Rebecca Works Hard and Will Be Very Successful

Thanks to the illustrious accomplishments of my roommate, I just got to go to a preview of Fahrenheit 9/11. It was good, although as usual I prefer the more abstract parts of the film to the ones where M. Moore is there to melodramatically guide your emotions. But then at one point the melodramatic part gets very spoiled and fucked up, in a bizarre triangular encounter that forms what I think is one of the film's best scenes. The bit of the film I saw five months ago (I don't want to give anything away but it is during the opening credits and the part on September 11th) remained the most eerily arresting of the whole project. I got to go with Rebecca to the wrap party at Soho House, which I'd only heard of because someone paid me to write up a movie treatment for her story idea, described as "Sex in the City Gone Bad." Needless to say, Soho House and the words "a clingy Missoni dress" shared a paragraph in her initial description, but with fois gras and a glowing rooftop swimming pool to schmooze around I'm not going to complain. It was pretty. A word of warning though: The SoHo House is not in SoHo, but rather in the Meatpacking District. ("Ringworm is neither a ring or a worm, it is a fungus," recall those who read Matt Groening as children.) I hung out with the bassist from Ween. He's only been with the band for six years but we mutually lamented the demise of songs like Poop Ship Destroyer in the mainstream vernacular of music. It was exciting.

I actually think this movie is going to be more politically influential than maybe any other American film ever. It is slated to open this weekend (according to Moore) in 800 theaters, a number unprecedented even for his own record-breaking precedents. Bowling for Columbine apparently never played more than 250 theaters at a time. It's really amazing. In a war where we have seen little televised images, the images in the movie strike really hard. Maybe it's just because I've only been reading books about war for the past two months, but it's always shocking to see the violence and the open wounds and injuries. You start to think of violence on such abstract humanitarian terms until you actually see someone's tibia exposed.

War lit is interesting... every book has a chapter on the glorification of war and the feeling the soldiers have of acting out their own movie -- it's a fantasy that is simultaneously shattered by the trauma of actually being there and perpetuated by the recording of it in the non-fiction recreation of the drama. I don't know why I like it so much. It isn't the violence -- I actually had to put Dispatches and Black Hawk Down down for a little while, because they were making me nauseous -- but rather that they can work as Saramago's Blindness did fictionally, questioning order and comfort and how very fragile the threads holding things in place are. Particularly when you are contrasting people who grew up sitting on a couch eating Fritos with people who have had violence around them their entire lives. Blindness also made me want to throw up. More than the other two even. But there's something about filling out an experience only seen from a position of comfort and then in 2-dimensions. In Homage to Catalonia when Orwell comes along and talks about how having lice in his underwear is such an undiscussed and unavoidable part of the military experience -- It's just not what you are thinking of when you watch Saving Private Ryan.