Wanted

Wanted is a poor movie. It's Fight Club for people who dig wrestling. It's Chuck meets Office Space meets The Bourne Identity, IQ adjusted for the Grand Theft Auto demographic.

I happen to be in that demographic and I'm not going to pretend at this moment that I'm any better than anybody else. After all I did fork over the dollars for this improbable almost campy rompy stumblebum of an action flick. The interesting thing about it is that now that I've experienced it, I feel like I want to slap a bitch up. I was composing gay poetry in my mind and channeling some woman hating uber-butch. That's the kind of emotional vibe I got. It's not so disturbing to me, I mean, I inherited some fairly mean street wisdom in my life, but I realized that I was listening to NPR before and after the show. The intellectual type of bitch-slapping I usually feel, and felt before the show, was supplanted after the movie by a kind of perverse rage. It was accentuated by some snippets of This American Life in which a drunk dude wants to stay drunk, and it startles the goodie two shoes liberal babe with the sociology degree. I practically wanted to do some damage to her earholes through the radio.

Then Larry Mantle comes on and insinuates more insinuations about how stupid our political and military leadership has been upon the release of a new report from the Pentagon that's bound to be all people talk about this coming week.

The protagonist of Wanted is a nobody who recognizes that his life has left him emasculated.  To give Wanted credit, the film doesn't blame society. I do, like Fight Club did, and I have my reasons, but it occurs to me in this reviewing that a Libertarian is someone who has figured out that they're too smart to care. It seems to be the most arrogant of all politics, because it has no real reason to ask to lead. I cannot tell the difference between Mugabe and Libertarians. The point is that I perceive two political classes of Americans who have no interest in what this kind of movie has to say, liberals and conservatives. But the theatre was packed. This kind of movie has this to say: we are nobodies but we all fantasize about taking control of our lives and fulfilling some kind of destiny and that destiny is fantastically violent because everybody around us are such killer assholes and everything is a lie.

There is no truth in Wanted. There is only ugly fate and convoluted destiny. Finding one's future and one's self out is an ugly business that only involves betrayal. It is a film without hope that only seeks purpose for a violent period. I am waiting to see how many gozillions it makes, and what popular following is to follow. I can tell you that I had to wait in line to see it, and I know I should have seen WallE instead.

But being a conservative and not minding my own uptight business, venturing out into the stinking stew of the masses for this bloody entertainment, I have come face to face with some part of my own pscyhe and of America's as well. And I think it leaves me a touch more anarchist than I want to be - given the conceit that I'm actually learning something from this experience. I am struck by the incredible arrogance of philosophically consistent liberals and conservatives who would dare to call this their nation where such a film can become a blockbuster. I don't know whether to be ashamed or to run and hide.