“Ontology! I’m just
telling you a story
about this projector, that’s all.”
Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II
Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
Oh, Phantom Hat, worn on the
wrong side of a disturbed mind.
Even poor Henderson, cops
lingering in his apartment, wife
strangled, recalls a hat no one
will corroborate, reduced to:
"Maybe I only imagined that
woman." Hats like nobody's
business, blatant, yet universal,
real, if fanciful, with a credit of
its own. Chapeau-noir worn at
a non-existent angle by Jack, his
psychopathic pal. A euphemism
for bonkers? If not those who
bonk? Like Kansas, the secretary
not the state, more than a match
for Cliff, the drummer not the
precipice, who, having absconded
with Jack's money, paradiddles
himself into a frenzy. More
perturbing is that fucking cop,
Burgess, who, like a spit-roasted
Republican switches sides with
the flimsiest of alibis. Perhaps it's
the heat, back when courtroom
settings had not yet been turned
into a series of air-conditioned
nightmares. No sweat, but saturated
shadows and oblique confrontations.
None so unsettling as Burgess's reply
to Jack's suggestion- self-flattery, of
course- that the killer might well be
a genius. "No," says Burgess, "he's a
paranoic. It's not how a man looks,
but how his mind works. Some day
we'll have the sense to train the mind
like we train the body." To which one
might reply, if the hat fits, why in the
world would anyone want to wear it.
Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)
If it really does all take place in his mind, had he,
or the film, not been shot on Alcatraz. Or turned
to pulp by a literate projector (invented by E.
Dorn, circa 1970). "A dream, a dream." In a land
of sleep-walkers, where only the exhausted will
be culpable and insomniacs reign supreme. Every-one else, irrelevant or speed-balling down the interstate. Riding shot-gun alongside a bevy of
eroticised women, their eyeballs drawing circles,
drugged, then examined for flaws. A tin ear for
Walker's footsteps echoing through LAX, planes
whining like badly educated mosquitoes. A woman's voice: “Can’t sleep, haven’t slept, keep taking
pills, dreaming about you, how good it must be
being dead.” What about that under-achieving
nightclub waitress: "Walker, are you still alive?" Or Angie, switching on every produit blanc, ecstatic
under the sign of commodity fetishism, advising
Walker, “Why don’t you just lie down and die.” No, not until he wreaks havoc on the corporate world:
gangsters, outsourcers, accountants, and a car sales-
man. With glass partitioning the cruel from the
sadistic, the kind from the catatonic, and Walker
from a freight train of thought. Through a glass half-
empty, elliptical as a Borgesian tango. Chasing
a shadow fading to all points blank, the money
just yards away, untouched, a torch song turned
to ashes, swept out in the mourning, this ghost of
a chance, inherited hardboiled America forever.
or the film, not been shot on Alcatraz. Or turned
to pulp by a literate projector (invented by E.
Dorn, circa 1970). "A dream, a dream." In a land
of sleep-walkers, where only the exhausted will
be culpable and insomniacs reign supreme. Every-one else, irrelevant or speed-balling down the interstate. Riding shot-gun alongside a bevy of
eroticised women, their eyeballs drawing circles,
drugged, then examined for flaws. A tin ear for
Walker's footsteps echoing through LAX, planes
whining like badly educated mosquitoes. A woman's voice: “Can’t sleep, haven’t slept, keep taking
pills, dreaming about you, how good it must be
being dead.” What about that under-achieving
nightclub waitress: "Walker, are you still alive?" Or Angie, switching on every produit blanc, ecstatic
under the sign of commodity fetishism, advising
Walker, “Why don’t you just lie down and die.” No, not until he wreaks havoc on the corporate world:
gangsters, outsourcers, accountants, and a car sales-
man. With glass partitioning the cruel from the
sadistic, the kind from the catatonic, and Walker
from a freight train of thought. Through a glass half-
empty, elliptical as a Borgesian tango. Chasing
a shadow fading to all points blank, the money
just yards away, untouched, a torch song turned
to ashes, swept out in the mourning, this ghost of
a chance, inherited hardboiled America forever.
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