Ronnie Hawkins?
my life is about very little right now. i mean, i spend all my time doing about four things with about four people (but the four things and the four people are definitely the best - nnnnno complaints).
one of those four things i do is watch tv on dvd. oh YES i love to do this (another thing i do is eat. and when i can combine these two activities it’s heaven). there have been three main installments - Jericho, five days, and dead like me. dead like me was terrible, boring and embarrassing.
five days was one of the best things i’ve ever seen. if you ever have five free hours (we still only rented it for less than 24 hours because it was a new release so we had to totally commit - paul runs a tight ship over there at movie art decor) of spare time and mental soundness, you should see it. watch it all in one night like we did. watch it late until 4 AM. put yourself through some real agony because it’s about murder and affairs and missing children, racism and bad friends. will leave you thankful and wiped.
but Jericho has been the real treat. a season and a half in about a week and a half, after the first few episodes we were riveted but unimpressed. but we finished it tonight and we’re all totally in love with it whether you’ll admit it or not, and we all love ronnie or ryan or whoever he is (this we’ll admit).
why do we love this stupid show? it resembles LOST, the way it starts small and gets bigger and you learn more and more and it’s never enough. the loose strings get all out of control and the sound bite at the end of each episode is almost as terrifying. less like, mental though. it doesn’t get in your head the same way and i don’t think i’m dreaming about it as much (although, you will dream about anything when you watch it hours straight like we do).
it has these elements that you’re dying for without knowing it. i’ll list a few.
1. AMERICA - a country constantly at war. the price of peace is like, boredom or something. times of war and disaster make people better. if it were not for the nuclear (nucular?) upset, Jake would have remained a no good son and Emily would have married Roger. And Eric would have never become a real man. Stanley and Mimi would never have realized they were in LOVE, ronnie would have never made friends etc. there is this real feeling of “having no electricity is bad, but thank God all this happened because now our lives have meaning.” people want war. they love it! and that’s why everyone wants America, the country that just keeps waging and waging, one after the other wars against terror and drugs, gay people and Iraq. i thought the world loved (or hated - but hated because they really loved) America because they sub consciously like liberty and diversity and the idea of opportunity and like me, love the image of American soldiers giving hersey bars to war torn kids after WWll (this image makes me sad now). but the world, in their collective love/hate for the USA must know that America has not attained any of these things but is constantly striving for them. they will have those things in abundance when peace time comes.
but peace is never going to come for the USA because they have intertwined their existence with war, war which allows you a perpetual state of “we must have liberty we must have diversity we must become better in the face of this enemy.”
because war means hope.
peace means disillusionment and reckoning. that is why we love America, why we want to be America. because they never have to deal with peace. they never have to deal with anything.
2. perfect gender roles. the scene that best exemplifies this: bonnie, the deaf girl, is meticulously setting the table. mimi bursts through the door because mercenaries are on her ass. bonnie puts down the dishes and picks up a gun, blows off some faces before she dies (because she’s deaf) but saves mimi’s life. so the women still set the table and overbearingly ask their husbands to stay home and blurt out their secrets. but they can really shoot! the men cry when their fathers, wives and babies die. but they still kick fucking ass. it is a perfect society, a mix of protection and psychological comfort. this is what happens in war time?
3. God. i don’t think the Jericho allusion is complete or at all thought out. nonetheless, this small town is rudely awakened from their relative apathy when disaster strikes. they slowly realize how massive everything is and as conspiracies/truths surface, the outside world begins to matter because Jericho comes to understand the way they are affected by the big picture. in addition, some key players get toaffect the big picture (they get to save the world, man!). And people are dying to understand that they are part of a bigger system, that their actions matter. We want to be important, even if that means we get bombed (this mentality is, obviously, horrifically pervasive in the USA). We want to believe that something or someone is thinking about us. Jericho never did anything that mattered to anyone outside the sweet little town, but they still get to be involved in “the greatest crime in the history of the world.”
now, should i attempt to interpret the biblical shout-out i can only conclude that ronnie hawkins is meant to represent Israel, because he is the only spy in the town.
and small town America must be annihilated to make way for the chosen people - in this case either the CIA or black people
