Malkina, Time and Space

Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor. (Picador)

Time and space.

Like everyone of us who are trying to resist the attrition of everyday existence in our electronic world, in this screenplay Cormac McCarthy has strived to draw a grain of a sense out of the fragmentation of time and space of our epoch.

The motion picture is well different from the screenplay and when you see the movie by Ridley Scott you realize that there is a really scanty amount of motion. We see facts in our minds while reading the screenplay and we see facts by our eyes in the superb sequences of the film, but the sense of the facts we see is to be found in the dialogues between the characters, in their comments and remarks about what is happening or has happened or about what is going to happen.

In a way, we may notice that this style of narrative is not so different from the style of Greek tragedy, in which you do not see facts happening on the stage, but you listen to reports by messengers and occasionally by the main characters.

And like the age of Greek tragedy, our age is an age of great transition.

Time is scattered and fragmented, space too.

A dreadful space, an unknowable reality which could even be a scarcely existing reality, just like the unreal reality of the Internet and of social networking, and in this film the enemy is everywhere and nowhere, like the Cloud. 

All that happens is not clearly intelligible.

Malkina is pregnant (in both senses) with the only remaining possibilities of meaning: love of nature, i. e. pets, and a child. At least, these are the only possibilities to draw out a sense of life that the present no-future mess has left to many people. (jessel)