It might, indeed, benefit from the shock of its
gleeful use of «nigger,» the surprise of its sodomy and ultra-violence, and the sheer
pleasure of hearing Sam Jackson say those lines and John Travolta dance again in a movie having faded.
You have to be a miserabilist — and I admit I am a sucker for art's bleaker regions — not to take
pleasure in Rist's warm baths of light and nature, her sunny uplands and repeated underwater rebirthings, her swoony songs and
gleeful mischievousness.