PARIS 3
OTC50#52
JUSTICE BY ANY OTHER STANDARD BUT JUST
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
J
ustice is a fixed concept entailing set notions of fairness and equal treatment of everyone. The concept of justice is a golden one like the Eiffel Tower at sunset, but the actual implementation of equal treatment may sometimes mean that everyone is treated equally unfair by a broken social justice system.
Social justice may be more important than legal justice.
The golden rule is to treat others as you would have them treat you, but when the concept of justice is fluid in a broken system, what exactly is the treatment?
Moral righteousness only pits one side of a just argument against another equally determined side of a just argument, while the fair redistribution of resources essential to living becomes forestalled from bridging the many social divides.
Ultimately, apart from the problem of the remote possibility of the presence of real evil, moral breaches interfere with baseline stances where justice for all requires everyone to have the same respect for the governing morality and the laws enforcing that morality within society.
True justice has been an issue for humanity since time immortal.
Before television, nothing was to be done with the evening other than deep contemplation of theoretical moral issues in the light of a flickering candle.
Darkness was likely considered in the dead of winter, while the full extent of goodness was was surely examined during the sunlight of the long summer hours that extend a golden glow into late evening setting in over the city.
Society needs justice to deal with conflicts on a case by case basis as issues arise, but potential long term outcomes must also be kept in view to prevent the injustices from reoccurring.
A case by case approach, without addressing the long term course, may exclude large segments of the population and eventually result in conflict when those people find out they have been had by a justice system espousing equality and freedom.
Justice has been so allusive, and often the faulty implementation of justice has been so damaging, that people are always one step shy of restorative justice with the victims and the offenders clashing in the streets, while many onlookers around the world remain not quite sure which side harbors more blame.
One concept is certain, that when protesters take to the Paris streets so determined in such large numbers, there must be a problem with justice.
When Parisians see love they make love, and when Parisians see an injustice, they riot.
France has a high unemployment rate of 8.5 %, as well as an accompanying staggering rate of poverty of 14 % affecting 9 million people of a population of 67 million.
All sides may agree as to the need for reform, but not everyone agrees on who should come and who should go. Who should pay for bringing justice to the impoverished and the working poor? Who should pay for the wealth gap?
Consumption taxes on such items as diesel fuel to fund carbon emission reduction programs does not seem just in the circumstances, not just because the attempt at implementing the fuel tax caused a year of weekend protests, but because the tax hits the working poor the hardest by taking much needed disposable income out of their pockets, and so the people have no choice but to spend what remains on weekend street protests.
We have talked about this issue before, but you know, the protests are still going on silently.
The question is no longer what is justice? The question now is, whose justice is it anyway?
Systemic change must more often than not be grandfathered so that people working under the original set of rules do not feel so betrayed by revisions thrust upon them just as they were ready to cash out and buy that small cottage in wine country, as well as a few ranging goats for milk for the manufacturing of brie.
Grandfathering would apply the new rules only to new people entering the system for the first time. But this incremental approach may be too slow to prevent the fast approaching systemic failure.
Grandfathering, therefore, while more practical, may not do politically.
France has normalized a lot of systemic problems that are no good for anyone.
Violence has become ingrained after the two Great Wars of last century were fought on French soil, as well as unsuccessful attempts to preserve empire in Vietnam and Algeria, with Algerian separatists terrorizing the country for many, many years.
Before that modern era of violence that created a lot of intergenerational trauma, possibly the greatest French ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, went a little wonky with his armies, although often using the violence abroad as a diversion for passing reforms at home that transformed everything.
The little big Bonaparte fought with everyone, including the English and the Russians, to unite Europe but only for a brief time after much violence.
Everybody knows Paris, but few visitors meander far enough out of the center of the city to witness the real problems in France more symbolic of the global struggle to reconcile extreme wealth with abject poverty than the Champs Elyse is to victory.
The Paris suburbs are occupied by people who cannot afford to work in Paris let alone live in Paris. The suburbs are also where the migrants go and the immigrants from the former African colonies reside.
The poverty spreads from suburbs like Saint Denis to the outer towns. People see the Paris Street Protests, but few people care to look at the problems of just living that have become embedded in the economic and political system over the decades.
Glad handing and a government of personal favors never favors well for justice, equality and brotherhood.
Just once it would be nice if someone could combine notions of equality, fairness, justice and brotherhood into one everlasting concept.
Concepts of justice should not differ from culture to culture. Everyone is a judge, and no one is above being judged.
Plato argued that to create justice a society must have just individuals and a just state.
The world is watching for when the two entities meet with expectations of reconciliation for all the world to follow suit.
TITAN #3
EFFICIENCY OF ELECTRICITY SETS EXAMPLE FOR TITANS IN THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE
OTC50 #79, March 4, 2022
THE FIRST AMENDMENT OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, 15/Dec/1791
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
T
he Internet enables a system of information collection. Essentially the Internet is an electronic machine allowing other electronic machines that produce information to attach to it as a central core.
The collection of machines and the information produced there from is then controlled by web browsers which are electronic machines operating within the big machine of the Internet.
The medium of the world wide web is part of the electronic information highway that began with radio and television. People diverted attention away from their daily labours and much more cumbersome information gathering from print sources to a medium brought to life by the efficiency of electricity.
If the medium is the message, then those electronic machines like Google and Safari, and Yahoo and Bing, controlling the use of the medium through stylized algorithms and search engine tools, have immeasurable power and influence.
The results so far of the digital revolution confirm that the information machines grow exponentially to such an extent that the information can only be usefully organized through Artificial Intelligence or algorithms. The sentimentality imbued by human involvement would only impede the growth of the process.
The expansion of the digital universe is experiencing such acceleration that these electronic machines operated by artificial intelligence may one day control civilizations as much as the electrical current has lit cities up and kept people’s beds warm at night. Unchecked, Facebook manipulation of communities is perhaps just a generation away from organizing from street to street, like the gentrification of Chicago from house to house, one street at a time.
But the Internet as an electronic library may only be truly more democratic if the user knows what they are looking for, because the search machine is controlling the access to information for other reasons than advertised.
Censorship is everywhere, beginning with the user’s limited choice of search terms when entering the interface between human sentimentality and the coldness of artificial intelligence. A poor choice of search terms may uncover more fake news than true facts, the further into the past the story meanders.
Fake news is a type of censorship erasing the truth and otherwise casting doubt on the true story built on real facts. E-censorship reinvents the present to manipulate the future without a second thought for the past.
But as a publisher, the Internet broke the silent exclusivity agreement of print publishing, in which the literary elite carefully selected authors to publish, thereby expanding the collective consciousness in their own image. Those old gatekeepers of the truth have less power to censor, with the rise of the Internet. In a way, a good lie has a place in the public domain, if for no other reason than to prove the resolve of the truth.
Marshall McLuhan stated that the electric machines become an extension of human consciousness which compels an entire generation forward into the future. Time and space are compressed for the traveler to move faster and further through the digital universe, often travelling so fast forward that there are only fleeting opportunities to just briefly glance into the past (through the “rearview mirror”).
When using electronic mediums, users unconsciously feel transported from the present into a future connected to other communities ad infinitum until a sense develops of being connected to a “global village.”
McLuhan predicted the future present of the Internet eGeneration three decades before the Internet was gradually brought together from a number of United States military intelligence applications.
Users, and in particular hackers, get this sense of infinity, leaping from one information machine to another, further and further into other parts of the world, without leaving the computer terminal, and in that process, becoming part of a world created by electronic machines that is becoming more and more simultaneously virtual and real.
And if you become part of the machine, that machine better be something special, as a logical extension that becomes as much an emotional attachment as an ethereal experience.
Apple CEO Tim Cook rose through the ranks of one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies on the planet by meshing the efficiency of the electricity running the machines and the efficiency of electronic information published on the machines into an efficient way of producing the machines and delivering them cost effectively to loyal consumers.
Cook moved up from watching black and white patrons using separate drinking fountains at the Piggly Wiggly as a child in Mobile, Alabama to the leading star at the Apple Park Spaceship Campus in Cupertino, California.
Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing has origins in Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line. Ford took some cues and tools from the butcher shops in the Chicago meat plants making cuts of beef on conveyer belts, but the efficiency of JIT was apropos electricity and electronic machines, and turned Apple around from a money loser, just one fiscal year from insolvency, to the first Trillion Dollar Market capitalized company.
Essentially, JIT manufacturers order parts to arrive at the plant as the parts are needed on the assembly line, and the assembly line only produces machines as the machines are ordered by customers. This immediacy of production eliminates the need for inventory warehouses for the parts and inventory warehouses for the manufactured end product.
This customization of production might appear simple and straightforward, but an Apple iPhone has thousands of tiny parts that must be brought together on one assembly line.
Cook learned how to build computers to order, which is what got him hired by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Jobs had great ideas and designs for Apple machines, but he struggled to improve the company’s profit margins, having $1 billion in unfilled orders in 1994, and then $400 million in unsold machines collecting dust in inventory in 1998 when Cook jumped on board.
IBM had developed the personal computer for mass market sales. The IBM personal computer became known as the PC, and everyone copied the IBM design while the world adopted the term PC for their personal computer. Cook spent 12 years at IBM PC.
Cook also saw the evolution of operating systems when Apple and Microsoft were still going head to head for market domination of the PC market. Windows 95 was essentially Apple’s Macintosh operating system.
Similarly to Ford, who had created a vertical market for automotive assembly plants at Red River, Michigan, Jobs had control of production from ‘bolts to fenders’. But the liabilities that that level of control over production entailed proved too much for Apple.
To avert sluggish growth and the consequential eventual collapse in an industry where growth and moving forward fast is essential to business survival, Cook entered into outsourcing agreements with parts manufacturers and he also persuaded suppliers to relocate their plants closer to the Apple assembly line, all the while reducing Apple warehouse costs.
Apple also shifted from manufacturing machines based on forecast sales to real time manufacturing in which a computer was manufactured made to order by a customer the day before.
This just in time manufacturing seems easy enough but an iPhone has a thousand tiny parts. And the electric car company, Tesla, still struggles to achieve just in time manufacturing, partly because the company had more orders than could be manufactured in the early years of production, and partly because they just cannot produce the machine efficiently enough.
Tesla’s Elon Musk can already pick you out a personalized serial number for your EV if you Tweet with him nicely before placing your order, its just that you have to wait up to three months for delivery.
Of course, Dell was already finding success with made to order on-line computer sales. But Jobs had not quite figured out JIT until Cook was put in charge of manufacturing and distribution at Apple.
Apple’s early success was the design of machines so beautiful and unique that people unconsciously wanted to be extensions of them and share their bit part in the collective consciousness with other similarly designed users of the Internet.
Jobs designed beautifully appealing products such as LISA and then iPhones and MacBook Air with which people wanted to be connected. This connection between the manufacturer and the machine and the user created a lot of brand loyalty that rather quickly grew around the world in a parallel course with the growth of the Internet.
If you want to travel the cyberworld, you may as well be proud owners and be comfortable with the machine with which you are trusting your thoughts and dreams.
Apple went one step further, demanding consumer loyalty. Once you buy an Apple machine, you buy membership in a club that exclusively shares digital media and only syncs personal information with other Apple machines.
The Air Drop app, for example, only searches for other Apple machines in your immediate vicinity, like picking and choosing friendly faces in an unfamiliar cloud with whom to share your deepest thoughts. But the unfamiliar crowd got smaller and smaller as the Apple community grew and grew until spanning the digital universe.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange used electric machines to project his thoughts through the design of computer code, the effectiveness of which reached further and further from his hometown in Australia to other parts of the world until he experienced travelling the world inside his computer toward infinity.
But Assange is an efficiency expert of a different sort. Assange is on the virtual e-world oversight committee which describes search engines, such as Google, as ‘undetectable mass social influencers powered by artificial intelligence.’
Assange too has the electric bug, referring to himself as a scientific journalist, who ‘precisely reports the facts with attributed sources while simultaneously providing as much of the information as possible. Just as Cook gets a kick out of the efficiency electricity musters by taking all the slack out of the Apple assembly line, Assange thought of presenting information in the most efficient way to produce independent thoughts.
Journalists are traditionally gatekeepers and filters of the facts of life so as to create news. The public might only see a smidgen of the total information behind a news story because the news process distils the information down to the most important facts by filtering out a lot of background noise.
But Assange believes that the public should be given as much opportunity to decide for themselves with the most complete information readily on hand. For Assange, inefficient storytelling and censorship are the real villains.
Assange developed WikiLeaks therefore to publish original documents with as little censorship as possible, and then to just let that information wander down the information highway until the facts find themselves into mainstream media news headlines. In a way, Assange created the inverse of JIT, a horizontal market in which the manufacturers of the news come to him for identical parts, and then go away to make unique stories for publication somewhere else.
United States President Joe Biden, when Vice President to US President Barack Obama, has a decidedly different view of Assange, calling Assange a cyber-terrorist because he had created a public profile by publishing secret government information.
One of the first scoops for WikiLeaks was the leak of ‘Task Force 373.’ Task Force 373 was a list of 2000 Afghans scheduled for assassination on a kill or capture order that quite often favored the former over the latter. The list underscored United States President Barack Obama’s exclusivity in keeping America safe at home. Obama had adopted the strategy of reducing the need for American boots on the ground in the 9/11 Middle East Wars by using lethal precision to eliminate leadership candidates for terrorist cells. The messy carpet bombing of Vietnam had no place in Obama’s legacy, especially with access to the electrifying precision of drone strikes.
WikiLeaks also claims as scoops the 10 million documents Chelsea Manning released, the Collateral Murder Video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, the Guantanamo Files, the Spy files, the Hillary Clinton Emails, the CIA Files – Vault 7 and more than enough diplomatic cables to make Assange one of the most wanted anti-heroes of the eGeneration.
One diplomatic cable revealed that the Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh had persuaded the United States Airforce to bomb Yemen in a way that would place blame on the Yemen Air Force. (Assange, p. 35) The more Assange discovered the more Assange became morally outraged, and the more determined he became to root out injustice.
Google creators once interviewed Assange for a book they were publishing. Assange turned the book around to highlight the close Washington DC connections between Google and the Obama Administration.
Assange seems overwrought with this existence of invisible electric political power projected into civilization by governments and corporations for the purpose of controlling and manipulating the populations under their authority. Censorship is a big topic for Assange. And in the cause of justice, Assange “began to look at information as matter and how it flowed through people and though society.” (Assange, p. 113).
Assange portrays himself, not as a villain hanging from thin shoelaces in Belmarsh High Security Prison while waiting extradition to the United States for violating the 1917 Espionage Act, but as an omniscient counter-intelligence anti-hero of the cyberverse.
The unfairness of the world can only be remedied by breaking the existing invisible patterns of government and corporate power. (Assange, p. 57) People are unconscious of the extent of government control because the rules forced upon them are invisible.
McLuhan had described the friction that occurs when two worlds running parallel with each other collide. This friction creates uncertainty, but also a sort of reinvigorated dialectic discourse into which Assange has plunged himself, between the technically minded generation seeking out injustice with their electric machines and the keepers of secret information and government lies.
Journalists are essentially conversationalists, and the more secret the facts uncovered the more interesting and the more invigorating the conversation.
This dialectic also compels social media. The emotion of sharing deeply personal views of the community, with people within the infinite space of a machine, triggers a lot of sensory perception all the more electrifying with the possibility of confronting just the opposite viewpoint held by a secret agent with a unique handle, who may or may not exist in an exotic location somewhere around the global village. People are watching. And Mendax likes a thorough discussion of the pressing issues of our time.
Cook is well aware of the presence of a global audience. Apple’s loyal customers are compelled forward ad infinitum when Cook directs Apple to take on green initiatives and to clean up workplace scandals so as to minimize the ‘rear view mirror’ history of loyal consumers.
Customers are given a splendid looking machine with futuristic capabilities of exploring the cyberverse in intimate enough bites that make Apple machines welcome in the kitchen, the study and the bedroom.
The iPhone is the perfect companion for members of the global village, essentially a portable ability to remain connected throughout the day to an infinite community emboldened by ever expansive notions of time and space.
The day is no longer confined to the space of the daily commute, and the conversation is no longer slowed by time zones. People are able to go anywhere at any time by using the iPhone as an extension of their consciousness.
Cook maintains the loyalty of the crowd by avoiding anti-social behaviour, or repairing environmental failures as efficiently as possible. Under Cook’s stewardship, Apple projects the message that the manufacturer of electronic machines is on the side of users. ‘Don’t argue with me, just fix it,’ Cook tells Apple.
Cook maintains the integrity of Apple for example, by promising subscribers an iPhone one day entirely from recycled parts, because ultimately, it’s the Apple owner, and their uniquely stylized machine extensions, against the rest of the cyberverse.
The message is not important to Facebook. The process of providing the machine and the artificial intelligence system of organizing information is the message. Belonging to Facebook creates the social interaction, not the truth of the content. In a sense, the bigger the lie the better, because the lie creates tension with the truth, and the tension creates further dialogue and thereby attracts more users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg likes experimenting with virtual communities. But Cook took Apple away from developing social media platforms, and recently provided Apple owners with a failsafe device for their apps, requiring the user to first consent each time an app wants to share personal information with other artificial intelligence driven machines.
Nobody cares about the level of truth within the conversation on social media, because the storytellers are the conversation. Red lights, green lights, no matter what the Internet traffic looks like today, the information must get through to publish the message: “I belong to Facebook’.
But when a red light and a green light appear together, that clash of opinion can create hate, revolution and perhaps even civil war.
Global Village, by Marshal McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1989.
Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, by Julian Assange, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2011.
Julian Assange in His Own Words, Compiled by Karen Sharpe, New York O/R Books, 2012.
Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage; An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel, Corte Madera, Gingko Press, 2001.
Tim Cook, The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next level, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.
When Google Met WikLeaks, by Julian Assange, New York, O/R Books, 2014.
ICONIC MOVIES
CHARACTERS DO FALL APART IN BITS AND PIECES
I
nnocence transitions incrementally within the moral divide only to become something more sinister so as to create tension with the intellectual dilemma.
Marion Cotillard often moves from victim to vixen from film to film, and just as easily snaps her conscience like a twig in the turn of a moment within a scene.
In Macbeth (2015) the screen character has the malicious intent of someone cast under a witch’s spell. Cotillard’s screen character revels in her casting as Lady Macbeth. Michael Fassbender costars.
Cotillard develops a searing defiance of authority by which she enables herself to encourage her husband to become king by killing the king. But the personal guilt from the devilish deed stains the court of the new King Macbeth, eventually resulting in a sequence of self-destructive actions that bring an end to the new King’s reign.
Cotillard’s acting exists more than in a black and white morality tale through. The French actress earned a well deserved Hollywood Oscar for her portrayal of French singer Edith Piaf in the biopic La Mome (2007) or La Vie En Rose (2007).
Piaf takes on a second and third life with Cotillard singing, crying and begging in the streets like the French chanteuse did in real life. Cotillard shows how one of the world’s most famous singers learned to enjoy life through her singing performances despite having to overcome one barrier after another, while also enduring tragedy after tragedy far away from the singing stage.
The child endures hardship, but she eventually finds her singing voice, and the unconditional love from many admirers all around the world.
In Inception (2010) Cotillard plays a self-referential role in this Christopher Nolan dark fantasy about the psychoanalytical science of dream manipulation. Cotillard plays the wife come back to get revenge on her husband after she commits suicide in a fit of madness within a prior dreamscape. Or was it a dream?
Nolan creates a textured narrative with many layers as the players choose one person’s dream to manipulate, but then battle the impromptu emergence of their own subconscious within that dream. Cotillard’s character, having committed suicide, exists only within the mind of the film’s protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Nolan creates a further layer to the dreamscape by making an intertextuality reference to Cotillard’s real life acting world when the director uses the music of Edith Piaf in the background.
Mal’s suicidal and self destructive traits continue in the afterlife with flashes of anger that seem justified because of her existence having become limited to impromptu appearances in her husband’s dreams through his subconscious.
Nolan casts an ensemble of actors that include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, Ken Walanabe, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy and Tom Berenger.
Nolan also cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Cillian Murphy with Cotillard and Christian Bale in The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Next to Bale’s Bruce Wayne character, Cotillard plays a rich socialite and philanthropist with an outwardly moral personality only to be discovered later as criminally insane.
Cotillard and Bale share an intertextual reference at the moment of discovery in the closing scenes. Bruce Wayne wears the mask of his alter-ego while Miranda puts on her metaphysical mask.
Wayne becomes momentarily struck by the possibility of an innocent child having become so altered by the tragedies of life that she now seeks to incinerate the world around her.
Batman refers to Miranda as ‘the child’. Although the reference refers to Miranda’s backstory, the term also refers intertextually to Cotillard’s role as Edith Piaf.
Piaf was referred to as the child because of her petite frame that gave her that appearance. These intertextual references are a great complement to the outstanding acting that transpired in the making of the biopic film, with Cotillard completely transforming into the struggling Piaf during various stages of her singing career.
Director Olivier Dahan frequently flips the narrative back and forth from the small child Piaf to the young adult struggling to survive on the streets of Paris, and to the successful music hall star, and then to the ailing global artist, and then back again.
Dahan shows how past life events have the power to bring the present tumbling down to an final end.
Cotillard has a great range as an actor and entertainer in her mirror perfect depiction of the French nightingale, transforming through various bouts of happiness and despair that have become so common in the human endeavor.
Cotillard can perform even more with her acting by working within the small subtleties ever present within the moral conundrum.
From the Land of the Moon (2016) Gabrielle admits herself to a health spa for treatment for stones endangering her spine, but her real problem is melancholia and not being in love with the man she has married out of convenience. Cotillard tones down her screen character by replacing the inner moral outrage with chronic unhappiness. Gabrielle is not sinister as much as she suffers the frailties afflicting humanity in that personal journey to find meaning, and then in the end, often being unhappy in that unsatisfying process of self-discovery.
In It’s Only the End of the World (2016), Cotillard costars in a supporting role with Lea Seydoux, and Vincent Cassel cast as siblings welcoming home their brother after he had found fame and fortune as a writer. Gaspard Ulliel plays Louis the writer returning home after many years with a secret he cannot tell. Nathalie Baye plays the family matriarch.
Cotillard shows her range as an actor in this supporting role as a befuddled, lost for words sister unable to speak clearly in the presence of her angry older brother and more socially aggressive family members frequently exchanging biting acidic dialogue.
Director and writer Xavier Dolan creates an interesting character study of a dysfunctional French family torn apart by ego and subconscious rage that develops as a result of lifelong unhappiness. Cassel cleverly builds tension in his character to show how family dynamics is in play in toxic relationships.
In The Immigrant (2013) two Polish sisters make the journey to New York, but they only get as far as Ellis Island before the corrupt immigration system shatters their dreams in 1921. Cotillard costars with Joaquim Phoenix. Jeremy Renner has a pivotal supporting role.
Ewa is eager to join her extended family in New York, but she is channeled instead into choices she must make. And she makes those choices, but only with deep unsettled anger for those people who make her do what she has to do to remain in America.
In Public Enemies (2009) Cotillard shows the true duality of humanity with her character initially only begrudging allowing herself to be associated with a notorious gangster, but who eventually becomes a loyal love interest.
Billie Frechette cannot pass up the glamour offered to her by Depression Era gangster John Dillinger. Billie develops defiance for authority as she falls deeply in love with America’s most wanted outlaw.
Cotillard’s screen character can light up a room with her glittering eyes and genuine smile while at the same time expressing reservation and doubt as to the reason for the delightful optimism her character has brought to the scene.
Cotillard frequently conceals her true identity from the other characters with whom she travels down the narrative.
The innocence people are born into is often destroyed by unforeseen events the character has no control over right up until the screen credits start rolling.
Piaf learns to survive by gradually letting go of her innocence, like disappearing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle never meant to remain complete.
Miranda learns to hide her anger and opts instead for quiet vengeance.
Ewa sells herself on the New York streets to remain in America, but she does not like the loss of dignity one bit.
Mal chooses not to trust her husband during life, but in reflection through his thoughts, she is angry and bitter, and destructive, bent on vengeance.
Cotillard gives the femme fatal screen sirens a further complexity based on her character’s inner thoughts that frequently never get told to the audience, even in a back story.
This unknowing creates surprise and suspense as the nuances of the character’s personality are revealed in bits and pieces, before being suppressed again for the main narrative.
In Public Enemies, the character goes through an entire transformation from the innocent coat check girl to the willing accomplice behind prison walls, having been influenced by the people she meets and the life events she goes through with those people.
The screen character chooses that path in varying degrees though.
Cotillard can become something else from the start of innocence during the course of becoming something else with meaning.
In film, depicting life, Cotillard portrays these little struggles and then moves on until finding another little struggle from which to move on from.
Innocence, and then something less than innocent, with various degrees of culpability, Cotillard’s screen performances pose the question as to whether actions of innocence are justified within the circumstances in which the camera has caught her character on film.