Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Tuesday poem #115 : Daniel Scott Tysdal : Fable Express



Composed on the occasion of Easy Blue's Oscar win, the first non-human victory in the category of Best Actor in a Leading Role.


Of course Tarintino would do it, write the role
that wins an Oscar for a dolphin. We should have
seen this coming after he liberated—through
the fantasy of epic revenge—one wronged population
after another: women, Jews, blacks, Scientologists
(if the latter seems surprising, re-watch Pulp Fiction
with an eye to Travolta's Vega as a sort of thetan-
aiding martyr). From who else’s palm would audiences
have lapped the far-fetched pulp of Fable
Express? Eastwood would have added a too precious
patriotism, making an honourably discharged, Yankee
marine out of animal rights activist, Fletch Fable,
purging the truly global spirit that pulled viewers
world-wide to the edges of their seats when DiCaprio
as Fable was mortally wounded while protesting
a dolphin slaughter in Taiji, and then had his mind
transferred into a dolphin's body for 24 hours
by an expert in ancient Japanese techno-mystic arts.
Cameron would not have cast Easy Blue at all,
contriving a CGI dolphin and filling its beak
with heavy-handed clunkers like, “I’m here for
the express purpose of revenge,” “I’ve got one day
to off these murderers, so get on the express
or dive off,” lacking totally Tarintino’s sylistic pop
and syllabic cool (Quentin’s alpha example being
the salty samurai geisha’s exegesis of Flipper
as a modern day “Book of Revelation”).
Of course, none of Tarintino’s genius and trust
would have been worth a damn without Easy’s
absorbing performance, or, better, without Easy’s range
of expressive squeaks and squeals, without the angel
of avenging fury he became, breaking the wake
of the escaping mariner genocidists, staring down
the baddie captain (played to perfection by
George Takei) with a “soft steeliness” Ebert likened
to Yul Brynner circa The Magnificent Seven
(an apt comparison considering Easy’s six-strong posse,
which included an eagle, panda, and koi). Without all
of that there would have been no trust on Tarintino’s part,
no delphinidal medium for his genius to mount
and propagate. With this glass, cage, and net ceiling
now shattered, imagine the future revolutionary work
Easy’s performance will inspire: the first iguana to win
for a Female Supporting Role, the first monkey-penned
Best Adapted Screenplay, the first entirely CGIed
Best Director. Maybe new categories will emerge:
Best Animal as Animal, Best Shaft of Light as Shaft
of Light: the crucial yet unrecognized elements
finally getting their ego-authenticating due. Or will
each revolution require its own individual instigator,
Easy being too species-bound to have a fin it? Or is Easy's
big break not radical enough? Perhaps the true
revolution won’t come to pass until he cracks
his golden, hominal trophy in half and stabs it, brain-
deep, through his visionary maker’s star-making eyes.



Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of three books of poetry, Fauxccasional Poems (forthcoming from Icehouse 2015), The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010), and Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). Oxford University Press recently published his poetry textbook, The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

1 comment:

The Black Maple said...

Hilarious poem, Top notch!