7/25/26

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Downfall: Nearly everything

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Downfall: Miopia

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7/10/26

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7/8/26

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7/7/26

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7/5/26

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7/3/26

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Downfall: trying to clean the murder scene

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6/27/26

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6/19/26

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6/17/26

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6/14/26

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6/9/26

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6/6/26

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6/5/26

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This review contains spoilers

- this sort of messy-looking and goofy guy very carefully combs the field for a cloth which the colonel admits he tried and failed to look for - columbo never seems to lie in this one. this is especially interesting to me. he catches the colonel while, until the final bit with the cider, always managing to keep him informed about what's going on in his head - at the dinner scene, the colonel says, 'now i'm starting to think like you, columbo'. there is in general a big emphasis on columbo's superhuman slowness. this is his main advantage. all the cops working for him are exasperated--can we leave now? the slowness and honesty give him the inevitability of a glacier - columbo's slowness and honesty really shakes up the colonel. he knows he can't win out, as he is so often used to, on moral grounds. this comes to a head in the part where columbo tells the colonel that the victim must have been killed intentionally, and then the colonel offers him a cigarette, and says 'you and me columbo we're not so different'. on the most obvious level, this is purely a move to gain sympathy from columbo; he is letting columbo into his world of secret pleasures. he thinks back to how columbo treated the delinquent student he tried to frame--with compassion, sympathy, and so on. maybe i can solicit that from him - but that's not yet what interests me about the scene. as he utters that sentence and it becomes real outside of himself, the anxiety that he will be caught transforms into this self-conscious anxiety--how could i acknowledge that this man is like me? that this guy who makes everything dirty with his cigar, that doesn't notice the dirt on his own shoe--that this guy is capable of recognizing and entering into the most serious pact that lies at the foundation of all polite society: a subterranean virtuous friendship between two serious men - he doesn't recognize the dirt on his own shoe. did you notice that the colonel 'one more thing's his boodle boy? i think the two are very clearly trying to be compared through the whole episode. columbo of course will, with his typical irony, 'one more thing' about only the detail that he needs to get right, or about what he may already suspect is the case but needs to hear a confession to get it to stick. the colonel? he notices his boodle boy's dirty shoes, and basically tells him to bring himself into the station. the colonel's world is a world without law; only *inner* discipline; a kind of christian self-effacement, which he teaches to all his 'cadets' - and then the colonel's next thought, as he tells columbo of the dangers of their professions, and their requirement for tenacity: whether or not columbo really does respect the secret pact of two serious men, it may not matter. this is the meteor that threatens to destroy the general's whole world. the seriousness of these men and the cleanliness of their shoes may not matter. whether or not columbo is 'undisciplined', he floats on like the world's most terrible glacier - the colonel's ideas about 'discipline' allow him to move fast through what to columbo appears as a mass of details and questions. towards the beginning, when columbo tells him that he doesn't think the cannon-cleaner did it, the colonel says "this kid has multiple infractions! this is a bad kid! what other evidence do you need?" but columbo knows (and the colonel reduces this to sympathy) that the whole thing is not a question of 'discipline', of whether or not one can keep his desires down or not, but of which desires act where, and of finding the little thread in the field of grass - and columbo more or less picks up on this difference--the only man to whom this story about 'discipline' and its lack really could matter are the colonel. this registers to columbo as productive of motive. for columbo there is only law and brute fact--a whole mess of conflicting propositions that might occasionally untangle into a working system. in a world where everyone imagines themselves to be socrates, trying to abolish the suspicion of others by drawing more attention to their access to virtue and good breeding rather than their wealth, columbo is socrates, but by playing the sophist and by returning to the discourse of the law court. he asks: what do your 'values' do? who are they for? who do you serve? where is the power? who is lying?

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5/31/26

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5/30/26

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5/29/26

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