Spotlight the way home

The only person I have telephoned
from Virginia, whom I knew before 
arriving here, I called for the
first time yesterday after seeing
the American movie, Spotlight. An
ancient friend I luckily met, as 
a young man in San Francisco. It
was a brief and happy conversation.

I believe I've just given the film
the only review it needs. For view-
ers who have ever been American or
ever been young, this is a script
capable of reaching beneath habits
and adjustments, to awaken sensings 
gratefully, of another's heart.

Unobserved isolations, internal ex-

iles persist deeply in a landscape 

of superficial toleration, on many 

levels just as intractable, if in 

spheres less spectacular than the 

rape of children by institutions of 

trust. The seduction of boys series

in this blog appropriates its title 

sardonically from a marker of genital 

invasion, for which the phrase is uni-

versal shorthand, for that reason -- 

to portray the enterprising range and 

corrupting consequence of a culture's 

dilettante, yet not whimsical manipu-

lations. The peripatetic hottie, for 

that reason, portrays iconographical-

ly the endgame of customary casuistry, 

high and low, in examples accruing al-

most every week. Now we have a movie, 

lauded by critics sounding exonerated 

in print media, hailing a whadya know 

discovery of literal genital racketeer-

ing in an outpost of the Vatican. 

I agree with them, this is a detective 

tale of zingy suspense, so far as it 

goes. But its path draws it along lines 

of Dr Tulp's discovery of innards in a

human body for Rembrandt. The question 

was not, who knew, not even who wanted 

to know. The prize cannot be genuine if 

it is claimed by the painter, any more 

than by the anatomist. It belongs to the 

life, investigated, feeling its way home.

Thobias Malmberg
Erik in Venice
2015

Michael Fried
Realism, Writing,
  Disfiguration  ~
  On Thomas Eakins and
  Stephen Crane
University of Chicago, 1987


Stephanie Zacharek
The Village Voice
3 November 2015

Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
4 November 2015

A.O. Scott
The New York Times
5 November 2015

Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
5 November 2015

Anthony Lane
The New Yorker
9 November 2015

Ann Hornaday
The Washington Post
12 November 2015