There are times a certain, specific image grabs you like a space leech from a science-fiction film, and not just any science-fiction film but a very specific science-fiction film, namely not, say, a B-movie with teens running around the 1950s and not some modern Hollywood CGI spectacle with ferrets flying up Darth Vader’s ass, but rather a hypothetical film made in Kazakhstan by a young Kazakhstani director several years ago but only recently discovered and distributed in art-houses in the West with grainy, odd subtitles; based on a script, an old script, so old it was once supposed to be filmed by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein but was ultimately shelved after disagreements on changes to the script when Eisenstein, for example, especially after seeing a performance by a Japanese kabuki troupe in 1928, insisted on synthesizing all the elements of his film — gesture, sound, costume, sets and color — into a single, powerful, polyphonic experience and was, personally and sadly for the project, unconvinced that certain elements of the script as it then was would allow for this; so that the script mouldered on the shelf until, decades later, it was rediscovered in an archive by the aforementioned young Kazakhstani film director who saw in it an apt metaphor for the state of society in the post-USSR republics and turned it into a powerful statement ultimately shown at a Sundance Festival and picked up by Miramax, maybe, or someone else, you’d know that better than I would, and that, anyway, had these leeches, which although they were very in-your-face physical bloodsucking leeches, about the size of an omlette with rows of gripping barbed teeth and the power of flight over short distances did not play a central role in the film. That’s the sort of leech I’m talking about. And you have to get that image out, so your train of thought can finally pull out of the station, whether it makes a goddamned bit of sense or not.