| In his Sept. 27, 2007, Stylus Magazine review of The Scene of the Crime,
Ethan Robinson writes |
| The Scene of the Crime works on that kind of fractal structure.
Everywhere you look, there are things taken away and returned until, sometimes,
they can no longer be returned. Over and over, there are people unable to say
things to the people who should be closest to them until, sometimes, they can't
be left unsaid. Sexual attraction is mistaken for love, and vice versa, and both
mistaken in turn for hate, in endless iteration. (Even the lie Thomas tells about
his parents being dead is repeated soon enough by the movie lying to us about
Thomas being dead.) | |
| and later |
| And again, this thematic semblance is a smaller version of the way the whole
movie, with only two real acts of violence, one off-screen and one at a bloodless
distance, and its resolutely restrained tone, can remind me so powerfully of Blood Simple. |
|
| Having not watched this film, we cannot comment on the aptness of Robinson's
observation of fractality. But at least in broad strokes he has noticed the type
of structure we hope to find developed in a fuller sense. |
| To have any chance of plausibly
representing a fractal, the substructure must be presented on at least three levels, and in
general, the more levels, the more convincing the claim of fractality. Robinson appears
to suggest only two levels of similarity, not sufficient to support a claim of fractal sturcture.
The "endless iteration" of the first quotation appears to refer to events repeated in
sequence, not across levels, the kind of repetition defining fractals. |