I would like to propose a toast : to Violent City & Friday Foster

I didn't think I'd ever live long enough to review a Charles Bronson... whatever you call these, commercial footage bundlesⁱ ; but as it happens it pairs so nicely with the other half of this article it made it unavoidable -- both its own review, and the overall article altogether.

So Violent Cityⁱⁱ is a uniquely incomprehensible piece of crap that in any meaningful sense defies description. It could be approached in detail, or at a rather high level, there's nothing available in the middle at all. Let's try the details : there's a most satisfying scene in there, of a man who is about to shoot a racing pilot. So, out in the countryside, as the cars hum their regular epycicles by, at a safe distance, the man sets down a picnic set, with actual porcelain plates held in by straps against the top of the picnic organizer box. Yes ? And then he takes his time, and sets his sights, and sets his clock, and cuts the bullet tipⁱⁱⁱ, and takes his time, and does that thing, and then that thing, and bam. Isn't it better than golf ?

It is, it's way the fuck better than golf, as an activity, as a passtime, shooting racing drivers from the bushes is way the fuck better than golf. So much better than golf it is, in fact, that even the depiction benefits, ineptly made as it may be by the inept sort of crew willing to spend their days in service of the production of commercial footage bundles. It benefits, it's a great two minutes of roll, with its swell and ebb and lull and blow. It has good rhythm, it is outright carnal, that Space Odyssey mysery, for all its trumpeted "success" never managed anything like it, as much as it'd have simply loved to.

Then, there's the girl. Some anodyne blondy nobody could be persuaded to fuck twice that Charlie Boy's decided to simp for. Nobody could explain why or wherefore, nor do they have to : "he's decided" and... that's it, she's thereby an' magically the only hole for him now. So she predictably (if inexplicably in context) "betrays" him, if you can call it that, by climbing in some friend of his' car right after he shoots him in betrayal -- let me thicken incline and underscore. Then he finds her again, and she "betrays" (now it ain't called that) the old cunt activity she was engaged in (going from gent to gent with her basket for them to deposit their surplus in, hurr) to go running after him. Just like that. He drives (badly) to the dicks docks, where he proceeds to... tear her clothes off of her (over her limp protestations).

Just as she's about to go Two Moon Junction on the set some longshoremen beating on a scab or somesuch interrupt them ; and that interruption takes, for reasons incomprehensible as they are inexplicable, and that's it, scene ends with her wondering why's the background always bloody & violent when she's with him and his protestation that it's always like that but she only notices it around him. No "hey guys, do you want your turn with the cum rag after I'm done ?" no nothing, "working class ideals" magically absconded in a puff of Sunday school falsification. Problem^iv ?

Moreover, can you believe this inane shit !? Charles Bronson may best be summarized as some kind of wanna-be Alain Delon, on a budget, a workable substitute in the sense synthetic fibers make "just as good" cotton socks as cotton itself ; but the production altogether is rather descriptive, I think, of 1970s white trash mentality, at least as perceived in the negative, as deduced from the bitemark left by said white trash in the apples of its diet. This is what the mechanisms animating the ambitious uncollegiate crowds looked like, more or less : manual dexterity and familial simplicity ; salvation through worship of the Mary figure and futzing with the prayer beads at precisely controlled intervals.

Meanwhile at the same time the blacks... Take Friday Foster^v for example. The negress ideal there proposed, Pizdi Salvatrix as iconified on the silver screen evertube is a strange sort of happy-ho-lucky Jezbel^vi who fucks like a pro : both the black politico and the black bussiness-o, while maintaining feelings for the "average" dude-o with a slight weight problem and scarce other redeeming features (which is important, because the everyman can't possibily possess any redeeming features).

Three holes she's got, three holes she's using (while carefully, studiously, loudly &ceterally turning down the pimp's permanently renewed oral offers, because totally^vii, she's "a" liberated woman and hear her roar, hurr!), and... well, "she likes men who know how to treat a lady". Better than working in a hair saloon, at any rate -- in fact, almost as good a "career" not to mention "career plan" as the little white bitches' "I'll go to New York to be a writer" (and somehow pay a thousand dollar biweekly rent on a broom closet out of a hundred dollar monthly consolidated paycheck for working three jobs -- one for each hole).

Apparently the salvation of "the black race" (as code for impoverished Afro-americans^viii) was going to come, back in the 70s, from very smiley whores fucking everyone into compliance "on their own terms" &cetera ; whereas the salvation of "America" (as code for working class whites) was, also back in the 70s, going to be very much more of the same (with less of everything) : keep futzing with the screws and worship some rando chick, Jeff!

As grotesque the picture these two halves together paint, as gross, as vomit-inducing the practice of taxidermia may appear to the uninitiated, nevertheless I'm well persuaded the result's not merely authentic but outright truthful : this is precisely what these people actually were, back then, democratically^ix speaking.

So let's, I guess, drink a toast to real 1970s America, directly and veritably scraped from insides of real 1970s American skulls : Violent Foster & City Friday. Sa fie primit.

1. Really, the torrent girl accidentally got the 1970 "Violent City" ie "Città violenta" in lieu of the 1975 "Violent City" ie "Roma violenta". Shit happens. [↩]
2. 1970, By Sergio Sollima, with Charles Bronson. [↩]
3. The little details meant to signal in-group-ness to the in-group ; you're perhaps familiar with the way statutory impotence works in our meanwhile failed colonies, where so-and-so "is classified" thus-and-following and therefore it can't be industrially produced leaving everyone in the know with self-obvious rectifications and everyone else hung to dry ? Because our meanwhile failed colonies being a specific sort of socialism, they're interested in certain things and approach always from the same, tiresomely predictable, directions ? Yes ? [↩]
4. Here's the lulz : pantsuit socialism is a contradiction in terms of the first order, because back when "socialist revolution" was a thing, the working class it aspired to rely on was purely and strictly a story of men. That's why "the working classes" seemed at some point more vital, more capable, and ultimately more worthy than "the bourgeoisie" or "rulling class" or "establishment" or "kulaks" : because in it, unlike all the others, the female had no voice at all. Because for the working class the females were naught but cum rags, passed around exactly like a beer or a joint, it then followed the working class was headed up in the world ; and for no other reason -- there can never be any other reason.

   How and wherefore did you think the faggots managed the Stonewall Inn -> textbook sex-ed transition ?! [↩]

5. 1975, by Arthur Marks, with Pam Grier. [↩]
6. Very large if somewhat saggy tits, not much ass to speak of. Not exactly what you'd expect, huh. [↩]
7. Fancy that wonder, a pimp who asks you twice.

   What sort of simpy bullshit is this, seriously now. In the unlikely circumstance someone can be arsed to ask at all, anything but the most enthusiastic enthusiasm will directly result in either the hole or the needle, directly and immediately forthwith. There's a fucking way these things work, what the fuck nonsense by-the-seat-of-our-skirt misrepresentative bullshit did these dorks come up with! [↩]

8. Who, as a demographic pocket, have about as much to do with the black race as the similarily pompously named World Series has to do with the world, or series. What passes for "black" in the US has more to do with the lab than with the black. [↩]
9. Spare me with the "exceptions" bullshit : socialisms are about the average not about the elite. [↩]