Violence is always the solution.

Has it really been 7 years since we reviewed a Fringe show on these pages?ⁱ For shame… Today, let’s take a quick look at “Escape from Edmonton/Winnipeg/Ottawa/Toronto” featuring Tamlynn Bryson and Rod Peter Jr., based loosely on John Carpenter’s 1981 “Escape from New York” featuring Kurt Russell.

With more than one belly-aching laugh rendered – one at the expense of Flair Airlines, another sexing-up Daniel Craig and Mads Mikkelsen’s torture sceneⁱⁱ and yet another with Muppet porn – this show made a lot out of a little. The projector translucencies alone provided more engagement and nostalgic delight than a thousand rendered cycles of CGI sameness ever could.

But what was most telling about the production was the distinct sub-text to it all. Eliciting the kind of knowingly-nervous-yet-genuine laughter that only the best comedy can, protagonist Snake Plisskin was blunt and revealing the way only overweight-yet-physically-adept young woman with a etch-a-sketch beard could be in this particular time and place, viz. that trad-values are like so totally hot rn, the fourth turning is like totally just heating up, and authoritarianism is like so totally back on the menu. Snake’s closing reminder to the audience summed it up thusly:

1. Never trust a woman
2. Never trust the government
3. Violence is always the solutionⁱⁱⁱ

While I personally happen to be in the fortunate position of trusting The Girl more than really anyone else on the planet, the rest is hard to argue with, particularly at this phase of the cycle. 4/5 STARS

1. See 2017 reviews here. ↩
2. Casino Royale sexy times!
   To the point that, really, would anyone be surprised if Le Chiffre and James went onto live happily ever after?
   If The Girl ever split (happy anniversary btw!), I can only hope that it’d be to go “a little bit Genghis Khan”… ↩
3. To quote the late MP:
   

   Violence is an absolute practical imperative of life on Earth (and, once we find life somewhere else – there too). It is more fundamental to life than breathing, conceptually as well as practically. It is an incontrovertible fact that violence is extremely expensive a behaviour. The principal avenue through which it is expensive is that you don’t want to piss off the wrong people, and there is no cheap way to distinguish them from the general population.

   The taboo (“you shall not kill, at all, for it is too expensive to kill the right people and we deem it unfair that they who know how to make this distinction be the masters of the rest of us – also if you want to eat the delicious cookies your mother made in school you best bring one for each other kid because they drool.”) intermingles with the delusional insurance to create “the monopoly on violence”. As far as the broken “logic” goes, “all is well” >because> “violence no longer exists” >because> “the state alone may employ violence”.

   This arrangement has very unfortunate consequences. On one branch, the state is even worse equipped than individuals to ascertain whom to kill. Consequently, it is an absolute given that the collapse of any state is merely a question of time – statistically speaking it certainly will fuck with the wrong guy and get wiped sooner or later. On the other branch, as explained other places, the “monopoly on violence” immediately reduces to an actual monopoly on property.

   Y’see violence is only a matter of when, and by whom, not if. Because it’s the ultimate trump card. ↩