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
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