Neither did “Nightmare on Elm Street”
Didn’t see “Saw”. Slept through it.
In order for a movie to truly scare me, it needs to get into
my head. Anyone can throw blood and guts
in front of the camera, and it’ll scare the kiddies, but it doesn’t do a thing
for me. True horror doesn’t always show
the blood—it doesn’t have to. But if it
gets your imagination working and makes you feel vulnerable and uneasy, if the
movie can scare you silly instead of shocking you for split-seconds at a time,
that’s horror.
There is a distinct absence of gore in Alfred Hitchcock’s
1954 movie “Rear Window” starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. But the slowly unfolding implication of one’s
neighbor being a killer kept the audience riveted, and made “Rear Window” one
of the greatest classic films of all time.
As a matter of fact, the only true horror movie to win an
Academy Award for Best Picture was “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991. In it, Jodie Foster portrays a newly-minted
FBI agent, Clarice Starling, assigned to capture a serial killer. To gain
insight in the way the killer thinks, she seeks help from another serial
killer: a former psychologist named Hannibal Lecter (played by Sir Anthony
Hopkins).
Clarice begins by attempting to cajole Dr. Lecter into
helping her, to no avail. Lecter offers
to help only if she reveals pieces of her personal history to him, teasing each
jewel of vital information in front of her with the haunting phrase: “Quid pro
quo, Clarice”.
Quid pro quo.
It’s a Latin phrase meaning “this for that” or “a favor for
a favor”. In other words, it’s a simple bartering
tool. In the movie though, Hannibal Lecter
made this common phrase sound more like a deal with the Devil. As you watch the movie, a part of you doesn’t
want Clarice to tell Lecter anything—even her boss tells her, “Don’t let him
get into your head”. But she does it
anyway. You see Clarice making herself more and more vulnerable to a psychopathic
killer. Willingly.
That still scares the beejeezus outta me.
That old bartering phrase has been popping up in my mind
quite a bit lately. It pops up when I
read the newspaper, or watch a news item on TV.
It happens whenever I see a story about the Los Angeles Department of
Water and Power. It happened today.
Today, there was a story in the Los Angeles Times that DWP
employees received raises of 15% over the last five years, outpacing the
payrolls of even this city’s first responders, our police and firemen. This amount equates to about three times the
rate of inflation in the greater Los Angeles area.
Elsewhere in the very same article, mention is made of the
amount the DWP is spending in support of City Controller Wendy Greuel’s candidacy
in the May 21 mayoral runoff election. 1.45 million dollars.
The DWP’s name also pops up in mayoral debates.
When her opponent, 13th District Councilmember
Eric Garcetti makes mention of the DWP attempting to buy the race, Ms. Greuel scoffs
at the notion as a case of “sour grapes” since Mr. Garcetti, like Ms. Greuel,
sought the DWP’s endorsement.
Ms. Greuel stated that she could remain independent of the
DWP’s influence should she become elected, and make the “hard choices” that
would need to be made to bring Los Angeles’ budget back from the brink of
insolvency.
Ms. Greuel’s main platform in this election is her claim to
have found over $160 million of what she terms as “fraud, waste and abuse” in
the City’s budget. An amount that
included $80 million of such waste in a line item called “Street Furniture”,
but in the seven items related to the DWP, she found a grand total of $0.00.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has spent
$1.45 million dollars supporting Wendy Greuel in this election.
One-point-four-five-million-dollars.
Quid pro quo.
A favor for a favor.
…scared yet?
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