Twenty-Eight One Thousand
Feb. 5th, 2021 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustI'm sitting here watching The Equalizer (dir. Antoine Fuqua), starring Denzel Washington, probably in anticipation of watching The Equalizer TV reboot, starring Queen Latifah and her killer weave.;) That's Sunday, if I recall correctly; Clarice starts next Thursday, I think. Haven't heard good things about it thus far, but as I said to a guy on Twitter, it's not like that's going to keep me from watching it. I have my obsessions.
The thing about the Denzel Equalizer is that it could easily be seen as a struggle between two neuroatypical people, a thesis I think was first put forward by mswyrr, who reads Denzel's version of Robert McCall and his obsessions with order, regularity, repetition and timing everything he does as an autistic man whose skills worked extremely well for him when he was in the CIA but have made his life difficult ever since he quit and his wife died. They're self-soothing stims, the way helping people who don't have anybody else to help them eventually becomes another sort of stim, another sort of obsession which at least has the side-effect of being good for other people and possibly allowing him to die "in battle," or rather during the practice of his personal vocation. The second neuroatypical person involved is the guy who turns up from Russia to find out who killed a bunch of mobsters over Alina (Chloe Grace Moretz)...this is Teddy (Marton Csokas), a born and bred sociopath who was once adopted by a philosophy professor who he eventually killed (along with the rest of his adoptive family) for the grand crime of loving him enough to hope he'd change. It's quite possible both of them are damaged people who found the right place for their special gifts, but McCall at least seems to have figured out that there wasn't enough true morality in the CIA to warrant him staying there forever. Teddy thinks morality's a joke, so it makes sense he's ended up where he has. He probably worked pretty hard to do so.
Anyhoo. Otherwise, Mom went out for a walk today, finally. I hope she didn't overdo it. And now I need to eat dinner.
The thing about the Denzel Equalizer is that it could easily be seen as a struggle between two neuroatypical people, a thesis I think was first put forward by mswyrr, who reads Denzel's version of Robert McCall and his obsessions with order, regularity, repetition and timing everything he does as an autistic man whose skills worked extremely well for him when he was in the CIA but have made his life difficult ever since he quit and his wife died. They're self-soothing stims, the way helping people who don't have anybody else to help them eventually becomes another sort of stim, another sort of obsession which at least has the side-effect of being good for other people and possibly allowing him to die "in battle," or rather during the practice of his personal vocation. The second neuroatypical person involved is the guy who turns up from Russia to find out who killed a bunch of mobsters over Alina (Chloe Grace Moretz)...this is Teddy (Marton Csokas), a born and bred sociopath who was once adopted by a philosophy professor who he eventually killed (along with the rest of his adoptive family) for the grand crime of loving him enough to hope he'd change. It's quite possible both of them are damaged people who found the right place for their special gifts, but McCall at least seems to have figured out that there wasn't enough true morality in the CIA to warrant him staying there forever. Teddy thinks morality's a joke, so it makes sense he's ended up where he has. He probably worked pretty hard to do so.
Anyhoo. Otherwise, Mom went out for a walk today, finally. I hope she didn't overdo it. And now I need to eat dinner.
