It was first nature to make a joke of a bad life-threatening situation, like abortion.

It was second nature to make a politics out of a bad life-threatening situation, like polio or Ginsberg imitators.

Mutatis mutandis it was third nature to make a poetics out of obscurity, to neologize a path back to the beds and minds of the young and libidinally hungry, whose youth made them invulnerable back when there was such a thing.

This was in the past of course, this time of these three natures, after the rise of the destroyer of worlds and the revolutionary chic, before the morning in America and the deflationary pressure on high leverage derivatives or currency hedges, blowing up all funds in a cloud of clotted cocaine blood.

Everyone worshipped Hitchcock, and the arbiters of deconstructive taste commissioned a scientific study on the diastolic-systolic difference that might come from watching Marlon Brando, but the unknown stuff.

Remarriage comedies as described in low rent zines of Cocteau aficionados kept the steel mills in Pittsburgh humming and the brothels in St Germain full.

It was a real humdinger of a synthesis.

Was it in a movie or a book where we first encountered the evil Queen who used to bathe nightly in the blood of young virgins to keep her skin taut and to stave off the sad saggy irrelevance of aging beauty?

So went the New Historicism once Stillman had his talkies made and the Slacker in the Hill Country made of ambivalence a high art, coupled with some parties at the Moon Tower and a rifleman in the clock tower.

Maybe all movies are texts in the way that every pillow is something to be humped to a yellow lab in his rut. Nails and hammers and such.

Sitting in a room, content, wrestling with whether a mirror or a lamp wins the dominant consciousness metaphor, until that metaphor comes bundled in the idea of a computer, and knowing that this contentment was a second-order kind, pale and arbitrarily contained, in comparison to Indiana Jones almost having his heart pulled out and becoming momentarily a possessed blood crazed monster until a child sidekick burned him, and yes pain can cure us of our delusions yes the pained child is the father of the turbulent man and there is no need to interrogate or problematize or decenter that or sundry other images.

First nature holds that to make a commercial out of a song is to auto da fe. To be accomplished is suspect. But abortion jokes still land.

Second nature knows Skynet is what one makes of it, to the point where mnemonic malleability overpowers even the most unimaginative studio executive. Empiricism holds sway, it doesn’t take a romantic to make clear that molten metal assassin robots from the future (as an idea and a praxis) will dialectic her enlightenment until she screams the paint off the walls.

Mutatis mutandis we make of an art a pose and craft a video of Paint drying into a commodity.