Ah, to live in the early 21st century… To be able to sit in a little café, drinking fresh, good coffee, listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations while reading China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. And then to come to the office, start up the computer, and blog about it, to validate the experience.
(NB: If this was an e-mail or a message board post, I would have put a winking emoticon at the end of the paragraph, to indicate the subtle postmodern irony – there I go again, being less than perfectly serious! – but I try to do entirely without smileys in this blog. After all, Jane Austen, Randy Newman and Alanis Morissette managed entirely without…)
However, this blog entry is not about irony, or cafe latte or the Goldberg Variations (which I am proud to say I can listen to almost without thinking of Hannibal Lecter). It’s more of a dire warning.
For I have seen the face of evil. And it looks like this.
Looks innocuous enough, you think? Look again.
You may be wondering what it is that makes me think David Morse is evil. The reason is quite simple: he’s the one responsible for dooming the human race. He’s the one who released the virus that killed most of humanity, forcing us to live underground. He is evil.
And this may be where you go, “Huh?” And, if you know where I am currently located, you may even be calling the doctors to come and take me away. If you know Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, you might understand what I’m going on about, but it might still not make that much more sense to you.
Yes, I can distinguish between fiction and reality. Yes, I know that David Morse is an actor, hired to play characters, such as the apocalypse nut in 12 Monkeys. And yet. Every time he pops up on screen, I tense up. I take an immediate and intense dislike to him. Sometimes I’m proven right (Dancer in the Dark). Sometimes I’m proven wrong (The Green Mile). Sometimes the film and the scenes he’s in are so atrocious that it’s hard not to feel sorry for Morse (Contact, anyone? Daddy issues on tacky intergalactic beaches?). But I don’t trust the guy, and therefore I cheered on the inside at the thought of Greg House, M.D. and PhD in Misanthropy deciding to thwart the Morseman’s evil plans. Who will come out on top in the upcoming fight between House and his newly found nemesis? Only time will tell. Until then, it’s drawn thermometers at dawn.
