"Identikit"

Detective work is essentially telling a good story. Researching your topic, finding the pieces, making them fit, keeping it all realistic. Not in the sense that you catch the wrong guy (though, sure, that happens), but in the sense that other people are invariably unknowable. And though I can only truly know (and truly dislike) me, myself, and I, life happens among us. So the cops catch the criminal--he is just as known, as real, as true, as the reality show star. The crime is solved, the craving is satiated. Both are "sweet faced ones with nothing left inside;" an identikit--a drawing reproduced from witness testimony--stands alongside the picture on the television, leaving us with positive thoughts: the streets are safe; boy, she's pretty! The mug shot becomes an odd liminal space where one becomes the other. (Auto-correct wants to say "imaginal" instead of "liminal." I look it up--"imaginal," relating to an image, as I'm talking about reducing a person to their picture, to what we see when we look in a face.) Ultimately, in industrial, suburban society, this is what we have: "pieces of a ragdoll mankind." The oddity of it all being that once we have that empty picture, that identikit, we know, we can't undo it. Thom says "when I see you messing me round, I don't want to know," because to know who his lover is with is to know the lack of infidelity; without a culprit, though, he needs to think such thoughts. It's almost saying something about Eyes Wide Shut, where another Tom can't help but imagine his wife's infidelity, daydreaming about it constantly, and yet he saw* the man she desired, but can't remember him. There is no face, no image, no identikit. It drives him crazy to know without knowing. "I can't read it--there aren't any words on it!"


*or, yes, could have seen

Edit 6/12/2020