Electric chair executions were yesterday suspended in Nebraska, which had been the only state to rely solely on electrocution as its sole method of dispatching the condemned. This doesn’t mean the barbaric practice is totally finished in the U.S. since, as the N.Y. Times‘ Adam Liptak has reported, “seven states allow at least some inmates to choose electrocution instead of lethal injection [and] two others, Illinois and Oklahoma, have designated electrocution as the fallback method should lethal injection be ruled unconstitutional.”

But it’s enough for all of us, I feel, to declare now and forever that Frank Darabont‘s The Green Mile — a movie about a nice-guy prison guard (Tom Hanks) and a little white mouse bearing witness as one death-row prisoner after another gets fried to death — matters even less than it did when it first came out. I hated this application of sentimental sadism with a passion when I first saw it eight and a half years ago, but these feelings have only grown over the years.
I for one would like to say goodbye forever to it. No more DVD rentals, no critical revisionist essays from Scott Foundas or F.X. Feeney, no more watching it on TCM….banish it from the collective unconscious. Am I alone on this?