Fight club

Twyla Tharp has been choreographing dances for almost forty years, and by this time she should be a mature artist, yet she is not. If your subjects are aggression and apocalypse, how much can you mature? The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who made a career of cool doomed odysseys, antic and antisocial destructions, what did he end with? Eyes Wide Shut, a last film in which he saw and said nothing, despite the fact that it was based on a story by the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, seer into souls. In a film about the subtleties of desire inside and outside of marriage, Kubrick came up empty. But then, when you do aggression-apocalypse you tend to get machismo-misogyny for free. Has Norman Mailer ever written a mature novel? Sam Shepard a mature play? In Kubrick women are dolly-girls or just not there; in Mailer they’re bimbos and bitches. This sounds a lot like Tharp. What begins as a dynamic fact of...