The Invisible Counterpoint

"Her"  The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a simple  experiment that has been repeated over and over again by Silverman and his group.  They showed subliminal messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one —" MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”— had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their  anxieties and pathologies and their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.  “Daddy and I are one” had no effect.  "Iron Man 3" Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers. Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and against Killer  Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is  the Aztec mother- goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that  cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers. ...

The Wolf of Wall Street (part two) Richard Brody just wrote a review of “Wolf of Wall Street” where he began by discussing “Inside Llewyn Davis,” showing how anything good—he really liked both films—is “about pretty much everything.” Specifically, referring to Llewyn’s catching a glimpse of Bob Dylan on a stage that he's  sort of owned for years, he says that the film's about the “terrible, subtle blow that knocks a person from the vanguard to the sidelines, from the promise of youth to the nostalgia of age in a single moment.” He then gets to his discussion of “Wolf,” about the particular fashion in which it's about pretty much everything—or rather, the considerable part of the human that involves huge internal energies we tend to want to suppress or deny. I wished he had paused before rolling along, for it'd have been the right thing to have done, and inadvertently he had handed himself a solid prompt to have done so. For what Brody does not end up con...

Any good interview, even one that’s entirely friendly on the surface, should have a slight adversarial quality, since the reporter and the subject have inherently different goals. The Coens don’t always suffer fools gladly, but they give good copy, even in one-word answers to questions that don’t interest them. (“Do you get excited about the Cannes competition?” one reporter asked them. “Does that get your heart pumping?” Ethan Coen: “No.”) Over the years the Coens have developed a routine that lies somewhere between practiced shtick and a psychological coping mechanism. Ethan, the younger, shorter, lighter-haired brother, delivers brief responses, often glib or acrid in tone, and then the taller, older and more loquacious Joel bails him out, expounding generously on the original question or diverting it into friendlier terrain. [. . .] Well, I feel like one aspect of that is that your movies almost always reward a second viewing. There’s always stuff I didn’t see o...