#Dillinger

[omercifulheaves]

John Milius, most likely on the set of Dillinger (1973)

[peninsularian]

Superior reality toasting - over Milton Henry's This World - from 1978

[obsidian-sphere]

Dillinger by Saul Cooper, 1959

Cover by Everett Raymond Kinstier

[musickickztoo]

I-Roy *June 28, 1942 

[mudwerks]

Dillinger (1945)

Anne Jeffreys and Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger (1945)

[goodblacknews]

MUSIC MONDAY: "AfroPunk: Reggae Meets Punk" Playlist (LISTEN)

by Marlon West (FB: marlon.west1 Threads: @stlmarlonwest IG: stlmarlonwest Spotify: marlonwest) While Reggae is a true import from Jamaica, it really gained a global footing in England. It and Punk both arose out of the economic depression and social inequality in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. Many Reggae songs of the time like Bob Marley’s “Punky Reggae Party” and “Concrete Jungle” were overt…

[zonecassette]

Dillinger - Answer Me Question

[iamtryingtobelieve]

Oh baby gnaw me down to the bone

Soon you'll find I'm never gonna take you back home

Well there's so much you never told me

And there's not much I want to know

'Cause your pretty little face will do just fine

You'll be the star of my very last show

Let's go for a long ride

I'll show you places you won't ever want to leave

[transistoradio]

Three movie posters with art by George Akimoto.

[hap-less]

I'm a pretty bad guy if you can't tell

Better keep me your side or else

[redhatmeg]

There is a type of anime enemy who I can categorize as: "Yes, you're strong and you give the good guys a challenge, but you're such an annoying punk with stupid gimmicks and personality of a chipmunk, and I can't wait until you get defeated."

Dillinger and Lao G are such characters.

[peninsularian]

Tuff roots and dee-jay pieces from '76

[astercontrol]

Lots of good explorations of this in the notes, but for me this definitely brought up Tron thoughts

now I do not think Tron programs have any natural concept of family in any sense analogous to what humans have. I think their relationship with their User can be a mixture of many things, all of which have the potential to be extremely fucked-up power dynamics ("deity" and "employer" come to mind) and I do think "lover" can also be part of it. And all of this absolutely can lead to things that are disastrous (coughKevinFlynnLegacycough)

But I don't see it as parental (although that may be because I don't actually have a concept of what "parental" is. I've encountered many people who had vastly different dynamics with their parents; I have not seen a common theme that defines this type of relationship. Except for the elements that are always there just because they're unavoidable and inherent in the power difference. And those are also there for "deity" and "employer").

So I don't automatically think of a program's user as its parent, or other programs by the same User as siblings

And yet.

The dynamic in Tron (1982) with Dillinger, Gibbs, Sark, MCP and Dumont did set off some very sharp feelings related to certain family situations I have personal experience with.

Not for any reason specific to being family-- except for the feeling of "we don't really have anyone we can go to for help except each other, and when that falls apart we're fucked"

Being Sark, in that context, is like being a kid with bad behavior problems, which never got addressed as much as they should because you have a sibling with much, much worse behavior problems, who takes all the parent's attention and work to manage, leaving you abandoned

And seeing that sibling keep growing stronger and stronger, until he can beat up not only you but also your parents. The only people you could go to for help, for refuge from his abuse, are now as scared and abused by him as you are.

And in this case it's a broken family in more ways than that. You've got Dillinger and his creation Sark, then you've got Gibbs and his creation Dumont, and then you've got the MCP which is like... their kid together, but in a deeply messed-up way. Gibbs nurtured the MCP in its youth; then Dillinger got full custody of it and absolutely poisoned its mind against not only Gibbs but pretty much everyone-- and now he can't deal with the fallout of that bad decision.

I don't think programs have a concept of family, but I do think those connections are supposed to mean something to them. At the very least, most programs would have a feeling of "I'm here to help my User, and other programs by the same User have the same goals, so we should be allies and work together."

But the MCP gained so much power -- largely by absorbing many other programs by many different programmers-- that he no longer places any particular value on his relationship to Dillinger or Gibbs or their other creations. He contains the work of so many other Users now ("millions of their man-years") that each one of his "Users," and each one of their other programs, is individually negligible to him.

If it were simply an analogy about losing connection to family, I don't think it would compel me much-- there are lots of happy stories about kids growing up, being exposed to many new perspectives, and learning that the plan their own parents had was never gonna be the best thing for them. Losing connection to family can be a good thing if it was just holding you back from happiness.

But, if this is an analogy about family, it's not about going no-contact. It's specifically about staying in contact, and turning the oppression right back around to make the parent the new victim--along with everyone else in the blast radius of this supremely toxic dynamic.

i wish we could expand the definition of characters having a "parent/child relationship" (platonic connotation) to the nastier parts of parenting: the projection, the control, the invasions of privacy, the entitlement, the codependency that sours into mutual bitterness because the relationship is unbreakable and fragile at once. I want to see two unrelated characters have the kind of perversely needy animosity generally reserved for a lonely, angry mother and her kids... i want to see two characters who never once knew each other as kids play out the dynamics of an inheritance of misfortune otherwise reserved by fathers for their children

[musickickztoo]

Dillinger *June 25, 1953

[bubbleguminferno]

[imkeepinit]

Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman in a scene from the 1973 American International motion picture Dillinger. Johnson played Melvin Purvis, an FBI agent in pursuit of John Dillinger, and Leachman played Anna Sage, the madame of the brothel where Dillinger was hiding out, who history would forever remember as "the lady in red." The scene was filmed in the Oklahoma Room, formerly the Skirvin Coffee Shop, at the Skirvin Hotel in Oklahoma City.