Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

9 October 2003

Mystic River

2003, U.S.

director: Clint Eastwood

Mystic River, the new movie directed by Clint Eastwood, is the kind of big Hollywood mystery in which you find famous people around every bend, brandishing accents as thick as the veins in their necks. The story revolves around three childhood friends, now adults living in Boston. A murder unsettles their neighborhood and stirs up some not-so-deeply buried memories for the men, setting into motion events that they seem to have been expecting for ages.

This somber movie is filled with fine actors — such as Tim Robbins whose face actually seems longer than usual and Sean Penn who looks like he's been wearing bifocals for years, although he does so here only briefly — but I was always glad when the story turned back to Kevin Bacon, the detective investigating the murder. He has a calming effect in this movie, mostly because he's not often called upon for gnashing of teeth but merely the steady uncovering of clues with his partner Laurence Fishburne.

The childhood friends have drifted apart as adults. They have plenty of opportunities to get reacquainted, and they do talk to each other, but they sometimes don't seem to be interacting so much as emoting, which may be more a fault of the filmmakers than the actors. There's a quiet scene where Bacon and Fishburne are talking to Penn, and near the end of their conversation, a brief, inconsequential shot of Laura Linney, who plays Penn's wife, startled me because I'd completely forgotten she was in the room. The movie seldom stays in one location long enough for us to become acclimated, which means we only get the high points of each conversation, not the still moments between them, which may in turn be the reason the neighborhood seems so tightly wound.

I'm also uncomfortable with the implication that all you need to know about a character is the one thing that happened to him as a boy, the one event that defined him for life, as if a person can be explained so simply. The movie doesn't tell us that these men have been programmed, definitively and deterministically, by a single event, since the three boys have gone in three directions, but instead of assuming the men were shaped by many events, the movie presents them as repelled from the same explosive point in history. I understand that this is crucial to the characters' fatalism, and to the movie's subtheme about roads not taken, but that doesn't make it any more true to life.

The climax of the movie is moving, tragic, and somehow expected, but the coda that comes out of it is something of a curiosity. If we take it in the same tone as the rest of the movie, a number of characters seem to flip-flop: from neutral to nefarious, from inquisitive to passive, and from AWOL to present-and-accounted-for. Some of these problems may be the result of character underdevelopment, something that can happen when a novel is adapted into a movie. (I haven't read the book.) But I suspect that the filmmakers' fatalism — which is distinct from that of the characters' but no less powerful — drives the need to arrive at an unearned conclusion, a beautiful structure that doesn't come naturally out of the characters as we've seen them developed.

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