Hogan/Golem/SuddenImpact

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. The death toll increases rapidly in this section of the novel and all of the deaths occur under mysterious circumstances. One victim is blown up in her house, another seems to have had a heart attack but could have been poisoned, and a third is found by the side of a road having been shot through the neck. There could be a connection between these deaths and that of Grace Blanket, but when Grace’s body is exhumed to try and determine whether she committed suicide or was murdered, the body turns out to be missing. One thing Hogan is unambiguous about: the exploitation of the Indians, where they can be cheated out of the money owed them by the state and even declared legally incompetent and made wards of the state if they resist, creates the ideal context and motive for their murder. We see this practice at work when John Hale, the local oil baron, takes out life insurance policies on Indians who owe him money. Hale’s ostensible reason for doing this is to give the Indians another option when they don’t have the money to pay him, but it obviously makes him a prime suspect in any of their deaths. Is Hale the suspect who is such an obvious choice that he can’t possibly be the real murderer? The answer to that question will depend on how closely Hogan follows the conventions of the mystery novel.

I also finished The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction. In this final section of the book, Baer discusses another eclectic group of texts: novels by Cynthia Ozick (The Puttermesser Papers, 1995), Thane Rosenbaum (The Golems of Gotham 2002), and Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket! Watch Your Mouth 2000), as well as “Kaddish," a 1997 episode of The X-Files. An unusual and interesting feature of some of these texts is that a female character creates the golem, and in the case of Ozick, the golem is also female. Baer’s analyses at their best are consistently thought-provoking, but also wildly divergent in terms of length; her discussion of Ozick is probably too detailed (especially in terms of plot summary), while her discussion of Handler amounts to little more than a couple of pages. The consistent emphasis is on how these texts, despite their differences, validate the importance of creativity and imagination in a post-Holocaust context: “Imaginative literature, we see, is viable—not only viable but absolutely essential to help readers ponder identity, grasp the failings and triumphs of human nature, discern what we can of divinity, and achieve social justice (and, sometimes, even laugh).”

I also watched Sudden Impact (1983),  the fourth (and highest-grossing) film in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ series, and the only one in the series directed by Eastwood himself. It’s a peculiar combination of a typical Dirty Harry film and a rape-revenge movie a la Ms. 45, with Sondra Locke’s character avenging herself against those men who gang-raped her and her sister ten years earlier. Despite the fact that Harry Callahan is investigating the murders, he ends up framing one of the rapists for the revenge murders because he agrees with Locke’s idea of ends-oriented justice. There’s an element of seemingly progressive thinking in the film inasmuch as the rapists are presented as scumbags (some of whom are pillars of their community, and all of whom are ordinary) and the trauma of the rape is conveyed unflinchingly. But on the whole it’s hard to imagine a film that conveys more perfectly the conservative law and order perspective of the Reagan era. Both Clint Eastwood’s and Sondra Locke’s characters are meant to be admired for doing whatever it takes to punish criminals when an ineffective and corrupt judicial system can’t do the job. Its success at the box office demonstrates how much this message resonated at the time.