Imtemporal beauty

She appears onscreen for just fleeting moments in Robert Redford’s QUIZ SHOW (1994). She has no name, and I don’t recall if she utters a single line of dialogue. She’s just there. There with the brevity of a breath, forever immortal on the perennial celluloid strip, morphed into bytes in digital support, like an aesthetic infection wanting to live for eternity, a virus of beauty spreading throughout the culture, throughout time.

Her bejeweled glamour speaks to us as if from the deep millennia of History. Hers is Nefertiti’s beauty, Cleopatra’s devouring allure, Circe’s timeless spell. In the context of the film (if we can so broadly frame her presence onscreen) she seems at the same time to contrast and to absorb the two wives of the married men in the triangle of male protagonists: she seems to be the very opposite of shrill Toby Stemple (Johann Carlo), and a more posh, and yet less intelligent version of middle-class beauty Sandra Goodwin (Mira Sorvino). Halfway between those two, she resonates with contingent possibilities, a Schrödinger’s box of yet undecayed realities. She's at the same time all possible women and a sole vision of desire, burning for a few frames, and then disappearing into the river of unrealized eternal beauty, leaving behind her, seared into the viewers’s retina, just one instance of that realized potential.