What I said to my hub-sand: "Now that Adrian Lyne has squished absolutely everything that Americans have been obsessed with for the past 10-15 years into one movie -- Viet Nam, New York City, subway violence, devils, angels, tentacles, goat heads, fortune-tellin' women, blacks & whites, government conspiracies, secret experiments, drugs, psychiatrists, institutional insensitivity, anxious men in those wood-n-glass cop-shop cubicles, dark-haired jezebels with great thighs, preppie ex-wives, cute kids w/ bikes and bunkbeds, sex in the shower, books with creepy engravings in them, identity crises because they lost your file, funerals, black umbrellas in the rain, drinking after funerals, old places with dim light and dark wooden stairways, raw-looking flesh, sinister surgeons, hospital gowns, surgical masks, hospital gurneys, first-aid stretchers, fucked-up metal wheels on carts, weird-looking trash, miscellaneous body parts, black women who wear out-of-style coats and sing offkey in the streets and are so real and heart-warming you just hafta love 'em, male bonding, lawyers, court rooms, phones, civil suits, men in suits who shove you into cars, baby dolls, baby carriages, babies crying, men who tell you to keep your big fat mouth shut or else, cars out of control, men in uniform, oh no lost my glasses, dirt, hostile birds flapping their wings so you can't see what's going on, we can't talk here because it's not safe, cops cruising by in cop cars, and by all means we have to include moving upward into the beatific white light as you die -- now that all of that's been put in one movie, would someone puh-leeeeeze -- OOPS -- I forgot about homeless people, the problem of evil, survivor guilt, 60's burnout guilt, bad drugs, peace signs, pentacles, ugly things that happen in bathrooms, rock music, alcohol, marijuana, helicopters with blades going whirr-whirr or whack-whack, cars chasing people, cars crushing people, cars exploding in balls of flames, cars in those weird non-road places they have in some cities, people who stand by and look glazed while strangers are being abducted,
anyway--
now that Adrian Lyne has given us all THAT in a mere two hours, will someone puh-leeeeeze (pretty please) make a movie about SOMETHING ELSE?"
Or: when the century's over, will someone please turn out the lights?
(apocalypseapocalypseapocketpickapockethotlips NOW)
(Oh I forgot: scenes where you're walking through the jungle looking for potential enemies/predators/bad guys -- it has one of those, too -- and scenes of spurting blood, too -- [sigh])
(Ohmigod, and we just *can't* leave out "It was all just a dream he had in the last few moments before he died/mutated/woke up/who gives a flying....")
Think of it this way: Adrian Lyne did us a favor. He gave us two
brand-new subjects to obsess about. Chiropractors and post offices.
Copyright © Fiona Webster 1991