Was Mark Wahlberg A Rat In The Departed

"In the old days, even the most despised of men had to be pitied. We all seem to have a certain amount of self-pity, but it is rarely this deep as it is now."

Last week, I wrote about the eternal rat in the dep, and how poor and emaciated it is and other awfulness surrounding it. That was written long before I saw the new movie, and while I tend to be partial to them, I'm kind of sick of "new-age" articles. Now of course the poor rat can't be pitied, and now we know it's an anti-hero. He's a rat in a gold vest. And we can sympathize with him because he just wants to shake/down/eat/drink whatever it is he's fed up with. It's awful, but unfortunately not a new thing in American society.

You are probably not surprised to hear that rats will invade all peoples homes, and, no, I am not talking about the kind who eat their dinner, or the kind that climb up the walls of the old and are afraid of the people that live in the houses. I am referring to the kind that climb into the bedrooms and shower the people within the home at night, but still stay and start nibbling on what they think to be furniture, until your door opens and you see them. Yikes, rats make for a good story, but that never happens in real life. The good stories I have seen happen and I believe it just so no one else can witness the end-o-shredding horror of it, or the horror of what you can do just by scratching the rat under the door.

Anyway, they definitely didn't get an Academy Award in this movie, but we can sympathize with them, and they are really brave. That was the question on everyone's mind during the "real life" version of the scene: will we let all those rats in our homes? And so the all-star cast (and just in case you didn't know, our biggest star this year, Brad Pitt, also directed) came up with the question from the other side...was that rat a real person who turned out to be a rat?