Word: psychopaths
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...black man's head into pulp. And Sailor is the good guy in this storm-sky fresco of two crazy kids on the run. Sailor and his girlfriend Lula (Laura Dern) hightail it to New Orleans and Texas, where they encounter fat-lady porn stars and a slick psychopath (Willem Dafoe) who loses his head, literally and spectacularly, in a bank heist. To Barry Gifford's source novel Lynch adds a murder plot, an Elvis impersonation, a few torture scenes, a drug cartel, some cockroaches and a happy ending complete with deus ex machina. Not to mention frequent references...
Three characters, all certified originals. The first, Frederick J. Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin), is also certifiable. "A blithe psychopath," in the words of Charles Willeford's spiffy source novel, Junior is fresh out of a California prison and primed for Miami vice. His M.O.: robs crooks who have robbed other people. Thinks he's smart; isn't. Has grousy temper; will break the finger of an unsuspecting airport Hare Krishna. Can compose haiku during his heists -- "Breaking, entering/ The dark and lonely places/ Finding a big gun" -- but can't choreograph a decent holdup. Junior is an engaging monster...
...architects of apartheid. Rian becomes the righteous recorder of black rage in the "charnel house" of Soweto, the largest black township created by that apartheid. Alas, the conflict of genealogy and emotion tends to produce more heat than light. In a typical episode, Malan recalls a psychopath who murdered whites with a hammer; Simon Mpungose's story "seemed to unfold like the story of a saint, deeply disturbing in its biblical parallels." This romantic notion of violence feels like a hangover from the '60s, and it has no place in a South Africa that aspires to a place...
...shoot people." Since Blue Steel is a weave of police story and lady-in- distress melodrama, she will eventually get that opportunity. Her target will be Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a Wall Street commodities trader whose romantic intensity fascinates Megan at first, before she realizes he is a psychopath. He murders at random and for pleasure; after a kill, he swathes his torso in the blood from his latest victim's sweater. "Death is the greatest kick of all," he confides to Megan. "That's why they save it for last...
Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg writes of the psychopath who can perfectly mimic a human personality without having one: "They obtain very little enjoyment from life other than from the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandiose fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when external glitter wears off and no new sources feed their self-regard." Stuart had tired of selling minks and perhaps of his wife, who was about to realize her own dreams of a family, dreams he did not share. As stupefying as it seems, Stuart apparently carried out his monstrous deed only to remake...