The Woman in the Window

Motto: 100% disagree that anything
could be more enjoyable when "slave".
~funkenstein_

Since we're doing zealotryⁱ, The Woman in the Windowⁱⁱ is as good an example as any.

The story goes, that a respectable professor is first warned about things. `Tis worth a quote :

"Don't talk like that. Men of our years have no business playing around with any adventure that they can avoid. We're like athletes who are out of condition. We can't handle that sort of thing anymore."
"Life ends at 40?"
"In the district attorney's office, we see what happens to middle-aged men who try to act like colts. And I'm not joking when I tell you that I've seen genuine, actual tragedy issuing directly out of pure carelessness, out of the merest trifles. Casual impulse, an idle flirtation, one drink too many."

You understand. Then he is served the actual Confirmatio, made to order. So : the woman from the painting they all admired comes to lifeⁱⁱⁱ, and she invites him for a drink, and they end up at her place where she goes about topless like it's nothing, statuesque bust covered in rather plain gauze. But then!!! a dude comes in, and goes to kill our hero, who, underneath the sudden, unexpected assailant, reaches out. And the woman^iv puts a scissor in his hand, and he "kills" the 200 lb dude. Somehow, this can happen. You try it sometime, I've had to kill people with actual proper fucking blades and it's a spot of fucking work, not a moment's folly in any case. And especially not if they're primed. Try this for your own amusement : go boar hunting, then when the boar's facing you in position hit it in the knee so it feels the pain, and then shoot at its chest - you know, that place where one bullet (of the 1/8 lb sort they use for the purpose, but still) puts him down. See how five rounds may roundly not suffice, and the beast's still fucking charging, with the extra lead just adding to its mass. But anyway.

Once they have the corpse, the hero decides to try and cover up the murder. The woman's ever compliant, she will help. She does, as much as possible. She's a lovely, truly, and I truthfully say I've no problem killing some douche and covering it up to end up with her, there's four billion douches perambulating and doubtfully a million like her, so anything in the single digits is an utter steal. For some reason the film has the guy decide to never meet her again, which is the height of inexplicable idiocy - Bennett's character is exactly what you dump the wife for.

And then there's this situation where the criminology professor makes a shocking bevvy of incredible mistakes, such as taking a toll bridge with a corpse in the car, and such as cutting himself up over some barbed wire as he tries to dump the body and thus NOT aborting and looking for a new spot, but instead carrying on. Wtf difference does it matter, right, some fiber, some blood... what's this criminology thing again, where you don't drive your fucking car in the mud ? Pshaw.^v

Then his friends, which include the DA in charge of the homicide, give him a blow by blow of all the ample evidence they have^vi, and yet fail to pick him up. They just don't believe it's him, what. But then! There's a blackmailer! And the woman handles him superbly, except at the end she makes the tiniest of mistakes being too pushy. And then he decides to kill himself. The end.

Except not really! Because impossible match cut to he's dreamed it all! And his dream "scares him straight" in the sense that next a woman asks him for a light he runs away like a twelve year old that's grown up on a farm in solitary confinement. Puritan victory > 9`000, adult male behaving like a retarded child for the "good of society" and "everyone involved".

Ridiculous as all propaganda ever is, this film is worth watching for the skillful work of the actors, and for the unintentional self-parody that all propaganda ever is.

1. Consider this :

   So we understand each other : John is some poor and kinda stupid kid from some ghetto in some indistinct townlet. One day, Mircea the Bad comes there on whatever business, sits down in the bar with his two bitches curled up at his feet and drinks a rum or something. The girls from the ghetto, for love of their country (in our example, that sad ghetto) pick John up forcibly, sit him down at the table next to mine and curl at his feet, just like the other two. They're definitely not slavegirls, they have neither the training nor the skills nor in the end the needs or structure of that relationship, and no marble columns, no gardens where water sprinkles among the cypress nor artesian fountains springing forth marzipan await them at home, but instead the nude concrete walls, the [low class mass produced kitsch wallhanging stuff], the bedbug infested pressed shitboard nightstand. But indifferent to all these points, they play a role to support a theory : the theory that here too, in the assghetto of shit "we got fine stuff", and a John who, even if only four letters long, is still quite as great as any Mircea come from afar.

   Well, that's patriotism, the girls in this example show "love of their ghetto" and that's the thing upon which socialist Romania was built, if you're curious - a structure otherwise borrowed from Carlist Romania. Totul pentru patrie!

   What is the notion that "Los Malvinas fueron, son y serian Argentinas", notwithstanding that they actually belonged to Spain, not to Argentina, and they were disputed by England back then, also ? (To be specific, if you're curious, the Falklands were French 1764-1767 and British 1765 - 1770 and Spanish 1767 - 1811 and nobody's (literally!) 1811-1829, and US 1831-1832, and nobody's again briefly in 1832, and then British and Argentine in 1833 and then nobody's 1833-1834 and then British for a century and more between 1834 - 1982, and then Argentine briefly for a summer in '82 and British hence. So... yeah, totally.)

   What is the notion that "Argentina no es un pais pobre" , or for that matter that the money to pay for all the cars sitting in traffic in the port city of a continent-sized soy farm comes from "el trabajo", as a cab driver stuck in that selfsame traffic dutifully explained for my benefit ?

   What's the notion that your mother isn't a whore, that your father isn't a drunk, that Francis Bacon wasn't a common fraudster, that love won't be betrayed, that you will not die, that when you die you won't be alone, pick and choose as you will, the list is endless. An endless list of fraud, more or less pious, that makes the unbearable misery of life tolerable.

   That's zealotry : belief, impudent as Impudence itself, daring to go on the basis of absent experience against he who speaks from round experience. "Yes, there's A and there's B, and I only ever saw A, and I therefore know it's above B", says the zealot, generally to the man of wider experience and more wisdom, who's seen both, who's lived in both, who knows both.

   And why not ? If people didn't think their town is better than the town over there they'd have to move, no ? That takes money, and time and in a word effort, and the nature of life is being lazy - or in proper terms, conserving resources.

   Yet there's a difference between the sensible "lest I see proof of better I'm not going anywhere" and the zealot's own dispensation of any such scruple. Not that the sensible path actually works all too well - for one thing, explaining the town to the peasant or the sea to the oak is above what Literature yet achieved.

   So is your mother a whore ? And if she were, how'd you know ? [↩]

2. 1944, by Fritz Lang, with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett. [↩]
3. Ding ding, hamhanded Aesop alert : even "noble" causes such as an aesthetic appreciation can lead to perdition!!1 [↩]
4. Ding ding, hamhanded Aesop alert : Eve!!1 [↩]
5. Ding ding, hamhanded Aesop alert : You see, even a criminology professor couldn't possibly escape the Puritan's notions of "world must work this way!!11". Because the world was given to the Puritan derp as a personal gift, what! Review the Constantine donation. What, fraud ? Pshaw! [↩]
6. It's all checks, no leads! [↩]