“Well, you’re able-bodied, and I’m not.”
I didn’t hear what the guy sitting in a handicapped seat, had to say back. Maybe that guy already sitting had some kind of invisible handicap—I can relate.
But this damn sight stuck with me. One guy with, apparently, nothing wrong with him, stuck with his seat, and the guy wrangling both a four-wheeled walker and a service dog, had to try his luck in the not-handicapped section.
Small uglinesses. Matter-of-fact discourtesies. Drops, steady, wearing away the stone of society. Reminding us of what goes on outside.
As we all sat down to watch the preview of The Long Walk from the Stephen King novel, first Hump Day of September (winter’s killing jar screwing shut), Big Orange in the White House seemed to be losing in the courts. As I sit typing this several days later, he seems tilted once again towards victories. We Seattleites, lucky enough to live Blue, stay nonetheless on guard against Red flecks. The black man on the bus with the white (notably not Red) cap nevertheless reading MAGA—I couldn’t figure out his game and felt afraid to ask.
Lights go down. Everybody knows the Second American Civil War is over, everybody knows that, yeah…the good guys lost. The Major (Mark Hamill) seems to run the country from behind his shades and gravel-growl. His system allows fifty young men, one from each state, to win a lottery for each year’s Long Walk.
Ah, that Long Walk. Fifty starters, surrounded by TV lenses and khakis with carbines. Maintain a speed of three MPH at all time. Fall below three MPH and you get a warning. Three warnings and on the fourth time you slow down—pow. Walk an hour with no warnings and you walk one warning off. Do not attempt to leave the highway. You get no warning if you try to leave the highway.
You also get no mercy, if you try to charge the guards—that earns a gutshot and a slow bleed out. You get no mercy if tank treads crush your legs leaving you screaming and squashed—you wait for the warnings before the headshot arrives as the angel of mercy.
Only one winner, and the winner gets anything he wants in the whole wide world. But forty-nine losers—no effective distinction between the first to fall, and the forty-ninth.
Why would young men jostle to join such a thing? Because, as indistinct as life outside the Walk seems, everyone’s so broke that taking that chance makes sense. King started writing this in ’66 or ’67, but naturally, we can shudder at the whole mess’ up-to-dateness. An iron-fisted leader who can fix the propaganda, fix everything except the economy. The Major’s banned books, to kudos, and he’s banned certain kinds of music. Big Orange certainly’s banned books to kudos, and for music…it’s my sad duty to sigh that music, much as I love it, gets easily co-opted. Big Orange has to play a song at a rally, after all, before the song’s artist or legacy (Linkin Park to Pavarotti’s people, Queen to the Stones, Elton John to Twisted Sister, Eddy Grant to Foo Fighters) can object—and that doesn’t count folks firmly in his pocket.
Though he’s out-of-pocket for the moment, The World’s Richest Man condemns empathy as a “bug,” hardly a feature, for humanity. Goes to the guts of this story: Goodwill, empathy, sympathy, altruism, and simple caring—all, now, nails that stick up to get hammered hard. Big Orange digs this as much as that Rich Guy (and hey, I’m autistic, but I try to avoid assholism).
So this goes to the interplay between the two leads, David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, as they charge to lead, make friends, stay friends, do what friends do in a crisis situation, propping each other up literally and spiritually. Of course, it was this crisis that prompted their friendship, and only one can survive. Hence the throttling of everything good and fair. I read the book several times and the Major presented as father figure and/or homoerotic; Mark Hamill strikes me neither. The Major lectures from the back of a Jeep or the equivalent and spins all the bloodshed into macho bullshit, jawing about the collective “sac” or possibly “sack” (no captions at this preview). Nothing much changed from the neighborhood bullies who whaled the crap out of me and sneered. Except of course, that those two miserable shits never got to lead a country. Not like some oranges we could name.
To violence: The first pow rips a skull apart in close-up. I hoped further pows might pow dialed back; no, not all of them. The honchos want us to get serious with the grisly. Pissing and shitting carefully designed to look real, at least, that too—but mostly the pow, the inhuman volume of the carbine (and how rare to find that in a film, how the weapon goes reliably off loud as all fuck).
My movie date called it the most gruesome picture she’d ever sat through.
My movie date made it all the way through Pasolini’s Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom.
Local professor Warren Etheredge lead a discussion. One fellow looped in the Chinese Cultural Revolution happening while King wrote–Red Guards skewering intellectualism in a bloody cascade. Another fellow went on at great length about how nobody knows their own history anymore (incoherent, but oddly in tune with the film’s own hazy sense of place: Not a cellphone in site, one kid with an old-school transistor, and all those vintage autos, inevitably junked or afire; farewell to what George Barris Kar Kulture?).
Warren Etheredge’s discussion group broke up. The man refused a handicapped seat, stood up, gently pulled the leash on his dog (which sat stalwart through all the gunfire), retrieved his walker, which he’d been obliged to park in an aisle, and took his leave. The publicists, twentysomethings, bid everyone good night (one had to think, several seconds, about who Mark Hamill was). One young lady sitting down in front introduced herself, and her girlfriend, to someone else, easiest thing in the world.
Outside, DeSantis goons painted over the Pulse Memorial in Orlando because they could. Big Orange proposed banning transgender folk from owning firearms. Because he could.
I bid you well. I hope we’re seeing brighter news by the time you read this. Watch this as a cautionary tale. Seek out chances to behave humanly. You don’t have to be able-bodied. You just need to human–verb…
