The special power a lady of wit and intelligence has in a man's world hinges on muscle, a rock hard man to watch her back -- is it any different the other way around? This is natural... does a cowboy not have a horse? Or a king a queen or confidente? A man wields a sword, a woman wields a man with a sword. Part of power is the ability to delegate responsibility. If a woman is always cleaning and watching her own back and raising kids she has no time to kick ass. She needs Geoffrey Rush, Barton McLane or Jackie Ido to help her out. Is this un-feminist? No, but it's interesting. To win the man she must love, or inspire loyalty. The three women we'll be discussing here all do just that. They know how to use their wit and intelligence to inspire courage, loyalty, and love. Sexual wiles pay little part - rather each transcends sex, becoming fashion plate insects, courageous sleuths and the Giant Face of Jewish Vengeance instead of just dames in need of a rescue. In other words, they move past being a supporting player in a man's movie, they reverse that paradigm, and that they do so without alienating the men around them shows it can be done.

 TCM recently ran the first in the 1940s Torchy Blaine mystery series, SMART BLONDE. In it Glenda Ferrell is a crime-solving reporter who relies on her perennial boyfriend played by Sam Spade's chief abuser in MALTESE FALCON, Barton McLane. He paves the way, provides the muscle, authorizes and follows through. There are several film noirs and Thin Man imitations where the woman continually has to to convince her man she's not an idiot, especially in post-code cinema where censors didn't much cotton to smart or independent women. But Torchy gets by and her man knows she's got more brains than he does and rides along, at least in the first on SMART BLONDE. This one is pretty pulpy and well-scripted if cheap and Ferrell takes the reins, so used to riding shotgun and cracking wise and being stuck with beta male Frank McHugh while Joans Bennett or Blondell got the alpha and the big brass ring.


One of the odd things about the Torchy series apparently is that she and Barton always promise to get married, and never do. I think that's worth mentioning in regard especially to the other women I'm discussing here, Shoshana in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) and Elizabeth I in ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE (2007). Shoshana Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) has a lover and confidente in the black Parisian projectionist Marcel (Jackie Ido) at the cinema she owns/runs in Paris. Shoshana can't really marry him because he's black. And Elizabeth can't marry either Raleigh or her own Barton Maclaine, Geoffrey Rush as Sir Francis Walsingham. We see Sir Walsingham deal with an entire plot by English Catholics loyal to Mary Queen of Scots, one that includes his own brother.
The contrast between the ugly pock-marked Catholics in their black dirty robes and dingy lighting, their faces puffy and ill with sores is remarkable and one of the reasons perhaps I'm so fond of this very anti-Catholic pro-Protestant movie. As Mary, Samantha Morton looks like she's been stricken with syphilis, rickets, and excessive carbs for way too long (even imprisoned in Scotland she could surely get some sun once in awhile) while Elizabeth barely looks human at all--like she's morphing into something of pure legend, "the stuff of.... future memory" as Arthur puts it in John Boorman's EXCALIBUR. In fact all three films are perhaps about the stuff of future memory; for BASTERDS is really more about war films and propaganda having the power to rewrite history with Hollywood's gain of UFA's Jewish expressionists helping us win the war as a parallel perhaps to our gain of EInstein helping us build the first A-bomb.


It's pretty strange that if you look at the reviews for GOLDEN AGE it draws a shaky 35% positive (vs. the first film's 85%, which I liked a lot less) with top critical dissent noting:

"This is romantic fantasy, not history, and much of the time you fully expect Kapur, here making his third post-Bollywood feature, to turn his cast loose in song and dance." - Jonathan F. Richards. 

Is the red-speckled beauty of Jessica Chastain tied inexorably to the 'modern' pre-Raphaelite art of J.W. Waterhouse? While he painted most of his works in the early part of last century, a while before Chastain was born --we assume, she keeps her age top secret -- is there a more cosmically unusual reason for that than usual?


Maybe it's a happy coincidence and not a case of time travel or immortality? It took awhile for me to place the aching feeling in my heart when I saw her in TREE OF LIFE -- it helped I was going through some serious stuff while viewing it (as I've written) but I could see the cells of sunlight coming off of her face and pale arms in some of the close-ups, see the auric stamp of her DNA's designer, feel her timeless maternal pull - luring me across the expanse of a solid century or so like Pinocchio on a slowly retracting umbilical puppet string.

Is it just a happy coincidence? I'm looking forward to ZERO DARK THIRTY to find out. I notice JC's in about 400 films this year and yet also finds time for a Broadway play. How does she keep so busy and yet look so good? Maybe it's her ability to transcend space and time. Sure, I know Waterhouse supposedly used his half-sister Mary as a model for many of these, but how can we be really sure? The few photos we have of Mary are fuzzy and at a bad angle or as a much older woman.  I'm guessing Mary may have been Waterhouse's approximate model, but as a painter myself I know the girl I'm most thinking about while painting ---the who has come to represent my inner female spirit or anima in that instance, as she does as the mood suits her-- usually appears in the face of whomever I'm supposed to be painting. So perhaps Waterhouse could sense Chastain's unborn beauty somewhere deep inside him and his anima took it on as a new coat, and as a result his beauties are a cross between sister Mary and etheric anima Jessica? I believe these things are, if not real, then true. If not true, then more 'real' than truth, for in the world of true artistic expression, time and space and dreams and palette all merge together as one force impossible to measure with anything like clocks, or calendars, or miles or inches. Only the finished work, as it accumulates and is dropped into the museums and Facebook pages of time. She's a vegan. She's a warrior. She's over 100 years old!

THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUTH
1930 - ***
There once was a hoary old saw about a gold-digging vamp luring a naive rich boy away from his Tess Trueheart, crashing him on the big city rocks and returning him to said Tess a wiser man. This saw was played out even by the end of the silent age, as Griffith learned when he got jeers for his 1928 opus THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES. The jazz age made the small town values this saw was forged from forever a laughing stock, but a smart director could use that to his advantage and play off the pre-existing tropes for wry modern effect. As "the Firefly" a pre-top tier Myrna Loy sews her wild oats as swinging gold digger siren who winds up luring weak-willed "the Imp" (David Manners) away from the arms of his loving guardian, Richard (Conway Tearle) and the Trueheart type he wants the Imp to marry (Loretta Young) the housekeeper's daughter. Flanked his two cronies from the war, Richard has been scheming to marry off the girl and the Imp because he never dared hope... he never  thought... he never dreamed that all this while...why, he's old enough to be her father!


The code would make dating girls half your age fairly difficult, aside from, say, Billy Wilder movies in the 1950s, which is why here it's so vital, and cool, and necessary. As the Imp, the usually square David Manners gets to cut loose in a few scenes, like the one above where he comes home from the speak drunk as a lord. And there's an almost Capra-esque level of humanity at work: Loy's vamp turns jake, giving Richard back his deposit once her forgiving sugardaddy shows up to whisk her away to Paris. Griffith never would have approved, but Humbert Humbert would!

LIFE BEGINS
1932 - ***
Something soothing and unusual, like a return to some primordial 'last gasp in the womb' memory, can be found in this ensemble film that spends a few days and nights in the maternity ward of a NYC hospital. Lanky comic Aline McMahon is the savvy head nurse of the ward and Glenda Farrell--as a showgirl giving twins up for adoption--hides booze in her hot water bottle and sings "Frankie and Johnny" with ward-tailored lyrics. Loretta Young is a convicted murderer allowed in the ward until her baby is born; the daddy is a twitchy little rat of a kid bouncing around the marbled foyer. Frank McHugh is another of the nervous papas. If you know Young's love of playing the martyr you don't need to ask what happens to her and her baby, but that's mostly offscreen. This was the age, after all, before Lamaze or rules like no cigar smoke in the waiting room. Things are so primitive there are even mentions of rules that later proved detrimental to infant and mom well-being, like keeping the child and mother separate as much as possible after birth, avoiding breastfeeding at all costs (so unsanitary!) and denying your infant any maternal affection as an essential ingredient for future well-being. 

I also love how the film never strays from that one floor of the hospital, except for one or two small scenes on other floors or drug stores. The closeness creates a real sense of atmosphere and camaraderie and since the women are all nice, pretty, younger moms for the most part it even engenders a glow of being back as an infant, and safe and warm and looked after, sleeping in a big building with awake people all around you all night, and since it's not HALLOWEEN 2 or VISITING HOURS there are no slashers, just an escapee woman from the psychopathic ward.

ROAD TO PARADISE
1930 - ***
Loretta Young playing two different characters, a kind of Princess and the Pauper with an ESP angle thrown in: the pauper is raised by two Runyanesque burglars; the princess is a weary debutante. Naturally the thieves get their poor charge to pose as the rich one and let them in from the roof, but everything is locked and only the butler has the key and a cop comes to investigate and keeps telling racist jokes. Meanwhile, the old matron forgot her headache powders so the Princess is on her way back. As Capt. Flynn would say: Prepare the decks for pleasant action!

Originally a stage play, the fluid direction gives us a real you are there feel that adds dimension to the comical cat and mouse antics, but what else is there? Margaret--the princess-- has a lot of money but her suitor looks like a combination Chico Marx and young Edward Everett Horton. The best part is the ESP angle (both girls have it) -- "you read it from her mind? that's funny, Barbara can, too!" The pre-Code era is still amongst our most enlightened as far as exploring the shades of psychic ability and crime, two things the Breen office did not approve of, especially from women. William Beaudine directed, with more attention to camera angles than he would later pay to films like RETURN OF THE APE MAN, but not much.

I LIKE YOUR NERVE
1931 - **1/2
Boris Karloff is a butler! Douglas Fairbanks stares and grins like a jackanapes as he woos--rather irritatingly at first-- gorgeous Loretta Young, who's promised by her oily treasurer of an unnamed South American country father to an old lech who promises to restore dad's 'borrowed' funds. On hand is Claude Allister as the urbane best friend who bails Doug out of jail. Allister's a great, gay character actor, how could he be considered less desirable than the closeted misogynist Jack Buchanan in Lubitsch's MONTE CARLO?? (my analysis here) Still, Douglas almost seems gayer than Allister thanks to that leftover-from-the-silents code of male conduct that says one should plaster on one's kisser a mirthless smile with all teeth bared... in every scene, just as Buchanan did. It took awhile before that icky silent film trend died out, but it did, so god bless Richard Barthelmess.

As a shade of things to come, Young calls her priest every five minutes for advice, but I don't begrudge her that in this case. And as a radiant 17 year-old she can still make a movie worth watching just by wearing sparkly black long gloves and a sparkly black evening gown. Her eyes are so big and wet they seem sketched softly by some specialist in limpid pools.


LOOSE ANKLES
1930 - ****
Even more so than in other films from 1930, LOOSE ANGLES finds Young looking so super sexy she's almost a completely different person than in later films. She's so pretty and has such long legs, displayed most pleasingly in silken lingerie, you too would die to caress her. Wry notes about prohibition and scandal and a flock of fusty relatives whose inheritance is contingent on Young getting married and avoiding getting the family name in the papers all provides the distracting comedy. Enter Douglas Fairbanks, hired as a male escort by Young to sink her name into the mire to defeat the 'morality' of all her greedy chaperones. Once Fairbanks sinks his peeps into her bottomless baby blues however he wants to marry her for real. Of course he does! We all do... Best line, Young's pal advises her on how to create a scandal, "first get a man, then a reporter, and leave the rest to the typesetter."


Hilariously, a long scene at a circus-themed speakeasy seems to mirror a similar one in GOLD-DIGGERS OF 1933 only gender reversed--two gigolo friends of Doug's throw themselves on the moralistic greedy chaperone grenades, who it turns out are happy to catch a buzz as long as there's plausible deniability (the drink they're served is billed as only 'punch'). By the end they're all clowning around together. Meanwhile it's fun to watch Doug Fairbanks act all shy considering his jackanapes grinning in other films. Since the loose ankles belong to gigolos, unabashedly for rent, there's a louche opportunist roommate who tries to horn in as if to supply some late inning suspense, but why worry since Young is so vivacious and sexy no one can defeat her.


The circus club scene includes a sexy leopard woman dancer but the actual circus element is flatly filmed. But like many good pre-codes the separate parts are generally unique and splendid and invaluable as peaks into a time of transition, where 'old folks at home' style bumpkins waged war against the emerging freedom of youth, until someone finally got them drunk, too. Let that be a lesson to dope smokers: get ab anti-legalization representative high and turn them over to our side, one toke at a time!

It was a strange year, not least because the apocalypse we were hoping for in our darkest heart of hearts never occurred. So now here we are in 2013 with no game plan. Our credit card debt is still intact. There's nothing to do but pick up the pieces.

I collected ten pieces I wrote that are for some reason in my mind worth revisiting. I know I write an awful lot every year, so even regular readers are bound to miss something. I generally leave everything written in the last few months of the year alone so this is mostly from last winter, spring and summer... I hope you won't think me vain, but I had a lot riding on the end of the world, and now I need every last scrap of [past self to move forward... if you're at all damaged like me, may these posts' scattered wisdom help you remember how awesome you are.

1. Kiss Me Del Rey (1/17)

"In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from us to be good, never considering whether or not we invited them to even taste a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately bad to scare away success, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons. So our sophomore album is bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back. " (more)
Stab: A Flick by Wes Carpenter (6/15)
The TV works you like any good cult brainwasher: terrorizing you and then comforting you, back and forth, over and over. In its overall guise as a continuing soap opera it hides the fact that it's your soul that's being soaped cleaned of its wallets and keys and sanity and precious dirtiness. Like raging waters in a flash flood that never ends the TV draws you under, promising any moment now the bubble bath soap salts will be added to the water and will cut you loose from the lead albatross of your body, blocking the sight of all the flooded black oil death below, and leaving free you to wander in Elysian Fields and to Wendy's and through the mall, and the monsters taking shape in the distant tornadoes shall be made once more too small to worry about... yet. (more)
In deconstructing the tragedy in Aurora please note I mean no disrespect to the victims (or the violence in the Sikh temple in Wisconsin which erupted as I was writing this) but since RISES is so weirdly aligned with random acts of political violence and random mass murder--of America's love for guns and action movies, celluloid, tear gas, blood and torn flesh--it's worth noting, a "Psycho Crashes the Midnight Movie." metatextuality. The real-life violence in Aurora was senseless and horrific, but there it is, and has to mean something considering the themes of the film. It can't be an accident, even if it's totally random. One must find the metatextual kernel, one can't let the Rorschach blot of terror stay unlabeled, because no man is an island, no act ever isolated from its context. So perhaps this post is sort of like the analysis of Earl Williams, the murderer of the 'colored policeman' in Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY, which reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) writes up in order to paint him as insane and get him a reprieve from the gallows. The tack Johnson settles on is Williams' having been enthralled by a soap box preacher's sermon on 'production for use' while Williams was homeless in the park. It's an apt description of any schizophrenic gun nut's ultimate act of self expression, like buying all these colors and brushes and being told never to paint. (more)



Freddie is reminiscent of that old Buddha saying: Do not seek enlightenment unless you do so as one whose hair is on fire seeks water. When we first see him he's on a beach, frolicking with his navy pals near the end of the war. While the other sailors gambol and chill out Freddie scrambles from one thing to the next, making hooch from rubbing alcohol and screwing women made from sand, finishing off into the ocean, in short, he's cooling his flaming hair with anything that's around. If you've ever convulsed with the DTs or been stifled by writer's block then you know what scorched hair feels like and you'll do anything to avoid it, including applying some dangerous, testosterone and Devil's Springs 162 proof Vodka-enriched wild man scalp ointment, hoping somehow you can just catch fire on fire and be free."  (more)

OTHER WRITING: 

A Guide to Cable TV's best Paranormal / Ghost Hunting Shows
"If you have a cat, it's recommended you fire up the laser pointer, if you have one, and get her chasing the red dot around the room while watching these ghost shows, to situate yourself in a metatextual fractal chain. The cat finds the very elusive, impossible strangeness of the glowing red dot both baffling and exciting, sometimes frustrating, but always beguiling. Are ghosts perhaps the red dot God flashes around to keep us amused, to keep us running around, interested and engaged in an otherwise rather uninteresting environment?..." (more)
Fallen Space Cowboys: 3 guys who were kicked out of their bands for being too awesome

O Brother Where Art Thou?

Three sisters --- immovable power.. the magic number...the trinity. A solid bloc of womanhood where sisters can't help but become witches.

Why three? Two women can be turned on one another; four women get lost in chatter; but three, should they stand united, cannot fall. No man, nor army, can stand up to them. They might be killed by Nazis, but they can't be stood  up to. They represent a feminine solidarity - an unknowable, strange concentration of feminine power. Three allows both intimacy and group dynamics without being bound to the pitfalls of either. This facilitates a rare and magic alchemical union of three souls that can become more than the sum of their parts.


There are groups of four sisters in the movies -- Meet Me in Saint Louis, Little Women, but they never quite rise to the thrize; they  mute each other out with over-talking and end up surrendering to one leader, i.e. Jo or Judy, rather than the perfect interaction of equal parts that is the number of three. With three there is constant support and competition. Each can take a part that leads to a calculated whole. Two and they get too conspiratorial and overly intimate, a kind of straight same sex pair bond that gets incestuous with no link left for the outside world. Four and it's practically a party. Three / is the magic number. There's always room for us to imagine stepping in and seducing one, but never shattering their connection.

top: Heavenly Creatures, Meet Me in Saint Louis, Macbeth (2006)

 Truth be told, I am haunted by the image of the three sisters. When I was an infant my mom regularly visited a relative who later moved who had triplet girls around four years older than me. While the parents talked the three girls showered me with affection, I was still an infant and became like their doll. They are in only one or two pictures - it was Xmas because there was wrapping paper everywhere, and sparkly Christmas lights. Their affection ruined me. I adore women in batches of three to this day. And when Charlie's Angels came along, I was double-hooked. In college our band was inspired by three beautiful Connecticut hippie girls...  ten years later and three beautiful blonde women sat with me the rest of the night after my intervention and it was like some dream had become monkey's-paw true. Let me say up front that I adore them but not necessarily to sleep with, you understand, but to be adored by, and to adore in turn. It's hard to adore the one you sleep with, for very long, but when you keep the adoration circle sacred it last forever... or until they get old and have three kids with some mere mortal.

 1. Ryan's three blonde granddaughters in Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Even fans of Spielberg's perhaps best film have some qualms about the framing narrative involving the elderly Ryan staggering possessed and gut-broken through Arlington, his wife, daughter and three hot granddaughters walking behind from a respectful distance, like they're following a drunken baby on his first brace of steps. We never get to linger our gaze but that girl in the center with the pink tight pants and lavender shirt naturally hooks our attention.


The power of the three daughters is employed the same way it is below, for Inglourious Basterds: three beautiful daughters in an occupied Europe would be like a five year slow heart attack of anxiety for any father. These three girls sense that, and they respectfully trail behind in awe of grandfather's experience of true horror in the name of a better life for daughters everywhere; they can wear those inviting, sweet pastels. One look at them and you know they've never had a rough day in their lives. They've never been lost in the woods or fighting against huns or starving in attics or terrified under floorboards. Their soft color health bespeaks Ryan's life as a success -- the 'wealth of feminin American'  What they lack in sophistication they make up for in un-trampled surface sensuality.

2. The three darker-haired dairy farmer daughters in Inglourious Basterds (2009)
The daughters here are much darker in lighting and mood and represent, if you will, the 'before' to the Ryan's granddaughters' happy after. Ingeniously Quentin and Waltz make Hans Landa a cultured intellectual superficially charming and meticulous man, his greetings to the lovely daughters, kissing the hand of the prettiest and saddest (on the right), a redhead who looks down at him with eyes lidded to hide her weary terror. He represents the evil that has created the tension of both films, and here we see what life would be like for any nervous father with three beautiful young daughters in an occupied country run by genocidal thugs.

The lighting differences for each set of daughters is interesting (as is their appearance only in the beginning of the film) It's prologue set in modern times, the Private Ryan lighting is awash in a bright but overcast grey twilight gleaming through a threadbare flag; the father's mortality is something to mourn, but nothing to fear, compared to the hell he's already endured for our freedom. At the beginning (1941) of Basterds in the cow country of Nazi-occupied France, the very land Ryan and company would climb through in Spielberg's film, the lighting (inside the farmhouse) is Godfather dark, the lack of trees or shadow outdoors and the darkness and the relative smallness of the house inside creates a feeling of fatalistic vulnerability. This little shack could get blown out of existence with the ordinance available just in one of those motorcycles. All the farmer has is an axe to chop wood. And France has already surrendered to the Nazis to avoid inordinate destruction of their beloved Paris, itself as exposed and unfortified as that farmhouse. Here the three daughter's presence stands for Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, the same thing it does in Spielberg's film but here they are a thousand times more vulnerable. In both films their trinity represents a bloc of innocent femininity any father would lay down his life to protect, and knows with some horror that if he fails, future generations will also end up living in fear.

Top: Clash of the Titans (2010) / Macbeth (1948)

3. The three Witches - Macbeth (1948)

'Power of Three' has to do with Alchemy. The Egyptian god Thoth or the Greek Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice Blessed or Thrice Great) are the progenitors of the Emerald Tablets describing the mysteries of Alchemy. The alchemy of three is demonstrated by its power of multiplicity. For example, in understanding the numbers - One gave rise to Two (1+1=2) and Two gave Rise to Three (2+1=3) and Three gave rise to all numbers (3+1=4, 3+2=5, 3+3=6, 3+4=7, 3+5=8 3+6=9). Thus in addition to being a number of good fortune, Three is also the number of multiplicity and alchemy among other things. Many believe the Triquetrais an ancient symbol of the female trinity, because it is composed of three interlaced yonic Vesica Pisces (a.k.a. PiscisSLatin for "Vessel of the Fish") and is the most basic and important construction in Sacred Geometry, which is the architecture of the universe. A Vesica is formed when the circumference of two identical circles each pass through the center of the other in effect creating a portal. 'The Triquetra' represents the 'Power of Three' or the threefold nature of existence i.e. body, mind and spirit; life, death and rebirth; past, present and future; beginning, middle and end; Sun, Moon and Earth; and the threefold co-creative process described as thought, word, and deed." (Crystalinks)

4. Irina Katya and Elena - The Derevko Sisters - Alias
There's numerous examples of the three sisters in television, including the three evil (or are they?) genius Russian sisters of Alias. One is Sidney Bristo's mother, a former KGB agent, the other two are even more insidious and deadly. The great thing about this early J.J. Abrams show is that his full attention seems to be on it, so the level of intelligence and forward thinking is astounding. These sisters aren't fooling around, and if there's ever some secret we learn about them, it's because they want us to know it, and so therefore it's probably not true.

20. Thence come the maidens

mighty in wisdom,

Three from the dwelling

down 'neath the tree;

Urth is one named,

Verthandi the next,--

On the wood (runes) they scored,--

and Skuld the third.

Laws they made there,

and life allotted

To the sons of men,

and set their fates.^{-- Vafþrúðnismál}

6. 3-Way Artsy Tie  Hannah and her Sisters, Cries and Whispers, The Three Sisters

If you can stand its mounting panic attack quiet, Ingmar Bergman's ultimate depressant film CRIES AND WHISPERS pays off with a tragic series of events that would stand as a good argument for gay marriage. Sweden at the turn of the century feels like one big nonstop SHINING--the endless nights and Nordic depression make isolation in red rooms (!!) a matter of being so far past the realms of time and space that those those eternal dingy lightless Nordic nights and brief but nightless summers create a national manic-depressive cycle that's been the Swedish birthright since the Ice Age.


And we learn, presumably, the origin story of all the subsequent auteur's genital self-mutilation fascinations, i.e. ANTICHRIST, BLACK SWAN and THE PIANO TEACHER; and out of the weird symbiotic passing of traits between the two living sisters at the climax comes, if nothing else, Altman's 3 WOMEN. CRIES is one of Bergman's more unflinchingly bleak films, but made with shocking confidence, and not a drop of music. Instead instead it's so quiet we can hear people breathing from whole rooms away and each toll of a clock resounds through the red rooms like some Poe like mortal disencoiler.

But also it's a film for anyone who love powerhouse acting and there's some malevolent depressive monologues so bitter they make Woody Allen's tepid INTERIORS, clearly a homage to Bergman and particularly this film--seem like one of his"earlier, funny ones." HANNAH is a better option but to me it's always seemed a little more Rohmer-esque. Then again, I quote Max Von Sydow's role nonstop. "I do not sell my art by the yard!" This is my life as it stands today!


7. The three old ladies in Love Me Tonight (1932)
Maurice Chevalier, nothing but a tailor, wins the instant approval of these three spinster aunts, immediately on his crashing the chateau where they sit and cluck amongst themselves. In their way the three ladies are the heart, soul, and Greek chorus of the picture. You know how it is: you go to meet your new girlfriend's parents for the first time and they don't like you. They count your drinks. But the cool old aunts think you're the shizz. That's how you know you're in. They're old enough to see things clearly and one thing they admire is bold masculine sass. God bless them.

8-9 - 3 WITCHES: The Three Mothers -- The Black Cat, Suspiria, Inferno, Mother of Tears
These ladies on the other hand brook no sass. 


10. Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer - The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
But these ladies are too sexy to brook anything else.


 Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy in Hocus Pocus (1993)
And these, who knows?

Rose McGowan, Alysa Milano, Holly Marie Combs -Charmed

11. Josie and the Pussycats
Man, it's too bad this film bombed or whatever 'cuz I thought it rocked, and had a hilariously frank attitude towards product placement (the highlight are the McDonald's curtains) and Parker Posey is wunderbar as the villain. I wanted to get something on here to represent grrl power in a 90s but non-witch setting and as a segue to the next one, two pairs of three that represent the lows and glamorous fake lows of Hollywood.... the original cartoon was a favorite of my childhood. I especially liked the hot uber-bitch villainess with the skunk hair, and of course Melanie, the dumb platinum blonde drummer. And the theme song had a vein of funky soul in it... i.e. the 70s.

The Three Weird Sisters from 90s kid cartoon Gargoyles.

 12.  The Manson sisters; Sharon Tate, Patty Duke and Barbara Parkins - The Valley of the Dolls (1967)

Maybe it's the height of bad taste to link these two sets of sisters together, since the Manson girls are responsible for the slaying of Valley star Sharon Tate, one of the grisliest crimes of the era. But that's show biz and show biz is bloodthirsty, and given the subject matter of Valley of the Dolls it makes sense. We should remember that 'dolls' means Valiums, the designer drug of choice for the pampered but hard-working LA elite. As that crushing song by Andre and Dory Previn sinks any last trace of hope, the girls rise and fall and only one survives, by moving home (New England) for the winter, and getting respectable. Patty Duke falls off the wagon and ends up freaking out in a combination stage-set alleyway and closet, and Sharon Tate ODs once she realizes she'll never be free of, or satisfy, her grubbing manipulative, soul-crushing mom who doesn't care Tate has to do Eurosleaze to pay her diseased husband's medical bills. When the three 'sisters' stand together they are strong, but they don't stand together that often and even when they do we worry show business will chew them up and spit them out, use them for sex, dub it into French, and then not pay them royalties.

The Manson girls aren't officially movie stars, though they were represented in countless true crime adaptations, such as Helter Skelter, Savage Messiah, and even, in its way, I Eat Your Skin. That they continue to revere Manson, the manipulator who got them in jail for life, speaks to the undying power one can have over others when one mixes mind control and really strong acid. Most of all since there are a core three of them, united in a bizarre psychic link, as if the three witches in Macbeth if they were dumb enough to hook up with him and became three murdering Lady Macbeth witch trio combo acidhead murderer soothsayers. Just looking left at the stunning beauty of Sharon Tate, forever robbed from us by their lysergic hippie rage makes me loathe and resent the Mansons for what they did not only to this rare beauty but to the good name of hippy cults everywhere, basically validating all the older establishments fears and doubts about the LSD generation. So in a way they are the ultimate expression of the negative "Three Witches" of Macbeth, turning the world topsy turvy, creating discord, only guided by a manipulative male into bloody, violent action, instead of the reverse.... sisters help us, the world really is upside down.  Where will we / how will we / learn who we are now?

When I made the last cinemarchetype, the Holy Fool, it so influenced me that I became a holy man for five weeks, even starting a whole new website and accompanying cult, Pswar of the Saints.  That's why I've been scared to approach the ego, which is the true apocalypse of the archeytpes, representing a paralyzed stasis, a black poison of insecurity, doubt and the need to control others, even kill or destroy to protect your 'interests.' This is perfectly expressed in our modern world via things like Big Oil, Republicans, and crazy cult leaders who prefer to force their congregation into suicide rather than lose them. It's a hard habit to break, just as the Holy Fool is a hard habit to keep. Naturally, as it is the polar opposite.

Of itself, in its proper capacity, is ego poses no threat and is vital to survival. When we move into life or death situations we need 'one ring to bind them all' so we can act quickly and not be confused by an abundance of empathy and mellow. But without calamity to justify its continued overlording, the Ego  must make some, creating a state of national emergency and suspending democratic elections until such time as the threat is abated.... and god help anyone who tries to actually abate it. On the political front an ideal example is Bush's tightening of power and invading Iraq after 9/11, meanwhile giving Bin Laden a two week head start. On the personal front, the sympathetic nervous system is supposed to relinquish control to the parasympathetic, and take it back only under 'fight or flight.'  Yet most of us live our whole lives without ever even getting more than a taste of the parasympathetic! Cuz our ego is whack.

This is why the best way to film our ego's hostile relationship to the collective unconscious is by making our ego representatives inhuman, such as...

1. HAL 9000 - 2001 (1967)
A perfect artificial intelligence, it's telling that HAL's emerging paranoia comes with the first glimmers of intellect, and time on his hands. He also has to cover, as ego's do, for his mistake. With conscious awareness, the back hand of problem solving, the Munschausen by proxy syndrome of the firemen who when he has no fires to occupy his time goes mad and has to start some. Later when HAL is being unplugged he goes out singing Maisie and then Happy Birthday, hinting that it is perhaps with birthday celebrations our egoic consciousness manifests. Indeed, aren't birthdays a kind of simultaneous celebration of our difference from others, and ideally a celebration where one's friends and family honor us? If the honor is lacking or we're disappointed in our gifts, we never forget it. The resentment manifests into permanent misanthropy. In HAL's case this develops as a result of his inability to admit he's made a mistake.

Once Kier Dullea silences the egoic voice of HAL, a long-hidden briefing tape comes on, letting Bowman know his mission, at long last, telling him of the obelisk, something that's still being kept from the public. This represents the ultimate goal of meditation, the silencing of our egoic chatter (HAL's singing), and illuminating our ancient mission: to go 'Beyond Jupiter' --to expand our consciousness and attain the stars.

2. Lord Sauron - Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
The constellation of Middle Earth peaceful races is the unconscious archetypes then Lord Sauron is the intrusion of ego, of the constant of the self- of the desire to control, to harness all the other powers it generally cannot control in the archetypal constellation. As an alcoholic in recovery I know too well this feeling - we are like ex-gollums, gradually working our way back to hobbit form and from thence across the sea to Elvish kingdoms. But if we relent and bring that ring, bottle opening to our lips, we sink instantly. Our dark ego sails spring up and we go sailing downward in a spiral to the bottom of a dank cave.

 Our average ego-dominated mindsets, where the archetypes exist only in dreams and seldom in our day-to-day thinking, represent the imagined future of Middle Earth should Sauron win the battle. That he is reflected by a giant all-seeing eye is telling because this is how we might imagine our inner demon, or controlling super-ego, but the ego constellation also houses the Id and Super-Ego, so this makes sense. Our sense of constantly being watched, of thinking there are microphones in our teeth for example, stems from being too ego-dominated. Our ego if it gets too far in its plans to conquer our middle earth will destroy us, it's a poison which we project outwards in mistrust of the same external authority we slavishly bow to. If we can lessen its control our lives flower, but if not we squirm under the lash of a persona that would destroy us rather than relinquish control. If the very thought of meditation or going to AA or a therapist makes you squirm to the point you would rather die than ask for help, Sauron has got you.

3. Orson Welles as Citizen Kane (1941)
Maybe it's my impending sense of mortality but that long slow pan along all that expensive junk suddenly seems super tragic, as does lines like "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" - the little boy treating the world like his candy store, yet never finding anyone who can bake like his mom.  It's telling that this film aroused such ire in William Randolph Hearst as it's not just about him but about all ego, Orson's included. Ego makes true inspiration impossible --the bigger the ego the more hack-like and stale the art, as it chokes the life out of the unconscious, from which true creativity emerges. And we can all tell the difference. What Kane can't get around is no matter how many papers he has, he can't change Susan Foster into a great opera star.

Susan Foster Kane's suicide attempt, the thing that finally ends his bullying her into singing, is what people so often resort to when the ego leaves them no other option. If they can't break free long enough to get some perspective they mistake the ego for the whole of consciousness, as if there was nowhere else to run, and this is just what the ego wants us to believe.

4. Boris Karloff - The Invisible Ray (1936)

The saddest element of this not entirely successful Universal sci fi film is not just the wasted opportunity to make something spooky and fun, but Karloff's character's huge ego's demands that the mysterious radioactive compound he discovered in darkest Africa is only for her his personal use. The story ends up so bogged in this bitter man's ego (he gets super mad when Lugosi spirits some off to Paris and begins healing children) that all the joy runs completely out of it. Karloff's ego is so toxic he starts to glow in the dark; he learns he can kill people with a single touch, as fine a metaphor for the choking power of the ego on creativity and art as your likely to find in 1936.


Karloff's egotism manifests also in his terrible treatment of his wife, and his servants and the hired help in darkest Africa, whom he threatens to destroy with his death ray if they dare run away on him. So... the whole world is supposed to come to a halt while Karloff loses himself behind lead protective shields and fiddles with something that as far as he is concerned is solely to make himself more powerful. Damn, what a self-centered prick. While it's great to see Bela play a good guy, a healing benevolent doctor for a change, it's also boring. B-western director Lambert Hillyer brings--as he did the year before in Dracula's Daughter--an odd mix of rich Universal horror atmosphere and humorless depression, naiveté and ennui.  We can only imagine how much more relish Lugosi would have brought to Karloff's role, recognizing as he often did that you can liven up a stale script if you give it your all. Karloff often preferred to sleep through some of the lamer material so watching him knock off the innocent is strangely joyless, Anyway the matte shots and special effects are first rate.

5. Bob Geldoff as Pink Floyd - The Wall (1980)
I wrote my big essay on this film in 2010 and I can see in my post-illuminated state the hungry ghost ego running through me that made me blind to both my own and Pink's hungry ghost neediness. Remembering what I learned from a hot art therapist at Bellevue, the open scream mouth poster should be a dead giveaway, the gaping mouth of the needy, first chakra-trapped addict ... but such is the blind rage of the one-ring-to-bind-them that the terrors of ego are invisible to the ego-terrorized:

In 1997, though, the film--directed by Alan Parker and written by Roger Waters--found its way to me via a big VH1 premiere marathon. It was on 24 hours a day and I'd done recently done a voiceover for a Curve Perfume ad ("Curve for men, Curve for women") which VH1 and MTV were playing--also around the clock-- during almost every break, so I watched THE WALL over and over, in a drunken haze of self-satisfaction, taking a heroic swig from my 1.75 Ten High bourbon bottle every time the Curve commercial played. In the process, THE WALL became mine, associated with my big Curve perfume glory and whiskey exaltation.... I've never been able to see more than 20 consecutive minutes on DVD, but on TV I can watch it endlessly. Ads and station breaks help metatextualize the film's repetitive jumble, and bracket the moments of animation so psychedelic as to make YELLOW SUBMARINE look like RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP. Ads are part of the whole meta thing, man... since a big part of the film is about selling out, and about... watching... TV. 

A wall itself of course is a grand metaphor for the ego -- that giant Hoover dam of a construct wherein rudimentary 'take-take-take' hungry ghost consciousness seeks to exploit and harness unconscious archetypal powers, to define, to create linear lines and divisions over the unmeasurable chthonic circles.

6. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri - Amadeus (1984)

[addressing a crucifix]
Salieri: From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. (imdb quotes)

7. The Blue Meanie - Yellow Submarine (1968)
Silencing the music of the spheres, of God, in favor of its own ersatz imitation, Salieri's music is the classic example of the musical ego, the one who desires to 'bind them all' to its ego-dominated ring of power, yet winds up only painfully aware of his lack of connection to the untamed wilds of true creativity and genius. Luckily unlike in Amadeus, the Blue Meanies never permanently kill anyone, and are brought back into the fold at the end, now right-sized and in love with the Nowhere Man.

8-9. Robert De Niro - Raging Bull
   + Humphrey Bogart - In a Lonely Place
(From Bride of Bogartstein (8/11).... The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his star charisma can be made ugly by vain antipathy. As Dix, even his proposal of marriage comes off like a threat, providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp, temporarily calm but... really, the rest of your life with this thing?  As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental.

(PS - this same description goes well for the similarly abusive Jake La Motta, wherein De Niro also buries his natural actorly charm to show us the ugly, violent, twisted face of the glorified savage animal male ego -- the smashing force of the repressive instinct, the need to control leading to paranoia, suspicion, and the unquestioned feeling one's own violence is always justified, even if its against your own fists)


10. Burt Lancaster - Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
11. James Mason - Lolita, Bigger than Life, North by Northwest, Mandingo
Mascon can't ever really be loveable in a straightforward way but as a rogue and scoundrel, a god or a demon, he is charming without peer. Take his slippery bad guy in North by Northwest, and imagine him like the later version of Humbert Humbert, Lolita having driven him insane to the point he not only killed Quilty, but her husband and child, and she's grown up to be Eva Marie Saint. This is love only in the sickest sense, as with his grandiose mania in Bigger than Life, he really never sees anyone else but himself, never hears any voice but as compared with his own.
By contrast, the similarly cast Claude Rains lets us see the insecure boy who desperately want to believe Ingrid Bergman loves him for who he is and not to steal his uranium samples. Mason would just show us the icy desire, the reptillian apex of ego that blocks out all longing and desire the way the moon blocks out the sun, the desire that could still throw Ingrid from the train with an icy grip while voicing his regret in resonant purring.

12. Emperor Palpatine - The Star Wars Trilogy
Lucas' films (post the original trilogy) may be blandly acted and overbaked but as myths they nail a great middle ground between the political, the social, and the psychological. The emperor is the ultimate in political leaders / ego / tyrant - uniting the archetypes whether or not they agree with the uniting, creating whatever problems may be required for such a unification's continued importance. This is the Ego in its dark splendor and existential sadness.

Of course there are other definitions of the ego, as the central figure of identification in any myth:  Luke Skywalker, Nina in TheBlack Swan, but for the reasons of this series I'm focusing on the negative aspects, as from an eastern philosophy perspective rather than a Jungian hero's journey per se. The egos here in this list have exceeded their authority, forgotten their place as an evolving force in the constellation. Rather than the secretary, noting and utilizing the unconscious archetype's inspiration, they have become censor, judge, downpressa man... May we all be so lucky as to utilize their lessons in our own inner dealings, to become wise and tolerant rulers of our archetypal kingdoms, allowing each aspect of the Self its vote like wise, chaste kings of old!

Filmmaking is a collaborative business, but when film critics and writers talk of film they focus on the the director, as auteurism has taken us over. Yet Hollywood brims with men and women instrumental in making certain classics, to such a clear extent that when they part company the director never makes another decent film and the assistant producers or DP or art director make plenty.

 The recent HITCHCOCK showed how Alfred's wife Alma shaped his masterpieces, a worldly class and taste he lacked on his own. Let us now speculate on some others:

1. Polly Platt - Art Director
With Peter Bogdanovich - TARGETS, LAST PICTURE SHOW, WHAT'S UP, DOC?, PAPER MOON
Her then-partner Peter Bogdanovich is  the designated auteur on the films they worked together on, but clearly her eye for historical detail and grounded presence surely held his indecisions and crassness in check. For example, as I recall reading in Easy Riders Raging Bulls, his casting of short, unimpressive leading men against his love Cybil Shepherd in the post-Platt Daisy Miller indicated to all concerned his feeling very threatened and insecure having lost his better half in favor of some midwest baton-twirling Lolita who is in turn ready to disappear backstage with some young German strongman and leave him cuckooing with a face full of egg any second. Just look at his decision to cut the swimming pool schlong in Last Picture for the expanded DVD! Don't we in the end earn all the heartbreak we dish out? For his sins, Bogdanovich pealed out of the sanity parking lot with a series of similar situations, culminating in his Dorothy Stratten connections.


In addition to Daisy Miller, the post-Polly Peter made At Long Last Love, They All Laughed, Saint Jack. Platt worked on unflinching termite-cool shit like Bad News Bears, Terms of Endearment and Bottle Rocket. She may have been listed as producer or production designer, but there's an edgy bravery to all these films that is so rare you look for a common denominator. Notes Leonard Klady:

Her career credit list rarely fully reflected what she did. Her contributions to such films as The Last Picture, Paper Moon and Terms of Endearment were considerably more substantive than costume or production designer that were officially listed. That didn’t make her unique in a town that extends and withholds true contributions. But those who were on the ground knew that a lot of things simply would never have gotten done without her prodding and persistence. (7/29/011 - more)

2. Gary Kurtz - Producer
AMERICAN GRAFFITI, STAR WARS, EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
Funny that the only two Star Wars films that are actually good movies are produced by Gary Kurtz, who, the legend has it, fought a lot with Lucas to keep all the things wrong with the later films out. All of us original Star Wars fans, the casual ones I mean, knew--if we were old enough by then and most of us were--The Return of the Jedi had jumped the shark (of course the shark was being jumped over on Happy Days was an attempt to link up with our still insane passion for all thing Jaws). Shall we take a look?


The films with Kurtz are moody, adult, dealing with big issues in ballsy ways. The first two have no CGI, or endless expository dialogue and kiddie show nonsense. If not for Kurz's influence, I can see Star Wars becoming just another hyped up dud ala the Di Laurentiis King Kong remake that came out the same year. I remember seeing a poster for Kong on my way up the escalator after seeing the first Star Wars in 1977, on the day it came out, before it had any hype... I ran around trying to explain to everyone how unbelievably cool it  was, but no one believed me... the pinned as just another B-picture for the kids, but King Kong was supposed to have a giant robot Kong! Well, we all knew real quick was a fake that turned out to be and that Kong remake was almost as big a disappointment as the Bo Derek Tarzan of the Ape Man! If Kurtz hadn't been around to battle Lucas's more self-sabotaging moments, Star Wars might have been filed among them.


Kurtz didn't produce too much after Star Wars--who would need to?-- but what the two major films he produced afterwards have such surprising mythic darkness for children's films they deserve mention: The Dark Crystal and Return to Oz. Both are underrated sleepers in that they treat their child audience like adults, something Lucas clearly doesn't grasp as evidenced in his cuddly ewoks and childish kowtowing in later films. Kurtz knew children don't need ewoks and hand-holding and spazzy rasta elephant eared aliens talking pidgin English... they can handle the dark, dark places even better than some adults. Maybe in the end, it's because these hidden auteurs are adults that they're not constantly grabbing credit and attention, preferring instead to hone their craft and remain always passionate about cinema instead of falling into the thresher of fear (not making money, getting laughed at), and desire (falling into cheap sentiment and needy fame)

 
Unless it happens to be during a revolution, killing the rich is wrong. But hey, it's always okay to lay massive curses upon them; haven't they deserved it, since the dawn of time? Haven't they, in a way, already cursed us? In two films made in wildly different but eerily similar decades, 1930s and 2010s, two women did just that... in cinema: Carole Lombard as Hazel Flagg in 1937's Nothing Sacred and Eva Green in 2012's Dark Shadows remake.

I was hoping, kind of, the world's stagnant cesspool would close with a mighty 2012 earthquake, leaving us with a chance to start again from scratch. Well, the greed of the mega-rich is still strangling this country, even if too slowly for it to seem apocalyptic: hypocritical politicians leaving our east coast to suffer in the mud after we aided theirs after similar disasters; Australian moguls training our gun nut brothers through Fearmongering Fox doctrine, like Napolean's dogs in Animal Farm. Then again, I'm sure the real picture is more complex than John Stewart makes it seem. That said, if Obama really was really Hitler now would be the time for his Night of the Long Knives...

A recent reviewing of the 1937 screwball classic NOTHING SACRED reminded me that my bitterness over the loss of the illusion that our half-strangled human culture was about to end makes me like Oliver Stone, furious that Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard, top) is not really dying of radium poisoning. Nowadays it may be hard to imagine such a un-fact-checked farce playing out in the local papers, but it happened, I think, a lot, or they wouldn't have this movie, or MEET JOHN DOE, or any of the other cynical newspaper man pictures. At any rate, the media circus surrounding young girls dying of radium poisoning was no fantasy, even if old news by '37:

The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey around 1917. The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to sharpen them; some also painted their fingernails and teeth with the glowing substance.

Five of the women challenged their employer in a case that established the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers. (WIKI)

 But the girls who won America's hearts as they shambled to the stand were hideously deformed (if your stomach be strong, check here) while Lombard comes to the city unmarred and super hot and in robust health. So the German specialists called in at great expense are instantly, ow you say, zuss-PISH-iouss?! Still, if Hazel was sick as a real radium girl she'd be too tragic to parade around New York! The hooplah-spinning Morning Star reporter Frederic March falls in love with Hazel, and half in love with his own words praising her and what he reads into her blank eyes as courage in the face of death. He's mad but thrilled to learn she's just faking for a free trip to NYC. And anyway, her story is life-affirming, just like the apocalypse, my precious, lost apocalypse.
I've always felt that doomsday anticipation makes life post-Scrooge precious. It fills me with gallows' gratitude and  freeing fatalism. But as I recently learned ("cough") there is a downside: that sense of horrible disappointment when the world keeps turning after the expiration date and you realize postponing going to the dentist was a foolish idea. TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) found Lombard in a similar situation, giving a tearful, anguished goodbye to her young college boy lover as she boards her train for New York, only to groan in annoyance when he decides to come along. Similarly in NOTHING SACRED, the power brokers of New York all wince in despair when they learn Flagg's faking since they've already used Hazel's 'plight' to advance their careers.




One scene is very telling early on concerning the class inequality lurking underneath the soapy tragedy of Burton's film: after spurning Angelique's professed love, Barbabas starts showing up with a doe-eyed Gothic Windswept Barbie (Bella Heathcote), pledging love to her while Angelique is scrubbing the floor down on her knees, watching them. Even alive Barnabas doesn't imagine her feelings might be hurt as she scrubs the floor and he romances other women. In fact he doesn't ever admit to his behavior being wrong anywhere in the film and yet it's Angelique who is somehow supposed to be the bad guy. Sexism!


Enter Victoria, the big-eyed waif reincarnation of his old love (also Heathcote), as if to sour the situation even more. For a 'true love' is very one dimensional, passive, like a Valium-ed Jane Eyre. No wonder Angelique hates her. Sure Victoria sees ghosts, and plays nanny to a similarly gifted (and labeled as insane) kid, but having spent a decade in an asylum receiving shock treatments, you would think she could develop more of a personality, or at least be able to stand up against Green's wicked and awesome Angelique. No mortal woman can compare when Green's voice gets deep and throaty in a chain-smoker purr (the way she did a little in CASINO ROYALE when fondling Bond's watch on the train). As she noted in an interview:

"Angelique is a woman who has changed with the times. During the 18th century, Angelique was a dark-haired servant girl. As Angie, the CEO of Angel Bay, she’s a successful blonde businesswoman. “Tim wanted her to look like the American dream,” says Green. “Everything about her is perfect. Too perfect. Perfect makeup, red lips, platinum hair. She’s very glamorous yet sophisticated." (Inquirer)

Damn right. And Barnabas and  Angelique even get in on again in their new incarnations as monsters, trashing her office in a fit of demon craziness set to some 70s hard rock song we all remember. This scheming witch and murderous vamp clearly belong to one another and so it's hard, very hard, to root for Barnabas in his endeavors to drive her from his ancestral town in favor of a doe-eyed doormat, especially when she's initially so thrilled to see him and races to his mansion for a reunion tryst, all grudges forgotten, his debt  paid, in her mind.

In better films that's more or less what happens, the beast and the other beast find or settle for each other and eschew the beauties, ala SHREK or KLONDIKE ANNIE. But this is more of a film like KISSING JESSICA STEIN or BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or even STEPMOM or STEEL MAGNOLIAS as the conventions of pro-dogma Christina conservatism are served on the sly. Man, 200 years of being locked in a coffin is a stiff price to pay just to preserve your social conservative trust fund dickheadedness.


How is Barnabas conservative? He holds a grudge and he takes the moral high ground no matter what sordid things he does on the sly, just like the Repiblicans. Barnabas can't help himself, you see, she cursed him by draining his precious... bodily fluids. Even though she doesn't kill anywhere near the amount of innocent people that he does (those construction workers he killed probably had children!) she's the witch who must be burnt at the stake for this to be a proper happening. The true neo-conservative doesn't care about the dead workers, after all, unless they're in his direct family. Drinking the lifeblood of labor and youth (he also devours a whole band of innocent hippies) while presuming we'll root for him anyway since he has such good family values is sooooo 1% entitlement. This kind of belief system, if left unfucked with, inevitably leads to a people's revolution! Barnabas shouldn't be reading Erich's Love Story but Zinn's The People's History of the United States!


Me, I'd take the lusty strong, slightly crazy fallen woman, be she fair in looks and enterprising in drive, over some waif who look like a Nina Friday or Jasmine Becket-Griffith painting come to life but has nothing else really to offer. Rejecting a badass babe with the power to destroy him and his loved ones is not only short-sighted, its why, when push comes to shove, this film never quite becomes an enduring classic like GHOSTBUSTERS or THE ADDAMS FAMILY or BEETLEJUICE. At least those films had subversion! DARK SHADOWS seems designed for a different world, one where Mitt Romney won and women are still expected to faint at the sight of blood.

from top: Bella Heathcote; Jasmine Beckett-Griffith; Lombard

Barnabas Collins' attitude of mystified old world entitlement perfectly resembles Mitt Romney's, and Romney lost. There's a new kid in town, the minority collective, and the blonde sorceress Hillary Clinton is in town to straighten things out. Victoria's passive dullness meanwhile is reminscent of past Victorian (get it?) heroines who study how to be completely vacant so as to not offend their man, and stand straight up to hide the fact they've become addicted to morphine. Preferring her to a real 3-D hussy like Angelique would be like if March preferred a dead, honest, withered Hazel Flagg to a live, lying, laughing, punching, slugging Carole Lombard. It's that movie with Matt Damon (TALENTED MR. RIPLEY) or Monty Clift (PLACE IN THE SUN) killing their gay, fugly, or poor lovers before they can fuck up their straight, upper-crust facade.


The ending of NOTHING SACRED though let's you know whose side screenwriter Ben Hecht is on. So instead of Hazel dying and bringing the city to tears she leaves a note saying she's off to die alone, and beats it out of the country with Marc. Isn't that just what all the doomsday soothsayers are doing right now, myself included? Instead of a raging Eva Green Kali whirlwind solar storm apocalypse of human sacrifice on the altar of populist journalism we face yet another 200 years or more of the same damn bloodsuckers we've always had. Oh Tyler Durden Oh Kurt Oh Erich Von Daniken did you strive for naught?

SHADOWS is still pretty entertaining, fast-moving, and there's slew of beautiful women in hot 70s clothes and pale white skin to ease your suffering over Barnabas' unrepentant tea baggery. The ubiquitous Danny Elfman's score is unusually inspired (though once more Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" shows up - see my earlier kvetch "WATCHMEN Dig my Earth" ---at least the lyrics are relevant to our entombed Barnabas).  But fun as it is to watch, DARK SHADOWS leaves one very dissatisfied. I don't mind rooting for the villain if he knows he's the villain. But here Barnabas is the most entitled, snobby psychopath who thinks he's the good guy since Dustin Hoffman in the original STRAW DOGS.  He's like those slimy male scientists who wore lead aprons and goggles while bringing paint to the radium girls even while insuring them the stuff was completely harmless, and never questioning their humanity in the process. Compared to this kind of unconscious villainy, even Angelique and Hazel Flagg are bastions of white, blonde decency. The apocalypse may not have happened but at least the revolution will finally be televised... if you care to blast for it.

Another redhead, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is actually blonde in Homeland--but those of us who know her from other things know her real color. Like Maya in ZERO DARK, Carrie's brilliance carries the CIA almost single handedly into victory, with her mentor the fatherly (bearded) Mandy Patinkin's belief in her aiding in the drive to move the CIA chiefs unwillingly towards the notion Sgt. Brody is a double agent, brainwashed by Osama stand-in Abu Nazir. It begs the question, in the world of spies and agent-flipping, isn't someone suffering from bi-polar paranoia the ideal analyst? Time and again we see in the series how men believe whatever narrative will make them look like they're in charge, that nothing can slip by them; they fall in love with caution, the ritual of work, the process, the secret handshakes. Women threaten this slow steady safety not only by diluting the male bonding epoxy with their estrogen and logic but by their incessant pointing out of the men's blind spots. The men don't want to think outside the box, but if needed for her own success, women will drag them out, breaking the bones and resetting them correctly like a patient but resolute (and possibly sadistic) mother. In the black-and-white era such heroines were few and far between, but one thrived through a whole mystery series.


By 1938 the Torchy Blaine series was so well established that BLONDES AT WORK could devote less time to the mystery and more time to the dynamic of ace reporter Torchy (Glenda Farrell) scooping other papers, betraying police naivete, and sparking gender warfare by outfoxing her stoic blustery police lieutenant fiancee Steve McBride (Barton MacLane). While the men follow obvious clues and make pedestrian snap judgments, blind to the limitations of official procedure, Torchy draws a bead and zeroes in, even dropping false leads to rival papers to advance her own rep for scooping.


The women in all these films aren't necessarily smarter than the men, it's just that the men don't want to think outside the box; natural laziness compels them to lean on protocol rather than hunches. In the opening of BLONDES AT WORK, for example, the top guy on the police force is tired of hearing complaints from other newspapers about Torchy's engagement to Barton granting her insider access. There had to be laws invented just to stop this snoop and scooping, apparently, as in the big final court scene, when the judge learns of the guilty verdict from the shouting newsboy before the jury even re-enters the courtroom. And in the end, Torchy's scooping is a continual setback to the police department, revealing police-classified information through snookering Barton's dimwit driver. Compare this kind of case-jeopardizing, sanctity of law-mocking behavior to, say, Kate Hepburn in ADAM'S RIB, or Ariel ignoring her father's laws and going where she may, heedless of how she almost lost the entire kingdom just for some boy, or Maya, the torch-red torturer in ZERO DARK THIRTY, insisting and demanding and fighting through the maze of males all busy playing war, so she can.... well, knock the board over, so to speak --  Torchy, Ariel, Maya, Carrie, they all knock the board over if there's a chance they might lose.



In ZERO DARK, when Maya demands time and attention be paid to following seemingly unimportant leads we naturally side with her in the film because we already know how what's coming, but what is fascinating is how eventually, even factoring the risks, the men all decide to roll the dice and bet on her confidence. They conquer their natural inclination to rebel against the maternal quicksand tug. They surrender to the apron string tentacle in the name of a holy target. The same goes for the CIA of Carrie Mathison in Homeland. Her manner of pitching her hunches is so wild-eyed and hysterical only a fool would trust her. That they do anyway transcends feminism and becomes more like blind allegiance. Her madness is like Cassandra's prophecies, given as inescapable fact, for her madness matches like a Cinderella shoe the gnarled foot of the terrorist world.


But not all female characters in these examples are Kali goddess board knocker-overs. Two classic example of the polar opposite of the outside the box woman can be found also on Homeland: Brody's wife, whose main role in the show is being angry if Brody stays out saving the world or trying to blow it up rather than being home at a reasonable hour so he can fawn over her, and a daughter who is such a tiresome nail-biting do-goody drag that she nearly knocks the board over just from her obsessive compulsion to keep it from falling.  But that's where the show reveals its ancestry to network prime time stuff like 24 and Lost, rather than forward-thinking stuff like Zero Dark Thirty or Blondes at Work where there's no time for such Betty Draper / Loretta Young rulebook inside-the-box normality.

Recently on TCM: MEN MUST FIGHT (1933) has a relevant scene wherein futuristic bi-planes are sailing over NYC while a rich matron and her son's wife gaze upwards from the flower-bedecked miranda, waving at the son as he flies overhead to war, discussing how one day they, the women, will be in charge of the governments of the world and all this dumb man bloodshed stuff will be abolished forever. It's a pretty wild if didactic film, depicting versions of TV, Skype, and  and WW2 as far back as 1933, and showing something very rare and terrifying, New York City being bombed from the air, the Empire State building shattering like so much balsa wood. I mention all this horror only for the last lines, stating that when the women run things, things will be done right (I paraphrase). Until then, men must fight. Yes, men must. But women are better at something else -- winning, ending the game.

When analyzing the roots of war it always pays to study the Australian aboriginals. Like many other indigenous groups their men are often at a loss of what to do with how to give their lives meaning once the food is stocked and the women are all busy with the kids. So they fight wars between the tribes, using only blunt arrows and slender branches as non-lethal weapons. Welts are the mark of a man rather than bullet holes. Somewhere along the line, this non-lethal aspect of war is always forgotten. But we can imagine a similar 'reason' for the Bush war in Afghanistan and Iraq-- Osama bin Laden being alive and allegedly in an Afghanistan cave provided the his administration with ample incentive to keep building up troops and firing high calibre weapons.  Naturally it would be a woman who just slides in there and finds him in Pakistan instead and wastes him. Sorry boys, war's over, now take out the trash and eat your spinach, mom's got to see the sea witch about getting you some goddamn nutz.

--------

NOTES:
1. For what it's worth, I tripped a lot with a similarly freckled redhead my sophomore-senior years of college, and wrote in my journal entries of how her strange jaw /mouth darted crazily when she laughed or raised her voice, to resemble the mandibles of a terrifying spider (if you've ever watched a spider dismember its prey, well, it was pretty similar.)

Ray Dennis Steckler lost out twice. He made films in an idiom sure to be ignored by serious critics, who for most of the time he was working weren’t looking for the kinds of things he was offering anyway, even if they knew he was offering them. Then, by the time the big paradigm shift happened, and everybody on Steckler’s side of the tracks was suddenly up for maverick genius status, he got a bit of the attention he was due but it didn’t stick, because what he had to offer wasn’t so easy to label as the stuff Russ Meyer or HG Lewis were selling.

“I’m not saying I’m a great filmmaker or anything; I try to just be different,” he explained in Vale and Juno’s Incredibly Strange Films. “It’s so easy to copy someone else, and I just don’t do that.” Therefore it is insanely reductive to describe his films as exploitation, because exploitation, if it is anything, is the art of sublimating or even repressing one’s personal instincts in the interests of saleability. The trouble with Steckler was that he was different from everyone.



Ed Wood might have been the closest comparison, but Ed Wood, for all his instinctive artistry, was essentially delusional. The effects he achieved were the accidental alchemical consequence of filtering ordinary Hollywood aspirations through an extraordinary psychological prism, on not enough money (a bit like a meth high). Alter the balance by changing any of the variables and the effect would be lost. With a proper Hollywood gig his unique qualities might easily have been submerged in generic conventionality, and what’s more, he’d have been the happiest man in the world. In a sense, his greatest dream as an auteur was to make a film that nobody could instantly identify as an Ed Wood movie. His signature was his burden.


Though he never got the chance to prove it, it is surely beyond question that the same could never have been said of Steckler. Note his own attitude to Wood’s work: a staunch defender of it against the Golden Turkey bullies, as alert to the psychological nakedness with which Wood personalised stock genre material as to the poetry of the result, he nonetheless knew better than to make any grandiose claims for the man in terms of advance planning.

Steckler himself was different: he loved cheap movies, he loved western serials and PRC horrors and the Bowery Boys, but it was life’s irony alone that forced him to recreate his ideas in the same basic industrial conditions. Given the breaks of a Bogdanovich, a Coppola, or even a Lynch, the whole world might have been talking about the guy who made Poverty Row mainstream and took a chunk of the zeitgeist along with him.


He would certainly have shown just how technically competent he was (and my God he was: a great photographer, a great framer, a great composer of imagery) but the films would have been thematically identical, and he would have balked at not being able to shoot and plan them the same way too. There have only been a few times in Hollywood’s history when the big studios truly gave away the kind of freedoms he took for granted: Hopper’s Last Movie, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, possibly Heaven’s Gate. (And note that on those rare occasions, whatever other faults or merits they possess, the results always seem to be elephantine, where Steckler’s are tight as a drum: the lesson may be that self-indulgence is a luxury permitted only to those who can’t afford it.)


That’s probably why the writers and critics behind the reclamation of exploitation cinema as alt-art only ever really flirted with him: he was too unusual to fit in any of the traditions being exhumed and venerated. Furthermore, those elements of his films that did slot neatly into the exploitation framework were plainly not the essence of him.

Unlike Wood’s his vision is deliberate, the effects he achieves are the effects he wants to achieve, and if he was ultimately every bit as eccentric in thinking that what he had to offer might tally with what the greater public went looking for, he was vastly more articulate and convincing when it came time to make a case for his legacy. Asked in a TV interview to define the essence of his contribution to cinema, he replied disarmingly: “I hope it’s originality.”

If, somehow, you can’t see what’s great about Steckler’s movies on a first viewing, read the interviews with him in Incredibly Strange Films and you’ll catch on straight away. Here is a film artist, no question: a man steeped in film, its grammar, its history, its power and potential. His work does not speak for itself in one mouthful, like Lewis’s or Meyer’s. It’s a dense tapestry of self-invention, self-justification and self-allusion; it can be delved into deeply, and it rewards close analysis and comparison. That hip reflexivity for which Tarantino is even now periodically lauded, the replication of mass culture as an index of individuality, is done so much better by Steckler: I can’t imagine anyone watching The Thrill Killers and still caring too much about True Romance, or finding much to hail in the generic mood swings of From Dusk Till Dawn after exposure to Rat Pfink a Boo Boo or The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies.

Steckler’s films are fun, but he’s not laughing at us when he makes them: the biggest difference of all from Lewis. He’s creating real work, which just happens to adopt an incurious attitude to the range of materials and ideas through which that work can be created. That made him tricky; because the first rule to being an artist in the exploitation arena is don’t really be one. But Steckler comes on unashamedly like an auteur; he makes claims for the work. (“I look at it every two or three years, and there are two or three scenes that are probably as good as anything ever done in the movie industry,” he says of his rarely seen detective movie Body Fever in Incredibly Strange Films.) His eccentricities sounded great in précis, in a big book about the wonderful wacky world of exploitation films, but he never got to single volume status: it takes too much work to pin his films down.


Plus, he doesn’t play any of the expected exploitation games. The most shocking thing about his signature titles may be the self-imposed restraint with which they mask nudity and shy from bloody violence. (The lurch to pastiche that characterises both Thrill Killers and Rat Pfink may well have resulted in part from his unwillingness to sustain their initial grim intensity.) On one of his DVD commentaries, he says how a viewer came up to him once and said that he liked his movies, but that they were surprisingly un-gory, and he’d like them a lot better if he put more gore in. But Steckler didn’t much care for gore, and for the squarest possible reason: he didn’t think it was necessary. Hitchcock never needed to use a lot of gore, he explained, and it’s hard to think of any line better able to alienate him from the fraternity that was poised to hail him as a counterculture hero. (When they asked him what his favourite films were, he would often talk about Casablanca, too!)

Doubtless Lewis had no burning passion to dismember people and tip their guts on the carpet either, but his commitment was to lowbrow demand. Steckler is following a vision that, even if it runs contrary to demand, will not be contained. He did do porno, towards the end, to make a buck, and he certainly wasn’t ashamed of it, but there’s no way of incorporating it into his legit oeuvre, because it’s not the same man behind the camera. He’ll be anonymous if there’s no hope of being himself, but the pure Steckler is only ever his own man: a true artist, though he fools around with junk concepts.


The proof of that is in the filmography: there aren’t a lot of titles there. Raising money wasn’t easy for Steckler because he didn’t have much to sell: he cheerfully recounted stories of how real chances to get into Hollywood movies were frustrated because he clung obstinately to his bizarre story ideas (he once tried to get the rights to Batman so as to turn it into a musical); even in his own domain he baffled potential backers with idiosyncratic decisions, like switching casts mid-movie, or opting to shoot a slasher movie as a silent because he had decided it didn’t really need much dialogue. But if a big studio had offered him big money to do it the same way, of course he’d have taken it.

He’s an ideas man; and his films are more subversive than anybody’s (except perhaps Paul Morrissey’s) because they deny those who swim only in the mainstream the standards they demand, but also the out of towners the hooks they need to be at home in the wilderness.

He may have just sounded pragmatic when he said he had to improvise because circumstances demand that kind of flexibility when you’re on next to no budget - until you remembered the kind of decisions he was actually talking about. Steckler changed entire plots, and switched the whole mood and style and genre of the piece mid-production, if some opportunity emerged to go another way or because the intended path had been denied by circumstances. And those circumstances can be anything, right down to and very much including changes in the weather.

He thought of himself as a nuts and bolts realist because he had the idea to turn a kinky crime thriller into the adventures of Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, to perk up a narrative that had run its course too early. He never quite saw that only an insane filmmaker would do that, that what he took for practicality was a species of creative lunacy that no other filmmaker – no matter how strapped or compromised – would even consider.
And that’s the paradox: the complete willingness to compromise, to subvert his vision utterly, to let circumstance dictate his ideas is his unique gift. The thing that makes his films so awe-inspiringly inventive, and so very personal, is the thing that he deems the most accidental and beyond his control. I cherish the dream of him working for Universal’s dollar, coming in one morning and telling the suits and the crew that he had completely changed the whole thing overnight. (Shades of Fields in The Bank Dick: “Instead of it being an English drawing room dray-ma, I’ve made it a circus picture!”)

The unspoken heretic truth about outsider art is that once you start calling yourself an outsider it gets much easier. It’s one thing to hide ideas within a commercial milieu, the way Hitchcock and Welles and suchlike are supposed to do, and it’s one thing to challenge mainstream standards within an exploitation frame, the way all those you-know-whos are supposed to do. But when the ball is kicked so far off the pitch that a Herschell Gordon Lewis can be hailed as maverick for giving them what they want exactly how they want it, and not even with an audible voice, then clearly a man like Steckler is not playing by either criterion. This is the nowhere his films inhabit: they are not layered; they are what they are, but what they are is something nobody else was doing, or asking for, and in the end, you run out of artistic criteria they piss on, and have to start inventing new ones.


Actually, there is one, just one, that they don’t violate: they look gorgeous. Thrill Killers,Incredibly Strange Creatures and Rat Pfink – the triumvirate on which his reputation primarily rests, or should - are beautifully photographed and beautifully composed films. They contain some of the most astounding imagery, and not just on the conceptual level: they are realised cinematically with rare but conventional precision too. They have great title sequences. And they are blessed by the presence of Steckler’s muse, Carolyn Brandt (above), an actress of true Hollywood luminosity content merely to shine on her husband’s ante-world, stunningly if untypically attractive, and never more so than in Rat Pfink.


Ultimately, any discussion of Steckler settles down to the subject of discontinuity and of juxtaposition. This is his defining element. If Hitchcock is the master of suspense, Steckler is the master of WTF.


I have this dilemma when introducing newcomers to his films: how much do you tell them first? Take Rat Pfink. Do you show it to them totally cold, so that they get that incredible feeling of shifting tectonic plates when it gets to halfway: that strange unease when a heretofore tense, pretty sexy, pretty creepy, pretty rough crime thriller (with rock and roll numbers) has now, at a crucial moment, shown the two male leads going into a cupboard… and now he’s showing the doorknob turning ineffectually, and there’s comic dialogue about the door being stuck and each of them standing on the other’s foot… and now – with the unimagined inevitability of death – the door is opening and they are dressed in the cheapest, stupidest home-assembled approximation ever of a Marvel superhero costume. And then the film doesn’t even switch into superhero adventure mode, but daffy comedy, with a near-endless chase as our heroes pursue the villains in a motorcycle and sidecar, an encounter with an escaped gorilla, and consciously spoofy dialogue. (“Remember, Boo Boo, we only have one weakness.” “What’s that, Rat Pfink?” “Bullets.”)


And yet it’s not a betrayal, it’s not a collapse, and it’s not even lazy: it’s just a different way of doing things. And it has you: the damned thing has you gripped. It works, just the way the crazy fucker thought it would. You can’t look away; you don’t want to. You know you are in the presence of something unprecedented, in the mind of someone unique.

But if you come to the film, as most people these days must, knowing what’s going to happen, and knowing how definingly Stecklerian it is that it does, and knowing what the title means and how it ended up that way, and loving and digging and looking forward to all that, you’re not quite having the cinematic experience that Steckler had in mind for you. You’re watching it as a cineaste, not as a punter.


It’s hard to get a grip on where his immense ingenuousness ends and his immense sophistication starts. The title both gives away the fact of its narrative leap and at the same time withholds it, because the actual on-screen title is not the strange but plainly anticipatory ‘Rat Pfink and Boo Boo’ but the entirely meaningless ‘Rat Pfink a Boo Boo’. But again, there’s Steckler’s innocence: he’s not playing games with us. Rat Pfink a Boo Boo is a simply magnificent title, one of the finest ever coined, but there’s no need to doubt Steckler’s explanation as to how it came about: the guy designing the titles got it wrong by mistake and it was too expensive to change. (Regardless of the fact that the expense would be irrelevant to every other filmmaker on the planet with a new film in their hands that they are trying to sell to the public: it’s simply not an option to risk putting it out with such a meaningless title.)

As with the title so with the movie. It’s very difficult to guess what kind of an experience Steckler wanted his audiences to have, or thought he was giving them. He thinks he has made a super hero comedy, because that’s how it ended up. How it ends up is what it is. Never mid that there’s no hint of any of that stuff for the first forty minutes, never mind the tonal shifts so severe they’re more like tonal ruptures.


This isn’t just a plot that doesn’t make any sense, the way his beloved Poverty Row and exploitation horror plots usually don’t make sense. Neither is it simple juxtaposition, in the way that Thrill Killers begins as scary psycho horror and turns into a horseback chase movie, or Incredibly Strange Creatures splices horror film and musical as if so weird a forced marriage was in itself a selling point. It is the conscious rejection of narrative convention, a kind of experiment in how far you can get it right by deliberately doing it wrong. These are ‘what if’ movies, and they are intoxicating.


The most important point to make about the first halves of Thrill Killers and Rat Pfink is that they work damned well on their own terms: as well as any other low budget thrillers you can think of, because Steckler’s a fine low budget filmmaker. And he truly had no idea where they were about to go until he took them there, so they never wink at you ahead of time. Everything’s in place for a low budget sleeper hit, and then they willfully go bananas, and for Steckler it’s just all part of the show.

In that cult directorial twilight, where so many discrete careers and trajectories jostle for attention in one glutinous assembly, some names loom larger just because they were bigger personalities, or did something first, or with wildest abandon. Few really cut their own track like Steckler. That’s why he’s a great loss. He would never have stopped surprising us. And he was a wonderful raconteur, and an articulate advocate for his vision.


DVDs of his films, with their extensive interview and commentary supplements, preserve more of the flavour of the man than we have of most directors, far more than we have any right to demand, but it’s obvious that this is a guy you could spend forever listening to. He had some great stories: about nearly killing Alfred Hitchcock, getting sued by Stanley Kubrick, being asked by Harpo Marx why he was shooting Eegah on his private property… I don’t condescend to Steckler’s movies: I venerate him the same way I venerate Antonioni and Fellini and De Mille. No Steckler movie is worthless, a lesson I taught myself on a film-by-film basis, always assuming that I had now seen all the good stuff, and that what remained would be a pale shadow. But Body Fever and The Chooper and The Lemon Grove Kids are all essentials, all feeding into the same single self-reflective oeuvre. There are in-jokes, allusions and endless cross-pollination that are played not for the joy of recognition but because that’s what total immersion in a world apart breeds in a man like Steckler, a kind of heroic, bloody-minded insularity entirely at home in its own dream world. Steckler may be the least famous director to ever act as if he was playing to a captive analytical audience; one that he knew didn’t exist even in his own backyard. And yet that is his future, of course: playing to just that audience.



Matthew Coniam also writes for Movietone News

"Fog... darkness.... surrounds us in its grip," Barrymore intones, "but no more!" "Night flying is going on!" he yells at board trustee silhouettes while brooding up at a giant topological map of South America. This is history. This is happening! The trustees wince in fear -- Buenos Aires is fogged-in, the Andes are dangerous even in clear daylight!

Long unseen, Night Flight turns out to be quite modern, with a weird, great musical score with touches of weird Yma Sumac-style singing and striking, muted poeticism in the winsome moment where Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--is forced to write notes just to communicate with his backseat navigator, but loving every moment. Once he's up in the clear night sky, a full moon above, Gable loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail.


To enhance the drama, there's some worried wives, the most floridly soapy of whom is Helen Hayes -- inhabiting big monologues like they're ether-misted greenhouses, and bugging Barrymore  to bring her man home, as if he can somehow stop the weather or the night. Even if he could, he refuses to let sentiment get in his way, and to bear out the need for these risky night flights, there's a box of medicine for infantile paralysis that has to get to Rio by morning or a child will die! John doesn't even know that, though, just that only a ruthless iron determination can create the impossible dream, and that night flights are already going on in Europe and North America and we have to keep up! Up!

But those places don't have to contend with the treacherous Andes, where fog and storms can roll down out of nowhere and spill over the coastline where the planes fly without a word of warning.


 A memorable poetic bit involves Young's slow, careful dismounting from his plane after a flight where he nearly crashed deep in a canyon in the Andes. Bumming a cigarette from the prop man and slyly kissing of the ground while he tests the struts, Young tells him that an "air current... dropped me into a canyon... just missed the rocks. It's as if the mountains were crouching ready to spring at ya.... not a thing moved... almost too quiet.... as if a secret...." and he catches himself, pulling back from conjuring a silent demon incarnation of the Andes; the high strangeness of almost dying in the middle of nowhere without a creature stirring for hundreds of miles and how the landscape itself starts to seem like some giant, sentient ambivalent god (maybe if you've ever driven through an empty stretch of Montana or Wyoming while almost out of gas you too know that fear). "It's too good to be alive... on such a night." Young says, and his gratitude-drenched sardonic laugh feels real and beautiful. Lionel tries to cow him with threats of fines for being ten minutes late, but Young's so glad to be alive the idea of losing 200 francs (why they don't use pesos since they're in Buenos Aires is anyone's guess) is as worrisome as a soft cloud of music. Capturing this feeling of gratitude and chillness, Young is unusually marvelous. Like Gable--still up in the air--Young conveys the joy of landing in one piece, and having a cigarette.

Aside from the beautiful muted poeticism there's a giddily unabashed look towards death that reminds me of The Little Prince which makes sense since the book was written by aviator-poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry; you can tell its written by someone genuinely in love with the moon, and with the freedom that comes from living on the lip of death. I am partial though, since films that occur in the middle of the night--that say fuck you to normal sleep schedules--really soothe my ruffled brow, and that for some stretches there's no talking in Night Flight at all, just the tick-tock of clocks and metronomes, the whoosh of turbulence, and weird ethereal vocalizing in amidst the lullaby soundtrack. Even the wives pining at home are helped by the silence deep dark spaces; their shadowy boudoirs are as expanseless as the moon and stars. And as they hover between life and death, love and loss, goodbyes and going back to sleep, a really dreamy, opiate sense of floating coheres.

While packed with MGM stars, ala Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight, any sense of Night Flight being an ensemble film is undone by how seldom more than two big stars share one scene. The pilots are off on their own, up in the clouds, bathed in darkness, fog, and moonlight; their wives are home alone, eating dinner and crying into their champagne; and in the Buenos Aires air station, Barrymores try to hold it all together while gazing up at the big board and browbeating sleepy pilots. In his grim insistence on getting the mail out on time no matter how strongly the board members plead against it, Barrymore resembles Ahab (whom he played in The Sea Beast), whose single-minded pursuit of the white whale is mirrored in Barrymore's ruthless aligning of his dream to the very unassailable momentum of human progress:

Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

Occurring over a 24 hour period, and mainly at night, there's a dreamy sense that everyone only imagines each other exists, they're all asleep and the empty night sky is the dream canvas. At home, the silence and dark tendrils of sleep seem to creep around Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy like loving arms of night.

Some of the comments around IMDB I think encapsulate what is wrong with the film as far as conventional drama, but for me these same 'flaws' are why the film's so cool, unique, and strange, so lyrical and even a little sad. Michael Elliot writes:

I think the biggest problem is that the screenplay really isn't all that impressive and most of the drama never comes because the story never builds up any emotional connection to any of the people we meet. The Gable character is meant to be the backbone of the drama yet we never get to really meet him and we certainly never get to know him as all of his scenes are in the air and he's given very little dialogue.

But Michael, that's the point! These characters we meet in this period are all isolated, adrift in their little pocket of the world, sleeping in dark art deco rooms or crying in front of the nervous maid, waiting weeks for their husband to drift home for a few days where all he does is sleep and look wistfully out the window at that old devil sky. It's like the modern age is being born before our eyes and the sad faces of old widows and brides as their men take off to sea are frozen in amber honey and spread across the dunkelbrot nacht. 

Kudos to TCM for rescuing this film via assisting in getting the licensing issues between Antoine de Saint Exupéry and MGM solved after 75 years in legal limbo.  It's fitting, I guess that it was unseen, lost in the dark clouds of litigation and lack of favor, for so long. It adds to the mystery, you can feel the lack of eyes that have been laid on this, and while many critics and fans were perhaps expecting too much and wound up disappointed, I wasn't expecting anything, except that it wouldn't measure up to the brilliance of another film about treacherous night flying over the Andes, Only Angels Have Wings. And perhaps it's in the comparison the Night Flight takes wing, the Fail Safe to Wings'Dr. Strangelove. In fact the two airlines could very well be connecting to each other along the South American flight plans! They might never meet, either, just a pilot once in awhile comes through, buys some drinks, and takes off again.

And you can find much breadth of vision between the two if you compare the warm camaraderie of Hawk's film, which takes place almost entirely in the cozy bar/saloon/airfield owned by Sig Rumann, with the shadowy isolation of the command center of Night Flight, wherein the only 'fun; moment occurs when Young and Dorothy Burgess drunkenly sing "How Dry I Am" as they drive up to the runway in her convertible... it's a single moment of merriment like a daring final laugh in the face of mortality, vs., say, a similar but post-mortem merriment, "The Peanut Vendor" in Angels (below), or the various macabre toasts, "Hurrah for the next who dies!" in the days of WW1 pilots as seen in The Lost Patrol.  The sun is just coming up, and Young puts his flight suit on over his tuxedo and gives his girl in the convertible a farewell kiss, and off he goes, still drunk off his ass. Even in these early days of commercial cinema pilots went to work drunk! Why not? It's not like there are pedestrians or stop signs in the sky, and you're already taking your life in your hands just going up there. You need courage, by the quart, otherwise you'd buckle and crash like a card house of nerves.


But now that planes can fly fly fly up high enough to coast right over the Andes, and even heroes like Denzel get dragged over the coals for cockpit drunkenness, the ways a man can sneer at mortality right into the history books have come few and far between. Only The Hurt Locker comes to mind as far as men deliberately facing death on a daily (or nightly basis). That film won an Oscar while Night Flight won only a 75-year shelving and disappointed critical reception when it was finally released. It's not perfect, but perfection can be boring. And the weird disconnect between all the stars' big scenes (like each was shot in a day or two on a soundstage where they didn't have to run into each other) is perfect for the subject matter. In careening through the inky blackness of the night sky instread of coasting through the inky dark dreams of sleep with their Argentine wives, these brave men of the air mail routes are, just like Exupéry's Little Prince, unbound up by the laws of gravity or sleep schedule convention, or the normal routines of human relationships, refusing to choose life over death or home life over the air or vice versa, and if they go down, they go like men, with only bobbing jellyfish parachutes for gravestones.


Some lines from Moby Dick maybe encapsulate the true kernel of poetic treasure within the seemingly disparate scenes of Night Flight:

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

Other MGM star-studded prestige pics like Dinner at Eight may soar high in critical esteem but in its midnight confessional strangeness, Night Flight aces them in the dreamy diconnect department. Where they all take a spin around the void, throw in some flares and then ride off back to safety, Night Flight plunges straight down into it, landing lights off, harpoons at the ready, all to get the postcards and insulin to Rio at the scheduled time. Call it crazy, call it suicide, but it's the kind of black art that stirs me up like Ahab's electric oratory. It's no surprise then that I'll defend the lonely black night beauty of this film though it crushes me to the core like gravity's ticking metronome.... and, like flying itself, in spots is just plain boring.

Watching Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS for the sixth time recently all I could do was absorb the language barriers; all those dinner parties I sat through in Buenos Aires while intellectual friends of my ex-wife talked in rapid fire Argentine Spanish finally paid off. When one is in a situation like that, one can't really do anything except smile politely and try not to take it personally and muse along BABEL-ish lines. After all, small children and animals feel bored and left out by adult conversation all the time... if you multiply that factor by Nazis in an occupied country speaking German, now you can start to get super mad just thinking about it. When Americans go to Paris on vacation and expect the waiter to know English, that's bad, but at least he doesn't have to. The tourists can't have him shot; they should take his rudeness as a sign of solidarity --he's free to be rude. No one is going to end up jailed or shot should any bad blood arise.


It might help to understand the feeling of being at the mercy of someone with whom you are having a 'civil' interaction if you've been either a drug dealer during the Reagan administration, or while trying to get through Turkish customs. But nowadays, just going through airport security should be enough to savor some of that long-term slow burn paranoia when one bunch of people has absolute power over another,  and each side pretends--one for their own vanity and human needs the other for basic survival--that everything is copacetic. These moments are when Tarantino shines. In his world, every meal, every round of drinks, is pregnant with these sublimated maskings. One side plays at being a cat, the other pretends they're not a mouse. Anything can go wrong and over drinks, deserts, and changing table guests, the suspense can become almost unbearable.


These scenes work so effectively on our nerves because they tap into a deep, unresolved response of infantile rage at the bullying ignorance of adults. We all remember being a child when parents and adults all claim to know what's in our best interest. They decide when our bedtime is and what TV shows we can watch  and if we can have ice cream. They can spank, whip, imprison, strip-search etc. you at their whim. In fact the only times we face this trauma, most of us (once we are 21 and/or out of our parent's house) is when we're passing through airport security checks. A relatively brief span of time, mostly, so we can screw our courage to the wheel long enough with little effort no matter how weak our poker face. But the poor devils in Tarantino's last two films each have to contend with whole dinner times going past, or lengthy conversations. A parallel might be trying to get through a whole dinner with strict parents as a ten year-old trying to hide the fact that you're stoned and drunk out of your gourd, and by dessert you think you've got them won over so your mask starts to slip a little, and you keep hitting the wine even though your mom glowers at the water level.


This is how the Jewish heroine of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS has to live most of her life, such as tense moments like the luncheon (above), where she's unceremoniously dragged then expected to be charming as people talk in rapid German (which she does not speak, as we learn indirectly in the beginning) about her theater, never even asking if she wants to host their big film night at her theater, all but forcing the honor on her, with blithe unconcern about her personal desires. They certainly know it's hardly an 'honor' for the oppressed French to host any Nazi event, but to mangle a line from THE MALTESE FALCON, "for her sake I let her pretend."

That's Tarantino's genius level one -- the power of lengthy dinner conversations to completely document not just the dynamics of power and deception, but of the way lengths of time work to change those dynamics, wearing down some positions and strengthening others, and the power of the words we absorb in their seemingly casual use when they later come into play, into action.


Even as early as PULP FICTION, QT buries valuable intel in the rambling opener with Jules telling Vincent about Tony Rocky Horror, a big Samoan guy getting thrown out of a window for giving Marcellus Wallace's wife a foot massage. This bit of knowledge adds great depth to our apprehension at the very thought of Vincent--who weighs far less than the average Samoan drug dealer--going on a date with the very same Mrs. Wallace, and when she almost ODs on his watch, well, now we're really scared for him in ways we would never be without the saga of Tony Rocky Horror.

 We would need also to have absorbed the dialogue back at Eric Stoltz's dealer pad about 'the Madman' and 'Panda' to appreciate the strength of said smack... in other words a whole day and night of seemingly random pop culture referenced-infused dialogue is needed, every last word, to finally snap shut an elaborate trap that is never clearly spoken or delineated. And then, that apprehension over Wallace's capability for wrath continues when we learn Bruce Willis needs to go back for his watch; and we needed the full length of Christopher Walken's speech about hiding that watch up his ass in a POW camp, to make us invested in Willis' need to go back and get that watch, even when the full brunt of this Tony Rocky Horror-killing bastard is going to be waiting.

So this latest viewing of BASTERDS was the time I realized Soshana can't understand what Goebbels and friends are laughing about at the lunch since she doesn't speak German. Her blank cutesy expression as the men talk around her can throw you off if you're just following their subtitles instead of listening to them in the polite way we listen to a table of people talking very fast in another language who are presumably thinking we understand what they are saying. In America we have such a deep embarrassment about our knowing only 'American' that we automatically assume every European speaks all European languages. And in BASTERDS we would think Shoshana knows English if not for her failure to bolt while hiding under the dairy farmer's floorboards in the opening scene.


In this first lengthy dinner scene -- the Paris bistro with Goebbels -- we get a sense of constant on-edgeness that must accompany life under occupation, wherein every smile, laugh and wink one gives to the occupying enemy are all there out of pure terror and desperation rather than any kind of love or cooperative spirit. A good analogy in the US would be if that the TSA extended its authority to random house searches and if TSA guys wanted to invite themselves over for dinner, search our bedrooms, and sleep with our daughters, we were expected to smile and nod and let them in, and never once mention bombs or sabotage --just as we can't when in the TSA line--even as our hearts curdled up in blind rage as they decided to move into your master bedroom.

Even if we're lucky enough that we're more or less protected from such invasions, as we are here in the USA (presuming we're not Native Americans, of course), most of us remember the hopeless rage we felt towards our parents as children. And the plotting to one day destroy them. It goes back deep, to that white-hot rage we all feel just hearing the news every night, that feeling of powerless fury.


And that's why every demeaning expletive and subjugation and atrocity is necessary in Tarantino's last two films--INGLOURIOUS and DJANGO UNCHAINED. Because no amount of vengeance, of cathartic destruction can be truly cathartic without it; if it sickens you beyond measure than the film is only doing it's job and this bloody catharsis is for you. This is the kind of trauma we should be getting from our movies, not the casual torture of films like Saw and Wolf Creek. Serial killers and psychopaths are frightening but they're isolated individuals and it doesn't take a great writer, only a sick mind, to dream up such films' events; but in Nazi Germany and the Antebellum South psychopathology is the law; extreme racist barbarism is the societal norm. That's the Quentin difference.
The second example of time elapsing is the sheer length of the basement drinking game scene in BASTERDS; audiences generally complain that it's too long and claustrophobic which is the point. Perhaps in some ways the film never quite recovers from its show-stopper aspect. But here's the thing -- it shows the gradual erosion of nerves over a lengthy session of drinking and chit-chat, the length between thinking you're getting away with your ruse and feeling like you finally have, your enemy is about to leave or give you what you want, only to have a last minute prolonged moment of suspense as suddenly everything reverses and you're caught but by then that's it - you don't give a shit about getting away with it anymore or even getting out of there alive. You've been stifled so long under the garb of your false identity and the other's ranting egotism that your rage overrides your sense of self-preservation and BAM! Say good-bye to your nuts.


DJANGO and INGLORIOUS each have one of these scenes, and these two films are separated by these scenes from the rest of QT's oeuvre. While gangsters, thugs and assassins from his earlier films are outlaws in a world in moral twilight, the pre-Civil War South and Nazi-occupied France are worlds beyond moral twilight because the morality of the prevailing social structure is evil and violent. Slavery and subjugation is moral according to the Confederate South, and Hitler's Germany. They use modern democratic social structures  to obscure the evil, but in these two films undisguised evil gloats from its established position of power via even the smallest of presumably friendly gestures. In a sense the Nazi's openness with their evil is almost more noble than the red state congressman who preaches family values and wants to ban gay marriage and sodomy, but then goes and picks up a male hustler at a bus stop; who wants to ban free speech but would never ban the right of rednecks to fly confederate flags outside their courthouses (imagine if the Germans wanted to keep Nazi flags in their court rooms, why is it any different?)

In being open with their oppression, the Nazis also set themselves up as an easy target, of course, and in doing so they--as with the slave owners in DJANGO--remind us that the power of cathartic violence lurks under the surface of any violently imposed social order. As the recent psychopathic gun violence in our country indicates, our citizens are hopping mad but aren't sure who is oppressing them, so they don't know who to shoot at. So thank your oppressors for letting you see their face up close, should they ever do that, because when you kill them finally in a moment of explosive release it will be so worth the wait.


ONE LAST THING -

Drugs are also Tarantino's sinthom magnifique - most tellingly in a seemingly plot-advancing scene in a vet's office after the basement shooting. It begins with a morphine needle to the thigh of Brigit Von Hammersmock. The Basterds have commandeered the office of a veterinarian, and are in his operating room - while he stands by in a robe. A bullet has shattered some bone in her leg. Aldo Raine presses on the wound in a bit of torture to force the truth out of her, angry at losing three men in what he perceives as a possible ambush. He relents when starting to believe her but his manner never changes -- as the morphine hits her system though Brigit slowly morphs from defeated to intrigued to almost excited, especially once the idea of pumping her full of more morphine is discussed. It's a subliminal melange of addictive trigger motions I haven't seen so subtly played since that of Juliane Moore hearing about all the delicious drops she can pilfer from her dying husband's scrips in MAGNOLIA. In fact there might be so much crazy subtle acting going on in these moments that these things I see might not even be in the actors or director's minds at all, not even unconsciously, that it might be just my own addictive, paranoid personality...BUT... that Tarantino can start me thinking like that, in these great self-deconstructing paranoid loops speaks to his startling genius.

I've been sick all week with a terrible flu--hallucinating, vomiting, sleeping round the clock-- and it all comes to a head and makes sense with THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936). I was raging with fever, sleeping in torrid bursts of super dreamy weirdness.  I wound up at the movies, of course, in 'the Martha Graham Dance Cinema Annex,' with girls smoking Virginia Slims everywhere while calling their moms and using the rail up to the aisle seats as a balance bar while collections of experimental dance shorts played in endless rotation over their heads, ignored by all but me, and I dropped by the pad my ex-wife in her new small apartment in Chile' and learned not only is pot legal there, but  huge spliffs are passed around through the entire populations as they go about their day, each joint like a little ship vessel that never returns to sender. In other words, I have lived mostly in dreams this week, with my influenza virus remembering, through my tortured brain, its journey to me along the smudgy railings and student handshakes, and my own mind barely noticing the difference having spent so many hours lost in screens. Maybe that's why I didn't turn away in saccharine-phobic horror from THE GREAT ZIEGFELD when it showed up on TCM yesterday and I was for the first time all week able to even sit on the couch and turn the TV on and there it was, by special unconscious request, as if I had dreamt a perfect halfway point between real cinema and the cloudy diamond-facet fractured dance hall unconsciousness I'd been hiding out in, clinging to the balance bar railings with the tenacity of a flu germ barnacle as nymphets in a torrent of Degas-esque Village Voice articles spout-pounced in my head.


The two main things the serious flu bug going around does is a, lift you from all abilities or concerns  regarding sexual desire and vices --you can't inhale smoke, you can't drink anything but room temperature ginger ale mixed with water without gagging and dry heaving--And b, makes you humble. You can't stand up so you keep yourself buckled over as if bowed under the heel of some unseen titan, and all other trivialities except not soiling yourself or falling down stairs and passing out in public are jettisoned.

Such a basic core of human experience, stripped down to the core, is the ideal putty for theatrical drill instructors like Busby Berkeley and Oscar Jaffee (as well as torturers like Abu Nazir and the Symbionese Liberation Front); they are like explosions from which stars are born. The heat of the flu, or of systematic physical abuse at the hands of an authority figure, work equally to liquidate once frozen notions of self, of loyalty, allegiance and identity. For example, I forgot my original prejudices against long, dull MGM musical biopics, and so whatever kept me from watching THE GREAT ZIEGFELD in the past, was now liquid draining from the ice sculpture sink of my personal tastes.

I worked for a rich crazy person like Flo Z., so I know the way the depend on an indulgent, super-rich backer and their drive to dance needs a foreclosure man at every turn as incentive. They spend beyond their limits and never pay back debts, all while buying bigger and more opulent gifts for everyone around them. They built the whole country by trying to mortgage their way out of poverty, to become too big to collect from. A rich person by definition amasses wealth, stores and saves it, builds on it; the Flo Z-type merely spends it, regardless of if he has it or not Without such men, alas, capitalism can't succeed for long. And 1929 stock market crashes are inevitable, like the end of a game of hot potato where everyone is burned.

The Native Americans had a thing called the potlatch where at the end of each year the richest person in the tribe gave away all their possessions and started out again with nothing. It was a great honor to have this happen to you but at the same time it encouraged a constant flow of generosity in the tribe. No one wanted to get too rich lest they have to give up something they wanted, so they gave everything away as they went Indeed, what is opulence for if not to dazzle the public eye, rather than one's own? To create magic for others instead of 'security' for oneself? And when a man's ego transcends his sense of security, and his drive to create show-stopping brilliance overrides self-preservation, that's entertainment, and the wheel of capitalism moves one spoke on your ticket blood.

That's Ray Bolger down there

But Flo-Z is always working to bring it higher, to outdo all past versions of his JENGA-style opulent towering, and that's why he gets a 3 1/2 hour bio. He personified the age of indulgence and is now--especially in NYC--is so ingrained in the texture of the city he's right there with the NY Times, Nathan's Famous, the Oyster Bar, and Tavern on the Green. He's a giant sugar daddy mountebank link across the generations of the depression back to the bigger, higher, wider school of Americana. He's one of a Mount Rushmore of salty icons including Walt Disney, Cecil B. De Mille, and D.W. Griffith. And like them he understood you could get away with anything as long as you wrapped it in so much lace and fashion show piety that the old ladies were too awash in sentimental sighs to complain when the bare thighs flashed. So the crazy headdresses went wider and wider in some pagan mummery glorification of grandiosity, all to keep the world rolling forward and trailing clouds of glory "for anybody willing to climb." A whole style of opulence became synonymous with his name, putting him in the same ranks as presidents, kings, Martha Graham, Rockefeller and at the same time shadiness, ala P.T. Barnum, Madame Tussaud's, and Ripley.

"Make mine Spud?"

So why praise him in an Acidemic post? Well, I love William Powell, but the real psychedelic gold comes in the centerpiece numbers, as surreal and strange as any Berkeley number over at Warner's. David Lynch taught us that if you push normality to its extreme it becomes more surreal than anything else - and the "Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" sequence of this film finally illuminates the appeal of frills and fancy MGM foppery to jaded, faded, junky nurses like myself by pushing it to an impossible extreme. The cumulative effect is beyond the usual sense of claustrophobia, of being like Sullivan sandwiched between the portly matrons at the movies during the first of his travels, and instead breaking through the roof and achieving a mythopoetic splume of transcendental connection, something even Willie Wonka as a child, trapped by his mom in some 1906 fashion show and looking up the skirts of the passing models could never imagine. He'd have to be reading Little Nemo at the same time, and strung out on Demerol.


Consider this revolving cake tableau: we start with the singer and his girl and revolve slowly to see:18th century noblemen, Chinese rural moon beam guitar pixies; Pagliachi belting out his pain before a giant drum; a beautiful flame goddess mocking him from above; a row of pianists working out Rhapsody in Blue, a sea of vampire women in black shimmering Dragon Lady dresses; a giant mummer sun crown headgear crown angel, and a magic femme fatale to crown the cake. best of all is the crazy spiral curtain, the slowly rolls up as the cake turns and then lowers back down. It's a very psychedelic center to the film, with billowing ruffles and angelic choirs that for the first time help me to understand the mindset that led to all the ruffles and bows of turn of the century theater and costumery. This number alone shows what all the others were aiming at, and just coming off stuffy and overbaked. Of course there's some of that, too, such as the ungratifying sight of an imitation Eddie Cantor in black face and popeye glasses square-prancing around like a politically incorrect robot singing "If you Knew Suzie" in front of a giant shower curtain. Oh! Oh! Oh what a gal and now I understand the big Carnegie Hall performance of Andy Kaufman in MAN ON THE MOON with the Santa Claus tower.


Like Kaufman's comedy, the follies predate sexuality and embrace a fully non-gender-specific humanism, a dreamy pillowy magic, a pre-Edenic gorgeous flowing white river of energy, where women are done up like beautiful Weird Tales covers brought to life and the men are all in tuxes and standing very still. Peter Max, Bouguereau, and Christian Anderson and The Yellow Submarine artistic designer Heinz Edelmann are all the heirs of this man. In another surreal number, we see legions of white and silver balloons flying out towards the screen, towards the camera eye, opening a middle field of depth that leads us farther and farther back, what Flo basically does is attempt to duplicate the effects of 3-D decades before it was invented. You can't help but be transported through the looking glass into a Little Nemo of Berkley wünderland, the kind that the Wall Street crash of 1929 would put an end to. That's the thing, when we watch a Busby Berkeley musical number we move inside the stage and the camera swirls and eddies and snakes around the dancers to form geometric kaleidoscope perfection; Ziegfeld didn't have the cameras so he uses each audience member's eye and proceeds to aim his balloons and ostrich feathers right at it, trailing big confetti streamers behind them.

In the era between 3-D and Ziegfeld's balloons, tapping into the limits of the eye as a way to change viewer mindsets was forgotten in favor of the recognized patina of cinema fantasy as we know it today - the 2-D proscenium arch style of middle range shot, the 'you are there' but-not-there ghost presence amidst the action we're used to today, i.e. we've become the invisible spectator. No one looks us in the eye anymore. It used to be that we could take our infantile delight in the cloud mobile above our crib and bring it into the adult world if we had the right guide. Ziegfeld is seen as the one who dares dream the biggest, to bankrupt the world to reach new heights in revolving stage staircases, all just so the stage can reach out like two pairs of big mommy hands into our infant crib of an orchestra seat.

Maybe back at the time audiences knew what those hands were reaching for, but in 2013 it's pretty clear we need to be half-dead from killer flus just to see what all the billowing dreamscape eye seduction fuss is about. Maybe it's all merely an appeasement, a Nazca line offering to the giant Kathy Bates in the sky--sledge-hammer in one hand, Vicodin in the other--the Kali of the flu-wracked MISERY arts. It's how She wants it, so Flo Z gave it to her, just so he could have his row of beautiful naked thighs... zzzz

The year of 1982 was, as we cineastes know, the great year of American science fiction and fantasy. Not only did we get enduring faves like THE ROAD WARRIOR, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, BLADE RUNNER and THE THING, there were two movies from the Spielberg camp, ET, and POLTERGEIST. Like a capstone to the great 70s, 1982 was a time to regroup on issues of masculinity, fatherhood and the outsider relation to the social order. A dad was notoriously absent from the ET family unit, and figures like Mad Max and Conan (and the entire cast of THE THING) stood firmly on the outside of any sort of social order or role model status, avoiding even feral kids as passengers; Deckard in BLADE RUNNER was a part of the order, a cop, but over the course of the film began to become more and more the bad guy, shooting 'replicants' guilty of little more than self-defense as they searched for a home on a planet beyond saving. In other '82 offerings, like FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, there were no parents of any sort. So what happened to the 70s dads?

One was left: POLTERGEIST, a rare glimpse into a 'cool' family with a hip, playful, relaxed good provider father, one brilliantly played by Craig T. Nelson, an ubiquitous presence on TV screens at the time, he was almost like the more domesticated version of Harrison Ford in his dry, knowing delivery and ability to seem dryly fun and employable at the same time. During the opening 20 minutes of POLTERGEIST we get to know him and his family, including hip wife JoBeth Williams. We get, among other things, a whole great early scene with them smoking dope after the kids are in their beds.



The scenes show the dead the master of his domain, note in these scenes how Tobe Hooper / Spielberg display his arms stretching to the edges of the frame, at ease, master of his domain yet not a tyrant. He jumps on the bed to demonstrate a high dive to soothe wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) over concerns about their daughter drowning in their under-construction pool. Rambling about air pockets, and when Diane mocks him saying "Your diving days are over," he gets all serious, arms outstretched, demonstrating form on the high dive, noting with great mock solemnity, "we're talking about the Olympics here, Diane."


Imagine such a scene today in a horror film and you can't - imagine Tom Cruise playing a dad this mellow, or Nicolas Cage a dad this unencumbered by free-floating anxiety.
And when the son, Robbie, comes in unannounced, they don't treat him with condescension, they're not ashamed or embarrassed to be caught smoking weed; they dont fall on some stock response like 'there is no bogey man go back to bed!" or some snide lecture about growing up, some excuse why it smells funny in their room.  Steve and Diane look at him warmly, with some concern, but not sappily. "Hey, sport," they say in greeting. They wait for him to tell them what's going on.... they treat him like a person, like a guest, deserving of a straight response rather than some rote, borderline hysteric bid at perfect parenting.


Spielberg's first big breakout film, JAWS had the premiero uno great 70s dad, so it's only natural this guy should close out the series. Instead of "gimme a kiss... I need it," we have him inviting the son to jump on his back, noting "I am the wind and you are the feather," clearly this is some kind of inside joke between them stretching back to his infanthood. There's no warm sachharine strings like there would be if John Williams was scoring. Thankfully Jerry Goldsmith is, so there is no score in this part, just the crash of the thunder outside, people talking in inside voices. Unlike Williams, Goldsmith has always known when to hold back, and even though the score gets overwrought in a few places, overall it's properly invisible, conjuring a 'safe' kind of menace where applicable, but hanging back in other parts to let the horror build on its own.


Dad Steve also has an appreciation for nature and the mysteries of the beyond. Robbie is freaked about the tree outside the window, feeling as if it's spying on him. "It knows about us, doesn't it?" he asks.

"It knows everything about us," replies his dad with utmost whispered seriousness. That's why I built this house right next to it, Rob, so it could protect us. .. you and Carol Ann, and Dana and you're mom and me. It's a very wise old tree." This is superlative parenting because Steve's not diminishing Robbie's concerns, not admonishing him for an overactive imagination. He's taking his son's worry seriously and elevating the sense of magical thinking, channeling it into the proper pronoiac (rather than paranoiac) direction.


But all is not well for long. He's humbled and at wit's end when he recruits the paranormal research group, and during their at-home investigation, Steve's sense of powerlessness over the events begins to diminish his sense of confidence and self-worth.


A subtle moment of this draining of power occurs when JoBeth Williams reaches over to him at the family table, telling the team, "He's been wonderful, really," as if boasting of some reformed wayward child to his parole officer. JoBeth's tone carries just the hint of condescension, like Dad tries really hard, but he just can't protect them from this thing. Steve is very rude, like a sullen, jealous child, when the dwarf psychic medium (Zelda Rubenstein) comes over, he makes cracks, referencing THE WIZARD OF OZ and snickering under his breath, even 'mentally' signaling to Zelda, refusing to answer verbally since he reasons she should be able to pick up his answers if she's so damned psychic. Very insulting, Steven!


 Losing his daughter to the void clearly throws Steve for a loop. He's seldom seen standing. He broods, seated, in shadows, his presence as a stalwart masculine force is simply not needed. The ghost hunting is in the realm of the feminine here. The older drinker lady first, and then the psychic dwarf. We see many shots of him sitting in shadow while the women stand above him, indicating his reduced status as an authority. Not even a promotion from his boss, worried he's missed so much work because he's looking for a better job, can sway him from his surliness. When he sees the graveyard that will have to be moved to make room for the new developments he's uneasy. Earlier when his boss was inside Steve's house he'd made clear attempts to hide the paranormal activity going on (such as an organ flying across the room), in other words he's attempting to create a facade of normality. He doesn't tell his neighbors, once they initially deny anything's going wrong in their houses. He's isolated in these events for reasons never fully explained. (Maybe it's that they fall asleep with their TV on a lot, enabling the ghosts to come through easier? Or that their kids aren't fat and ugly like the neigbor's?)

Steve ends the movie homeless and unemployed... presumably neither for long, but also a whole lot wiser. The issue is, is that a good thing? What has he lost, this reader of books about Reagan, and survivor of poltergeist attacks, this real estate man of the living dead, along with his innocence? Are he and his wife still going to smoke pot to relax after the kids are asleep, or will drug hysteria from Nancy Reagan convince one of the kids to report their pot use to their teacher and have their kids taken away to social services? Will the disaster of the house be blamed on him, for illegal building of a pool or something?


He's certainly treading a thin line, paying a stiff price for this disillusionment. The threat of invisible ghosts, Russians, terrorists, drug dealers, you name it-- was keeping the Reagan-Bush dynasty in business. The fun freewheeling 70s were over. Ghosts, slashers, and bogeymen were making their way to every home in America via the arrival of cable TV. Meanwhile, everywhere huge lawsuits and civil actions erupted: hysteria over child molestations at day care centers led to massive firings of male childcare workers, just to be 'safe' - moms were thrown to the ground in handcuffs when they went to the fotomat to pick up pictures of their nude daughters. MADD boosted laws and public awareness against drunk drivers, thus killing a sense of nightlife freedom for an entire nation. Suddenly no one wanted to drive to any party even at a friends house a few blocks away, unless their spouse was going to be the designated driver, which itself was a total buzzkill as who wants to drink in front of a judgmental, sober spouse. And god forbid you had a joint in your purse or something when they pulled you over on the way home: you might still be in jail even now.

 Oh yeah, and hysteria over AIDS leaving it open season on firing anyone who happened to be gay, or even sound gay, lest they somehow contaminate our children. Plastic gloves, condoms, fear of inappropriate touching, all led to a great turning away from the social sphere.


The withdrawal of Steve Freeling into an embittered dad, prone to panic, sulking and defensively snickering is implicitly linked to this national parenting sea change. It's emblematic in the way he pulls the rope too early during the rescue of Caol Ann, because his myopia misinterprets what Zelda is saying. The psychic is continually reversing whether or not Diane and Carol-Ann should go into the light, and it's too loud to hear well, but he panics at the moment she's talking to the trapped spirits who are caught in the crossfire between the demon and the Freelings. She's telling them--the innocent, trapped ghosts-- to go into the light, but Steve thinks he's telling Diane to go into the light and so freaks out, pulling the rope too early. Similarly, our national sense of security became tied into the personal, our inability to let go of attention. A TV show like America's Most Wanted had never before existed until the 80s, and it was a huge hit, and everywhere we became suspicious of our neighbors if they bore even a cursory resemblance to someone involved in a reported crime. People bunkered down for the long haul, drinking at home so they didn't get arrested by MADD, cheering the draconian drug laws that trapped innocent pot and acidheads like fish in a net meant for coke heads and at-risk youth. No one could go into the light anymore, period. And spirits had to just stay trapped in the plowed-over graveyard maze of suburbia.

These sorts of drastic measures seem very sane, comforting even, to someone who is very, very afraid of what's happening to their neighborhood. Maybe it was Indian immigrants, or blacks or hispanics, instead of ghosts moving in, but the resulting drive to retreat and fortify defenses was the same. The bad 80s dad had replaced the carefree 70s version, and for no clear reason other than media suggestion. It was just our time to withdraw, the hangover for the 70s boondoggle was bad enough that we were swearing off having any kind of fun, at least in public, and in the center of it all was a dad, beaten down and emasculated by supernatural forces he could not control. Steve's final act of defiance, kicking the TV out of the hotel room, seems foolish. You can't shoot the messenger, and more than likely that TV would be stolen before morning and he'd get charged on his bill. But Steve is right in one thing, the TV is the 70s dad's mortal enemy, it defeated his good vibes. It defied and destroyed his sense of self; it made all men who played with their kids seem like pedophiles, and all men who ignored their kids seem like bad parents; it made hostile strangers of neighbors, and turned children against their parents and themselves.  Dad'sonly consolation, by the 80s, was that 'sign off' national anthem flag shots used by channels in the wee wee hours were gone. As if quietly correcting the problem for future families, now the screens would never go static. Now channels were always, always running programs. There was nothing to do now but wait it out, alone, unemployed, and shattered to the core by TV's endlessly rerun phantom menace.

"Didn't you realize when we started," asks John Dahl of Bonnie Cummins in GUN CRAZY that once we started we'd never be able to ask anyone for help again, not even if we were dying?" He could be anyone grown suddenly aware of all the friends they lost touch with, how isolated from the outside world their love has made them. In outlaw pair bond movies being in a monogamous couple means cocooning yourself from the outside world, even if only for the rest of the night. Once you've had sex you're supposed to spend the remaining time conscious together, parting only when awake after whatever furtive sleep you've managed has changed your outlook so much its generally agreed you're not the same two people who went to bed together the night before. Falling in love is the best thing ever but it's also scary - the volume on the rest of the world is turned way down; you barely notice the danger and turn back signs that used to paralyze you with dread. If you're lucky enough to be in a screwball comedy, you never die, or kill anyone, but in outlaw pair bond movies, there's not even jail to look forward to at credit's knell.

While this archetype is perhaps the most instantly derivative, all seeming to stem from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) on one end, which in turn was inspired by Gun Crazy and Don Siegel's trashlarious 1964 rendition of The Killers (1964) on the other, which inspired Pulp Fiction. It's worth including as an example of how a strong pair bond can transcend any sense of grounding in the social construct -- a simple series of escalating dares, a sudden accidental homicide or finding of a clue to secret treasure, or just the right hitchhiker at the right time, even just the heady allure of flirting, can spin a pair bond out of orbit and into the fast lane. All their friends shake their heads confusedly and dad holds the weeping mom close, for she knows her baby's going down hard.

Part of the effectiveness of the outlaw pair bond especially hinges on the right chemistry between the leads. If they have the sort that's strong enough to bust loose from the bonds of the social order, then we can thrill to the romance and the velocity of their escape, dreading the existential payback for such freedom, the eventual death. Or maybe if they pass all the hurtles, escape... always to the same place: Mexico.


The other keys are the availability of guns, cars, and lots of space to hide in. The real Bonnie and Clyde came to prominence in a perfect storm of factors -- the depression creating an environment where outlaws became heroes, robbing the banks that were foreclosing right and left on farmer's lands; the dawn of the American highway (a by-product of the FDR's New Deal); and enough gas stations to make cross state-line driving easy at a time when the FBI was still in its infancy (it was formed to combat inter-state robbers like Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Ma Barker, and so forth) and sensationalist journalism that made heroes of the outlaw.


Lastly, this archetype is perfect for low budgets and high energy. We all long to just drive with some dangerous man or fertile hottie we pass on the street, just hop in her or his car and leave your life behind. These films allow us that cathartic thrill, and when they get finally caught--if they do--we're suddenly grateful that this was all a fantasy. Directors like Godard and Arthur Penn can incorporate that sense of willing suspension of belief into their films, where even outlaws love to read about themselves, and momentum becomes the ultimate in self-expression.  

 1. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The key moment is Bonnie's freakout when she learns Gene Wilder is an undertaker, and she throws him and his date out on the side of the road. She may be enjoying the moment, but she sees the writing on the wall. There's no way out of her current velocity state except death or incarceration. Romance can't quite stem that icky feeling, perhaps because her man is impotent, but more likely due to the uncouth loud boorishness of their other gang members.


Movie lovers tend to be sensitive types, easily bruised by the uncouth loudness of odious relatives. In her wincing at the loud hillbilly roaring of Clyde's brother (Gene Hackman) and his whiny wife (Estelle Parsons), Dunaway resembles the lovely Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), forced to put her sexual longing on hold in favor of tedious Americana.

The film's release got off to a slow start but after steady promotion by producer Beatty and a glowing review in The New Yorker by Pauline Kael, which gave America the high-fallutin' language with which to appreciate it.  This was a better time for word of mouth press, as films could circulate the country for years, a handfull of prints slowly gathering critical acclaim and this is what Bonnie and Clyde did until it took off into legend, where it gave rise to a whole deluge of period films recreating the 20s-30s crime era, such as Corman's Bloody Mama (1970), Big Bad Mama (1974), Boxcar Bertha (1972), and The Lady in Red (1979). Bogdanovich's Paper Moon,


It makes sense that Beatty originally thought of Godard or Truffaut for this film as it has a very New Wave feel - the sheer Hollywood glamor or Dunaway and Beatty set them apart from the rest of the cast all of whom resemble dust bowl portraits and 'ugly America." That they regularly send in photos and poetry to the newspapers helps draw the parallels between the burst of creativity from young auteurs in the 70s (which Bonnie and Clyde helped create) and crime. And like all the good films of the outlaw couple there's the sense that once velocity is achieved, there is a collapse of the imaginary, symbolic, and real, especially as involves that most sacred of outlaw spaces, the interior of the car.

2. John Dall and Peggy Cummins - Gun Crazy (1950)

"One of the American cinema’s finest and most influential B-movies — and one of the archetypal “fugitive couple” films — Joseph H. Lewis's legendary, made-on-the-cheap Gun Crazy moulds the cheesy clichés of 1940s crime melodrama into a manic tour-de-force of technique and deadly eroticism. John Dall, as a gun-obsessed sap, and Peggy Cummins, as a predatory femme fatale, are the film’s pistol-packing doomed-couple-on-the-run. Said to have been an inspiration for Godard’s Breathless, admired by the French surrealists as a rare illustration of genuine amour fou, and certainly a seminal influence on Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, this off-beat, original and utterly stylish work has been lauded by the likes of Martin Scorsese and widely hailed as a cult-movie masterpiece. Lewis’s other notable noirs include My Name is Julia Ross and The Big Combo. "The art seems to grow right out of the trashiness...Gun Crazy builds up so much power that comparisons to Tristan and Isolde do not seem entirely farfetched" (David Denby). "Far more energetic than Bonnie and Clyde — the most famous of its many progeny — its intensity borders on the subversive and surreal" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out). 

3. Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger - They Live by Night (1948)
To watch a beautifully restored print of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT is to understand why the French New Wave fell over itself over old Nicholas Ray. His young lovers are framed so that the interior of their car is perfectly framed and full of warm life, like a kid's fort made from couch cushions, with only terrifying darkness of the playroom without. It's only when they leave its safety that trouble looms. These kids never want trouble, but don't know how to say no to sleazy uncle Chicamaw, they just know how to keep running until the darkness of the long arm of the law finally swoops over them like the shadow of death.

4. Burt Reynolds and Sally Field - Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
...Smokey and the Bandit was the 'other' big hit of '77 (after Star Wars of course). Burt Reynolds became a huge star with this, number one, not that it fazed him or inspired better films, but he's superbly funny and even believable as a good old boy who knows how to drive. Sally Field resonates charm and sass in perfect measure, showing that even an actress with formidable chops can whoop it up when necessary. She knows not to show off when sparring with a naturalist like Burt, so instead she starts out from scratch, jumping into his car a full-blown cipher, keying her mannerisms into his, like a jazz bassist keying into the drummer. Her evasive posturing and knack for pulling out truths slowly draws out some things even Burt didn't know were there. It's here in this list because it's emblematic of a time when not just the youth wanted to get in a fast car with a dangerous man and run from a fat lawman, but everyone, even our parents. It was the seventies, the closest we came as a nation to all liking the same things at the same time. Parents learned new curse words by taking their kids to see Bad News Bears, we all danced to "Macho Man" never imagining the Village People were gay, and wife-swapping was as normal at bridge parties as kids sneaking down to steal M&Ms and sips of whiskey sours. Mmmm. A whole fleet of trucker CB radio-style films were dumped on the market after this, and they're all on Netflix streaming if you want to check them out. I tried.... good lord they suck.


5. Geen Davis and Susan Sarandon - Thelma and Louise

“People complained about our suicide,” said Sarandon in an interview with Richard Ouzounian of the Toronto Star. “But I didn’t hear a peep when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did pretty much the same thing. 

Author/activist Judy Rebick, president of the feminist National Action Committee in 1991, liked the movie for its portrayal of a powerful female friendship. “They fought back…they were free. They liberated themselves,” she said in a telephone interview with Diebel. The movie showed Melanie Caplan, fragrance consultant in her 50s, that you can be powerful and not give in. “They controlled their destiny when women were [and still are generally] being portrayed as victims.” In a world where they are expected to be rescued by men, I might add. Near the end of the movie, the sympathetic Arkansas police detective played by Harvey Keitel—their shining knight—does try and fails to “rescue” them.  

That’s what the controversial ending was about: not giving in. Not giving in to a false “god”. Not giving in to the imposed rules and strictures of an androcratic* world. Not giving in to feelings of unworthiness and victimization. Not giving in to the oppression of the sacred feminine wisdom, the goddess in all of us. Celebrating The Bitch. ” --Nina Munteanu (The Alien Next Door)

6. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette - True Romance
I thought about putting in the Winona Ryder-Christian Slater mix of the very popular and influential HEATHERS, but I object to the feel-bad use of 'no faith' philosophy in which Winona's character ultimately rejects her handsome beau's homicidal impulses and moves to save the school and prevent further mayhem. It's like bitch who do you think you is? Are you going to go all Loretta Young and confess your involvement in the earlier faked suicides? I freakin' doubt it. This is supposed to be a revenge fantasy against all the hateful subgroups of high school, so indulge a little! As if we didn't know the difference between films and real life! As if we might see a film like Heathers and start shooting up our schools! Never!

At any rate, Quentin Tarantino is a great one for redressing these kinds of choices in other movies, even if here he only wrote the screenplay and the late, great Tony Scott directs. There's a key scene that reflects the key difference early on: Slater has just killed his new wife's old pimp and shot up the brothel / drug den where she used to work and has returned to her all bloody and hopped up on killing. She starts to freak out and he braces himself for yet another moral lecture like he had to endure from Winona in Heathers five years earlier, but NO!!! She's just deeply moved by the true romance of his gesture. This, my friends, is a woman.


7. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen - Badlands (1973)

Now TRUE ROMANCE has that weird steel drum soundtrack and if you see this film you know it comes from this film, a clear inspiration. Director Terence Malick is now known for big pompous masterpieces of cinematography like TREE OF LIFE. But before all that he stunned the world with this. Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek both became stars overnight and from then on every time a redhead was cast in a film you had to shoot her hair reflecting the setting rays of the evening sun.

All of which I mean as prelude to saying the film itself manages to be beautiful and disturbing, raising as it does the question of Spacek's character's involvement in the actual murders (it's based of course on the Charlie Starkweather case). What's brave about this film is that it acts as kind of sobering counter-dote to the giddy high wire bullet-huffing of Bonnie and Clyde and all their breakneck escapes from the sheriff. These kids might be playing outlaws on the run but really they're just sick. Spacek's voiceover narration (another tac borrowed for True Romance) lets you know she's not playing with a full deck, on the other hand, maybe she's faking to avoid too much jail time. Starkweather/ Sheen meanwhile, just rolls with it, anxious to get his picture in the paper. In its odd, beautiful, quiet way the film is like a broken down Chevy at the crossroads between the ugliness of Columbine era / Natural Born Killers and the old-fashioned fantasias of They Live By Night and Gun Crazy.  The outlaw couple romance exists in this film, but only as long as this couple stays isolated, adrift in the empty off-road spaces of the midwest, their own desolate forest of Arden, where their mutual craziness can intertwine like two sick vines that make an even sicker vine.

8. Anna Karina and Jean Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Now it seems marvelously modern, hip and edgy, because after several viewings it becomes apparent that Belmondo's jaded intellectual husband is fully aware this sexy babysitter he's running away with is only going to ruin his life. All the best noir heroes have no delusions about the unfaithful duplicity of their femme fatales, and they just roll with it anyway, aching to see how their dicking over is going to happen. It's sad, because as that song in West Side Story goes, when "love comes so strong / there is no right or wrong / your love is your love." Even if it means you're going to die fairly soon, and are already knee-deep in gun-running and terrorism. Karina makes his defection from life, lover and liberty understandable, she's so hot. And conceivably the husband would be less attractive to convince as a bourgeois gadabout but Belmondo adds self-reflexive distance cool. Even if you don't understand half of the fractured stuff he's saying, it's hilarious. And they get a second chance the way few of their types get. They get, in fact, the sky and the sea, or at least blue ektachrome.

9. Billy the Kid and Captain America - Easy Rider (1968)
The problem with these kids is, they want to be outlaws but got no one to run from. We're supposed to believe a guy in a gooney chopper like Fondas' is going to fill his gas tank with enough rolled up hundreds to retire in Florida with? And one piddling yayo deal with Phil Spector is going to fund it all? And why would a good-looking boy like Fonda want to retire in Florida with a dimwitted stoner townie like Billy? Different times, man. They bump fenders with some redneck diners but aside from them there's no one chasing this pair, and it's only when Jack Nicholson hitches on for awhile that they find any kind of soul. Even their acid trip is murky, sad, and fish-eyed. Dig, man. Dig. But there's a lot more going on here. Easy Rider was the film wherein the soundtrack was culled entirely from the Dennis Hopper LP collection, setting a trend for this sort of film. The Lazlo Kovacs photography is heaven-sent and I've seen it a hundred times, yet not once in the last 20 years!

10. Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw - The Getaway (1972)
Here's a pair of actors that became romantically entangled over the course of making a film, and it shows and works in the course of the narrative. Masterfully directed by Sam Peckinpah, it captures the initial coldness of a couple who've spend the last few years apart and missing each other, only to find a huge wedge between them once they're finally talking outside of a wire screen (he's been in jail for armed robbery). But they work it out through ballets of orgiastic violence against a bunch of slimy, cold-dead rednecks manned by sleazy Texas politico Ben Johnson, who insists Steve pull a bank job with Bo  Hopkins and Al Lettieri. Naturally things go bad really fast. But Peckinpah is in peak form, the driving is insane and the chemistry between the beautiful but remote Ali McGraw and the beautiful but remote Steve McQueen is remarkable, and it has the best escape-through-a-garbage-truck in the history of chase outlaw cinema, as well as some controversial and realistic slapping. Based on a book by the amazing Jim Thompson and coated with sweaty, vivid detail, the ending comes as a legitimate surprise. And as far as archetypal couples on the run go, this is one of the rare ones where the couple are already married, both badasses, and neither much of a gabber. And when they finally start rekindling it's so slow and natural, with ebb and flow of attraction and disdain just like real couples, that you genuinely root for them to make it. Since you aren't sure they will, either as a couple or out alive, is such a rarity for this sort of film that for once there actually seems to be something at stake.
11. Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci - Monster (2003)

 12. William Powell and Kay Francis - One Way Passage (1932)
The chemistry between Francis and Powell is electrifying yet urbane and smooth. He’s a caught criminal sailing home to face execution and her character is dying and only has a few weeks to live. An ocean liner trip from the far east to San Francisco is all the time they have. Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies, trying to make mothers out of each other so they can cry in a lap again. ONE WAY PASSAGE, by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to their deaths like it’s just another ocean voyage. Unlike the 'sea and sky' of PIERROT LE FOU, their love lives inside broken champagne glasses, the stems crossed forever... until the broom.

The rock musical has seemingly vanished from the landscape, not counting fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA. I do not count them - the former type since they are freak, fringe event; the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows began. And try as you might you can't count stuff like CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM as rock. In fact, original mainstream rock is almost gone from out the musical landscape, replaced by genres aimed at each micro-demographic: bright, brash Disney pop for the tweens; snotty emo for the teens; 'cock rock' for the blue collar guys on their way to work; 'classic rock' for when they drive home. But there was a time when the rock musical soared on wings of brilliance. I'm talking of course of the late 60s-early 70s -the age when impassioned singing met electric guitars and funky bass, and bi-curious guys in silver make-up and long hair strutted shirtless, and God was not ignored.


Broadway was always a little ahead of the curve, for you must remember that Times Square at this point in history was riddled with grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, drugs and--most shocking of all to our Agent Anita-poisoned minds, flagrant homosexuality (ala MIDNIGHT COWBOY). When film versions of JESUS CHRIST, SUPERSTAR (1973), GODSPELL (1973), and HAIR (1979) were presenting midnight cinema audiences with mixed-race cliques of dancing counterculture youth singing about Jesus, Broadway was showing the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA! HAIR was clothed on film but originally rife with nudity. Surrounded by the sleaze of Times Square, Broadway's mere nudity and simulate coupling managed to stay somehow clean and so showed Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that those scruffy homeless kids on the street might be disguised angels, so treat them right and tip the girls. Books like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying with its ode to the "zipless f-ck," the tawdry glam gossip of Rona Barett, and later, even the ingenious cute old lady delivery system of healthy sexual advice, ex-Israeli sniper Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women were enjoying their new orgasms and the world was just a little less uptight, and we kids were listening in, soaking up the loose prana with our hungry spinal snake-sponges.


But in the midst of all this came the arrival of my least favorite drug of all time -- cocaine. And if the hippy love-in zipless f-ck era was winding down, well, there was always the other extreme: disco. With its dance-friendly music and glittery fashion, disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan neo-decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for children of all ages could revel in disco. Even if there parents wouldn't let them see it because of its R-rating, kids like me were dancing at birthday parties nonstop to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  And whatever 'free love' had represented before was being subsumed in blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and nostalgia for the earlier decades, before the counterculture's paisley rise, i.e. the 40s.


But then disco and the disco musical died, a heart attack right on the dance floor which had already been converted into a roller rink... And how did it do that, you ask? XANADU (1980)!

Little newborn disco wasn't without parents and grandparents; it was of course the glitzy empty shell throwback to the 30s-40s dance music scene, the swing and sweet, as it was called. Swing was the 40s version of rock, cooked up by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman (at least for mainstream white America), and sweet was sappy ballads by radio tenors, meant to lull nervous brides waiting for the men to come home from WW2, and ease the worry of 19th century-born parents that their children's generation was going to hell by daring to raise their hem lines. It was only natural then that the re-emergence of cocaine, the drug of choice for turn-of-the-century soda fountain barflies, would lead to re-emergence of the sweet/swing emptiness of pure 'dance' music, so Donna Summer and the Bee-Gees replaced the Byrds and the Eagles at the top of the rock charts, and we disco balled our way back into this sexless yet tightly-trousered sweet/swing dichotomy.
 
We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair album cover in our parent's record collection, but found the electric light cover too disturbing (though not as nightmarish as Sgt. Pepper's), but we loved John Travolta from Welcome Back, Kotter, so seeing him on the Saturday Night Fever cover made everything all right. He had the working class Italian vibe we were now familiar with via ROCKY, and the Fonz (and Cha-Chi, and Carmine from Laverne & Shirley) but he could also sing, and acted stupid with a winning smile that let you know he was far smarter than he'd ever let on. As long as he was connected to it, disco could cross over to suburbia, where, as I've said before, we loved The Village People because they were dressed like all our favorite icons as kids - cowboys, Native Americans, motorcycle cops - and not one of us ever imagine they were, you know... not straight.


Meanwhile we kids also found the sudden relative sexlessness of, say, variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie (above left), and Shields and Yarnell very soothing. I recall that towards the end of the 70s sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I molested two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was ten years-old. I'd lie in bed and marvel at my erections while indulging in twisted fantasies involving being a naked, collared slave to Susan Salter, the cute blonde girl in my first grade class. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges.
And mind you I had no orgasms during this stretch -- I had been led to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. Masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act that very few people actually did. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground.  It was only natural that when the right bad influence friend came along, I would give up girls and turn my attention to war, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, the sort that wouldn't make my 'situation' any more painful than it needed to be. And so.... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

Sandahl Bergman at far right

By 1979 GREASE had broken the mold on 'the past' (it played in theaters for years) and Happy Days were here again. And you know what else was a hit on the charts? Some piece of crap called "Disco Duck" - the guy who 'sang' it--Rick Dees-- wondered what to do for a follow-up? So he came out with "Disco Gorilla" - i.e. "Discor-illa" (It's so cheesy I can't even post it but you can check it out here). In other words, now disco was almost solely in the realm of children. We inherited all the fads and crazes after the adults had moved on. For example, we were crazy for our "Keep on Streakin'" T-shirts, even though none of us had ever streaked, or seen a streaker.




GREASE IS THE WORD:

GREASE (1978) and its late 50s greaser milieu was helped by the enormous popularity of Happy Days. Henry Winkler aka Arthur Fonzarelli was wanted to play the part that later went to Vinne Barbarino aka John Travolta. Some angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums! They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years and years, comparable only to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Frampton Comes Alive! But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar Bronx-ishness, Grease was smartly moved to the suburbs, to Burbank CA in fact, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming.

Travota on Captain and Tenille

Anyway, it was a monster hit. And so why not merge the GREASE with the NIGHT and add the then emerging roller disco craze, throw in a fantasy element and an old duffer or two, to do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop?


However, 1980 was not 1978. And while great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta. They made him a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in FEVER), and put Olivia Newton John in as a muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly to open a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and big band fads like zoot suits and Tommy Dorsey collide like a roller skating accident with ELO, The Tubes, and discomania and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop. Just compare the two stills below - top from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade. In EARTH, Rita Hayworth is Terpsichore, a muse who comes down from Olympus when she learns a Broadway show is mocking the old gods. 

Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?

 Just because GREASE worked, though, there was no reason to think you could 'modernize' the 40s as easily as the late 50s. The glamor and elegance of the 40s big bands are forced to collide in one particularly painful number, with the raw energy of the Tubes, signifying the emerging hair metal scene, and everyone, old Gene Kelly included, end up on roller skates. You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors, nearly empty sets, and cocaine, that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time, literally here as the Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" The Tubes do all right belting "Won't take backseat / tonight!", but this aint no marriage made in heaven.
 

Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)

It could have been a tie-in of sorts with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, NEW YORK NEW YORK (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg. XANADU was pretty egg-like itself, and not even a ripe one.

So without long hair and sleaze to produce hand-me-down pop culture iconocgraphy the decadence was inhaled up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, it was as safe as B-12 can be, leaving us with no choice to find the stuff straight from the source. And so it was that as children our interest in sex was rekindled. Among other things, the 80s brought a chance for us all--parents and kids alike-- to finally see X-rated movies. As with any huge sea change, the censors and critics need time to catch up and for awhile, freedom reigned and every child above 12 saw all there was to see, all at once. Censorship had chastened TV for so long we felt protected from anything it could deliver on our invulnerable home screen. The huge backlash against pedophiles and Satanic child molestation rings presumably all over the suburbs was no doubt inspired by seeing just how base our fellow man was. In the 70s we had forgotten to be ashamed of our bodies and our desires, perhaps because we just never really saw them so nakedly.



So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool, and everyone was invited to the roller rink, so we dutifully trudged as massive multple family packs to see it. And then fell asleep trying to make it to the big finale. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974), we in the too young for R category had dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just went off towards the screen and rode on the swings and then fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape. When we emerged, half-asleep, dizzy from the round and round roller rink musical scenes, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John treacle, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede. The concrurrent style of rock and roll, i.e. the Tubes and ELO, would survive the disaster, to mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco began to implode. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.


Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind the huge hit GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed so bad XANADU looked like STAR WARS by comparison. And in the case of both of them, very little of that money is visible on the screen. Sure there's dancers and glitz, but the blocking, pacing, and acting is a mess. Now I'm just speculating, understand, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr. But cocaine is all over the 1978-80 wave of films, where once genius staggering talents deliver barely-in-focus confusion and just remembering your lines is considered snnnorrrt heheheh Oscar-worthy, baby!

In short, 'family entertainment' could only make it as far back as the 50s for nostalgia, which our parents remembered and we loved because of the Fonz. Any further back and no one really cared, except old people who got senior citizen discounts anyway so they didn't impact the box office. The days of romancing a past decade with music and glamor were over, at least until the 90s, when suddenly the 70s looked like the last great, free unprotected moment America was ever going to have.

But on the plus side, we have Turner Classic Movies. So forget about the blues / tonight! And never take condoms from strangers. (to be continued)

SPECIES (1995) gets a bad rap. Hey, the bad rap is just because it's got huge flaws and an overly sexy plot. Say what you want about the script and directing the whole thing movies very fast and well. The dialogue is laughable in spots but it's good to laugh, sometimes. THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER, I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE, PLAN NINE --they are laughable too, and look at the love they get! Every so often, you see, whether intentionally or not, a film's unique badness DNA mutates into something profound, commenting on the human, experience in  ways more mainstream, 'better' films--chained up in groupthink, second-guessing and censorship--will never be able to. But a certain breed of science fiction and horror film, unintentionally, gets deep into the reasons we, or at least I, love movies. In short, they are powerful myths made all the more resonant for being told by an excited eight year-old rather than a dry college professor.


Sil (Natasha Henstridge) is a fast-growing hybrid of human DNA and alien DNA raised--she grows up in mere weeks, and blossoms from there. Like Jane Eyre, she starts out as a different actress, in a drab, stern environment (the lab) and then escapes... on a train ---which is one of the reasons it's such a great movie if you love trains -- into LA, looking to breed with any man not encumbered by faulty genes, and at the rate her kind respawn, she could repopulate the city within a few months, like a virus. As the scientist who tried to gas her with cyanide before she bolted, Fitch (Ben Kingsley) would say, "She's... that fast." You would think such a dire threat would get call out the national guard, or at least inspire proper tailoring, but Fitch moseys around Sil's bloody trail in an oversize suit jacket and black T-shirt, sooo 90s, with a 'hand-picked team' of four civilian consultants. Sociologist Stephen (Alfred Molina) is set up as a somewhat lonely / horny but friendly guy - ever trying to score with ladies at the hotel but then settling for the platonic company of the 'hand-picked' telepath, Dan (Forest Whitaker), whose empathic statements are always comically obvious, such as "Her eyes are in front so she can judge the distance to her prey." There's also the MILF-ish Dr. Laura (Marg Helgenberger) and Preston (Michael Madsen) as the tough guy.

 


For the unattractive nerd trio of Dan, Stephen, and Fitch, Syl's chosen killing floor --LA--is a hostile, uncaring place. Pres asks a club owner if any playas left with any hot blondes before they got there, and notes there is "only prime players, no assholes" and suddenly the whole depressing shill of night life is felt in the bones. For Sil, this nerd quintet are the assholes, a gaggle of merciless cockblockers with the power to call down air strikes on her car or trace her use of stolen credit cards before her current victim can even get, as they say, the tip in. Ain't that always the way?

With its 'mobile population' and sun-baked lonesome, Los Angeles bends and shifts to accommodate Sil's killing/sex spree, with the team of humans scrambling after her the way the mainstream ugly America follows hipster artist into gentrified neighborhoods, eager to live in thriving artistic center, and in so doing turning said 'hood into just another overpriced chain store strip mall, forcing the young artists to be on the road again, ever searching for a sanctuary from the tedium of normal people.


Don't all of us have sexual fantasies with people we know are bad for us, that are continually prevented from coming true by cockblocking friends, the law, our parents, lack of a condom, no erection, sudden eruptions of crying. Wouldn't we all have to take Henstridge home if she threw herself into our arms? Would knowing the truth about her make any difference? Sure, Syl's allure is a Venus Flytrap genetic con job, but such a concept is particularly apt in an age where unattractive metallic mutants hide behind fake Facebook accounts? Just watch SPECIES and then CATFISH and then kill yourself, probably.


We live in an age of media saturation: models smile blandly on every available screen and page, this is only natural; our fantasies are never meant to come true. If they do, it's best to look that gift horse in the mouth and search for retractible fangs. But we never do. In an age of digital surface only LA has depth, since it's where the beauty goes to be pixelized, so the zombie Angelinos Syl encounters never dare register as more than easily dispatched cliches, and in her aching beauty, Henstridge's Sil embodies that ghost image of Los Angels better than anyone - you're seduced by the surface, then gutted by the ugly CGI banshee within; you get a five minute window to mate with 3-D perfection, and then you're suffocated by the digital Giger tongue. Welcome to Blu-ray!


Luckily, we have at least one other classic Henstridge performance, as the druggie cop who teams with Ice Cube to battle Goth zombie mutants in John Carpenter's underrated comedy masterpiece, GHOSTS OF MARS (2001O. Check out my piece from Acidemic #1, Death-Driving Ms. Henstridge.

To those of us who recognize her special gifts, who know how to appreciate the beauty of reticence, part two of BREAKING DAWN proves a hilarious, moveable feast where we get to see a new, ass-kicking side of Kristen Stewart. Now officially a vampire, she looks more alive than she did as a human. It's as if being dead really is like a weekend in Cancun--despite what the preachy 'I wish someone had tried to save my soul before I too was turned' types might say--and since Bella is a "newborn" she can outvamp all those who previously lorded over her. Gone is the usual insecure adrift ghostly-pallored innocent. In her stead, a monster mom. In a way, this new Bella is so refreshingly cool and violent, she might be played by Chloe Grace Moretz!

Forgive me if I sound enamored of it all. It's more argumentative than anything. I'm now almost old as Bella's dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), was at the start of the series (2008) so my view of the series has changed, from bemused, slightly intoxicated outsider fondness (and nostalgia for my year of living in the Pacific Northwest) to mopey adoration for NEW MOON's whole 'Baby Jane-en-verso' aging ur-text, to weary respect. Now with the final installment I am already way past the point of feeling a direct connection to my old awkward high school passions. When I was Twilight-appropriate age I was all in the comic book Elfquest, and had fantasized my way into a very similar tribe, the Wolf Riders. I tried, really tried, after one achingly perfect, mystical dream, to disappear into the Elfquestverse, the way I'm sure kids do today with the Twilight - indeed they are similar sagas, tribal fantasias of belonging with the cool kid clique-- but enough time's passed that the dream belongs to someone else, some different assemblage of cells and thoughts, one still strung-out by public school days and lonesome comic book night teen trauma.


With my  first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09,  I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me."  But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly, like a common human, and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just kept coming, as did new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grew at an exponential rate and I just couldn't keep up.

That's why in this last and final incarnation, me older than a mummy or so it feels, the TWILIGHT saga is no longer a contrast or fantasy or escape but a breath of misty old growth forest air, because it outdistances ADD trendiness via teen Methuseles whose every... sentence... takes whole Antonioni films to come out... but the molasses pace is what gives the films their dreamy kick -- one has time to wrestle with the Big Issues of life, not just as a teen girl or old man, but both rolled into one immortal soul; anima and ego swirled together, a Benjamina Button conjoined twin set, one aging chronologically the other the reverse, until they meet as grandparent and newborn child, and then disappear beyond the veil.


In this fifth and final installments the Cullens need help to raise an army of their fellow beings to fight the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, come to wipe out the clan on a false charge (as the Volatari do nearly every film). This leads to a gathering of other tribes in the Cullen's defense, all with special powers and stories of fighting in the revolution and war of 1812, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. It's carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the dark of their seat he or she fits right into the mix.

I may not be able to see the youth clearly now, the world in my ball has gone dim; they shimmer like ghosts in the glow of their digital screen surroundings and my glasses seem to work less and less well with each passing film--but I can still meet them halfway, at the forest of one of their own primal mythic worlds, where everyone is centuries-old and frozen at youth like movie star images on TCM, or how I still see myself as 21 in the bathroom mirror when the Baby Jane clarity is fogged by the steam of showers or my not wearing my glasses. I can still meet them at the halfway point where those who strive for eternal youth settle for an early death. Call my deconstruction of the series dangerous to its intended youthful demographic but there is a rich modernist ancestry to that subtext, as I've pointed out in a past post, particularly to films from the 1930s like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, THE WIND, and MOROCCO.


Any true horror film knows that real ambivalent attitudes towards life and death are rare even in the classics; they mistake gore for subversion. In Meyers' work the ambivalence is so pronouned it should scare parents even more than it does. The parallels of the Cullen clan with some kind of cult or drug scene are never avoided and parents should be scared that their impressionable TWILIGHT fan daughters will be predisposed to roll with the next pale, good-looking junky clan that happens by. Such worries were perhaps dispelled, allegedly, originally, through the popular press's misinterpretation of the series as advocating cellibacy, but celibacy isn't always adherence to a restrictive social order --it can be the reverse, especially in permissive times; it can be a renouncement of societal expectations and the impetus towards blind reproduction, marriage, peer pressure, and male desire. Not only do Edward and Bella wait for their wedding to 'do it' but once they do it instantly triggers an accelerated pregnancy that kills the mortal Bella. Not since SPECIES (my explanation here) has a fantasy film so cleverly tapped into our secret revulsion towards the Cronenbergian biological express train nightmare underbelly of sexual desire. Once you slow down time you can speed it up too. God drags pregnancy out as long as possible so the full horror of it doesn't have time to settle.


And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding. Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as anyone who hears about reacts in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn even by worried parents who've never seen it or read it. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and Mormon or not that's so punk rock!


Another punk element is the scene with Bella coming home and trying to explain why she's not dead to her one-note worrywart dad Charlie; he doesn't like it, but what choice does he have? Where can you find a deprogrammer in rural Washington State? In the 00s? Meanwhile his granddaughter grows way too fast, and Bella's cold to the touch and has weird eyes, or uses eye drops so he won't see how red her eyes are. But if Charlie says anything to anyone about how weird it all is, she's going to bounce and he can't deal with that and thus it is yet again that Bella uses her dream child to dominate not just Edward (she forces his hand so he has to turn her into a vampire) but her father as well. To create a situation where your father has no choice but to allow you freedom to be stoned and/or stone, to leave you and your bad boy alone as immortal statues left for centuries in overgrown gardens, hidden from his meddling overprotection, this is a situation to be devoutly wished by any and all 6-17 year-olds.  In previous films Bella has indirectly attacked Charlie via nightmare screaming, and the reckless pursuit of danger (the only thing that makes a phantom image of Edward appear as if a symptom of adrenalin-poisoning) but nothing beats a miracle gro baby. And besides, dads in coming-of-age myths exist mainly to be ignored and left to stew and think about how they need to give up trying to tell us kids what to do.


Understanding the lost ability of these kind of 'child revenge' sagas can shed light on our darker instincts, and help us in understanding just why American folk heroines are so different than Europe's Red Riding Hoods and Gretels. Through myth we can embrace the irony: America's population is composed of wanderers and the descendants of wanderers, Ellis Island, or Vikings or colonials, or slave-owning ex-Irish penal colonists. The rest of the world is full of people willing to stay where they are; their fidgety neighbors who used to ramble on about their plans for exploring are all long-since moved to America. And so it is that we in the USA find fantasizing about wandering an unrewarding use of time. We have to do it for real, as our ancestors did or not at all. Our fantasies are of staying still, but in a new home where we live surrounded by cool peers-- Hogwarts, the Shire, Forks, as long as parents aren't there. Those who paint the best fantasy homes get visited by others, until a world beautiful is created online, only to have marauders break in and slaughter everyone during the big wedding.

This is our history as a nation and a world, but for vampires its history without the forgetfulness that goes on as generations snake forward through the tunnel of time, leaving only bad habits and alcoholism in their wake. In the Twilight realm, the original explorers who left Europe in the 1800s are all still here, and still in their hot early 20s, and willing to be friends with your sorry ass, thus elevating you to some Wagnerian height of 'belonging' ecstasy, a height missing from your usual low-to-the-ground-so-some-dick-sitting-behind-you-doesn't-flick-your-ears high school height. Here at last, those troglodyte ear-flickers are devoured and forgotten. If each successive generation is just a little more slackjawed than the last, gone soft from suburban slovenliness, then these vampires and shape-shifters represent a chance to undo them all, to clean house, to eradicate the slow moving herd members.


Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby, such as Renesmee, the child of Edward and Bella. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being supposedly cute. Her smiling face has floated in a CGI mist over enough younger bodies that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy. That weird creative choice makes her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley, but it works. It serves the story, which centers around the child having to prove it's not a vampire but a hybrid, not just between vampires and humans, but between dream and reality, digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback.


If you've read the book, then you know what happens and then doesn't happen never happened, but it's still a pretty great surprise, a Sam Peckinpah / Walter Hill style bloodbath even Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich franchises at their bloodiest couldn't match. There's an eerie silence that results when characters you've spent the movie getting to know are suddenly absent, with a snap or a blam, as final and startling as an introduction to the finality of death as any child could hope to find. If you do manage to become involved in the Peckinpah-ish finality of it, if you know the sad desperation of the lonesome teenage suburbanite for whom no amount of friends and super powers can compete with that Truman Show sense of isolation, then you know how such blanket cold can radiate so warmly, like a wedding cake corpse cooling in an unheated winter theater. In our lonesomest hours we'll risk our lives just to feel connected, even if that connecting involves the sacrifice of the last few vestiges of your mortal reality on the altar of the fantasy franchise, as long as you both shan't live.

These days they're all but absent, aside from the work of auteurs who can do whatever they want, like Tarantino, PT Anderson, HBO, and Spielberg, but 40 years ago there was an abundance of movies set decades earlier, back to the days of prohibition, swing, racism, and cigarette holders. Why? What was the appeal? Was it because all that old furniture--none of it disposalble pre-fab stuff like we have today-- was still around, and the costume storage was still accessible in a still undead studio system?  It perhaps says more about memory and the human need to evolve at least in clothing and car design if not actually as a country to look back to those wild carefree days. It's more than nostalgia, the 70s for the 30s just as the 90s has for the 70s; it's like a haunted decade ransacking its grandmothers' attic to find its voice before its censorious 50s mom got home.


Confession - I've never been a fan of period pieces - something about the use of old clothes I find depressing. I have a weird sense of 'virtual smell' with movies, and in period pieces, unless they're really well done, I can smell that old clothes thrift store smell, and remember the frustration that nothing vintage ever fits me and lord I have tried and the trying has left me feeling locked out of history. And other things not to like - being set in the 20s-30s is an excuse for a lot of actors to get lazy, to rely on schtick, on Vaudeville patter that was corny even then. And I hate those ragtime-era plaids, those ornate feathered hairdos, though the 1900s-20s has a different flavor than the 30s, a worse flavor or at least I used to think so.

But the 70s' infatuation with the Depression, likely borne from the successes of BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE STING, an economic recession, and the popularity of cocaine and Vaudeville recycling variety TV shows, is a big exception to my overall period malaise. Why? Maybe because the 70s were the first overly permissive 'anything goes' decade since the Depression, since the crash and production code. If you doubt, just realize how much more liberated I was as a kid than I am now, even as an adult. There are only so many cigarettes I can smoke in my own apartment before I feel the weight of the world crush me with its the heft of its snooty nanny-state rejection.

If you want proof of how great the 70s were, just realize that the 70s are still in fashion in Europe and South America. They never left. They were too smart to just go all pouffy shoulders and crazy 80s hair just because the Brits on MTV were doing it. They knew the 70s was the best. Since they never went 80s they didn't have to go all grunge in the 90s to try and forget them. In fact, in NYC there was a bit of a jazz age revival in the loungecore scene, which was quickly overrun by swing dancing, like the goddamn 40s were happening all over again.

The 1970s were uniquely liberated thanks to drugs, wife-swapping, est, and a post-hippie middle class. As a kid therein I became a bit enamored with the older period depicted in the popular films I was never allowed to see. I couldn't even stay up to the end of most movies we saw on evening TV as a family as they ended at 11 and my bedtime was 10. It left me scarred and angry but also created a sense that films were mystical things --I often dreamed endings far wilder than any real life film could provide. Meanwhile I regularly marveled at the newspaper ads and TV commercials for movies that were coming through town. So I was very aware of certain styles and some I did not care for, like those damn flapper hats that hid all the hair worse than a nun (even as a kid I loved beautiful hair).

The Fortune

The disco look of glam was a direct relative of the 20s art deco look, the 30s films of night clubs with their white decor, endless floorshows, whiskey pints wrapped in cloth napkins and delivered under the table instead of on it by waiters during prohibition finding a perfect collary to the selling and doing of lines of coke along the disco club tables, as dancers paused for quick snorts in the laps of guys in leisure suits, their sweat electric, their skin shiny with reptilian slimes of desire, cologne and dance floor sex oozing from inside their unporous open-chested polyester shirts. Doing a period film was the perfect excuse to conjure the class divides of the great depression, the tuxedoes and glamorous gowns Hollywood dress designers still knew how to make, and maybe even had made back in the day, and maybe still had in storage deep in the wardrobes of Paramount.

But there's a deeper flow than mere fashion, the 30s/70s times, a 40 year gap, so in the 1930s they loved films set in the 1890s, ala the gay 90s, wherein the folks was gay, and not in a Depression. But hindsight makes the strait-jacket of production codes sweet by comparison.






A spate of period piece gangster films came out in the late 60s, early 70s and while BONNIE AND CLYDE might be thought of as the most influential. Several of Roger Corman's gangster films predate it, such as his ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE which came out the year before, in 1967. Either way a flood of Corman product followed, too vast to list all of here, as well as major label contributions like DILLINGER.





Actions of the Great Depression, true stories not just of mobsters but of legendary hobos, tortured artists, social activists, writers. and chicanerous mountebanks:







In the interest of keeping it fresh, there was also going farther back, to the turn of the century and the era of Ragtime. When the film RAGTIME came out there was a lot of hooplah not least for Jimmy Cagney's return to acting (he plays a racist fire chief who sets off a riot). A biopic of Scott Joplin predates it, as does other films set in the era (one of my least favorite as I despise those plaid suits the men wear, as on the poster for HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK and GREASER'S PALACE (below). Coppola also visits the era for sections of GODFATHER 2. 



By the 1980s, with the inability of XANADU to recreate a yen for 40s swing, and the inability of 1941, UNDER THE RAINBOW, AT LONG LAST LOVE, NEW YORK NEW YORK or HEAVEN'S GATE to turn a profit, period pieces were out.


If anyone had any doubts about that, CITY HEAT in 1984 was the bomb icing on the cake. The cake itself was a huge loss of cash, time, and good will sunk into Coppola's THE COTTON CLUB.  The news covered the disastrous feud between producer Robert Evans and Coppola when the film went over budget ond shooting was endlessly delayed and even half the people working on it were badmouthing it. But I think Evans was right. Coppola ended up with final cut and based on what Evans said about working with Coppola on the first GODFATHER film we can assume what he objected to was Coppola's overediting. The big crosscut killings in GODFATHER (between all the murder's and his nephew's christening) worked because there had been so much slow ominous build-up, i.e. Evans made Coppola lengthen the shots and slow parts down so the speedy parts would have contrast. Even by GODFATHER 2 it was getting cliche'd to have big violent scene crosscuts with a musical or ceremonial performance, and that's all COTTON is. So as far as we were concerned, that kind of thing was over - period.

I realize looking over this bunch of cool film children that I don't really hate kids, just the no-neck monsters the way 40s-50s Hollywood sacharinized them. The fact is, most children are monsters, capable of extraordinary savagery unless their empathic response kicks in or they are effectively subdued by strong adults.  Pregnant women are often kept away from the crops and gambling tables in small villages because children are considered to be demonic until old enough to be initiated into the tribe and thus recognized as actual people. The only equivalent we have today to those initiations is christening and that which goes beyond the symbolic, circumcision.

Of course it's not that simple in modern times. Circumcision and christening guarantee nothing, and even if empathy is developed, it can often be stunted, intentionally or otherwise. There are those who only care about themselves and their family, and 'God' and every other living organism is either food or an enemy.  At the extreme are the PETA member crying in the meat aisle at the carnage everyone else sees as food. There are some kids better off not having an empathic response, like the hero of Lord of the Flies. 

The list below rounds up an array of 'wild' children, the ones who either refuse to be inducted into any society which attacks them for being bad athletes, scary hybrids, or casual drug users whose word is never believed if it conflicts with even the shadiest of parental authority's second-hand opinions; or there is no adult society to offer this induction, or the adult supervising them is her or himself an outcast (The Piano, Paper Moon).


But no  matter what the root of it, we secretly thrill to see amok children. We all still harbor resentments against the adults who symbolically castrated us--teachers, cops, parents, neighbors, bullies--a secret stash of inner savagery just waiting to come out, as evinced by the amount of young men who harbor big stashes of automatic weapons. After all, as kids we're expected to lay down our arms and surrender to a system that, in the end, expects us to follow rules it itself doesn't follow, to be truthful even though it will never believe us anyway, and to make no fuss or argument when our basic human rights are stripped away in the name of our own 'safety.' No wonder NRA members are so paranoid about having their guns taken away! They feel like they finally have their balls back, and now Obama wants to cut them off all over again.

But these archetypal children embody much more than balls. We exorcise and exercise our repressed inner child vicariously through them, and the result is both cautionary and exhilarating. Like our previous entry, the Outlaw Couple, we go along for the ride like nervous virgins in the back seat of a metalhead's Trans Am. These kids are within all of us, for the 'inner child' is neither good nor evil, but exists outside of those notions. A sweet angel of a girl might torture her gerbil on a royal whim; a boy who's normally nice to his little brother may suddenly sucker punch him and never really think out why. These children are not all vicious or violent, but all are 'free' more or less of the confines of the social order. They either openly attack, exploit, or avoid the adult world. They live out our secret wish to blow things up, to lie, cheat, kill, and steal in the time before things like guilt, empathy, and responsibility for our own actions soured up our sense of freedom.

1. Student body of New Grenada - Over the Edge (1979)
It's important to note that OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find ourselves in MONKEY BUSINESS, with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater, the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy zipper. (See: Vandal in the Wind -2011)

2. Tatum O'Neal as Addie (1973) - Paper Moon (1973) / Anna Paquin as Flora - The Piano (1993)
Im these two examples the 'only' child rides around with an unhinged single parent: Flora is the translator of her weird mom's sign language, and though mom has a hard time adjusting to the stark oddness of the wild swampy New Zealand landscape and sweatily repressed husband, Flora becomes--with the help of some amateur theater fairy wings--a diminutive Ariel / Caliban of the forest, finally even bonding with the repressed father and ratting her mom out about her affair with Harvey Keitel to demonstrate her heedless ambivalence as far as consequences to her own jealousy. Like Keitel's character she takes on a Hearts of Darkness-style going native quality, but fits in with the white world too, as needed.

Con artist Addie hooks up with her dimwit father and moves through the landscape with similar ease while he struggles and flails. It's great to see her smoking in bed and listening avidly to Jack Benny on the radio (O'Neal played a similar character, a few years older / later to drunk dad Walter Matthau in our next choice...

3. Full team - The Bad News Bears (1976)
As a kid I was always picked last for teams at gym and recess--my scars still haven't healed. For all I suffered, the Bad News Bears would be my chosen team. It's pretty cool how many of them have the same long blonde hair, like an army of Viking rejects. A couple of ringers almost win the big game for them, but then coach Walter Matthau says fuck it and lets the bench warmers take a turn; who cares if they win? The beers that continually flow along with the curse words help keep the game in cosmic perspective. Robert Aldrich might have directed this with a little more vitriol, but in its own sloppy way, the film is just about perfect and these snarling little ragamuffins are like a slightly less violent and organized version of the Over the Edge bunch; rather than compete for the acceptance of a society that has rejected them they prefer to reject society. When Tanner (Chris Barnes) says 'take that trophy and shove it up your ass!" at the end of the film, I still feel a fighting thrill. Every kid in the theater I saw this with back in 1976 let out a triumphant woop at that line; we never forgot it. (for more - see Walter Matthau - Great 70s Dads)

 4. Harvey Stephens asDamien - The Omen (1976)
Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST never quite counts for this cinemArchetype as she is fully socialized and 'normal' prior to her possession; indeed her possession seems to be triggered in part by puberty or the onset of menstruation, which can lead to one's entering a whole new realm of archetypal force, but having been socialized even for a few weeks, a child loses their cachet in the world of the abject, of the chthonic and unassimilated wild. The demon possesses her, while here its the other way around.

Damien, on the other hand, is never assimilated, and remains an evil blank slate. We only see him when either of his parents are present, and then they're half the time rushed out of the nursery by his big black dog or servant of Satan maid. Everywhere he goes his lack of socialization, castration into the social order, causes a row. He can't even get near a church, or a baboon.

5a. Emil Minty as the Feral Kid - The Road Warrior (1982)

Though never speaking except in grunts, the Feral Kid becomes a pretty vivid character in George Miller's influential classic. Following Max around like he's Shane, cutting off fingers and killing bikers with his razor boomerang, grinning uninhibitedly from the sound of a simple music box, he becomes the focus of the picture when it all boils down to him reaching across the massive hood of the truck to retrieve Max's fallen shotgun shells. In his relative benign savagery and loyalty to the enclave around the tanker (no one seems to have claimed him as theirs, so he must have just showed up) he shows that the wild child in and of itself is not evil. It takes an evil parent (or guardian, like in THE OMEN), or a gang, to turn them rabid. And in a wilderness where the law of the outback reigns supreme, the Feral Kids' wildness is simply--and without bitterness--what is needed to survive.

 5b. Jean-Pierre Cargol as The Wild Child (1970)

 "Taking The 400 Blows to another level, François Truffaut's 1970 feature considers a child who is literally wild, with the filmmaker himself starring as an 18th-century country scientist molding his charge in civilization's image. Shot in neat black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the historically based movie is measured out by Dr. Itard's orderly account of the experiment, even as his momentous study finds an opaque mirror in the near-mute boy, never truly knowable. Shaggy Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) starts off not fierce but blindly wriggly, like a penned-up puppy, before assuming more control and becoming a piece of silent cinema under the reserved scientist's direction. (His solitary learned word is emitted in an unforgettable squeak.) He's both pure—communing with rainfall, unexpectedly showing affection—and something incomplete, a tension echoed in the film's regimented path of discovery. All is fodder for Itard's journal transcriptions (a remove later tweaked for comedy in Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist's optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in." - Nicolas Rapold - Village Voice

6. Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark - The Bad Seed (1956)

..How we love to hate little Rhoda. And for some of us (myself included), how we love to love her…she’s just too damn full of vicious personality. I even go so far as to nearly (I say nearly) champion her actions and wish she would invoke more harm (film wise) before her inevitable demise.

Living with her mother Christine (an understandably neurotic Nancy Kelly) and mostly absent father (William Hopper -- Hedda Hopper's son) Rhoda's life is one of privilege and attention. When kissing her father goodbye he asks “What would you give me for a basket of kisses?” Rhoda coos back: “A basket of hugs!” Landlady and supposed expert in psychology, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) dotes on Rhoda, applauding her out-moded manners and showering her with presents -- one being rhinestone movie star glasses that Rhoda, of course, loves. As she prattles on about Freud and abnormal psychology, the rather ridiculous Breedlove cannot see the freakish behavior in front of her. She's blinded by all that bright, beauteous blonde. (Kim Morgan - Sunset Gun)

7. Macaulay Culkin as Henry - The Good Son (1993)

Henry: I feel sorry for you, Mark. You just don't know how to have fun.
Mark: What?
Henry: It's because you're scared all the time. I know. I used to be scared too. But that was before I found out.
Mark: Found out what?
Henry: That once you realize that you can do anything... you're free. You can fly. Nobody can touch you... nobody. Mark... don't be afraid to fly.
Mark: You're sick...
Henry: Hey, I promise you something amazing, something you'll never forget. Where's the gratitude?

8.a. Leo Fitzpatrick and Justin Pierce as Tully and Casper - Kids (1995)
"Virgins, I love 'em!" Tully narrates with a mouth gone to mush from endless deep tongue kissing and cunnilingus. The film follows him and his buddy Caspar over the course of a long summer day and night and they're a terrifying duo - one a half-asleep alcoholic rapist, the other HIV positive, anti-condoms smoov-tawka who's always fixin' to deflower yet another virgin. He'll never run out of them, because these kids are always recruiting new kids to their clique; all the parents in New York are never around so the kids raise themselves; the old teach the young how to roll blunts and boost 40s.

By buddy Max. I really connected to this film as we were very similar in our dynamic to Tully and Caspar. We still talk in some of Tully and Casper's comedic rhythms. Max was the driven seducer (though avoided virgins) and I was the Caspar (avoided raping), more concerned with getting fucked up. I often woke up at big keg party sleepovers like the one in this film, and like Caspar I'd wake up wherever I passed out -- the couch, the floor -- and immediately start seeking more booze and a cigarette, just as Caspar does. After seeing Kids I even did while singing Caspar's song:

that's a foamy 40, not milk, playa

Parents didn't like having this movie around, and producers felt obligated to contextualize it as a "wake-up call to the world." Truth is, these kids aren't evil; they've never been taught any better. They've been cut loose into the jungle as firmly as the kids in Lord of the Flies. Except here there's drugs, girls, and idiots who talk trash and need a skateboard to the dome. Larry Clark captures something that's slippier than lightning in a bottle: these kids grow and change before our eyes; we see the way ideas and energy spread among them like fire; the way a couple of girls kissing in a pool can almost create a wilding gangbang riot; how a group of ten year-olds can turn each other onto grass and lingo and suddenly begin to grow into looking like each other, talking and sitting the same way, as if there's some Satanic group mind that sucks them in like coke through a straw. Sure it's disheartening.... it may not even be 'real' - but its awesome to see, and its never really been seen again. Except with...

8.b. Evan Rachel Wood and NIkki Reed in Thirteen (2003)
The merits of Kids can really only be gauged by another film in its class, and the only one besides Larry Clark's other masterpiece, Bully, is this film written by Nikki Reed and starring her as a bad influence friend on the impressionable young Even Rachel Wood. Director Catherine Hardwicke shows why she was the perfect choice to direct the first Twilight, and why they suffered in her absence; she gives teenage girl angst the rare combination of operatic emotion and escape velocity it deserves. Thirteen received an even more alarmed outcry from parents than Kids did, and worried moms demanded someone tell them that Reed had made it all up, that she hadn't actually done any of those things in real life. That it was all a dream. Their concern said more about the modern see-no-evil approach to parenting than anything else, how adults don't want their guilty conscience attacked -- lie to them so they can sleep at night.

What really bugged them, of course, was that Hardwicke neither demonizes nor celebrates the girls' 'bad' choices -- she merely tries to film the exhilarating feeling of going from outcast to insider, to what it's like to be suffering from depression and launch into an extended manic spree. If there was no giddy thrill there would be no emotional investment at all and the film would be little more than an after-school special. Instead, Wood is never judged even as she proceeds to burn down every last trace of good will from their parents and friends, rushing into sex and drugs and all that other jazz, at a dizzy-from-anorexic-hunger speed; Hunter's mom finally has no choice but to tackle her and hold on tight, for however long it takes for the humanity to seep back in.

9. Daniel and Joshua Shalikar as Adam - Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992)
This weird Disney film deals with a very interesting issue involving the pre-empathic state that we all spend the bulk of our infancy in, where the world is a candy store, and only the mom's nearness matters, all else is but a dream. If such a being in such a state is put in a position of total power over the world, look out, they can destroy it all just because they're grumpy and need a nap. As the great Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote " Credibility is strained by the safe bet that no one will get killed, even though the near deaths are so plentiful that the plot comes to resemble a tricked-up theme park ride. Still, the allegorical possibilities of infantile innocence run amok (particularly as a view of this country in relation to the remainder of the globe) are amusing and potent," 

And this from EW's Ty Burr: "Judging from the reactions of the kids in the screening theater, it's clear that they see what happens to Adam as a power trip of primal proportions: He plays when he wants, he sleeps when he wants, he goes where he wants — and if mom and dad don't like it, he puts them in his pocket and toddles on. By the time he rips the 85-foot-tall neon guitar off the facade of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe and starts playing it, they're with him completely, screaming in anarchic delight."

10.  Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) / Children of the Corn (series) / The beach boys in Suddenly Last Summer (1959) /

The unease created by movies such as Who Can Kill a Child?, the Children of the Corn series, and the wild-running orphans in Logan's Run and that gang that shouts "bop! bop!' on that one Star Trek episode hinges on two elements, one is explained in the 1976 films' title; apparently we're hard-wired to not kill children and though they may have gone rogue and be trying to kill us. That's the unease number two, for as adults we're expected to reach them, bring them around through strong leadership and mature nurturing. If we fail, and have to resort to violence it means either we are, or our social order is, weak. Who can kill a child? Only a monster, like them. Kids are, at heart, sociopathic, until they learn empathy. Many of us develop this empathy while torturing insects.

Me I was torturing Japanese beetles (the US was infested in the 70s) with a friend, when seeing that poor thing dragging itself along the driveway, leaking black blood, I suddenly felt ashamed, and that I couldn't do it anymore. I left that kid in disgust, right where he was crouching with his little batch of fireworks. Yeesh, kids are nightmares. But there are levels of developmental empathy - if you doubt just go to your local supermarket some time and hang out in the meat section; none of those shoppers give a shit about the organic beings that were butchered; there are no sad cow faces hanging above the steaks.


My offhand diagnosis is that empathy is a 'luxury' in brain chemistry, a sophisticated neural upgrade the mind takes when it feels safe, when it feels supported and surrounded by people it can trust. Once the empathy kicks in it can never go away (except on cocaine) so the brain doesn't want to bust it out too soon if the brain feels it might be a hindrance, as in needing to be free of empathy if it is going to have to kill others to survive. But sociopaths tend to be loners, so what you have with a mass, a gang of unsupervised kids, is fascism, mass hysteria, of being desperate to connect to the point you need to kill all outsiders without conscience lest you be branded outsider next.

The rhythm of this phenomenon is apparent in all group human interaction. I've witnessed and been caught in three different riots over the course of my life. I never could catch the insane spirit of it all - I hurried away as the opposing ranks were drawn, embarrassed. The cops and the rioters had more in common with each other than with me; it was like I was intruding on their very private meeting.


The most highbrow of the above-listed films in this entry isn't really a horror movie, the events are mostly described by a progressively more hysterical Elizabeth Taylor; we don't see any gore. It's pretty clear just the same that these crazy kids have eaten their cruising tourist sugar daddy in a fit of mass hysteria and hunger.

11. The Children (1980), The Children (2008), Emily in Night of the Living Dead (1968), the No-neck monsters inCat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

I love this post from Brenda Tobias about the changing attitudes towards children and the eternal power of the no-neck monsters to horrify:

Just imagine the shock of the 1950s adult (children did not attend the theatre) audience upon seeing those no-necked monsters. Those grating little characters were hauled out and scattered like confetti on a parade. There they are playing Dixie at the airstrip to greet Big Daddy (who reacts with the same horror/disgust of the audience.) There they are “performing” at Big Daddy’s birthday party to which adult friends have been invited. (Big Daddy voices our wishes and asks for an intermission.) There they are barging into bedrooms and demanding adults engage in play. And there they are repeating hateful remarks to their aunt. It’s enough to evoke a gasp. That it still does that today is remarkable.

Children are not sequestered today. In fact if anything the world has become theirs and adults are seen but not heard. Adults can often not be heard over the din of children in restaurants, theatres, museums and funerals. Babies and children are not so much integrated into adult lives, as adults are integrated into the lives of children’s. We’ve created retail empires for babies and children. Broadway has discovered the steady income stream of children and the white way is dotted with flying people and talking teapots. Infants and children unfamiliar with the term “indoor voices” are dining out at 7:00, 8:00 and even 9:00 PM. They don’t shy from the highest end restaurants either. A simple dress code of: No Pull-Up Pants would put an end to that; but we digress. The point is that the world has changed tremendously since Mr. Williams created those no-neck monsters. Yet they still have the power to horrify. That is partly due to the scenic background of their terrorizing. They are clearly in an adult environment. The house in which they are running rampant is stately; there is no great room, there are no toys. It is clearly adult space. (more)

12  The Lord of the Flies (1963)
The original, the classic, written by William Golding based on his own WW2 experience and a report from a teacher about how allowing his students total freedom in a debate led to a violent altercation in class. Peter Brook's film adaptation uses scintillating black and white photography to create a naturalistic mythopoetic beauty wherein you could see how the ambivalent strangeness of unbridled nature acts on the boys' vivid imagination (a small boy expresses fear about a demonic figure in the woods, the boys' own symbolic WMDs if you will, and its this fear that overrides Piggy and Ralph's common sense and leads Jack to a Hitler-esque rise to power. It's funny how our current situation in this country hasn't changed overmuch from this sad dichotomy - the republicans (Jack) whipping up things to be terrified about and sounding the war drum while the Piggy/Ralph democrats try to keep things calm and rational.

The main issue of course is that people gravitate to the figure they're afraid of. Fear is a high, and it makes you feel secure in your mass mind panic / hate contingent as you continually find straw dog enemies to attack - Piggy (and the wild boars on the island) all come to represent the Lord of the Flies by proxy. The trouble is, the enemies have to keep coming to keep up the momentum of a despot's power.

The arrival of the adults at the very end brings a presumed end to the madness, just in time and it's interesting to note the similarity of the ending with that of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I'm sure Mel doesn't mean us to read it as the reverse of his intention - that the Spaniards are there to educate the savage Maya and protect the neighboring tribes from being wantonly sacrificed. What we know is that the Spaniards wiped out hundreds of thousand of Mayas via disease, enslavement, and religious persecution and destroyed most of their books and records. Nice. Nice going assholes! The Maya (and Aztecs) were woefully unprepared to deal with things like canons and muskets but they could have repelled the initial landings of Spaniards easily had they not been expecting a visit from the 'white' gods and thought these were them. It's a good moral and one that repeats throughout history, never trust the voice in your head just because its shiny and scary! As we huddle by the fire and wonder who we can trust, our urge to be rational and compassionate fighting the urge to blindly lash out, wondering whether to vote for Jack's conservative circle-the-wagons worldview or Ralph's let's go talk to the natives and make friends approach. It just shows you we have not progressed too far from the savage, and maybe never will.

13. The children of The Village of the Damned (1960)
"When there is an invasion of otherworldly evil it is common for the main character to have some sub-Freudian link with it, some barely tangible connection that only the weird old, cackling old woman at the bar can see. It was the boiling over sexuality of 1950’s teenagers that caused the giant insects in all those old bug movies; the strange love of Melanie Daniels intruding on the domain of icy mom Jessica Tandy in The Birds, always in an oblique butterfly effect kind of way the film never directly analyzes. Gordon's desire for a child so late in life indirectly creates this invasion and so he cannot reconcile the reverse-Oedipal urge to kill his kid with the buried suspicion that his wishing brought the stork of Satan down upon them all. So rather than admitting he made a mistake, he wants to find some good therein. He starts arguing that the Midwich spawn are not inherently evil, but just at that pre-empathic stage of all infants; there is good to be found in them, and fun things to study and learn about the human mind.

Gordon's brother-in-law, the Major, is concerned: “What if we can’t put the moral breaks on them?” This is a legitimate worry—if they know you can never spank them, why should they ever listen? And Gordon’s unwillingness to condone their extermination distinctly sets the field of science/eugenics up against humanity’s own survival. The sense of taboo that resulted in the Intuit and Mongolian children being killed at birth doesn’t exist for the civilized man, who has to wait until the children have grown so big powerful only nuclear strikes will do the trick (which becomes the fate of two other damned “civilized” villages). In this context, Gordon becomes his own bad guy, like Dr. Carrington in The Thing (1951) shouting: “You’re wiser than we are, you must understand!”  The comic book/movie series X-Men follows a similar tack, with the mutants finding refuge at a school operated by a master of mind control. It’s that misunderstood teen fantasy of letting all the freaks go live together since the adults hate them so much. Like some pint-sized biker gang, the Hitler Youth or a rock band, they “all want to dress alike,” and walk around the streets like they own the place. They are part of a new movement, the dawn of the eugenic-counterculture.  At one point Gordon even asks them; “What do you kids want?” The kids reply: “We want you to leave us alone!” This request which would later become immortalized in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a 1982 rock film chronicling a fascistic rock star’s childhood in post-war England. And as in that film, the adults simply cannot leave their little Nazi progeny alone. When faced with a higher or different intellect than themselves, the parents must try to understand, meddle and control and failing that, destroy them rather than be made irrelevant.

  “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, you would be as strong as we are,” David says to Gordon at one point, indicating that what the adults see as their “humanity” is something the Midwich children have transcended. Or as Floyd put it “if you want to find out what’s behind these blue eyes/ you’ll have to claw you’re way through this disguise." It has long been a source of fascination with UFO theorists that if humans could access our entire DNA, we would be able to recognize and harness powers which we now think of as “alien.” Some go so far as to speculate that alien “DNA dampers” are what keep that other 90% of our minds inactive. We could be as strong as the Midwich kids if our minds weren’t mostly shut off as a result of some higher being’s neutering of our genes, which our 'humanity' is perhaps a side effect: When David’s “real” extra-dimensional father last pulled his “induce sleep and artificially inseminate” business it may have been with apes at the dawn of time. He made sure to lower the wattage of our alien chromosomes, but for this next go-round, he’s turning the dimmer switch up to “bright.” Gordon notes that the children’s’ power has no limit, any more “than there is a limit to the power of the human mind.” We are still bound by our own compassion as human viewers, and any compassion we had for these “different” kids is compromised when they start killing more and more innocent people, justifying the military response and making Gordon's compromises seem like associative guilt... . We may not like the townspeople, but these lovely, weird blonde children are the devil - and they won't let us in; they won't let us join their gang (the way we're kind of allowed into the similar units like the X-Men or the Cullen clan). So we need to destroy them. (see Acidemic #5 here)

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See also: WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (1933)