem is that it doesn't work; in trying to recreate the page of a comic book, the film actively and explicitly subverts the experience of reading a comic.

Despite presumptions that, being marriages of image and word, comics and films are a lot alike, they're not, because the method of experience is so different. A filmed work substitutes the camera for the viewer's eye; sure, we can look around in the frame, particularly on still shots, but what the camera does is force us to look here and not there, and most importantly it does so in time. You can't look at the expression on a face we just cut away from, because it's not there anymore. This is where the moving split screens don't work as well as you'd hope, because the eye/brain hookup is, by eons of design, keyed in to movement, so suddenly introducing a new window on the movie screen forces us to look at it at the moment of introduction, and we're always pulled one way or another by wherever the most new activity is occurring. The panels on a comic book page, by contrast, are there to be read as we please, sped or lingered over as the impulse strikes, and most importantly they control time in a very different way than a camera does. Shutter speed can accelerate or decelerate, and jump cuts to somewhere or somewhen else are viable film techniques, but a sequence that, in five seconds of audience time, goes into slow motion, then fast-forward, then freeze frames, then cuts to a memorable image from a character's past, then back to the freeze frame, then back into regular time, would be near-intolerable. Its use, if effective, could only be to force the audience to experience a character's subjectivity, and we would process that subjectivity primarily as confusion. Comics do this sort of shit all the time and do it well. The possibilities inherent in sequential and/or overlapping panels of illustration provide for an incredibly rich variety of effects that can be exploited for storytelling and emotive purposes, and most of them are completely unique to comics. In some ways the quintissential comic-book effect, the thing that only it can do, is interpose a panel in which nothing is, image-wise, different from the one before or after it (or both), save that there is no text. As in: in panel one, we're closeup on a character's face and he says something; in panel two, we're in the same closeup and nothing is said; in panel three either we stick to the closeup but something is said again, or we move on to something else. What happens in that middle panel? He's thinking (or remembering, or feeling, or, zen-like, just existing in his own moment of stillness). But it's a completely unique method for portraying this fact. Why? Because the second question is How long did that panel take? and the answer is "as long as it needed to". !!! This is what film emphatically cannot do, because time is always in motion. The camera cannot hold a literal freeze frame for more than a second or two without antagonizing the audience, but a comic book panel can use that image to represent an hour's isolation or a vital nanosecond in which the character decides his new course of action, the moment of stillness in a storm of activity. Prose can't do this either, because it can't communicate indeterminate time without telling you it's communicating indeterminate time, which is almost always on the nose and doesn't work. And the other point is that unless the rest of the context clearly forces you into making a presumption about how much time that panel took, there is no answer. It takes as long as it needed to, which means as long as the reader wanted or needed it to. Comics can render time as indeterminate in a way that film cannot, and trying to use the techniques of comic layout in a film's editing room robs those techniques of most of what they can do while compromising much of what makes film effective.

But it's a really cool idea, Ang.

Wrapping up (!) this Hulk of a post, let's come back to the last thing I didn't say in the prior post. I indicated that the movie's third failure was one of technical capacity: the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk just doesn't look that good. Neither, really, does the Hulk in Hulk. If "not that good" is taken to be "doesn't look realistic in the context of the rest of the film's visual texture," both films fail. Hulk, though, intentionally or not, renders the big green fella as a cartoon; he looks a lot like something you'd see in the pages of Marvel comics dropped, Roger Rabbit-style, into a live action movie. Whether it works for you or not - my attitudes are mixed - the film made a virtue of its inability to get a "realistic" Hulk. The newer film's Hulk, despite five years' worth of CG advances, doesn't look any realer, and fatally it clearly so much wants to. The Incredible Hulk, so to speak, isn't remotely on par with Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies as a fully integrated and lifelike CG character. Partly that's because I don't like the character design and partly that's because, I think, CG characters still struggle to convincingly look like they're obeying the laws of physics. Gollum was like a seventy-pound wraith, insubstantial except in his moments of hissing aggression. Gollum is physically there (storywise) in a literal sense, but he's rarely a physical presence. The Hulk is supposed to be huge, to walk heavily, and to lift heavy objects. That physical presence just doesn't come across. This might actually not just be a CG problem; in general film struggles to portray superstrength. The movie Hulk is about nine feet tall, but he's much much much stronger than the proportional relationship to a normal adult male that would imply, even accounting for his outsized musculature. Buffy the Vampire Slayer never really sold Sarah Michelle Gellar's punches well because even if the stunt was brilliantly executed, the eye doesn't want to believe that those arms and shoulders could generate that effect; the leap of suspended disbelief is a little too far (whereas her kicks, equally improbably in objective terms, are much less troublesome). Wolverine is supposed to be like 5'3" or something, but the movies were probably right in casting Hugh Jackman, who stands a foot taller. Not only could you not find a white actor with the appropriate physique to portray the Wolveirne of the comics - a male gymnast would come closest - but an audience is just not going to believe the presentation of a 5'3" guy who's also supposed to weigh 200 pounds (all that adamantium fused to his skeleton) and be able to lift multiple guys over his head simultaneously. Wolverine's superstrength is modest by the Hulk's standards, but he's much much much stronger than a normal person could ever be, and a burly 6'3" Aussie simply sells that to the eye better than a burly 5'3" dude. This is one of many problems live action has over illustrations or animation; the eye is more skeptical about the realism of what it sees.

May, December

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the music video for Hayden Panettiere's new single "Wake Up Call." I watched about half of it; the song's fine generically - I wouldn't wince if it came on in public somewhere - and her voice reminds me of someone else's that I can't place right now, but it's also OK. I mean, good enough for pop starlet-dom, but (to judge her by the standards of people who are now, shudder, her elders) it's like Britney-good (though they don't sound alike), not Mandy Moore good, and nowhere near "restrained Christina Aguilera good". The notable thing about the video though is, well, the video, which I gather is getting press because Ms. Panettiere seems to be trying to play up her public barely-legal-maybe-sexpot image (which heretofore I'd thought of as having been unwillingly, uh, thrust upon her) vs. her cheerleader image from Heroes. Anyway, the point is that she's rather inept at it. In an interview with Britney Spears from the post-Timberlake pre-Federline era, Chuck Klosterman spent some time trying to untangle Britney's appeal from a variety of angles, but one dominant throughline is that however immature she may be (have been) in so many, many ways, she either intentionally or intuitively was able to walk a line between mature and frank sexuality and girlish innocence. Not a girl, not yet a woman is basically the whole point of the first five or six years of her career, and it's all there in the "Hit Me One More Time" video and etched in granite by the time we get to "Oops!...I Did It Again". (Aguilera, only one year older, by my estimation basically hit the big time already jumping to a youthful but definitely adult take on her sexual image [which went with her more overtly R&B-influenced music], although the Dirrrrrrrrrrrrrrty era kind of became a caricature of this. Of course, with that voice, it's not like she really had the option to play the coy sixteen year old.) By comparison Panettiere's underwear-flashes and attempts to eyefuck the camera are embarrassing because it's clear that she's trying, which is pretty much the antithesis of everything she's shooting for. I don't know her in her personal life, obviously, but as a performer she can't summon up "smoldering" and shoots right to "glaring". I stopped halfway through the video because I felt bad for her.

If you want to, you can find with no effort whatsoever the recent pictures of Dame Helen Mirren in a bikini. Now, if you know me in real life then you probably have gathered that I'm pretty frank about the fact that I look at pornography and stuff that can be observed for similar purposes (like, say, non-porn pictures of attractive women). However, I don't intend for this to be That Sort of Blog. Nonetheless: Daaaaaaaaaamn. The Dame is literally days away from her 63rd birthday and in addition to her ever-luminous face (evident in umpteen-hundred red carpet photos) has a figure that's...I'm not even going to try to put it politely. Let's just sidestep the descriptions and say that she has a body suitable for a woman half her age. A really hot woman. Sexual attraction is actually almost edged out by pure curious amazement. I must confess that I've never actually seen one of her films (which I intend to rectify, and no, not just because she's beautiful now and was beautiful forty years ago), but I'm pretty sure that by this point in her life, at least, when Helen Mirren sets out to eyefuck you, you stay eyefucked.

Perhaps Not Entirely Advisable

Nothing came of it, since the "stranger" in question was me, and we were in an elevator in an office building, but:

Might I suggest that if you're in a public space with people you don't know standing around, it's probably not a good idea to make fun of the Army? Particularly in a way that mocks their collective intelligence? Especially if you're not military or ex-military yourself and can't play off any unpleasant escalations with the whole "Hey, man, I'm in the Navy/Marines/Air Force, you know, professional rivalry, all in good fun, ha ha," thing. I had no ability to glean the conversational context, but this guy - who, by the way he said it, clearly wasn't military - said to a companion something like "The Army isn't very bright, are they?" In addition to being more or less wrong - as an institution you might think the Army has done some stupid things, but they're undeniably very good at the job they're supposed to handle, and that requires having a lot of intelligent people around. And, really, bad idea. You don't know who's Army or not and who might be incline to get in your face or not. I mean, I don't look like I'm ex-military, which is good because I'm not, but a friend's dad was a Ranger (or was he a Green Beret?) in Vietnam, and I wouldn't have at all guessed it to look at him. Anyway.

And While I'm Out On The Internet

This is a better and more interesting article than you'd think from briefly considering the concept: "Hey, MMA is like gay porn!" I'd say the final twist on page three is kind of stupid and offputting but I don't actually have any knowledge of or insight into what gay porn is like. (Really!)

We Can Be Randomer

Stray thought from the other day:

There's all sort of little stories or little elements of stories or ideas floating around in the general category of "time travel could be a mechanism for creating wealth." As in, your knowledge of the historical monetary value of a stock or some collectible item, or the outcome of sporting events, can be used to continually and dependably realize huge profits on relatively small wagers. What inexplicably popped into my head (I wasn't even especially thinking about time travel) is that this basically only works one way. If I'm based in the timeline that, well, I'm actually based in (born in 1982, a young man in 2008), I can (setting aside all issues and paradoxes and what have yous stemming from the time travel itself) hope to travel into the future, find out the 2009 NBA champion, and put a lot of money on that and wait to collect. Or travel thirty years into the future, find out what stock was to the 2010s and 2020s what Apple and Microsoft were to the 1980s and 1990s, get in on the groundfloor and wait to reap the benefits.

What I can't hope to do is travel backwards from my base-timeline and win money by betting on the Mets to win the world series or buying a 1959 Gibson Les Paul and bringing it back to the present day when I could sell it for 100x the original list price (not adjusted for inflation, but still). I could do it on the very short term (go back and bet on the Celtics to win the 2008 championship, e.g.) except that would start raising paradoxical issues. But I really couldn't go back to 1986 or 1959 or whenever to make any money, because I'd have no way to pay for anything. Currency design keeps shifting and old designs are intentionally sifted out of the market. If I go back to 1959 no one would recognize my cash as legit legal tender; they'd think I was a particularly inept forger. Credit cards would be declined and checks, if they don't look too different, might be successful as long as I made sure to get out of town before the thing bounced - which raises an ethical wrinkle as well, since I'm now not only depriving someone else of the chance to honestly make the remunerative decision that I'm making with the cheat of hindsight, but then I'd also be actually stealing. The only way to work it would be to take something back in time to sell or pawn, but then you start having to do the math of what you could take back from 2008 that would be sellable in 1959 *and* which would allow you to turn a profit when flipping back and forth between FY1959 $ and FY2008 $. There are potential workarounds or you could do them in stages, but they'd all take a lot more work than just finding out that FutureTech stock is going to be worth $150 a share (in FY2008 $!) in 2020, and take away from the elegance of the idea.

(One possibility that just occured would be to do things in stages. Go back in time and get enough local money to hop around buying up comic books that will be valuable in the future, jump forward to the late 80s or early 90s and sell your small but highly desirable collection, roll that money into something else that'll escalate in value, and keep going. The problem with travelling back for massive sports bets or winning lottery tickets is that you need an excuse or mechanism for turning the money into cash - or buying something else again - before bringing it back to the present. Bank accounts get us back into the various paradoxes I was trying to avoid by examining the simple mechanisms of how you'd try to make money.)

So if you ever wondered "Hey, what's some of the stuff Medrawt thinks about that he'd randomly share if he were in my presence but since he's usually alone just vanishes into the ether?" well, there's an example. (Although I've actually already told someone this particular idea, but I'd also already decided to blog it when I did so.)

Other random thing: I flipped through the latest Popular Science in a Walgreens because the cover promised a piece on baseball pitching, which is a subject that fascinates me much more than baseball itself. The piece was a lame dud - it diagrammed the mechanics that go into throwing serious heat without getting into any of the business that mystifies and fascinates me. Yeah, it puts ridiculous stress on the tendons in your elbow, but why is the ability to do that 100 times every few days so rare, and why is the ability to do that with pinpoint accuracy so much rarer, and what exactly is going on in the arm of guys who can hack it in the Show vs. someone like me? I'm undersized for a prototypical modern MLB pitcher - guys in the Clemens/Schilling/Beckett mode, 6'5" hosses - but I'm a bigger guy than not, and if I'm not especially strong at the moment I certainly could be (will be?!?!) if I lifted weights more regularly. Forgetting accuracy, there's no way I could throw a baseball half as hard as an MLB pitcher; I doubt I could generate the sheer physical power to come close. (And that's half of what fascinates me about pitching; pretty much every other impressive sporting activity is, beyond a relatively low physical threshold, more about skill than raw physical potential [until you wrap around to the people who do physically impressive things while engaging in impressive sporting activity]. Anybody can hit a ground stroke as hard as a pro tennis player, but few can hit it that hard with the accuracy and spin of a pro; anybody in shape who's 6'3" should be able to dunk [and plenty who are shorter can as well] but running a pick and roll in the NBA requires ball control, court vision, and decision making-at-extreme-speed beyond most people who aren't already running pick and rolls in the NBA, not to mention the purely physical requirements.)

ANYWAY

the pitching "article" was a dud but there was this fascinating / frightening bit on research into the inhibition of the protein myostatin. Myostation itself acts as, I guess, a limiter on muscular growth; when it was inhibited in lab mice they doubled in muscle mass. Myostatin absence is also apparently a naturally occuring mutation in some cases - there's one human toddler, a few breeds of cow, and Whippets. The article in Popular Science did me the service of informing me about the existence of Bully Whippets. Go here (not the Popular Science article) if you want to read more, or just to look at what a Whippet - which normally has the physique of a dog deep in the throes of cocaine addiction - looks like when it's born with the body of a steroid abusing weight training Rottweiler. Further down the page there's also a picture of a spookily muscled cow. (Also, people in comments seem to think these photos are faked - or there's straightfaced joking I don't know about since I've never seen that site before - but basically the same photo of the same dog showed up in what I assume is still a reasonably respectable national publication, so I'm working under the presumption that there's credibility here.)

No one knows what happens to the development of a human brain with this condition - as the article linked to here points out, we traditionally think that the brain requires a reasonable amount of fat to develop, and if everything stays the same the kid in the article will wear his teeth to the bone trying to eat enough food for his metabolism to allow him to store any fat - but so far he seems like a healthy kid. (I mean, he's a freakishly "healthy" kid, but you know what I mean.) What I wonder about but amn't going to do the research on is why this doesn't appear to be a progressive condition; the muscles experience a massive development over what they normally do, but only to a point, unlike many instances of gigantism, where the individual in question keeps growing until what we'd consider a premature death.

Maybe I should travel to the future and check out what companies developed mysotatin inhibitors as a safe performance-enhancing supplement, and then come back and buy their stock.

That Cobra Thing

Some fuckwad bought billboard space and put up a picture of the Twin Towers burning with the legend: "Please Don't Vote for a Democrat". Really, it's a stellar example of what I meant by quoting the whole "can't think of conservatives like you're trying to rationalize their thought processes." (Hat tip to Pandagon, btw.) Now, I'm not being fair, this is one dude, somewhere in this land of ours is a crazy fucking asshole with deranged views on the left wing who'd come up with something equally inappropriate. (Like, gosh, since it was actually a Republican in office when 9/11 happened, the exact same image with a message saying "Please don't vote for a Republican" might be apropos. Except that it'd be a huge mindfuck to the sort of people for whom this sort of thing is persuasive, since that juxtaposition would run so violently counter to the acceptable narratives and idea-boxes we have. Disfigured and/or Iraqi children crying into the camera lens would be a more thematically appropriate leftist equivalent in our current political/theoretical/ideological lexicon of bullshit.) This is just one guy, and reacting to conservatism for this one guy is like someone not wanting to like Tool because he met some Tool fans once and they were massive dicks. Still and all, though, it's a...hmm...it does well to remember that this sort of thing is out there.

(And, to be fair, I've passed on the opportunity to go see Tool because I gathered a sense that the prevailing audience behavior at a Tool concert might not be to my liking, although I have to imagine there's also a lot of people who go stoned and just stand still hoping they'll play "Third Eye.")

Not to get all explicitly or implicitly contrasty, but here's Elizabeth Edwards on Tony Snow's death. During the primaries I was an Edwards booster until that became a non-viable option. I was, admittedly, somewhat uncomfortable with what Yglesais might call the "optics" of that alignment, since an ostensibly pretty liberal guy was rooting for the white Southern male with what turned out to be a voter base of conservative Democrats who were also white Southern males. (Of course, that was a good indication that voters don't pay attention to what the candidates are really saying, since Edwards was clearly the most overt liberal in the race other than somebody like Kucinich.) The best thing I think Edwards did for the race this year was push Obama and Clinton to the left a bit and, more to the point, get the Democratic candidates talking in specific terms about what kinds of reform they want to see in this country, particularly re: health care. Essentially marginal figures who run "to keep the other guy honest" and stay in it long past viability to try to leech their 2.5% of the vote or whatever always wind up pissing me off in the end because I think it's an act of hubris (and people who turn independent to do the same in the general even more so); the only politicians who have an honest shot at "keeping the other guy [or gal]" honest are the ones who also have a shot at winning. Edwards was clearly the distant third option, but a world in which he wound up the nominee was infinitely more imaginable than the same happening to Kucinich; you need to be of a certain stature to have the kind of effect presidential candidates like to think of themselves as having. Anyway. The second best thing is that I hope Edwards' second primary run solidified the status of his wife as a public figure. Elizabeth Edwards' piece on Tony Snow is classy and sweet and cool, if not especially interesting ("we should cure cancer! we can all agree on that!") but that she bothered to write it in a public forum is indicative of her intent to stay in the public eye, hopefully writing more substantive pieces as she has over the past year. I'm definitely not alone among former Edwards fans who'd say that actually we kind of think she's a lot cooler than her husband.

We're Not So Alike, You And Me

When I first started reading political blogs, back around 2001-02, I made an honest effort to read as many conservative (or at least libertarian) blogs as I did liberal ones. I never read Instapundit because I really truly didn't get what all the fucking fuss was about, but otherwise I kept reading for several years on a number of reasonably well known blogs. And eventually I stopped and gave up, for a complex of reasons, but I find the essential core of the problem well articulated by a commenter at Crooked Timber:

The thing I didn’t appreciate until the Internet is exactly how weird conservatives were. I thought about conservatives the way most liberals think about anyone different from them. I tried to imagine, “What would make me think that?” or “What would make me act that way?” Reading conservatives on the Internet has taught me that conservatives cannot be understood that way. You’re better off using the same part of your brain that you use to understand a cobra.

Now, I'll be nice and say that the operative phrase there isn't "conservatives" but "conservatives on the Internet," but the point holds. I wonder how often an attempt at honest understanding and rapproachment ends in fortified partisanship.

I Do Have Limits, At Times

My first attempt to watch The Machinist failed, just now, partly because I didn't want to see Michael Ironsides lose a hand but mostly because I can't bear to watch Christian Bale in this film. Not his performance - it looks typically good - but I physically can't bear to look at him. This is kind of a new thing for me. I'm generally not impressed or persuaded when a critic (professional or otherwise) says of an actor in a movie that they can't take him seriously in the role because, implicitly, it's just too weird to see (e.g.) Keanu Reeves doing Shakespeare or what have you. That's either a failure of the actor's skill or the critic's imagination. But I can't, at least right now, watch The Machinist because Bale's obscene levels of weight loss takes me out of it, makes me uncomfortable, makes me worry about his health, makes me want to not look at anyone that skeletally grotesque. On some level I can't imagine that the point wouldn't have been sufficiently effective had Bale starved himself down to, God, I dunno, 140 lbs.? He's a big guy and at 140 he would've looked pretty fucking thin. Supposedly he got to around 120 and wanted to keep going.

There'd been some comment when Batman Begins came out about how Bale was doing all press related to the movie in the accent he used to play the role, suppressing his own Welsh accent; I thought this was kind of cool since he explained it as a gesture to not try and confuse little kids who might wonder why "Batman" sounded different. But I looked at some of the DVD materials on The Machinist and he's, again, doing an American accent; maybe it's because he wanted to stay in-accent at all times on set, which I guess I can understand, but it ties in with the idea that Bale immerses himself to an almost creepy degree. On the DVD of American Psycho Mary Harron talks about watching Bale eat a chicken breast while arguing on the phone with his personal trainer about the time of their appointment because he needed to run to the store and return a videotape (of, I believe, Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and she recalls thinking "My God, he's turned his life into Patrick Bateman's." On the little documentary included with The Machinist Bale says something like "I appreciate immersion, but I'm not going to be stupid about it." This is a moment after the director relates how Bale declined the use of galoshes when he had to run through a working sewage system. Dude.