Hillerman/Hobsbawm/JackFrost

Today I finished Tony Hillerman’s 2006 novel, The Shape Shifter. The novel climaxes, appropriately enough, with a confrontation with the ‘shape shifter’ of the title. As was increasingly clear in the last part of the book, Jason Delos and Ray Shewnack, the wanted criminal who had supposedly died in a fire many years before, are in fact one and the same person. The twist in the ending comes not only in the form of who ultimately dispenses justice to Delos, but also in the fact that this revelation of identity is not definitive. In other words, Shewnack was also an assumed identity, and the true identity of the man who dies at the end of the novel remains a mystery. Although this is not one of Hillerman’s best outings, what he does with Leaphorn at the end of the novel is genuinely surprising and suggests that this character is still capable of evolving and changing even though he has supposedly left his identity as a lawman behind.

I also read the next fifty pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20^th Century. In this section of the book, Hobsbawm turns his attention to religion and art, but not (regrettably) to the relation between them. In “The Prospect of Public Religion,” Hobsbawm tries to make sense of the combination of the manifest decline in religious belief and observance over the course of the twentieth century along with the fact that religion still maintains some kind of influence over many aspects of public life around the globe. He concludes by pointing to the “paradox of revived religious fundamentalism that it sprang from a world where existence rests on techno-scientific foundations that are incompatible with it, but remain indispensable even to the pious.” And in three shorter pieces, Hobsbawm examines the relationship of (avant-garde) art to revolution and power. In all three pieces, Hobsbawm seeks to clip the wings of the truism that such art is truly world-changing in any substantive sense. Rather, he says, whatever influence it did have was limited both geographically and temporally, so much so that Hobsbawm says quite flatly that “changing society is more than schools of art and design alone can achieve.”

Given that we are currently experiencing what is hopefully our final winter storm of the season here in Buffalo, I chose something suitably snow-themed and watched Michael Cooney’s 1997 cult low-budget horror film Jack Frost. It tells the story of a serial killer named Jack Frost who, while being transported to his execution, crashes with a van containing ‘genetic material,’ which bonds his DNA with the snow and turns him into a murderous snowman. And yes, the film is exactly as absurd as that summary makes it sound. To make matters worse/better, the film’s special effects are truly amateurish (especially the snowman himself), which is of course what gives the film its cult status, along with (one presumes) the very poor acting. If you like cringe-inducing low budget horror, you’ll love this movie. Oh, and anyone interested in the oeuvre of Shannon Elizabeth will also enjoy Jack Frost. The scene in which Jack kills Elizabeth’s character in a shower is the most egregious Psycho rip-off that I’ve ever seen and it alone makes this awful film worth watching.