Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver

Saw Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises". Here is my treatise on yakuza, tiny babies, blintzes, and naked eye-gouging. There are spoilers, sorry:


It's interesting that David Cronenberg and David Lynch both released films in 2007 featuring eastern Europeans shadily huddled in alleyways. These movies also shared a similar theme: the fetishization of violence and the abhorrent results of realizing its appeal.


Eastern Promises is really just A History of Violence, but having roped in a more mainstream audience with his previous (and much more mainstream) film he allows himself a little more of the "bodyhorror" that characterized his earlier work. Cronenberg, for you nonfans, approached horror from a modern cautionary perspective, in Videodrome and Crash and The Fly and Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers(his best film) he shows us what happens when "technology" and "the body" overlap due to one of three things:

1- man's hubris (The Fly);

2- unstoppable perversion (Crash, Dead Ringers)

3-insanity (Naked Lunch)


With A History of Violence he allows his thematic approach to mature. It isn't modern technology as such that threatens "normal" humanness, if such a thing exists, rather it is the absolute failure of anonymity--the impossibility of anonymity--in the modern world that makes us constantly at risk. Viggo's character cannot re-start life after leaving his gangster ways because his gangster life weighs down on him -- he is "found out" but mostly because he could never really hide.


Similarly, Eastern Promises offers us an extension of this failure of anonymity. A Russian girl gives birth and dies wordlessly, but, alas, she has left a revealing diary that threatens the existence of underground yakuza-style Russian gangsters living in London. This damning book draws Naomi Watts and Viggos' characters further into this dark world, but also draws them together. Not only are the identity of prominent Russian gangsters threatened, but most importantly at stake is that of THE (tiny) BABY born in the film's early scenes. Her existence provides genetic proof of the villain having raped her, and is used to close the case in a sense.

I like this movie because we are reintroduced to what Cronenberg started in his last film, an exgesis on why we can never restart out lives/have two identities/go on lying forever. Not in this world. Not in a world where dying women leave diaries. Not in a world where babies surface to genetically prove our crimes. Not in a world where perverse curiosity (Naomi Watts is drawn further and further into this world because she "cares about the fate" of the baby, but her fetishistic maternal instinct are understood, in the film, as at least enmeshed in her sexual desire for Viggo).

I was interested most of all to see what Cronenberg would do with his new mainstream attention. What he would force THE EYE OF AMERICA (hyperbole maybe, but H. of V. was a big, big film) to gaze perseverently upon?

Answer: A dick. Viggo Mortenson's dick. An extended, naked, shower fight sequence. Well choreographed, I might add. Not what I want to see-- but sort of brilliant, Mr. Cronenberg.

I like mainstream-Cronenberg, even if he no longer can serve up perfect horror premises like he did in Dead Ringers (identical twin gynaecologists who work on mutant vaginas). But La-Di-Da, la-di-da.

D.C.ed over

Went to Washington D.C. a few weeks ago and had a horrible nightmare.

In Washington, because there isn't a one-fare-to-anywhere model of subway pricing, you have to swipe your METROTICKET or CHARLIEBUCK or whatever the hell they call it in our nation's capital (Freedomcard?) before you board and after you get off the train.


Listen, I get it.
Okay, Jeremy? I get how "awesome" D.C. metro is -- the flashing lights that let you know when you are about to get hit by a train, the nifty ticker that lets you know when the next Shady Grove-bound redline is careening through. Thanks. I even appreciate the entirely too-futuristic subway decor, which honestly looks more like the sub-arctic government base set in the X-Files movie than a public transportation depot:

(actual film still-- tell me I'm wrong)

Anyway, why, D.C. METRO, why? Why can't we develop a better system? What if I lose my ticket while on the ride? (this happened). What if I am wearing cargo pants and cannot find the pocket it is in for over 5 minutes after de-boarding? (this happened).

So the nightmare I had involved me being in the D.C. subway and losing my ticket. When I tried to tell a police officer they told me basically that I was shit out of luck and had to start life down in the subway. It is at this point I realize there is a whole tent community down in the subway of people who lost their ticket and were forced to re-start life "on the other side of the turnstile" with I-bankers, Smithsonian curators, even a (gay, Republican, fondling) senator here and there. I woke up just as a Hobo-ified Lila Lipscomb (small difference) was offering me some canned peas.

Talked about being D.C.ed over.