This leaves the provocateur director herself in her role as catalyst for the mayhem to follow as the ultimate filmic presence wreaking its influence on others. Assigned only the title of “The Girl” in the credits and never referred to by name, she is the figure of new womanhood here to serve notice on the Epsteins of the world.
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One of the aims of ritual in religious practice is to invoke a spirit. A “presence.”
Think about that word a minute.
The first, simplest definition in Merriam-Webster is the fact or condition of being present. That suggests real, tangible existence. The evidence of your eyes. Focus on the last word and you bring it into the here and now; you also realize that the present thing could be engaged or involved itself, and bear some form of agency or influence. Like when your therapist or acting coach reminds you to “be present.”
Definition 2a, the part of space within one’s vicinity, makes it more personal, conjuring the sensation that comes with being near this thing; to have it taking up room in your own space, or mind. And how such closeness makes it harder to refute or deny: There it is. 2b goes further, elevating the title or significance of the present thing: the neighborhood of one of superior especially royal rank. And by extension the effect this has on the viewer, again, from simple observation to awe, respect, or intimidation.
Putting the dictionary aside for a minute, the inspiration for this thought experiment was a modestly budgeted film from 2021 that made some small waves on the indie and horror scene, The Scary of 61st. It was the inaugural directing effort by actress, podcaster, and all-around upstart Dasha Nekrasova, co-written by herself and co-star Madeline Quinn. The premise is simple; what follows, anything but. Two women fresh out of college discover why the uptown New York apartment they’ve let came at such a bargain: it was a meeting place for notorious financier and erotomaniac Jeffrey Epstein and the stable of underage girls he engaged with when not trafficking them to his well-connected coterie. What this does to the minds and bodies of Nekrasova’s characters almost beggars recounting, it’s so wild, discontinuous, and at times incoherent, in the sense Robin Wood meant in his essay “The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 70s” (alluded to by Josh Nelson in his commentary to the Vinegar Syndrome blu-ray). It fails to cohere, in telling ways, as though disrupted by the very presences inhabiting it.
There’s only a handful of characters in the film, but each one is a presence, starting with the city it takes place in, New York, New York. We’re introduced to the metropolis during the opening credits by way of its gothic architecture in the form of gargoyles and cherubs, with a Season’s Greetings wreath, sex shop, and drone’s-eye-view of Central Park adding to the flavor. It’s concrete, glass, and neon, with what would pass for an Edenic heart if not for the later, rhyming aerial view of Epstein’s American-Virgins compound, aka Orgy – or, more to the point – Pedophile Island, not unlike offshore Manhattan itself. Those gargoyles were supposed to protect the angelic babes, but like the political and judiciary entities Epstein had on his payroll, that was not gonna happen. Until it did.
The snake evaded serious consequences the first time he faced justice – not counting his involvement in “the largest Ponzi scam in US history” in the 1990s (as Barry Levin put it in The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell), which his partner did 18 years for though Epstein got off scot-free. We’re talking the time he plea-dealed himself out of “one count of solicitation of prostitution and one of procuring a person under the age of eighteen for prostitution” (Levin again) in Palm Beach in 2009. Then along came #MeToo and that was the end of that orgy. When Epstein found himself charged for the same offense 10 years later and wound up on the business end of a makeshift noose in the Correctional Center cell where he resided alone despite having demonstrated suicidal ideation while the two guards on duty slept 15 yards away and security cameras conveniently failed, it was either “the perfect storm of fuckups,” as described by then-US Attorney General William Barr, or the deliberate eradication of a figure whose orbit included presidents, judges, celebrities, scientists, fashionistas, captains of industry, a labor secretary, a couple legal eagles, and wouldn’t you know it, Barr himself. None of whom would be pleased being linked to a procurer of young women who had his properties kitted out with a battery of security cameras only partly for his own delectation. Cue the conspiracy theories, from the far-fetched to the close-to-home.
Noelle, the first-seen of the two women (played by co-writer Quinn), would hardly seem naïve. But her snarkiness is hiding something, a vulnerability she heaps upon roommate Addie to the point of rupture for the latter damaged child of privilege. Their repartee at first strikes a person as typical hip-chick wiseassery meets earnest waif in a yin-yang complement likely born more out of mutual misfitism than ride-or-die self-identification, so that when the schism comes it makes more sense than you might expect. (Wobble Palace, Nekrasova’s first feature film credit, co-written with and directed by fellow Russian expat Eugene Kotlyarenko, was premised on a similar breakup, occurring on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election.)
Most of us are more Addie than Noelle, so we understand how much the warm-White-Claw attitudinizing of the one provides a shield and a bulwark for the other against the insistent intrusions of the world. For Noelle, Addie is a foil, someone who can meet her tough-love insensitivities with self-help nostrums that seemingly deflect but ultimately weaken her when encountering a genuinely malignant influence that more than pretends to not care about anyone or anything else. The Teorema-like introduction of a third party contributes to Addie’s descent into instability and Exorcist-level histrionics, murder, and one personality’s revealed complicity in it all.
Opinions differ on Addie’s boyfriend, Greg (not the third party mentioned above). Many regard him like Noelle does, as a simp and a cuck (her insult of choice for him, an invention of her generation meant to strike a man at his supposed weak spot, his sense of ownership and entitlement; neither of which Greg seems to profess), when all he seems is limited, if more than a bit self-directed. He’s a squarer version of Palace’s sweet but problematic beau Eugene. Inept as he is in proving it at times, Greg cares enough about Addie never to neg her or stoop to Noelle’s casual cruelty – till pushed. And when Addie in her least self-possessed moment asks him to cross a line that offends his sense of decency, if not respect for her, he’s man enough to refuse and not hasten her descent; none of which could be said about her roommate. Toward the end he displays a callousness that could be seen as either well-earned or revealing of his true character – or simply that he lacks the context to meet a moment impossible to foresee.
Before addressing the final presence, whose imposition triggers the cascade of ruptures and psychotic breaks to follow, let’s consider definition 5a: the bearing, carriage or air of a person, especially stately or distinguished bearing. Distinctly not Bro-Magnon (as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas describes him in her commentary with Nelson) Greg but the lordly apartment manager who shows the women around in the first scene. His unexpected return near the end reveals a truly incoherent alliance with another character and provides a connection to still another presence whose influence looms large and provides a possible antidote to Epstein’s noxion.
Stanley Kubrick, of all people, receives a smirky dedication in the film’s closing titles. Nekrasova has more than once located her film in “the Eyes Wide Shut extended universe” and lauded Kubrick’s “understanding of world power”; she ends 61st with a direct rip from Eyes that might blow your mind if you get the connection and make you wonder which film you just saw, or simply beribbon a foregone conclusion. Besides a superficial sense while watching that each film is going wherever it wants and feels it needs to – impressions Nekrasova’s film shares with another filmmaker we’ll get to in a minute – the main thread tying films that couldn’t be further apart in terms of budget, scale, star power, and preparation lies in the secret society in Kubrick’s film, whose influence and reach ladders up through the halls of power, as one of Nekrasova’s characters learns about the Epstein network.
The cults themselves, though, couldn’t be more different. In Kubrick’s take on Eurotrash erotica, it’s slightly ridiculous – in the seriousness it takes itself with and the real repercussions of its behavior. Its somber rituals and liturgies are little more than a front for orgiastic sex parties, nothing like 61st’s murder, insanity, demonic possession, and self-abuse with Royal Family kitsch. The only real power Eyes’s society wields is the ability to hire models, ex-beauty queens, and high-priced call girls the way corporations hire legacy rock bands today to prove they’ve still “got it” and that these artists can be bought, besides keeping the occasional thug on retainer to threaten and lightly rough up the family doctors and moonlighting jazzbos who might out them to an indifferent world. If Nekrasova’s cribbing a warning note from the master in the end meant anything at all, it would be mostly Stan, you had no idea.
More befitting the pedophilic backstory to 61st is the impact of another director Nekrasova readily and uncritically acknowledges, Roman Polanski, whose drugging and anal assault of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977 caused him to flee America for permanent exile in his European homeland, despite Geimer’s forgiveness in adulthood. 61st’s apartment setting resonates with similar venues in Polanski’s Repulsion and especially Rosemary’s Baby, where Elisha Cook Jr.’s building manager is the obvious grounding for Nekrasova’s similar. But the more pronounced comparison is to The Tenant’s deteriorating distinction between external and subjective reality as a reflection of its main character’s mental annihilation and blurring of identities with the room’s previous inhabitant. Nekrasova’s paradoxical embrace of a figure who precisely embodies the qualities of her unreservedly vilified villain is typical of the artist whose Red Scare podcast (in the company of another expat, Anna Khachiyan) could play host to Alex Jones, the same unspeakable presence whose infamy her rise to public awareness was predicated on when her response to a reporter for Jones’s Infowars – “Honestly, you people have, like, worms for brains” – proved a momentary Internet sensation.
Other directorial influences like Abel Ferrara and Todd Solondz have been duly noted, but the one whose aura most hangs over 61st is its least mentioned, Brian De Palma, whose equally referential conspiracy-driven genre exercises give the most informative context for Nekrasova’s similarly rangy, unpredictable, and defiantly derivative work.
You could start with De Palma’s first distributed picture, aptly titled Greetings. Of a type with other countercultural satires of the time and like them inspired by the sketch-comedy aesthetic of improv groups of the day, Greetings is loosely structured, incorporating gags, monologues, ad-libbing, topical references (Vietnam and the draft, computer dating, new sexual mores), key among them the Kennedy assassination the director says he was obsessed with at one point in his life and seems never to’ve let go of. Filming non-union and on-location in New York, his crew often shot guerrilla-style, without permits, as was much of 61st, which moves in a similarly intuitive fashion and with a satirical undertow that complicates how you respond to its horrors.
The nearest kin to 61st in the De Palma canon is Sisters, the director’s first move away from vaudeville and toward the suspense and horror genres he was to make his own. Also taking place in Manhattan, also involving a divided personality, female investigator, and freighted with political-conspiracy allegory, with everything taking place under the shadow of a manipulative authority figure of questionable ethics, both Sisters and 61st imperceptibly shade into fantasy and end in nominal defeat, with brainwashed main characters and the knowledge that a heinous crime has been committed that their heroines are left frustratingly unable to bring to light. The most salient aspect of De Palma’s influence is in the gaslighting effect of the US government’s malevolence toward its people, with Nekrasova mixing in the money and power dynamics of later De Palmas Obsession, Blow Out, and Body Double.
This leaves the provocateur director herself in her role as catalyst for the mayhem to follow as the ultimate filmic presence wreaking its influence on others. Assigned only the title of “The Girl” in the credits and never referred to by name, she is the figure of new womanhood here to serve notice on the Epsteins of the world.
Defiantly Catholic, Nekrasova was born in Minsk in 1991, grew up in Los Angeles, studied in the Bay Area, then after an aborted return to LA lit out like Addie and Noelle to jump-start her career in NYC. Like Bo Burnham she’s one of the most new-media-saturated of modern filmmakers, happily offering how informed by her “own research” into the Epstein case was 61st. Her identification with the Factory Records/Manchester-scene “downtrodden ethos” aligns her with the Dirtbag Left and adds depth to the class resentment in her and Quinn’s script, while claiming influence on the more esoteric side by Slavoj Žižek, Camille Paglia, Michel Houellebecq, Christopher Lasch, and others. A breathing paradox, her progressive bona fides are complicated by a running debate with neoliberal feminism as well as flirtation with such third-rail issues as climate-change denial. But about Epstein’s fate she is unequivocal: he was murdered.
Nekrasova’s extrafilmic persona bleeds through in her performance as The Girl, an Epstein truther who intrudes on the young hangout the day after Addie and Noelle move in; posing as a real estate agent, her actual ties to reality prove tenuous at best. Noelle lets her in while Addie is out, and she immediately ousts the roommate in Noelle’s affections, quickly becoming her lover, Noelle turned on as much by the squirminess of the apartment’s late tenant and his epic misdeeds, as revealed by The Girl, as by the latter’s charisma and shared sense of the rest of the planet’s inferiority to her infallible instincts and intellect. (Not unlike Epstein himself, who fancied banking his sperm to inseminate large swathes of womanhood in order to seed a new generation of like minds.) Such is the vibe Nekrasova exudes, too, and watching how her film unspools under her influence conjures a certain caution on the part of the critic toward its creator.
When The Girl discovers Addie late in the film in the basement of the apartment building, where she’s constructed a shrine to Epstein including an inexplicable blowup of a Darger-esque tarot card and Caligari-painted walls, it’s a descent into the subconscious of the world created by the reckless exploitative upper class. This tarot, like other of Addie’s manifestations, was known only to The Girl and Noelle; so aspiring actress Addie is acting out the horror and anxiety these other women are too icy-cool to allow to surface, themselves. (Probably the reason Noelle doesn’t need her beverage chilled: she’s already cold-blooded enough.) While the others are LARPing at laptop investigators, she’s out jacking off in the doorway of Epstein’s 66th Street townhouse, dressing up like the 17-year-old in that photo with Prince Andrew and Maxwell, and violating herself Regan-style with kitsch from Nekrasova’s personal collection … and never knowing why. Her ritual candles, icons, and artifacts aren’t necessary to invoke the malevolent presences of the apartment, city and nation, anyway; they bubble up by virtue of their outrageous existence. And when things go really crazy, you see how world-warping that effect can be.
The encounter between Girl and Actress doesn’t go well. Addie smacks her unconscious, erupting the screen into subliminal shots of gargoyles, Andrew, his companion in that picture Virginia Roberts, and other images of abuse, as though belched up from her roiling subconscious. As Addie continues bashing The Girl’s head on the floor, Noelle appears from behind to stab her BFF in the back, the basement, previously unregarded, now a place of convergence – a center of the self, an alimentary as well as uterine vacating point in the psyche.
Here’s where the film really becomes “incoherent.” After offing Addie, Noelle reports back to the manager of the apartment, which has been scrubbed of icons, citrus waste, blood, claw marks on the walls, you name it, much like the murder scene in Sisters and as will be performed on the basement too, as though cleansed by the catharsis below. “It’s done,” she informs him, in obvious reference to the Crucifixion and indicating that she and he are in cahoots. Though they’re associated early on when she echoes him in warning Addie not to touch the piano in the room, little more is made of the coincidence till now and it’s never indicated when their alliance began. If we’re looking for reasons for such conundrums, then we clearly need to look past mere presences to non-presences, too, which have agency beyond the film frame. Consider this in terms of dreams, where there’s a similar governing consciousness orchestrating everything, seen only in surrogate. Which then begs the question of who the dreamer is; a question usually solved by the principle of the least-present-person, unseen because enveloping the drama. That could be any one of three people, in this case, whom Addie’s ritual could be seen as summoning in order to make manifest what’s been driving her to such extremes.
Most obvious is Epstein. Seen only fleetingly, in subliminal images reminiscent of The Exorcist’s bogey Captain Howdy, he’s the epitome of evil in his seduction of young women into doing what they normally would not but for the allure of his money and far-reaching connections to power. Then there’s that power itself, which allowed him to evade justice by way of witness tampering via campaigns of intimidation and character assassination, when not simply calling in favors from any of the judges, cops, and attorneys – the “merchants of justice,” as Julie K. Brown put it in her dive into Epstein, Perversion of Justice – he was paying off in one way or another. When finally caught the first time, he was able to bend that system to his own devices such that, to take but one example, the terms of his incarceration allowed him to work from his mansion home 12 hours a day six days a week, during which time he had sexual liaisons with at least two women under the nose of the deputies there to supervise him. While in stir he bought two pairs of panties from the Correctional Center commissary, was found masturbating to a female assistant on Skype, and reportedly abused two more young women before this serial probation violator was released a month early for good behavior. All because he had money. Lots of it.
If we accept the film as his dream of continued abuse from beyond the grave just as he did from within those prison walls, his ability to run his trafficking ring in the daylight with the full winking awareness of eminences in just about all offices of human civilization lends some context to the incomprehensible nature of so much of 61st and the way it, too, gets away with its rapid descent from Gen Y hangout to all-out insanity with little opportunity on the part of the viewer to question how or why. Given Nekrasova’s claims to have expiated her fascination with and horror at the Epstein saga through making the film, you can see the drama as a ritual laying his malevolent influence to rest – complicated by the film’s last twist. The man is taken care of, but the social structure, like the apartment building itself, is left to continue the dirty work.
Yet Epstein is only an extension, a manifestation of still another figure. Addie is the alleged victim of a father “who fucked [her] up so badly,” according to Noelle, though the nature of these abuses is never disclosed; they remain metaphorical, as does the Man who represents only money to her freeloading roommate. More real was Epstein’s accomplice – one in a small group of such women – Ghislaine Maxwell. Like Addie, she was a daughter of privilege by way of publisher father Robert, an “abusive egomaniac,” according to Brown, suitably born in the archetypal vampires’ home of the Carpathian Mountains. (As if that weren’t classical Universal Monsters enough, Epstein had a bodyguard named Igor.) The elder Maxwell allegedly beat all his kids and had a punishment room full of modern-medieval instruments – riding crop, ruler, shoehorn – to that end. There are Mossad-related conspiracy theories about how the financially beleaguered magnate died in a fall off the deck of the yacht named after his daughter. Ghislaine fell into Epstein’s orbit on his death, finding a safe home in a New York City where people were less agitated about her family’s corruption and she could escape daddy’s shadow for a while. She and Epstein became an item, after which they remained friends and business associates, she finding a continued place in his life scouting out women as young as 14 for his and sometimes her own sexual involvement here and at his luxe compound in Palm Beach. Never charged criminally during Epstein’s abbreviated life, she was finally arrested in July 2020 and convicted in June 2022, and sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to sexually abuse minors. (The fact that she ran free for three years knowing all she did about the man and his contacts lends serious question to “theories” about Epstein’s demise.) Somewhere in the interim, Nekrasova claims to have interviewed to intern with Maxwell for her TerraMar ocean conservation group; podmate Khachniya plays her in the movie.
The aforementioned Virginia Roberts, 16, was one of these recruits, from a nearby Florida resort where her father did maintenance. Which brings up the most conspicuous of the non-presences in 61st, which we’ll get to. But first.
Nekrasova’s film makes several references to ex-president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, in conspiracy-theory allusions to their “crime family” and so-called Body Count. (Hillary also receives the occasional approving nod in Wobble Palace, in the form of one character’s joking reference to Clinton’s “I’m with her” campaign slogan and Nekrasova’s Jane musing on the coolness of a possible woman president.) Clinton was in fact part of Epstein’s circle of acquaintances; Levin counts 21 phone numbers for him in Epstein’s personal directory. He was a guest on Epstein’s island and had philanthropic ties to Maxwell c/o his Foundation. Also notable in their relation, though, was independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose salacious pursuit of Clinton led to his impeachment for lying to Congress about his consensual affair with 21-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky. This product of the far-right Federalist Society and persecutor of legal-age infidelities served with equal zeal to defend a serial pedophile as part of Epstein’s Florida defense team, unsuccessfully pressuring US Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher to drop the case against him. The friendship between Clinton and Epstein was evidently over by 2019 when London’s Daily Mail published a photo of a painting hanging in one of Epstein’s residences of Bill in Lewinsky’s notorious blue dress. For what it’s worth, the deeply embedded Roberts has all but exonerated Clinton, observing to Brown that “he made me laugh a few times” but that she “saw no evidence he was interested in” herself or the two brunettes Epstein had flown in for one of their island meetings. Still, he’s not the one we’re getting at.
Continuing the film’s pattern of head trauma as metaphor, Nekrasova’s Girl is unconscious in the basement while the episode revealing Noelle’s collusion takes place, meaning, in psychological terms, that the ego has absented itself in order to allow the most guarded-against information to come to light. She rouses and returns to the apartment only to get her head smacked on the piano, by now symbol of upper-class privilege as well as cold, hard reality, by Noelle, which she responds to by cracking Noelle over the head with an obsidian crystal offered by a shady New Age shop owner as a talisman against evil, mystical totem now as blunt instrument. One last subliminal of Epstein’s face ignites like a phosphene flash across the eyes and as the final exorcism of this film’s Pazuzu – who was used in the Friedkin film as the focal point of other characters’ projections. Which brings us to the ultimate non-presence whose influence yet permeates daily life through the force of its own perversity, the one enemy-other even the controversial director is unwilling to engage with formally.
Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, another (twice-) impeached former president makes several cameos in the Epstein drama but is never referred to in 61st, a figure evidently so abject as to be Unnamable (in the Lovecraftian sense if no other), Donald Trump, whose shadow looms largely over Palace, too. In probably the one area where the pugilistic real estate magnate and television reality show host would prefer not to compete, Trump also appeared in Epstein’s Rolodex; 14 times, by Levin’s count. Among the 91-times-indicted and 34-count-felon ex-president’s previous endeavors was the Miss Teen America pageant whose changing room he proudly admitted gawping into because, apparently, when you’re famous, they let you, and among the limitless lawsuits against him was an accusation, according to Levin, of participating with Epstein in the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. (The lawsuit was dropped around the time of the 2016 election for undisclosed reasons.) Epstein’s first underage recruit was introduced to Trump at age 14; it was his Mar-a-Lago retreat where Roberts was discovered and inveighed into the Epstein circle. Two months after Epstein’s release from “prison,” he was seen partying with soon-to-be Trump luminaries Wilbur Ross, Rudy Giuliani, and Steve Mnuchin; Steve Bannon also hobnobbed with him post-incarceration. An alternative title for the movie might well have been The Scary of 45th, but that would be a giveaway.
Yet there’s more. Alex Acosta, who served in the first George Bush’s Justice Department and was appointed Trump’s Secretary of Labor (among whose responsibilities was the investigation and prosecution of sex traffickers), helped Epstein get preferential treatment under his first conviction. He was fired from his Secretary post – that is, he resigned – only six days after Epstein’s second arrest. Not least of all, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, son of the Donald Barr who hired Epstein to teach at his tony Dalton School, had Geoffrey Berman, the judge overseeing Maxwell’s potential legal cases and who brought the indictment against Epstein, dismissed at his boss’s urging after Maxwell – who is said to have introduced Melania to the future president – reportedly tried to smear Berman via two “fake news purveyors,” according to Levin.
That Nekrasova, through her deeply questionable main character, would make such an effort to namecheck the Clintons and render Trump invisible at a time when that figure and his own activities were very much in the public’s consciousness is the film’s ultimate failure of coherence, making the frisson of her final revelation the more resonant.
If Addie’s ritual was performed for another reason, to restart time, as is commonly the case, apparently the big reset for The Girl was the realization that her partner in crime was acting on behalf of the evil other all along, which we might associate with Nekrasova’s sense of betrayal on learning of TerraMar Maxwell’s Epstein connection. What to make, then, of the film’s final episode?
After bashing Noelle, The Girl drags Greg back to the apartment, only to find it spotless, as is the basement where they part ways. When Greg finally asserts himself against her and Noelle’s belittlement, it’s the first step in the reassertion of masculine agency as well as conscious rationality, and when he lashes out by saying I don’t even know who you are, it could be her asking herself the same question. The everywoman suggestion of her ambiguous name now starts looking more inchoate or elusive probably even to herself, as if her entire identity had been founded on a worldwide web of questionable data, innuendo, and conspiracy theories, all fallen to blank walls and scrubbed-clean floors. She’s one step away from De Palma’s brainwashed Sisters heroine insisting There is no body because there was no murder.
On Greg’s exit, The Girl discovers a heretofore unknown backroom. It’s as if a new option had presented itself to her, the Kubrickian opening of a Stargate on HAL the computer’s decommissioning. Here she finds a piano like the one upstairs, with a note on it. It’s the same message Tom Cruise’s Odyssean wanderer receives after his Wide Shut encounter with the erotic upper-class underground, cautioning to GIVE UP YOUR INQUIRIES WHICH ARE COMPLETELY USELESS, AND CONSIDER THESE WORDS A WARNING. WE HOPE, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, THAT THIS WILL BE SUFFICIENT. One interpretation of Kubrick’s final film is as the thoughts of a 70-year-old filmmaker on the permissiveness of a sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s he passed through without the consequences of others of his peer group like Polanski, and the sense of a bullet dodged, as when Cruise’s character learns that the prostitute he toyed with engaging had the next day been diagnosed HIV-positive. Nekrasova may have felt a kinship, knowing how close her scrape with Epstein’s universe might have been.
Our secular society’s ritual for laying things to rest has traditionally taken place in the halls of justice. With the profusion of courtroom dramas in the current cinema and streaming (Anatomy of a Fall; Where the Crawdads Sing; The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial; The Burial; the ongoing popularity of TV’s Law and Order; no doubt the list will continue), Nekrasova is apparently not alone in looking for expiation. There is a noxious presence impacting all our lives – the very definition of untouchability – similarly being protected from the consequences of its actions by highly placed cronies and accomplices despite multiple felony convictions, that will not go away any other way. Reading about Epstein and his cohort with their human trafficking and sperm-freezing schemes, you come to appreciate how the monied and elite really do assume privilege, priority, and authority over the rest of us. We will see in the coming months, maybe years, whether they can properly be brought to account for their actions, and another apparition entombed.
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All images are screenshots from the film or YouTube videos.