Page 17 - Just Deserts

The Decimator

“Oh, yes, it was, indeed. Especially for a great fan like me.
Anyway, I won’t go into too many details about how I arrived at my
conclusions—” a barely audible sigh escaped the lips of both
older men—“but I will tell you now, so you won’t be wondering
why, that I had to eliminate all your early Westerns: not enough
recognition among the eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds, and you looked a
lot different then. For similar reasons the rogue Special Forces
commando movies you made in the, uh, twilight of your career were
ruled out. The foreign adventurism issue has recently been subjected
to too much controversy and bad press, and might give Kalogeros a
stick with which to beat you.”
Crag Sunderbar suddenly felt suspicious of this glib disheveled
researcher. How could the man be an admirer yet deliver so blithely
such scathing and dismissive remarks about the canon? As far as
Sunderbar was concerned, he had never appeared in a role that was
not all-American, heroic, virtuous to an extreme; and he had never
made a movie that was not memorable, no matter how many years
had passed since its release. But Cyril Keller’s next remarks made the
erstwhile film star forget his animus completely.
“So we come to the Decimator series, six very popular cops-and-
robbers films, combining the purity and idealism of the frontier
Marshall with the hard-nosed worldliness of the secret agent in the
familiar role of the big-city private eye. Rod Deal, the Decimator, was
a character at once perfectly fitted to your cinematic persona and
totally embodying the unconscious fantasies and social agendas of
lower-middle-class white males; an inspired match of performer and
audience. We’ve checked the Nielsen ratings on reruns and the
breakdown of videocassette rentals by neighborhood, and they
confirm this analysis. Crag Sunderbar, to many of your potential
voters, is the Decimator. The films, in fact, constitute a sort of
encyclopedia of images relevant to this campaign: virtually every issue
can be spun into an object lesson forcefully made in a Decimator
movie. Let’s look at a few clips.”
Hathaway dimmed the lights from a rheostat set into his desktop.
He pushed another button and a panel slid up on the wall, exposing a
large-screen monitor. Keller picked up the remote control proffered

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