Monday 16 August 2010

salt

Oh genre movies and America's mythology. “We kill nine million people and anger billions of Muslims, and America suffers a painful death.” Seriously? Here the rather anachronistic Russian enemy gains post-Cold War relevance by wielding Muslim believers as his weapon of mass destruction. There are between 1.2billion and 1.5billion Muslims, 'billions' connotes 2 or more, to meet Noyce's scaremongering with pedantry to make a point. Interesting that Muslims are referred to as a threat by their global total (exaggerated) volume, rather than, as Russia might be, by its particular equipment of nuclear weaponry. The new paranoia fears less the professional mole but rather the civilian mole majority demonstrating the new power of ideas, belief and guerilla aggression in an age of cloud networks and radical islam?

Orphans and Superheroes. Salt is an orphan, joining a long list of Spidermen and Howard Roarks and Harry Potters before her. These orphan Types are not merely incidentally so for the convenience of concise casting, rather it is almost crucial to their superness: “The loner, cut loose from family responsibilities, is an inherent part of the romance of America, the myth of eternal fresh starts..” (Wirth-Nester).(via McWilliams) Protagonists command our attention and affection for reflecting the person we find ourselves to be, and, at the same time, embodying that person we would like to be. We find ourselves fatherless, practically, biologically and metaphysically, and from this conception, we aspire to the self-made independence and the unrestrained heroic of these orphans we would be. That is to say, we do not want a Father to the fatherless, we want to be Evelyn Salt, prodigally unobliged to none in no gift economy of upbringing, inheritance or apprenticeship. It will be interesting to see as this trilogy (?) plays out, how they account for her defection from her surrogate family of communism, where Winter etc do not. Relatedly, what is it of parents that Jesus would have us hate in his call to orphan heroism in Luke14?

Who is salt and why 'salt'? What's in a name? Salt in a wound, salt of the earth, assaulted and desalinated, short enough to be an acronym or an ICAO phonetic, the punning potential for flavouring review titles is endless. Interesting that a few verses after orphans we get salt in Luke14. Salt, like Bourne, is a pregnant word, catchy and allusive.

The female James Bond. So this part was written for Tom Cruise and then changed, what changed? Salt cross-dresses as a man to gain access the White House, is there a reciprocal to this anywhere in Bond?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944835/

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