the groundhog day project

I was thinking about westerns today, you know, as one does. And, about war films, and cop films, and all those ex-soldiers killing far too many bad guys in the 80s, and there was a clear trend about (mostly) lone white men fighting all levels of evil, this specifically American (but surely understood in many another culture as well) fantasy about how much one man can do on his own (or with a small band of similar heroes). And, while recently we have drifted back into the same fantasy with the prevalence of superhero films, there is an interesting gap through the 90s--full of aging versions of too many of those 80s heroes and young heroes raging against fascist governments--that makes me want to do a serious study, a la Wright's Six Guns and Society or Nowell's Blood Money , but focused on the thesis that all these various types of action films are variations of one genre, not multiple. That westerns and those grungy cop dramas from the 70s, those big buff soldiers (some damage...

                      Today I saw Call Me By Your Name , right now I've got Whose Streets? playing on the television. I'm inclined to write in relation, in response, in my usual twisted sort of echo, to the former rather than the latter. Writing about police violence and Ferguson will get me into a political rant that I am not in the mood for... Which is its own sort of troubling notion, separate from the rant itself. That I get to be tired to such things. That as much as I seek out stuff on social media to argue with, I can turn it off and my life is enough that I don't need to be in the middle of that. When so many people don't have such a choice.           The privilege of my life. I can choose to write about a love story--one trapped behind an 80s anti-homosexual vibe, but--SPOILERS--that ultimately doesn't go the route that one producer apparently wanted by having a villain; instead ...