the walls are about to blow
the briefings
the trainings
the meetings
presentation rooms
doomsday scenarios
did any of that prepare you
for the moment when
you’d have to make
a choice
give instructions
ad-hoc guidance
on what happens next
the promises
the agreements
that everyone swore to
seemed more fairy tale than old memory
your wife is across the ocean
on a mission for the elephants
one of your trusted staff
does his job well
as he did for your predecessors
but in the end
you’re all just “chronically late narcissists”
but at least you “read the news”
so what does happen next
when the waste has splattered the heavens?
is there even a right choice
a best choice
a better choice
when anything you’d command
would lead to no good outcome
when your opponent won’t show
their true hand.
– yiqi 19 October 2025 6:55 pm
~!~
This poem came to me while I was thinking about Kathryn Bigelow’s film A House of Dynamite (2025) and listening to The Contortionist’s album Language (Rediscovered edition).
Without spoiling anything, the film consists of three sections: Inclinations Flattening, Hitting A Bullet with A Bullet, and A House Filled with Dynamite.
Rebecca Ferguson is primarily in the first one. Various characters are introduced in doorways and video calls. The second section focuses on how the beginning played out from the POV of the military officials. The third section is mostly from the president’s POV. Idris Elba plays the American president. His accent is better than Rebecca’s (probably because he’s had more roles to practice).
I liked the way Kathryn Bigelow presents different conversations via different communication methods. Face-to-face vs. phone vs. video. What a character says on a video conference comes across differently when you see them say it for the film camera, such is the case with the Secretary of Defense (a perfectly cast Jared Harris; everyone with a speaking part is perfectly cast).
There’s definitely a sense of there are no right choices or there is no best choice. No matter what happens, something worse will.
And yet, somehow that is more comforting than real life.
Willa Fitzgerald and Brian Tee are briefly in it and play their parts so well. He makes a brief appearance in the beginning and then returns in the last segment. He shares many scenes with Idris Elba. It brings such a smile to my face to see how far he’s come in his acting from the first time I met him at a film festival nearly twenty years ago.
Click here for an interview with the director, writer, some cast and moderated by the Lincoln Film Center.
The bulk of this post was originally published on my tumblr.
Original pic cred: IMDB
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