The Professor

The Professorⁱ is cinematographically interesting, which is something that rarely can be said about the other Bollywood (the one in North Los Angeles). Here :

It very well could have been a film about a Physics professor who had two boyhood friends (by reason of physical proximity of the spawning cunts at the time of spawning them, which is how boyhood friendship works irl) -- one of which died violently (such as for instance by drowning) in their very presence, resulting in a very close, lifelong friendship with the other survivor, a Math professor himself, a very socially distinterested, highly focused and disciplined individual who, for the past lo almost twenty years has been entirely -- mind, heart and soul -- engaged in resolving one particular problem (say, for reality tie-in, the Fermat thing recently blown open by a very similar Russian fellow). This actual film could have opened just as well with the scene of a well to do, upper class man towards the end of the third quarter of his life, finding out from one of the talking trees in the selva selvaggiaⁱⁱ that in fact he's been blessed in the common contemporaneous way (as opposed, you see, to being blessed in the family way). The greater part of this actual film that isn't could have proceeded similarily to the nonfilm that actually is -- excepting, of course, the ridiculously imbecile misrepresentation of the subservient half of the human race as somehow important, interesting (and right, and important, and whatever the fuck else) by mere dint of unqualified existence now fashionableⁱⁱⁱ, and had the perfect ending at the ready : during the culmination bender (but of course) the hero explains to his math-addled friend, conversationally, unassumingly and incidentally, how to resolve the problem he's been dedicating his life to. As an aside, an apropos, "hey, by the way" -- because this is exactly how it happens among extremely intelligent men participating in the daily business of the tip of human consciousness (and why they even bother to socialise -- among each other) : one man's stray thought is the specialist's ten year gold mine. So, you know, "what if you applied Galois field theory thus and so", for maximal reality tie in (not to mention Galois finite fields are eminently conversationally captivating, if only in the hands of a speaker that understands what the fuck it is they're talking about, to my standard of "understands"). The awestruck friend scribbles down notes in a drunken frenzy, they part/pass out respectively, and then in the morning...

In the morning... well... you see, morning comes, bright and clear^iv, as it always does. But Mr. Math is neither. He's kneeling on a different floor, so to speak, he's groggy and, suddenly, upon emergence from the dark waters he's struck by emergency. Dire, uncaring, implacable disaster. "Bring me a tonkergongk"?! What the hell has he written down, none of it makes any fucking sense whatsoever. It's not even readable. Is that even a letter ?! What! WHAT the shit is this!!!

Yet he remembers, clearly, distinctly, not merely the form of elation but, almost, its substance. He can almost taste it. Through the apparently metalized tongue-and-palate assemblage, moving together incorrectly like a swamp of cheap horse glue, he can almost taste the memory. So he flies to the phone, to call the hero -- who answers him calmly, and sets his mind curteously at ease : nothing whatsoever has been lost, come right over and I'll explain the modest idea all over again, at breakfast.

Cue a frantic rush to get there, to just fucking get there, why is it so far and why do the keys have to go into the thing, there's no time, no time, there's no time no time notimenotimenotime for any of this bullshit, oh my god how long does everything always have to take... and here we are. He's arrived, and so we have arrived : it's the end.

The hero is dead, peacefully asleep in his armchair.

It's the end, and you... you who are left behind... you who yet haven't made the cut...

You'll never know.

Like that, it'd have been a film, to live up to the legacy of that intellectual tower of human achievement, to live up to its cinematography, to live up to the immense investment of time and effort the whole thing requires and demands. Instead, however, you get the usual inanity, about "English literature" professors, as if there can even be such a thing. You get a chick with no lines, a retired stripper, hired exclusively to be anonimously French-kissed by Johnny Depp -- I wonder what the casting call went for that one! You get nothing in tinsel foil, you get your good old friends Mr Yakkity Yakk * Mrs Bla Bla Bla, you get meaningless summaries and superficial references banking on the flimsy premise that you'll be always satisfied with the first pass and never look any deeper than that. In short, you get what you get -- not what you need, but what you deserve.

The end.

1. 2018, with Johnny Depp, by Wayne Roberts. [↩]
2. Esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte, che nel pensier rinova la paura! [↩]
3. Seriously, nobody gives, ever has given, or ever could possibly give the first inkling of a flying fuck as to what "erotic conquest" some ill-banged ruin imagines herself astridin'. And I mean ill-banged in the sense of look at this sad shit :
   
   

   Ever seen sadder bangs ?

   The reason women are socially discouraged from "making conquests" in the male way is strictly and inescapably that their sexual activity is fundamentally unimportant (not to mention anti-interesting), and therefore socially inconsequential. There can't be found a way out of this, because there isn't a way out of this -- I don't give a shit what your naive extensions of whatever you [think you managed] to steal from Europe would seem to indicate. Please stop "trying" just about now, it's not just woefully improductive but radically unseemly besides. [↩]

4. Here's a coupla bonus items, for the would-be philologist :
   • ***Morning came, bright and clear, Rex jumping up on his bed to wake him as usual. [Asylum]
   • Then she'd catch a wink a sleep, and be awoken again, and so on until daylight came, bright and clear, and with it an orange jumpsuit, dirty in the specific way institutionally laundered clothes are dirty -- deeply, inconspicuously, furtively and secretly so as to not irk the officer in charge into taking any kind of action. [Things that happened to Sam]

   What, my dear chitlins, are we thereby & therefore suspecting the author to have perhaps meant, and how is the coloring and layering of the master's hand working, and why does he do this like this rather than something else somehow else ? What is the importance of the "morning came, bright and clear" device, what is the relational and differential semiosis of its relationship with the structure of the body of work, how does it construct and how does it deconstruct the...

   You still go to school, don't you ? What, exactly, do you do there ? [↩]