The Happy Accident of SALT

I saw "Salt" this weekend, and was delighted and intrigued. Though you had recommended it, I knew little of the plot and went in with no expectations.

After seeing it, I discovered that the project was intended for Tom Cruise but rewritten for Angelina Jolie. While Tom would have been fine in the role, a male Salt would have been merely "Mission Impossible: Revisited."

What luck that Tom Cruise was unavailable, though, as I felt most of the story's power resonated in Salt being the only female at the center of the most masculine of all struggles, the Cold War.

Her destructive power was transcendent. Like the Goddess Kali, she was creator and destroyer all at once. Though I had no evidence through most of the story of whether she was acting for good or evil, I found myself rooting for her to just destroy, destroy, destroy. Rather than seem like a minor piece in someone else's chess game, Salt became a powerful grey Queen mercilessly cutting down black and white pawns.

It was as though the imbalance inherent in the all-male world of war and supremacy had to be corrected by any means; only a woman, free of male ego, could move through this world and do what needed to be done.

Did anyone really care if the Russian or American President lived or died in the end? No. We care that Salt prevented the deaths of millions of innocent women and children in the Third World. The Great Mother had an agenda, and men were expendable to save the offspring.