>Like Susan Sarandon herself told in radio interview in KPFK, Los Angeles,
>it is a love story.
 
Though Sarandon may have said this I think that it is a mistake. *Dead Man
Walking* is almost structured like a love story, but it  is infact a dual
passion of a different sort. Passion as in *The Passion of Christ,* a
pasison related to the vulgarized passion of the Hollywood love story by a
certain (at least etymological) passivity and a potential to shatter the
human and the reflex arc on which it depends. In a love story 2 people
undergo an (almost) unbearable subjection to their repective other, and
those others are the each of the 2  people, respectively. In  *Dead Man
Walking* 2 people undergo an unbearable subjection to others who are not
themselves members of the diadic couple, these others are ethical and
religious situations. The vortex created by this dual passion whips out
from the screen, shattering the audience. Its enery does not drive inwardly
, throwing together the main couple.
 
The image of the murdered couple in the glass screen of the execution
chamber isn't meant to be taken literally as a "real  presence." It is an
expression of the permitation of both of protagonists utter permiation by
the elements of the situation that has lead to Penn's recieving a leathal
injection from the state. This reading arises not merely from the film's
theme of taking resposibility, but from its status as the most developed
and technically coherent expression of the heritage of "method" acting. As
the greatly mourned Giles Deleuze put it "method" acting is centered around
the permiation of the actor by the situation of the film. In  *Dead Man
Walking* that permiation happens untill it is a saturation and the actors
emit pure affect instead of actions. It is percisely this dissemination of
affect from the still point of a persons becoming that defines a passion.
This is really quite an achievment in for the contemporary American cinema
(which as you may have notice has not exactly been flooding the market with
philosophical master pieces).
 
As to the objection that the film does not take into account race politics,
an important point to be sure, I can only say that  *Dead Man Walking* is
an ethico-religious work and not a political one. While it is true that on
an "ideological" plane this approach masks the race politics of the U.S.'s
execution industry, to chose any approach is to mask something on the
ideological plane.
 
lgs
 
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