Comparative Predation

I surprised myself by finding something derivative out of Sebold's metaphysical triumph over trauma in The Lovely Bones. If you like dark parlor games, consider Stanley Tucci as George Harvey against Michael Rooker as Henry, against Hopkins as Hannibal. That is your job spastic, might saith twitter, might saith the hapless surfer, or those who chance posted with me prior to community banishment. My rebuttal is distillation takes time, and my facial ligaments are in pain.

For me to watch a film twice in rapid succession means the transcendent caught my interior suction cups, and decided me to track Sebold even though I cannot do it her way, find my way through the thorns to loss of my own ego. My escape as a writer is to burrow into the agony, with or without substance aid, like Thomas More in his hair shirt, willing to accept the assassin. But my challenge to the Sebold victory is this: Would a mouse be owed the same consideration? It is the snicker bar on the evolutionary scale, killed swiftly, killed slowly, high pitched squeal as its spine is snapped on a glue trap, or pummeled and then eaten by Joey, speared by his brother. What does the fabric of space give the insect, krill, or plankton, for that matter? Why did I pay for my pet's ashes if I am a non-believer? There is also Aaron Eckhart's work, scathing and stark, which I thought of during the morning hours before Sandy's landfall, but evaded me in the initial post draft. In the company of men is a different genre, a masterpiece of social manner, critically acclaimed, then buried by the public, but it is a vehicle willing to be honest in its illustration that blind justice, fortune, are projections about how the primate moral code works, possibly no more than a facade; yet Sebold strikes something a mass audience needs, just as I needed Joey's remains, my deceased, now part of all minimalist dead pet theatre.

Even if we keep it on the human scale, is the serial predator simply an evolutionary outcome our self-domestication refuses to accept, or is it disease, as we attribute it in clinical terms? A footnote on which I'll have to catch up. Tucci's performance here nearly matches his more physically magnetic role in Big Night.