![]() ![]() We measure loss through pans along kitchen counters full of objects that suddenly seem valueless. But Testament is haunting in its utter composure. ![]() You want to believe that these incidents would somehow still feel monumental: that the sight of a bonfire in the distance-undoubtedly a signal of loved ones’ fiery, decisive annihilation-would be somehow shocking. Great pain, in Littman’s film, arrives with an air of normalcy that, in any other context, would feel like inconsequence. That I felt completely outside of something that ought to have been happening within me. (A promise that, to date, I have not kept.) No: what was strange wasn’t the mourning itself, but that I felt like an observer rather than a participant. That isn’t what was so strange-disconcerting enough that I could barely make it through 20 minutes of the wake before shutting it off with a promise, as I bookmarked the link on my phone, that I would return to it later. Mourning violates the norms of composure that regulate our everyday lives. The experience was strange how could it have been anything but? Open, fearless mourning, unfettered outpourings of emotion are always a little surreal for a bystander-and even for participants, in those brief moments of clarity in which, suddenly, you can hear your own wails. Last weekend I attended a virtual wake for a relative who died of COVID earlier this month. As it happens, Testament is all the better for this smallness. It explains the smallness of this production it isn’t a stretch to say that the lack of crash-bang disaster theatrics might have something to do with the film’s budget. The charge that this film has the humble patina of a “TV movie”-an insult levied by critics and others at the time-is in fact perfectly apt. But in the tradition of some of the most notable films about nuclear fallout, this movie was made for home audiences. It was originally produced for PBS’s American Playhouse, but it got a theatrical release through Paramount because of that, it qualified for Academy Awards, earning Alexander a best actress nomination. The movie was adapted by John Sacret Young from a three-page short story by a California school teacher, Carol Amen, who died a few years after the film’s release. ![]() It’s about the steady crawl of inexplicable mass death into peoples’ lives. The film’s focus instead is on the fallout-the radiation in the air, not the carnage you can see. This is not a film about war, though surely there must be some geopolitical explanation for the nation getting hit on both coasts with nukes. Testament is an apocalypse movie in name, but not in spirit. There’s hardly enough time for Carol Wetherly ( Jane Alexander) and her children to process this news before warning becomes reality: a hot, white, blinding flash of light. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is real,” a news anchor says, before a message from the president warning people to keep phone lines clear. ![]() There’s a fuzzy signal, and then a live news announcement: nuclear bombs are falling. It’s early in Lynne Littman’s 1983 film Testament, and the beginning of the end of the world-or something like it-is coming, accompanied by the starkest, most unsettling silence. Quite honestly, you could take it a step further, outside of Perry and what it means to him, but he always wanted justice for Charlie Dodson, and there's a part of him that is freeing Charlie, I think as well, at that moment, right.It starts with a bit of television fuzz. And yet he holds on to that symbol, and so, by the end, there is something he's freeing. It's an early piece of evidence that he gets, we see him try to pursue it in a way that he thought would be easy, and quickly learns that there's nothing that's going to be easy about this case. I thought it was emblematic of his journey."Īdded Downey: "It's definitely intentionally symbolic of his evolution. you see that in the last shot of the show, he's letting it go, right? Some sort of acknowledgment goes off into the wind, and now he would move on. And, to my mind, I would say that this is. Disconnected, disenfranchised, paralyzed, from wherever he came from, and that gave him purpose. Van Patten, who directed the episode, told Collider that "I think represents his internal journey, actually, from where we found him in the beginning. In the final moments of "Chapter 8," though, as he gazes out at the ocean, he removes it from his pocket and lets the wind catch it. Ever since he took on the case, Perry has been holding onto one of the threads used to sew Baby Charlie's eyes shut, even at one point trying to identify where the thread might have come from (a futile effort). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |