I am hoping it is a sign of convalescence that I am dead flat exhausted all the time, because I am finding it very boring. I take a half-hour walk around the block and then I lie down for three hours and don't even watch a movie. It may also be a side effect of my antibiotics, in which case I just want them to finish their job and (Quintili Vare, legiones redde!) give me my brain back.
As all sources of my acquaintance indicate that Robert Ryan was an interesting and intelligent person whose progressive activism and eventual pacifism hardly ever showed onscreen except in the photonegative of his knotty, violent, toxically masculine heavies, I feel I owe his ghost an apology for the typecasting of last night's dream in which he was playing the racketeer whose shock at discovering the daughter his now-deceased ex-wife hid from him when she fled their marriage twenty years prior to the start of the picture transmutes almost immediately into an incestuously possessive pride, showing off the girl to his underworld buddies like his latest arm candy, lavishing on her the attentions of a penthouse and a wardrobe that spares no expense that have his long-time mistress packing off in a huff. She doesn't even look like her mother; it wasn't some kind of film noir Donkeyskin. He's just incapable of interacting with anything—a lover, a rival, a second-in-command—without that sexual element of control. Whoever produced it must have fought tooth and nail with the Production Code Administration. I wish I could remember more of the plot, but all I've got is the carbonado glitter of Ryan's eyes by candlelight and the slow neon strobe of a window's night mirror, his face clenched as so often with the pain of something it sickens him to want. His daughter wasn't an object to the audience, but he couldn't see it; he never would. She would survive him and he wouldn't understand that, either.
I am having a lot of trouble with the progress of this summer. I have more doctors coming up in August and I just want a break.
As all sources of my acquaintance indicate that Robert Ryan was an interesting and intelligent person whose progressive activism and eventual pacifism hardly ever showed onscreen except in the photonegative of his knotty, violent, toxically masculine heavies, I feel I owe his ghost an apology for the typecasting of last night's dream in which he was playing the racketeer whose shock at discovering the daughter his now-deceased ex-wife hid from him when she fled their marriage twenty years prior to the start of the picture transmutes almost immediately into an incestuously possessive pride, showing off the girl to his underworld buddies like his latest arm candy, lavishing on her the attentions of a penthouse and a wardrobe that spares no expense that have his long-time mistress packing off in a huff. She doesn't even look like her mother; it wasn't some kind of film noir Donkeyskin. He's just incapable of interacting with anything—a lover, a rival, a second-in-command—without that sexual element of control. Whoever produced it must have fought tooth and nail with the Production Code Administration. I wish I could remember more of the plot, but all I've got is the carbonado glitter of Ryan's eyes by candlelight and the slow neon strobe of a window's night mirror, his face clenched as so often with the pain of something it sickens him to want. His daughter wasn't an object to the audience, but he couldn't see it; he never would. She would survive him and he wouldn't understand that, either.
I am having a lot of trouble with the progress of this summer. I have more doctors coming up in August and I just want a break.
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