When I hear the sound of the gavel, I salivate like a Pavlovian dog. For even if justice isn’t served, the truth will be revealed. The onion will peel. There are layers. We are passengers on a rising aircraft, and the landscape will slowly come into focus until we can view all the puzzle’s pieces at once, fitting together to form a picture we did not, at a lower altitude, have the perspective to see.
On Law & Order, the cops and lawyers are beautiful. Since I am on their side, I, too, become beautiful while I’m watching. The pedophiles drive white vans and lure children with balloons and the promise of a party, they abduct and even kill the children, but not every one: there is always at least one we are able to save. The pedophile is never beautiful, his teeth are bad. His abdomen is a testament to shoddy discipline and a sweet tooth.
But sometimes the bad guys aren’t pure evil, and the good guys aren’t pure good. When this happens, the officers begin to contemplate. Life and meaning are called into question. Between commercial breaks, we get some sense of how fast the world is spinning, of the chaos inherent in a dead innocent, in the senselessly abrupt ends lives can find. We see the triumphs of justice but also its limits. The struggles that can never be prevented or stopped. It is so sad to strive, knowing the odds. But what is the alternative? A loss of hope, a slide into a darker lack of feeling, an apathy that could distance us from the things worth the fight. My own mortality is too painful to dwell on. But I can watch these deaths and agree, nothing more could’ve been done.
I was always under the impression that Christopher Meloni, the actor who played Detective Elliot Stabler in Law & Order SVU, was the same guy who played the role of Casey Jones in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the movie. I told everyone this and everyone believed it. I was wrong.
Turns out the guy who played Casey Jones is named Elias Koteas. The two actors look almost exactly alike. Koteas had a small role in The Thin Red Line, and I was under the impression that this was the same actor who played Casey Jones and the lead in L&O SVU. I was right on one of those and wrong on the other, respectively. As a consolation prize, though, I found that although Christopher Meloni wasn’t Casey Jones, he did do the voice of Spike on the short-lived stop-motion animation show, Dinosaurs.
As a kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of my favorite movies. I saw it eight times at the dollar theater near our house. I also loved Dinosaurs and secretly watched it on our upstairs TV with the sound down so my parents wouldn’t hear.