I started to write about KILL LIST (2011) and how British cinema's so edgy and America's so lamely safe. But if I think about KILL LIST I start to write about the Illuminati and mind control and then I got to write about the alleged 'entrance fee' of child sacrifice as one the dissociative traumas used in brainwashing. Meanwhile, I've been having a series of mild panic attacks watching ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK Season Three, man. No one escapes the trauma of continual self-realization on that show, and it's too well acted and written, and I can watch too many in a row so that soon I can't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore, which in turn reminds me of KILL LIST again, because that's what indoctrination is all about -- breaking down a person's mind and distancing them from the collective 'concrete' reality so they're receptive to programming in order to activate the inner killer. Ever since being dragged to a dry frat rush as a freshman at SU I've harbored a streak of horror and hatred towards the baser elements of the masculine species. And when a man like me is all hopped up on depositions or depictions of rape and sexualized misogyny, I'm ready to go stomp anyone with Greek letters on his sweatshirt. Amp it up a little more, dissociate me so that I think I'm just vividly imagining a heroic role in a vigilante rape-revenge picture and I'm ready to kill... ready and set and waiting for the starter pistol.

Bad Day at Black Rock

That's why there's KILL LIST, which twists the Plainview milkshake straw to this collective 'good' male inner killer and co-opts it to the logical insidious end. Is that the whole point, perhaps, of all this evil in the first place? To provoke a response that will enable us to kill people on command (via post-hypnotic trigger word activated false accusation)? In movies like TAKEN they use it for a different kind of trigger: knowing we'll instantly be deeply focused on the film, that Plainview milkshake straw twisting like clockwork from our empathic response to our bloodlust until we're as fired up for vengeance as young Hotspur in HENRY V.

Only occasionally, as in MYSTIC RIVER or GONE BABY GONE, is the full futility of that vengeance truly exposed, the ease with which it can blind you to the truth of a given scene. The girl who casually admits she was lying after you've already done the retaliatory assault, the abduction that turns out to be a benevolent rescue from the real source of abuse, it all forces us to confront the ugly truth of that primal response. In GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO on the other hand, we're so on the side of Lisbeth Salander that her liberal reporter friend's law-abiding humanistic hesitance at her full measure of retaliatory violence is seen by us with disgust, emblematic of how following society's rules is like being in a cult for some people, making them blind to their own self-preservation. And the result: we grow upset with mankind as a whole, rabidly against anything capable of creating such true vile sexual evil. Lisbeth is our redeemer, killing the men who need killing. When men are too stuck in passive wuss journalist mode, teaching us what it is to be a man and sickening us at the same time, the same way TOOTSIE did in reverse.

Other sources, like SIN CITY, are almost anti-misogynistic porn; women-hating creeps and pedophiles set up like nine pins to be disemboweled in vivid high contrast black and white. It's cathartic, but it also panders. One of the reasons I love old TV like CHARLIE'S ANGELS is that total absence of that sort of thing. If rape or child abus cropped up on TV in anything made before the 70s it did so in 'special episodes' with much forewarning and the violence was abstracted (such as the candle being dropped in THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE). Now just watching LAW AND ORDER SVU is enough to give me an ashen sense of being brutalized by the system as well as men in general, for weeks. In CHARLIE'S ANGELS a girl might be tied up and kidnapped but she's never sexually abused once so (other shows like the later hour-schedule POLICE WOMAN might be different, that show's way too intense for me). HBO programming like GAME OF THRONES and SOPRANOS meanwhile is so rapey I can't watch it at all. A woman is brutally raped in SOPRANOS season three just so the rapist can get off on a technicality and the victim can be presented with the option of telling Tony Soprano about it so he can kill the guy. She decides not to, thinking herself some great hero I'm sure, but of course leaving the rapist free to continue brutalizing women who don't have the mob recourse.

In 70s films on the other hand, this kind of shit happened to your wife and child and the vengeful vigilante as hero was born, the law seen as impotent, unequal to the task of dealing with this new breed of punk --as in the SOPRANOS, the law would rather let them go on a technicality and harangue Dirty Harry for his off-book mauling rather than try to get these scumbags off the streets: DEATH WISH, for example, is a vile yet huge hit that led to a score of imitators, the best of which is Abel Ferrara's MS. 45. On the other hand, that female avenger's sin is then 'absolved' and dissolved through her nun's habit into the raped nun in his BAD LIEUTENANT, where she forgives her two rapist attackers while everyone in the city fantasizes about catching them and beating them to death in front of their parents. Once again, raping a 'good' woman ensures you're not only forgiven and go unpunished, but that she'll consider herself a saint for not getting even. It's a cop out, of course. Or is it? The violent retaliatory response good men have within them to weed out these perps is left with blue balls so to speak, which can then explode in different ways, none of them good.




Part of becoming, as I have, a total recluse in my off hours, is to gradually lose all perspective, my comfort zone narrowing down into a tight strangling shroud. Besieged and eaten away by death, money, and employment all changing and shifting, riding the lifeboat of the televisual.

As Skeet says in SCREAM, "life is a movie, Sid, you don't get to pick your genre." One's life (if you're me) starts out a warm hearted family film becomes a high school persecution saga, a war movie, a tragedy, a college-set sex and drugs concert film, and then a young couple comedy, then a break-up drama again, a comedy, a drama, a romance again and again and finally the narrative shrinks all together into one of pure and unending horror, and one must begin drug and alcohol recovery. In a horror movie "sex equals death." In a sense childbirth is death as well, death of an old paradigm of self, and isn't that all death is anyway? Yeah but talking to God as you understand him (or Her) and getting the lord can lure you right into a nice family movie again. Boring, but safe, you're not stuck as the grumpy uncle or a landlord while young people slowly accrue, ever younger, pushing you right on out of the door of your own house and into a nice pine box or crematorium. You're part of them, and of all life, and all is one big comfortable white cloud with heavenly Tami Briggs harp music, all without having to actually spawn oneself or shun, surlily, children as a class. Surely your unborn children are grateful to be spared the inexorable SOYLENT GREEN future. of playdates, tiger moms, and bulletin boards.



Now, sober and vulnerable, I personally go out of my way to have never seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IRREVERSIBLE, or any of the TAKENs, any white slavery documentaries, THE HUNT WITH JOHN WALSH on CNN, any of the ID programs not about deadly women, and so forth. Even the deadly women who con guys like me into killing for them, with tales of abuse fabricated to vibrate our Plainview straws.

Luckily I live in an age where it's easy to cocoon yourself in a unique patchwork quilt of your own making. The result is, I watch a lot of El Rey channel and TCM, listen to mixes I create that never end and can't tell one ninety-pound chalk-white dude in suspenders and tiny fedora or Children of the Corn hat playing a standup bass or mandolin from the other, nor would I wish to. As a result, unless I get stuck watching THE VOICE, these anemic high-voiced smarmy pishers escape my fury and doubts about the future of masculinity outside Australia.

A guy in my day would have been beaten soundly for being such a wuss, and as a result we became manly... because that's what men do- we patrol ourselves, stomping out the sign of weakness, and preying on women and children is the worst weakness of all. These high-voiced needle legged hipsters are just long keystroke or guitar poke fingers, ears with little white 'ear buds' in them, and clunky glasses reflecting some glowing screen or other. Where is their goddamn crippling anxiety and self-loathing? Not to kill you, to kill your soul... slowly? Why did Courtney Love even bother getting sober?

And now... demons.

The goal of demons is beyond just possession, but to create in general a backlash against all spirituality. When priests or beloved childhood figures like Michael Jackson, Cosby, etc. are revealed to be sex offenders, our sense of trust in our fellow man dwindles. The devil takes steps to rob us of the ability to enjoy God's grace. Overpopulation makes even the beauty of childbirth seem selfish. The animals we love to eat are given soulful sad eyes all the better to haunt us with--all various components of the devil's plan to shrink our soul from wispy stratus clouds into contracted dense purpose cumulonimbus so when it rains (i.e. you die) the soul falls, and the water is collected for Hell's steam engines that run the THEY LIVE mind control force field. The agony of collected souls is trapped in its own isolated battery cell, then slowly burned into nonexistence to fuel the steam engine that keeps them in dominion over us.


Human sacrifice involves the idea of throwing another soul under the bus to escape being ground up oneself in the steam engine, being able to hold onto one's evil self, the liquid condensation of the evil ego making all sorts of harmful deals rather than surrendering.

 But there is in the end, on the macro level needed to dig where I'm coming from, one soul, so every victory of the demons is another square mile of our precious rainforest lost. That's why we, when our souls are rising and almost up and out of the wheel of woe, so often turn around and go back to help others along. I've done it three times already!

And once I'm back down, buried under the mystery misery I always kind of regret that decision, or rather the ego, which returns, inevitably, convinces 'me' to regret it. The 'Me' who regrets isn't the me who made the choice to stay, it's the difference between a terrified kid on his first day of school and a graduate with a million friends, or the difference between a selfish thug and the benevolent social worker trying to reach him. You can't get to heaven without becoming a selfless love thug. The trouble is that once you're that selfless, you hesitate to go to heaven when so many of your denser soul fellows are still suffering. The rich man can't enter the kingdom of heaven anymore than a camel can go through the needle, etc. Once unburdened by wealth, the needle threader pauses and looks back. Is this wisdom, compassion, or another devil sucker play? Is there a difference?
Who am I to judge ya / on what you say or do? Deep breath. And so it is I run... I run so far away.... all the way to QUEEN KONG.








Now while the women are awesome and numerous, QK has a slight cheeky problem: it's bawdy 'Carry On' brand of cheeky humor doesn't translate as well as some when leaping across pond and decade. QUEEN KONG ain't perfect. It may have the lamest ape suit in the entire history of lame ape suits, looking like it's just a bunch of fake fur throw rugs stapled together. But damn it, how does a woman ape look that's different form a normal ape? And it doesn't start well, and one has to be ready to tolerate great levels of British camp, but movies with reversed genders (where women are strong leaders and men all fey weak objects) are few and far between. And generally these unique products of the 'women's lib' feminists are loathed and buried. There are only a few of us who keep the torch alive for Norman Lear's ALL THAT GLITTERS and the British-West German co-production STAR MAIDENS, and when we stumble onto something like QUEEN KONG, which I've been avoiding for decades after being depressed by GODZILLA VS. KING KONG once as a child, that when we do, it's a blessed relief. Some of that terrible KILL LIST Plainview straw rage melts away. It's a dumb fantasy, but in a way so is TAKEN... so whaddaya gonna do? You just try to get through the day.

One of my ways, is movies with assertive British women and Valerie Leon, so assertive and imperious and sexy in BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, is a favorite. So when I learned she was in QUEEN LONG, I had to see for myself. That said, she's almost unrecognizable - she's lost some weight in the baby fat department and is wearing disco-level make-up and the print on Amazon Prime is royally messed up.

But it's a good film for all that. The plot offers some nice high views of the Portobello Street Fair and we have the cheeky Ray Fay ("eat your heart out, Elton John") and great snatches of diva dialogue between Ray and the local girls prepping him for sacrifice:

"Why does she want me?"

Leon in PREHISTORIC WOMEN

"She wants you to because you look like Doris Day." 

"Who's he?"

The leading lady is Luce Habit (Rula Lenska, Britain's answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor or Peggy Hopkins Joyce. At least that's what we figured back in the 70s when she got off a plane like we were supposed to know who she was in an Alberta V0-5 ad. Our not knowing set a chain reaction to the point she was canned by her agent. But all that's in the future. Here we learn she's a grand comedian if nothing else. As Luce Habit she's the Carl Denham of the narrative, offering her loving protection to her shanghaied boy (she drugs him after catching him stealing a KING KONG poster in the Fair, slings him over her shoulder in a sack, and makes for her vessel, a little tugboat party vessel of a thing). She even carries some joints for him. In short, Lenska's Luce Habit is a great camp diva delight as "the biggest producer (of B-films)... with love interest... in the business." In fact, her wry delivery of intentionally terrible lines reminds me a little bit of my own in

Of course they eventually wore out the schtick, at least for me. I liked the JAWS dance but when a lame shark shows up with lipstick and breasts and a big sign around her neck it's a good sign this shitshow's going to collapse long before it's officially over. I confess that I stopped watching after two tiresome battles in the jungle section of old QUEEN. And there was one too many leering Benny Hill ass shots and just too damn much of that damn moth-eaten 'lady' apesuit. But how often do we get a movie that's nearly all female - just a few baggy pants weirdos on the island and the rest either Luce's chorus of leggy bikini models or the all girl Nabonga tribe.... it might be gayer than John Waters and campier than 60s BATMAN but once we're just forced to reckon with this truly wretched ape suit and papier mache monsters; I just couldn't let it go on. I had to stop and take a nap. That's show biz.

But the point is, we spent an hour avoiding thinking about the diabolical paranoia-fueling brutality of KILL LIST and its all-knowing savvy about the long game of mind control when programming an assassin, and how maybe that's what all this shit like A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, TAKEN, and the zillion movies with fearful captive women's faces on the covers, this kind of vile shorthand for sexual abuse and misogynistic violence, is for... MK-ULTRA programming of male assassins... get us all riled up to go stomping frat boys, sex offenders, or whomever we're conditioned to think is raping and abusing our innocents. We all know who's next on the kill list... if you saw the Trump speech in Atlanta, and how could you miss it, you may have noticed the resemblance to Hitler's early stuff--just substitute Mexican illegals for Jews and the Reichstag for D.C. All he lacks now is a reason to seize power.

And hey, both QUEEN KONG and KILL LIST are British so it all ties together. I wouldn't go so far as to say wonderfully. My brain is always making connections to random unrelated events, and its susceptible as hell to the mad loop of conspiracy theory. Because I finally know that, unless maybe I'm about to charge into battle and need a speech about how the enemy is raping our women and children, I don't need or care to have that Plainview milkshake straw tapped and manipulated. If we kill anyone, let them get up a moment later, take off the dinosaur suit and take a bow. The genius of actors like Arnold is we never really take him seriously. It helps avoid trauma. We can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined, but in keeping everything fake and weird, our narrative immersion dissolves and we're symbolically freed from the drama of our movie lives. When you decide your movie's a comedy, regardless of the tragedy or doom around you, it is. The grim circumstances just dictate how dark, how deadpan, and how surreal it is.


God hears our complaints about war and misery and all the evil and the suffering in the world the the way loving parents hear their kids cry over not getting what they want at the store. If God makes it too Edenic then God is forgotten. 'No atheists in a foxhole' is a truism that explains war's entire existence, a slippery slope straight to God, for whom death and rebirth and life itself is a puppet show, all just a long test of merit and faith. When we take off our masks, like they do in a Godard movie or a movie about moviemaking or something accidentally Brechtian, we're God finally, if only 'til we're sucked back in. Godard would know how to save this movie: the dinosaur takes off its mask to show some girl puppeteer operating it, who absconds with Ray up into the sound stage catwalk while Kong looks up, utterly confused, and lights a Gauloises. Erasing all lines between meta and textual, we're finally free. We are--in the moment of laughing at a lame special effect or line--free from identification's iron fist grip. CUT

The recent discovery of cannabis traces in Shakespeare's old pipes only confirms it: Shakespeare was 'experienced.' It takes weird alchemical magic to write as potently as he did, which means mind altering heights not dreamt of in your dusty professor's philosophy. And even more common than cannabis was the potent psilocybe cubensis mushroom which--lest we forget--grows naturally in the foggy climate of merrye England. Thanks to an obscure but enduring law stretching way back to the ancient times, it's always been an inalienable British right to grow, harvest, sell, and ingest all shrooms. They even had a renaissance when that law was remembered, I saw some for sale at the Portobello Street Fair. I nearly lost my then only five year-old sobriety. I thought I'd stepped into Lewis Carroll's Wonderland or Burroughs' InterZone, or a Hitchcockian version of Pepperland. Then came Ben Wheatley's A Field in England; and then I knew. North America is way, way behind the evolutionary curve when it comes to tripping. And even the ravers of today, no matter how clenched their jaws, can't hold a candle to their Elizabethan ancestors, the flourishing of alchemists, astronomers, and poets, Spencer's Fairy Bower, leading to the metaphysical poets, seances, fairy photography, and ghosts of ancient castles made visible only through enhanced eyes.

Conveying the full breadth of all-cylinders psychedelic madness in coherently poetic dialogue is beyond even the most willing and wasted authors; too often they lapse into either incoherence or abstraction; they fall into the bad trip asylum (Poe, Lovecraft) or the good trip monastery (Ram Dass, Ginsberg), or fake their way along in a kind of faux hip snap (Eric Robbins). Only the truly far out can see once all the walls and territorial lines are burned away there's a radiance so bright it encompasses the depths of darkness and a whole new layer of shadow emerges, and that shadow snakes like the clouds of Sils Maria over Shakespeare's craggiest plays, creating beauty by illuminating in HD clarity the depths of the collective unconscious' and voicing an archetypal rogues gallery.  Not all Shakespeare's trippy, but they all have that hip playfulness when it comes to non-sequitors, and Beatles-esque wordplay reflecting the imperanence of life and the constant movement of the moon and stars.

And there's no Shakespeare play more layered in meaning and counter meaning, given the full measure of multiple meanings--all three eyes aligned and taken in the full wide-eyed weirdness--than Hamlet. And no version more attuned to the druggie parallels than Mel Gibson's in Zeffirelli's 1990 film, with: Glenn Close is the queen mother, Paul Scofield as the ghost dad, and a 23 year-old saucer-eyed tarot card come to life, Helena Bonham Carter is that ultimate in hometown girlfriends, Ophelia. I had forgotten all about how good this was until it showed up on EPIX the other day. It blew my mind. How did I forget how good it was? Of course. Mel Gibson. Even then we was too big an action star, so it was stilted down to a snarky late night TV joke. But the joke's on us, because this Hamlet is the one to beat. You can taste the tang of acid in its air and Zeffirelli, who became a counterculture honoree when his 1968 Romeo and Juliet caught on big with the free love generation, hitting the perfect note of how young love and idealism is trampled underfoot by the older generation's petty grudges (Vietnam, the drug war as an excuse to arrest and ruin innocent flower children for the crime of being free, etc.) Well, a lot has changed since then, but you can still feel the psychedelic pulse in all Zeffirelli's subsequent work. I reviewed a lot of it for the Muze canon at the turn of the century, while I was newly sober, and seeing his long version Jesus of Nazareth and Brother Sun Sister Moon was a bona fide spiritual awakening). I hated The Dreamers, but think Stealing Beauty is underrated. Zeffirelli works in a kind of Merchant Ivory of Italy classical beautiful light style that's almost cliched'ly 'art house' but he's the real deal, his films pulse with a genuine connection to Italian art stretching back to Michelangelo, a sublime mix of sublime natural light craftsmanship and genuine artistic-spiritual feeling. In other words, he's a perfect Shakespeare dude, he's the Italian William Blake.

Mel Gibson's great genius in the lead is to use all his star wattage and 'crazy eyes' Martin Riggs Aussie wildman energy to bear on Hamlet's mood swings, rather than bury that wattage in some stilted bowing to the pillars of 'important' art like so many classically trained Shakespearian actors would. He'a fully aware stuffed shirt critics are going to roll their eyes at the thought of this Mad Max playing the tortured Dane. Almost to spite them, he rips it up, he brings Max's and Martin's madness with him, ranting and frothing like the dark bad trip cross between Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx's paranoid schizophrenic shadow. Bringing terrifying coherence to a miasma of late night drug dealer paranoia, the way the fear of death--normally down to a manageable abstraction--becomes terrifyingly vivid. Wen morning breaks, you wonder "is that the sun or a cop?" And when the band finally comes on, the players arrive, you rush to the distraction like a drowning man to scorched desert.


It's not for everyone, that kind of 'high strangeness.' You have to be drawn to it, called. Most people fear it--they cite government misinformation about how it damages chromosomes and makes for mutant children; or that--in letting go of your sanity--you may never get it back, never quite come down--which is true. This kind of reticence, fear of flying, appears in Hamlet courtesy of the coterie of buddies who lead Hamlet to the battlements where his father's ghost walks, then urge him not to follow where it beckons, as even seemingly benevolent spirits can turn into demons and convince you to jump--that you can fly... mirroring another big urban myth about LSD. How often have dumbass wallies been drawn to to the ledge with absurd thoughts of flight or elasticity of bone!? Hard to say, as that sort of detail doesn't get reported in general, except through the grapevine--it's just another college student leaping off the roof otherwise. The thing with psychedelic drugs though, is dosage. A drop gets you high, but drink the whole vial and your psych-ward bound. You're only chance is to get very, very drunk and/or gobble many Thorazine. That's why any good and responsible dealer in the more extreme of psychedelics takes care in prescribing. Give a 90 pound nerd the same dose as a Woodstock-era Wavy Gravy and you've got either a complete breakdown (like that naked chick trying to crowd surf in Gimme Shelter) or worse, a guy who's not nearly as high as he needs to be.

Thus the detailed caution of Horatio and the rest of Hamlet's entourage, that the father's spirit might be a trickster, the type who tells you three truths so that you believe the fourth which is the lie that undoes the other three before you can profit by them, as if this was all too common, a form of demonic possession or cult brainwash (isolate the subject from his friends, make it impossible for him to turn back, and then spring the trap). That Shakespeare had even the language for such bedevilment (the priest cautions against the three trickster witches' predictions in Macbeth) indicates this was a time when people were still allowed, perhaps, to believe in such things, especially in Elizabethan England, "the Golden Age." In that era of freedom from Catholic church oppression, discussing supernatural beings openly in a play was a form of ideological propaganda against those who believed only priests were allowed to see spirits, and then only holy ones. In fact, America's own draconian drug laws make a fine analogy to their persecution of witches and pre-Christian herbology. The caution against believing witches or ghost dads the same as cautioning against a charming dealer who lures you in with tasty free weed, and moves you slowly up to inescapable and expensive heroin.



Black magic, in fact, is all over Hamlet. Just like at Jimi Page's castle or NASA, there's deep 'rottenness' in Denmark. We never see the odious Claudius given evil ideas by spirits himself--there's no three witches pronouncing him Thane of Cawdor but it's trickster move-countermove as Hamlet's rash ghost-fueled frenzy of revenge strikes amiss and kills doltish Polonious instead, setting off a whole second arc of vengeance this time from Laertes on Hamlet, the instant chain of bad karma set in motion when, for example, a kid you sold doses to gets busted and next time you see him is toting two tie-dye undercover cops (Rosenkrantz and officer Guildenstern) who speak to you with falsely jocund familiarity. We'd let them know that we were drunken high-as-hell decadents only north by northwest; when the wind blows southerly we know a righteous high brother hawk from a narc handsaw.

It takes him a few beats for him to snap out of his wan funk, but after dad's ghost lures him up to the dangerous heights of the Stonehenge-tower battlements, after receiving 'the word' from his ghost father, he's like Moses coming down the mountain, then Mel's genius madness kicks in. For his Hamlet, performing his madness in a way that hides his true insanity by conveying it openly (a trick I myself did when shrooming my face off at the dinner table and trying not let my parents notice) then he's already past the point of no return, arguing with himself, stalling, hallucinating dad wherever he looks but paralyzed with dread--as we all would be at the thought of killing our uncle in cold blood--and going genuinely insane from the acting of it, dragging Ophelia (her "young woman's wits mortal as an old man's life") in his lysergic wake; she's the girlfriend you convince to shroom with you but it's soon clear she's not going to handle it well at all, and you're too far yourself to talk her down, and his mom, too, going mad--as if it's a contagious disease spread by this initial horror.  



And as that dame of Denmark, a 23 year-old Helena Bonham Carter, is the most dosed of all Ophelias. Super duper young and fetching, able to oscillate brilliantly between innocent, confused, thrilled, blessed, sexually aroused, distracted, crushed, and round the bend wavelengths all in a single bounding wave of a chicken bone she thinks is a flower (but could even more easily be a thick psilocybe cubensis stem), Carter's game for whatever. Like all the best young saucy acting natural blue bloods of England (she's related to baronesses and prime ministers), she's got the kind of class that goes so deep she doesn't ever deign to be merely ladylike. Architecture of the era was designed to compliment her cheeks and eyes. So unlike American actors who, alas, get stuck in the white elephant tar pits of bourgeois loftiness when doing Shakespeare, their bodies and tongues forced into all manner of unnatural poses, passing the antithetical monologues across the proscenium arch as if kicking it against the wind, Carter swims in it. It's like that line in Hawks: She's so good she doesn't feel she needs to prove it.

A lifetime of decadence and recovery has left me with a sharp eye for who's been to the mountaintop, 'experienced' in the Hendrixian sense. Gibson, Zeffirelli and Bonham Carter have all been up there, clearly, so when they plunge into heedless madness they do it way better than, say, Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh or Olivier or Leigh could (1). That said, the more classically modulated the player-- as far as the people who go to Shakespeare plays in America are concerned (i.e. the bourgeoisie) -- is the better. For them classical acting must at all times strive for conveying the high arts. But Shakespeare doesn't need the protection of lofty grandeur. It spits openly on such lionization and in doing so elevates itself higher than its forebears,

In 1948, mountaintop-been-to madman Welles' termite art Macbeth came to art theaters but was overshadowed by Olivier's white elephant Hamlet the same year. Olivier's was how Shakespeare should be done the bourgeois critical body proclaimed. For Welles, 'done' was the key word there--his Shakespeare writhed and pulsed as something never done... eternal as madness itself. The best moments in Olivier's Hamlet are with the ghost dad, who looms in full and weird armor enshrouded by fog and speaking in an echoing boom whisper, seeming to be flowing right out of Hamlet's brain. Welles' entire film flows that way. (See Hallowed be thy Shakes).

Pssst, those stones in the moonlight look like me in about 20 years, i.e. rock, star-crossed, stoned dead - but an experienced space cowboy would just eye this specter and presume it's a hallucination... even if it's real, isn't it safer?

The dad ghost (Paul Scofield) too, that woeful shattered superego, is like a bad shroom hallucination, not showy or iverly surreal, he's allowed to blend into the darkness so that he may be the moonlight reflected on the mineral veins in the stone of the battlements.  is the ghost - good as the part is small but essential that it's nailed by an orator full up to the challenge of embodying that most horrified of souls, forbidden by some unseen master specter from spilling the secrets of just how fucked the other side is.

And when Hamlet comes down from the parapet he's alight like some mix of Moses from the mountain and that annoying kid who comes back from Burning Man or the Rainbow Gathering with dreadlocks, an activist girls phone number, and the feeling he's been chosen to keep the world green. For one semester's stretch he doth berate unreceptive ears with facts gleaned from phone calls with his allegedly corporeal Greenpeace girlfriend. The ranting rage of Mel crying "like a whore" and unpacking his heart with words (and pamphlets) rather than direct and violent action (blowing up a factory). His is the woeful midnight tantrum of a lad who realizes no amount of feeling-- poured into his angry young poetry slam soliloquy notebook even unto whiskey stained margin--will undo the catastrophic damage his already crumbling American white male legacy hath wrought upon the world. Even if he pound his plodding pen to plastique it would explode no illusion beyond popping the proud bubble of his own inchoate solipsism.

And in this analogy to a college drug dealer drinking his way towards a chimera self assurance, each new blessed deliverance from the dead father's terrible injunction, that crippling superego self-consciousness, comes at a terrible price. He can't even make out with his mother in her bed than dad's ghost pops up, dismayed at this halting of his son's bloody path.


In order for this all to become psychedelic though, it can't be told by the British, by the Royal Shakespeare Company... neither Italian Zeffirelli or Australian Gibson are inclined to be all Olivier-level wry, measured, or fey--they don't need to work a slow unraveling with subtly sloping energy levels like Kenneth Branagh. It's a deep psychedelic resonance that's lacking in later and earlier versions: Hamlet as a raving but hyper-eloquent lunatic, the type to smash phones in hotel lobbies, leave anti-Semitic rants on answering machines, and trash hotel rooms in fits of manic pique, stabbing at the rats he sees in the walls and behind the paisley tapestries of his college dorm (but what about the Poloniuses hiding inside your skin, bra?). In typical Zeffirelli style, the dusky David Watkins cinematography uses natural light streaks which with the floating castle dust gives it all a haunted painterly quality. Then, at first unrecognizable, along comes Ennio Morricone laying down a score that only becomes clearly his own (via wordless swooping Marni Nixon-esque top notes) during the mad scene up in mom's boudoir, which makes sense as it's such a giallo moment--incest, bloody murder, hiding, insanity, blades piercing through barriers, vows of secrecy, maternal guilt. Despite the tightness of her hippy braids, Glenn Close is subtly unhinged as the queen, following Ophelia following Hamlet into that blessedly cracked and melted mirror which--through the totality of its warp--undoes sanity's merciful blurring and throws the horror of the real into unyielding focus.

Author at left -Oakwood Cmty, Syracuse NY 1986

The graveyard, Oakwood, in Syracuse, where I shroomed so much in the late 80s and where we too found a skull, but it wasn't of poor Yorik, but H.B. Crouse one of the trustees of one of the lecture halls... and some idiot freshman took it back to his dorm and started boiling the skin off (in the communal Flint Hall kitchen) so he could use the skull in an art project. Yeah man, eerie similarities. I was too aware of that I was having dated in the hippie chick A-list towards the end of my band's tenure, and they were all as thick in the head as thieves in their warrens. Anyway, the morning after we first hooked up (me still high on shrooms, natch), me and this gorgeous Italian-American crystal blue-eyed girl who shall be nameless but had been following me like a haunting dream all through sophomore and junior year; we saw the broken-in tomb and the skull sticking out, and I thought about climbing through the bars to get it (which the more limber of us could do and regularly did, that mausoleum being on the hill we all hung out on -sort of our unofficial hippie meeting place. I almost climbed in to take it, but then she stopped me... and a day later we read about this idiot getting kicked out of school. (I wasn't in the dorm then, and would have got away with it---for I had thought the same thing, get in there, get the skull, boil the parchment think skin and long thin gray hair (for hair really does keep growing after death) off in a big pot, and have the coolest of all skull tchotchkes. I was glad I'd listened to her though, then. For it would have no doubt cooled our budding love if naught else.

Man, that girl really did a number on me... so hot, so cool, ultimately so dumb... she could kill a big swinging group conversation stone dead with a single interjection. I didn't realize at the time how really pretty women are often damaged from excessive male attention that they act like idiots almost as an unconscious passive aggressive dude repellant... and never need to develop the wits by which the lesser mortals up their appeal.  It wasn't a stretch for me to realize her attraction to me, then in my the first flower of my alcoholism, paunchy and bloated, was part and parcel of this idiocy. Her beauty was such I could barely look at her without it hurting. Those clear light blue eyes with flawless white skin and wild jet black hair, I still feel my electric blood up its voltage just in thinking about her. She and I went westward after graduation to seek our fortunes. Shrooms told us we were broken up on afternoon at the Seattle aquarium after about a year. I moved back east to my rotten Jersey Denmark basement, my parents shaking their heads over my erratic drunken unemployment. And only then (as you know from my incessant mentioning) I realized I loved her. If it wasn't for Night of the Iguana who knows where i might be today? And when this film came out, the same year, I taped it and watched it over and over, though at first it wrankled, for it was painful seeing Max Max so hampered by conscience against a foe so worthy of his usual vengeance. He should have chained Claudius to a car about to explode and left him with a hacksaw and five minutes on the clock.

In between TV access (my dad watched a lot of golf, baseball, and football), I smoked and drank in the dark cellar and wrote her endless letters. Only decades later did I realize how easy true love is when so one-sided. On Facebook now she's old, gone wild gray haired and dowdy like an Anna Magnani--but in 1990--ah, she was still so hot--I wrote her such letters from my boomerang ensconcement back east in my parents' boozy Jersey basement as would wilt the most iron rose to mush. I got a phone call one afternoon whilst half asleep in a dopey drunkard funk--twas her new husband! He promised to kill me should I ere I write again. I was furious and hurt, but obeyed, my love wounded gravely until my own insanely jealous wife, ten years later, forced me to make a similar call, to a girl in Seattle-- a different one--ah, life, like Shakespeare, never offers one absurd staged scene within a scene lest its dark twin later appear, warped and ill woven as if to mock the first, hence the conscience of the king-catching drama Hamlet writes (the artist's version of vengeance?) mirrors the scene Ophelia is forced to play to lure Hamlet into confessing his love and intent while their fathers watch from without. Polonius's strategy here is eerily similar to when I first had dinner with the aforementioned hot girl's Italian-American parents; after dinner the dad plied me with wine, drinking along as I downed a giant bottle and got more and more wasted. I thought we were bonding, but they were testing me, worried I was a drunk. The dad though, was delighted as well, to have an excuse to drink so much. His father had a problem too, and when he'd do shots with me I'd hear about it as grandma had to clean the sheets the next morning, for his bladder was not strong.

I mention this, why? 1990 --a magical year - the big hair 80s disappearing into the past. As if a herald, this Hamlet, where even Gibson's hair cut is legions better than Olivier's super fey blonde bangs in the 1948 version.


But soft--we were yelling on Hamlet, as depicted by the shroomer-esque Mel Gibson.

As for the recent anti-Semitic deep end of Mel; well one can't fake crazy that well, unless one is a bit crazy to start with, which is the problem with so many British interpretations. With a masterful slow boil, Gibson seems overwhelmed and weakened by the role until the ghost encounter-the deep end beckons, he dives in. His Hamlet's obnoxious, the type you never want to see movies with because he's always shouting "this is the part where..."

And there it ends... I refuse to give away the ending, or influence your findings. I will say that all enduring works tend to be universal, organizing one's own history like a transparent overlay, and so it has done the same to mine. See it on an ergot-encrusted rye cracker and peanut butter and think of me as I used to be in our old rooms at Allen Street, pacing to and fro with my bong and bass, and driving the neighbors to the point of sad distraction. Oh wait, that's Sherlock Holmes, not susceptible to the gibbering unspeakable elder god things in heaven and earth, more ghosts and machine elves, and absinthe demons-- than are dreamt of in his philosophy or fairy photography! Watson, the needle... is dusty. The charm's unwound. We will speak further...









NOTES
1, I rag on Olivier a lot - BUT he does deliver a great termite Shakespeare on film//video performance, and that's, strangely enough, while in disguise of blackface and a voice lowered a full octave as OTHELLO (1965). Though shot on video, it pulses with an off-the-cuff energy that makes it feel like it's all happening in real time, with a great 'go on forever' settting sun orange sky and a superlative Iago in Frank Finlay; though Welles' OTHELLO finally looks good on a remaster which will be on Blu-ray hopefully soon, he's almost out-Wellesed by Olivier here. 

 In the beginning there was just a simple poster, with a lot of strange fake names like Ally Gunning and Ahab Bricks and an image of a moviola running a reel of segmented human intestine or spine or something through the sprockets, a kind of EC Comics final twist panel for a movie as yet unwritten. Commissioned for a Canadian "Nonexistent Film" poster art show, the idea was intriguing enough for a trailer, and then, finally, a feature. That order may seem strange but the crazy horror genre is used to it; Val Lewton famously was given the titles for his films by RKO brass, then had to write a film to go with them --and today they're all classics! And now, comes to DVD/Blu-ray, THE EDITOR.


A zippy, blood and nudity-primary color drenched satiric whirlwind that makes Rodriguez' PlANET TERROR seem pretentious and talky by contrast, its frenetic pace, along with inextricable layers of cinematic self-reflexivity and metatextual breakdown, can make for quite a blurry ride until repeat viewings bring it all into focus, sussing out split personality nuance and allowing room to savor the Argento's INFERNO-esque colour palette, the 70s-80s bedroom racing stripes of a thousand Canadian-present-merging with-Italian yesterdays, and the irresistibly old school analog synth score. Will you make those multiple trips to the Astron-6 quadrant? Will you take my hand, and return it to its rightful owner?

The weirdest thing about this final 2014 film of THE EDITOR perhaps is that it's almost as much a satire of the post-giallos made today as the old ones made yesterday that have become classics and been largely forgiven and absolved from charges of misogyny (charges I too once levied). As DVD and HD widescreens have given visually and aurally psychedelic color-saturated Italian giallos from the 70s and slasher-horror from the 80s a second life--making their films demand re-evaluation by once-sneering critics (such as myself)--they seem newer than most 'new' stuff being churned out today. So it stands to reason there'd be an emerging slew of imitators, just as there were back then. And so Moloch bless us everyone, in our glorious Blu-ray age, great companies like Blue Underground, Code Red, Synapse, and Scream Factory make 70s-80s horror films seem like miracles that still carry a nostalgic jouissance-tingling currency for a generation too young to actually see the originals at the time. Now we're old, but we still remember vividly how freaked out we were when we saw the local TV spots, or heard about them, or looked at the picture inserts in the novelization. That weird older adults-only horror movie frisson cut our soul deep, like initiatory tribal scarring. So now we watch our DVDs of them over and over, half out of a warped obsessive-compulsive disorder, half out of cargo cult-style reverie. So it's natural we want to make our own totemic effigies, just to feel that childhood thrill of terror again, or at least hear some colors and see sound.


So lo and behold, a whole new breed of horror film is erupting, the post-giallo thriller--either straight (Peter Strickland, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani - as seen in my curated Netflix festival entry, Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic ala Netflix) or for THE EDITOR, respectuflly satiric: the Canadian 80s-obsessed filmmaker collective known as Astron-6 use mustaches, intentionally off dubbing and too-watery blood and a layered post-modern style that incorporates such eye-popping sights as a man climbing out through the screen of a moviola. It's kinda misogynistic but no more so than BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and it has the Asia Argento-Jennifer Tilly hybrid  of her moment, Paz de la Huerta (left), who does batshit busted ass crazy pretty well. She would make a grand Martha in a horror movie update of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF or SCORE! Here she plays the sexually supercharged and big-lipped wife of the star, the titular editor, Ray Ciso (director Adam Brooks) and makes Edwige Fenech seem like Annette Funicello. 

Whoa, is that reference too inside? You don't know Fenech from Funicello? Then you may be the wrong audience for THE EDITOR. Best you go home and watch CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS and BEACH BLANKET BINGO, alternating DVD chapters until they bleed together as CASE OF THE BLOODY BLANKET or BLOOD IRIS BINGO. We'll wait.... right here, with our massive finger collections drenched under grueful kliegs.

Back? Good. Now you can love THE EDITOR, to a point, the same point. I forgot to tell you to see THE BEYOND. But how can I tell you to see something I don't particularly like? I love about 1/2 that film but after the third minute of watching unconvincing gore close-ups tarantulas pull at latex, well, it cheapens my love of the genre, for once gore loses its punch, its shock value, what the hell good is it? But I do love those white eyes, that girl in the middle of the road with the dog (even if it leads to a rip of SUSPIRIA), the overall oppressive vibe, the contrapuntal score, and the existential ending. I'm not surprised the Astrons so clearly know THE BEYOND by heart, for like Fulci, their strengths and weaknesses are facing each other but they're one --pure dream logic sensationalism at the loss of coherence, and a gleeful reveling in ugly excess that eventually deadens its effect. So THE EDITOR is mirror reflecting whirl of gruesome splatter, unconsciously puritanical sex, and overbaked abstraction and 80s aerobics, BUT I love its Franco Nero mustaches, and the Negaverse' alternate shadow reality populated by ghosts of the slain, severed fingers and floating FROM BEYOND-esque air eels, and swirling black mists. Man have to be blind not to love that. Though having been to some similar places in my 'ahem' travels, I assure you one thing, Verstronians, the real DMT-verse has more spiral fractals, and the FROM BEYOND-esque air eels are endlessly intwining in a double helix that encompasses the breadth of your now widened third eye perception!

From top: The Beyond (1981); The Editor (2011)

There's only one real main flaw, for me: a kind of tawdry misogynistic strip club brazenness (and by misogyny I don't mean the great scene where the cop shows up at his quarry's table during an argument with his wife [La Huerta] to slap her for him--that's hilarious) that's at odds with the more laid and repressed-but-sexier Italians of the era depicted. In other words, I feel fine showing SUSPIRIA or TENEBRE to a hipster feminist, but wouldn't feel comfortable showing her THE EDITOR. Maybe I'm just the prude, I feel the same way about GAME OF THRONES. And can't help but feel the layers should produce a feeling of disoriented self-reflexive paranoia that's not here the way it was in THE STUNTMAN or MULHOLLAND DR. But hey, aside from that, good on ya, mate. Cuz Udo Kier is in it!!

The marvelous Udo

The gorgeous Jean-Louis Trintignant and gorgeous Ewa Aulin in Italian Guilo Questi's qua giallo

While sensitive souls wait for the day that factory farming is regarded as one of humanity's worst atrocities, for writer-director Giuliu Questi (Django Kill, If you Live... Shoot!) and co-writer Franco Arcalli that day came back in 1968, the same year as Argento's groundbreaking Bird with Crystal Plumage. With weird dialogue that sounds like some kind of enigmatic code --the way Belmondo and Karina sometimes talk in that half-recited way in Pierrot Le Fou, there's something kinda magic about DLAE but it's not in the underlaying weird horror plot about the accidental production of a headless chicken, the full measure of factory farming bio-horror guaranteeing the horrified coop owners a heftier profit margin and Marco (Jean Louis Trintignant) a nervous breakdown. That's just the grotesque nadir of a grisly operation. But this split between the ugly truth and the lofty boardroom is well embodied by Marco, who vents his frustrations at being a glorified trophy husband for older woman chicken magnate Anna (Gina Lollobrigida) by cutting up prostitutes in a secret hotel room and covering scarves with Zodiac killer symbols. Gabrielle (Ewa Aulin, Candy herself) is Anna's hot secretary, and it's implied she might be having affairs with both Anna and Marco, and whomever else wants to go for the seven minutes in heaven. During their cinq-a-septs, Marco keeps pressuring her to run away with him, making all these declarations. She worries he's too broke without access to Anna's pockets. "What different does that make," he says. "We can always steal, can't we?" Ever the Lorelei Lee, our Gabrielle cautions him: "Love is a luxury."

Yeah but Trintignant's playing an Italian, and they don't like to be put off. So he takes it out on the prostitutes, maybe, but he draws the line at the headless chickens created inexplicably by the accidental introduction of Anna's wrong-stepping dog into their feed. "This is the beginning of those mutations I've been working for!" says the scientist. "It will bring radical changes to the production." The chickens don't turn homicidal like the house cats in The Corpse Grinders, but the monstrosity of it all drives him into a humane societal fury!


But this seemingly benign tale is rife wtih weird flashbacks, twists, and ragged editing of an almost Bill Gunn-style sideways termite-Eisenstein brilliance; Bruno Madera's patchwork soundtrack plunging down in the atonal piano mash abyss one scene and all up in bossa nova and Anton Karras zither the next, with shoutings in German over Brazilian violins during the lovemaking. Meanwhile, as Bruno skulks around egg symbols and real eggs, Gabrielle and Anna start dressing up like whores and frequenting Bruno's secret haunts. Or do they? Is anything what it seems here?


-----------------------------------------------

Once upon a time there was much variety in movies, in cop movies, the genre, and then.... there was Beverly Hills Cop, which made so many dump trucks full of money it became the only kind of movie Hollywood would ever make again. That's why in every post I've ever written I talk about the post-BHC and the pre-BHC era. And in the post BHC era, there was also The Terminator, and Robocop, and there was Lethal Weapon... and of course, Flashdance. And so, it was natural to come along and quadringulate the four - the cool fast-talking black guy, the buddy cops who hate each other at first, the automaton, the Jennifer Beals getting wet in spandex and fuzzy leggings and hair while studying to be a yawn ballet dancer (in the post-Saturday Night Fever mode, or PSNF).  There wasn't a girl alive who didn't try to rock the soft focus leggings, kinky hair and headband look. Just thinking about it makes me all weak in the knees. Once again from the top: Murphy, Beals, Gibson, Schwarzenegger. And if you want to get technical, Jennifer Jason Leigh's half-sister Jamie Lee Curtis in the willfully forgotten misfire Perfect (1985 - above). This was the 80s, and if those involved with it have their way, you will never see Perfect in your lifetime. But...



There's an out-of-sync with its era vibe to this six years-late 'cool black cop and MILF engineer vs. amok android genre;' its director died trying to rescue his cat during the 1993 California wildfires two years after it came out, not that such tragedy should affect our affection for a flatly filmed but fascinatingly proto-Carol Cloverian thriller about a chick robot who--as in all terribly written Robocop clones-- finds street crime wherever she goes, forcing her to kill and/or get a robotic concussion which disrupts her neural network, sending her on a one woman vendetta against all the men who wronged her maker in childhood, while trying to shake a feeling of lost confusion.



On the other hand, no one is more lost than Gregory Hines, whose 80s tap dance career somehow qualifies him for hunting indestructible irrational chick robots. Here's an actor who's not about to go brave a wildfire to rescue his cat. Then again, why is he even cast? Oh yeah, Beverly Hills Cop part of the holy 80s quadrangle. And Hines was famous once, the new Sammy Davis Jr. and the past Savion Glover. A footloose and fancy free tap dancer with a trim beard and a face that looks like someone pulled his nose way out and then snapped it back so it hangs loose like his 90s suit, we first find dear old Gregory berating a bunch of hardcore military mesomorphs after they fail a hostage rescue training exercise. Shouting at the top of his lungs, voice barely cutting through the thick testosterone. Is keeping a straight face while this mustachioed Snoopy shouts at them like a fussy choreographer part of the training? That's a hell of a tester. The amok Eve VIII (Renée Soutendijk) should be easy to find and wrangle after that. All Hines has to do is tell his SWAT guys where to shoot and follow her down the traumatic memory lane of her 'image and likeness'-style designer, also played by Soutendijk and named Eve (who gave her identical namesake replicant her own memories; or as Deckard would say, "implants"). What it is, kid. Too bad his guys can't shoot for shit, so EVE VIII ends up decimating entire ambush parties with a single Mac 10 clip. Next time you want to train some inept SWAT guys, better call R. Lee Emery!

Soutendijk, a Dutch actress, was in some Dutch Paul Verhoeven films neither you or I have probably seen, but probably want to (they're OOP in R1).  She's the girl holding the scissors in that Fourth Man poster (left). She makes a pretty solid Nexus 8 model, and as she's a single innocent robot suffering from PSTD going up against an array of supposedly competent armed men and sleazy studs, it's pretty cathartic when she blasts them all to hell. And this time there's no "Humans Killed: Zero" statistic like Arnold's in the same year's T2, Badass.

I admit I recently bought the Blu-ray of EVE, mostly out of loyalty to a drunken half-remembered night when my brother and I caught it halfway through on cable back in 1991. It's not quite as good sober in 2015, but what is? Made before CGI and with a decent budget, it's good enough that when you're craving a witty Terminator-Robocop-style 80s flick from the early 90s, look no further... than Dark Angel (1990).

If you're still hungry after that, pour the Hines. And PS: Going back into a raging inferno to rescue your cat? Regardless of the outcome, simply badass.

In interviews Sam Elliott called the weird 30s old dark house 70s devil movie hybrid "fifteen years behind it's time." Well, as so often happens, 30 years later and we're all the way around again to where it shines like the gleam in Sam Elliott's timeless cowboy eye. Either way, trailing Satanist glory as it descends the stair, THE LEGACY (1978) demands the best and gets it via a gorgeous remastering for Blu-ray from Scream Factory. Like Elliott's sturdy mustache, it's gorgeous, right painterly. The kind of film Sam would probably be proud to hang behind his gun rack in the den.

I'd never seen this film, never heard anything but bad reviews. Baby, I been misled. At any rate, glad I waited til now, while its perfect, for who knows when its fifteen years will be up once more?


Never more beautiful or assured, with that great long straight chestnut hair and autumnal wardrobe her she/s like the 70s own called-forth Cleopatra Babalon Marjorie Cameron Isis Scarlet Woman. And unlike so many of the 70s iconic beauties, she could act when the situation demanded it, not that it does here so much. But she looks great but she also looks mature (she was 38?) and intelligent, swept along in this weird tide with her man. There's no whining about wanting a baby or not having one or getting too much sex or not enough. She's equal partners with her man, for the most part, and when she inherits her legacy her whole face seems to change shape, expanding into an uncanny extra dimension of glacial stillness which shows why she was so effective in THE STEPFORD WIVES.


This is the era of some real strides in depicting assertive hot women who can believably order men around and sleep with them without emasculating them. If their mustache was on straight, and they'd smoked enough to get a nice deep live-in voice, they could even forge a new path. It's rare, but men characters were doing it all the time in the late 70s--there was Brolin, Kristofferson, Voight, and here's Elliott, singlehandedly bring his character back from the brink of feminism's total wash-out of the straight American white cowboy male. I mean, he winds up having a pretty rough time, a foreigner at a strange party he can never leave where his presence is superfluous and his stock is falling from there. His crankiness seems to indicate he's destined for death or irrelevance.

Well, I should have given more credit to old Sam --he's a warrior from the Iron Age of cowboys--the 70s--the Kris Kristofferson / James Brolin school, of guys so cool and badass they blazed a whole new trail of how to be macho while helping or at any rate not hindering the breakout women's lib vibe erupting all around like a myriad black hole tentacle whirling of tossed Mary Tyler Moore hats. These dudes might feel left out and sidelined as whole swaths of their power changed hands, but then, instead of staying sulky for more than a scene or two, they throw down and smash their way back to parity. Hopefully they'd then finally untuck their jeans from their ridin' boots.

The 3D clarity and glistening deep colors are perfect for the setting, a big weird English mansion called Ravenhurst, with a very bizarre pool room which I remembered clearly all this time from the TV spots (when I was 12) along with the white cat. There's a few moments when the couple's wearing white on white in the white room, when you think perhaps we're in heaven, or a halfway house, ala CARNIVAL OF SOULS. And sometimes the waxiness glistens too much, but overall the dusky great Allan Hume / Dick Bush photography is given full resonant expression, with a lot of magic hour deep blacks and the extreme angles, vertical and diagonal POVs inside the mansion are hypnotizing, lots of looking down from ornate stairs, the creepy nurse's face bleeding into the myriad portraits. I usually hate the way rural England looks in daytime shots--the stone white sky, the landscape all washed out and dreary and depressingly still (taking the tube to Heathrow from London--which turns into an above ground train once outside London--is like traveling across the land of the time-frozen dead) but in THE LEGACY it looks plenty ominous, sexy, and cool. I'm so happy to finally make my peace with British exterior shots, you don't even know how I suffered. And that Bentley is hypnotizing in the pristine HD cleanliness.

That said, don't judge by the pics here which I scrounged around the web, for you!

Orchestral and at times predictable but has great synths too, and it doesn't get too up into the helicoptering Korngold-Williams style. It percolates and oozes with sly menace in the Carpenter carpet style and sometimes browses around a giallo vibe with echoing female vocalizing and twangy guitar octaves. In other words, Lewis keeps it simple and cool rather than showing off your symphonic training every five seconds and boring everyone but the longhairs. And there's even a great tacky 70s theme song sung by someone named Kiki Dee.

This is from DEVIL RIDES OUT, but you get the picture

There's a minimum of the usually ubiquitous thriller scenes of the heroine in a nightgown padding around the darkened mansion investigating strange noises, and even fewer soft focus dream sequences, what we have instead is a kind of tumble down horror litany - the guests are dropping off and the host-- instead of just being a wheelchair bound codger with a will being read at midnight--is a mysterious dying monster behind a white curtain (like the old witch in SUSPIRIA) announcing only one of the assembled six will wield the ring of ultimate black magic power. Katharine Ross it seems is the designated one, and 'the power' isn't just the vast and unfathomable wealth of his sprawling estate, if you get my meaning. And it all makes perfect sense --these are the sorts of people we only saw with their maskies in EYES WIDE SHUT... and boom, they're popping off like firecrackers.



And then there's the weird elfin gnome-ishness of Daltrey, this strange being with the tiny body and huge head and wild mane of hair. And he's playing a rock icon much like himself, who's links to this weird ghostly mansion estate indicates black magic got him where he is today. Clutch. And leave it to a nouveau riche plebe to give us most of the exposition on how rich and powerful everyone there is. THe LEGACY is actually second film from the 70s I've seen where some dies from choking to death and no one gives him the Heimlich maneuver. My own grandmother knew to give me the Heimlich maneuver when I was just a child; she saved my life with it, before this movie was even made! So it was not unknown, at least in Sweden, though according to CNN

"In August 1974, editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association contacted the doctor who had developed a new method to save someone from choking -- then a major cause of death in the United States. His new technique was saving lives across the country, and they wanted to tell him they were publishing a story about it, and were going to name the procedure after him" (CNN)"

Either way, watching him choke to death at the buffet table is twice as agonizing as everyone just stands around freaking out. Is that really what they did back then?

There's some solidly imagined escape attempt sequences with the estate vividly depicted from the towers down to the stables. All the rustic one lane roads lead back to the mansion; they try to escape via horses, saddled on the sly which Sam does with a relaxed quick assurance of the real cowboy, and their mad ride to freedom manages to be 70s rustic lovely while scary; the near mauling by the hunting dogs, the crossbow vs. shotgun duel--all very town and country (where double barrel shotgun and crossbow must be continually reloaded as they would be in real life, a truth which seldom engages less imaginative screenwriters) going with the on location mansion setting very nicely and creating a much tighter unified whole than EYE OF THE DEVIL which loped along a similar track but--the Sharon Tate scenes aside.

 I can't spoil the ending but let's just say that no one fucks with the kid, whatever that means. I really liked all the directions it was going, I didn't know whether to cheer Sam's bloody death or root for him, the last thing I wanted was to see him instill some last minute bad faith better my girlfriend be dead than a Satanist edict she return unto his patriarchal coddling. But it's a great ending.  Maybe it's because THE LEGACY's based on a bestseller which apparently was heavily promoted to reach the the list in an elaborate bid to get some EXORCIST-ROSEMARY'S BABY association vibe. And makes sense that the couple met on the shoot, married and had a kid and went on to a groovy life, they got that daughter up in that pic that's the daughter up there. To use one of his LEGACY lines back at him, whatever he's doin'.... he's doin' it right.

A beautiful film on a beautiful new Shout Factory Blu-ray, Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy moves in a steady hypnotic rhythm through strange dom/sub head games played by a pair of lesbian lepidopterists living in a world without men, where it's always autumn, and the Gothic architecture is ornate and fecund with overgrowth. The beautiful dusky purples and oranges of the butterflies and the house interiors match the women as they move through the subs cloistered scripts in an endless repetition.

from Jess Franco's Succubus (1967)

The 70s 'Eurosleaze' genre so championed by Mondo Macabro's Pete Tombs (who originally commissioned the work) and embodied most clearly in the low budget films of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, is the source material here, their dreamlike mood at once boring and fascinating, best seen while falling half asleep (which their slow pace is guaranteed to help with). For within that lulling, the lullaby of the same storybook over and over, the same song sung over your cradle by the giant mommy goddess, lurks the keys to all spirituality, carnality, and musicality: Chanting and ritual work not, as some think, to lull the conscious egoic mind into a trance but to annihilate it by boredom, the way a cigarette snuffs itself out once dropped in an empty bottle.  To deliberately court this annihilation is the core of masochism, at least in film. Warhol's films court this, all but proving that behind masochism is post-modern awakening and behind that, nirvana. Once the ego's been bored to death, the unconscious gets the wheel and one's third eye dream and the film screen combine into one organic reverie. Similarly the films of Josef Von Sternberg with their fetishistic veils and inert momentum, or the magical repetitive hypnotism of Kenneth Anger or, especially as its so clearly referenced in Strickland's film, the 1963 Stan Brakhage experimental film, Mothlight:


I'm a confirmed proponent of the masochistic gaze theory posited by Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro, I knew what to look for in Darionioni Nuovo tremolare Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, the genesis of the story (according to his interview in the Blu-ray extra) being that Pete Tombs (of Mondo Macabro fame), commissioned the film, wanting a remake of Lorna the Exorcist (a very long awaited Jess Franco title, for those who wait for such things). Me, I've learned that like Rollin's work, the only way to enjoy Franco (for me at least) is while alone at dusk, falling asleep as the sun sets, waking up fitfully, lulled into a weird trance. In all other ways they kind of suck. Though I screened SUCCUBUS for a bunch of kids at a European horror film class, I hadn't realized just how sex drenched it is until they shifted uncomfortably at their desks. Interestingly the next class, I explained the best way to appreciate what's going on in that film (the secret to most art films) is to just presume the lead character has amnesia and doesn't want anyone to know. As everyone is always drunk and high out of their minds, and don't speak the same language, it's only natural. Take it from me, if someone I've never seen (to my knowledge) comes up to me and starts talking about somewhere I've met them but don't remember, I'm going to just play along. If a hot redhead naked under a fur comes over to my swinger apartment at four in the morning I'm not going to say "who are you and what do you want?" though I probably should...

Anyway, once I said that, and played it a second time, it all made sense---they got it, now they liked it. They got the modernist frisson.  In the end that's perhaps why Fritz Lang 'got' the art of Franco, as did Welles. Because Europe in the 1960s-70s is the Capital of Amnesia and the tower of Babalon Working when a producer, actor, and director may easily have no language in common. And drugs were ubiquitous. When you can't remember how you got there, you can make a big deal about it and get ejected from the in-crowd, or just roll along and let the mannequins assemble for the sacrifice, presuming that your unbridled arrogance will convince them that you're not the designated victim. The gathered wait and kill the first one who admits they don't understand what's going on.

In the Shout Factory extras, Strickland notes that after a screening he heard bourgeois critics talking about how Duke of Burgundy'elevated the genre' and he got mad - I thought at first he was being snotty, that how dare we lump his masterwork in with Franco et al - but non, he was defending the genre, defending the films of Rollin, Franco, the slew of vampire lesbians from the 'vampire women era' of 1970-74 (begun with Hammer's Vampire Lovers and more or less over by 1974's Vampyres) Daughters of Darkness, Girl Slaves of Morgana La Fey --indignant that critics think they shouldn't be considered on the same high art level of other art films like Mr. Arkadin, Alphaville or Cries and Whispers. Hey, I get it.

I have been called onto to do the sadistic part for others, both just as verbal descriptions of bizarre maid humiliation fantasies and actual 'belt-play' or whatever the ladies at Toys in Babeland call it. But the act never works as well as the threat, the speaking of it. It's about the submission, the show, the whispered declarations of power vs. humiliation rather than the practice; which again all ascribes now to the Gaylyn Studlar masochistic film theory vs. the Laura Mulvey sadistic proprietary male gaze theory:

"Studlar uses Deleuze’s treatise of masochism as a starting point for her article. Where Mulvey views the female as having no power, in a masochist reading, the woman is powerful due to possessing what the male lacks, so pleasure is not gained by “mastery of the female but submission to her” (1985:782). This is in direct contrast to Mulvey’s view, which centres on voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia being a defense mechanism to castration anxiety. For Studlar, there is not always a connection between looking and control and therefore the process of looking, or obtaining pleasure from looking, is not always about objectification. If the viewer is getting pleasure through identification, then there is equality between the spectator and the subject being looked-upon." (Z- Mediated Musings)

October is here so I may as well confess I recently got the Universal Horror Classics Blu-ray box (avail. for $40 if you know how to look): Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera- I admit it and I'm ashamed- they look great, brand new--they're like totally different movies, like seeing them all over again for the first time, as if one's quaffed the kind nepenthe Poe craves in The Raven so that he might forget his lost Lenore; which if you've seen most of these over and over so many damn times as an alienated monster enthusiast, over and over on tapes one made off local TV, you're most grateful to have this second chance, the nepenthe quaff memory wipe of uber-HD Blu-ray, cleaned and enhanced to the point of 3D. Now I can see the brush strokes in the painted rocks of Henry Frankenstein's crumbling phallic tower interior, the brush lines of make-up on Hull and Karloff; the reflection of black greasepaint under the eyes of Frye and the shimmer on Mae Clarke's wedding dress; Whale's camera stalking and puttering and winding staircase through a 3-D expressionistic vertical maze of black and grey. In Dracula, the clarity of HD Bela Lugosi--once in London--seems shorter, his hair oilier, his complexion steamed from the klieg lights, as if he needed the mirakle of celluloid grain, the early sound ether, even the UHF ghosting, in which to materialize his full unearthly measure of malevolence. In the earlier scenes in Transylvania there's a strange sense of Natural History Museum diorama interiority, as if all of the village where Renfield is told not to venture on to Borgo Pass is about five feet deep, the black and white of Freund's camera like an alien technology window into some human third eye fever dream dimension.

"whom d'angels name Lanorre"

Not all of the eight films belong in the set: Phantom of the Opera is just a lavish, well-made 40s musical-romance with a disappointing unmasking (more like a localized skin rash than a hideous countenance to glut one's senses). It and Creature from the Black Lagoon (great, but belonging to a whole different period/genre than the others, it would go well with It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula, Incredible Shrinking Man... etc.) seem included purely for their name recognition. The rest of the films hum with expressionistic atmosphere and delirious alchemy of light and shadow, such care should go to the lesser knows but just as delirious and alchemical.

No, friends. In order to truly be a cohesive, lovely package, the Universal horror Blu-ray set should include some of the other 30s Universal gems that fit the sound expressionist black magic of Whale, Freund, Browning.... The Raven, The Black Cat, Murders in the Rue Morgue and Werewolf of London and The Old Dark House. Rich in the kind of expressionist atmospherics that would really send a brother on a crisp Blu-ray. So consider this humble post my arc of triumphant piss against the wind of Universal big wig indifference. For the purposes of this post, though, I'll focus on two from 1935, The Raven, and Werewolf of London (which I prefer... heresy I know... to the Wolf Man).


In THE RAVEN (1935), 'Karloff' gets top billing even though Lugosi's really the whole show as a totally insane Poe devotee who's actually built, you know, some of the torture devices described in Poe's stories in his basement. Afforded a rare chance to be the whole show in a relative-for-him A List project, Bela does not waste a single syllable. He's a brain surgeon and contented genius, obsessed with the Divine Edgar but when coerced into saving modern dance artist Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) she starts sending him mixed signals while he plays that eerie Toccata fugue by Bach (Karloff played the same tune in the previous year's The Black Cat) and suddenly Poe isn't enough for him.

He misreads her coyness, or rather he doesn't --she's being a tease. And well I know the weird obsessive shame and confusion when a girl pulls that nonsense. You know what I mean: moving from being flirty and coy to shocked when a brother closes in for the kill. After all she's engaged to young Jerry (Lester Matthews, a constant at Scotland Yard and legions of 30s-40s Universal horrors).

But unlike the bulk of the 'normal' rivals in Universal horrors, played by David Manners or John Boles, Jerry's a bit of all right. His response when learning Bela's sweet on his lady is, "Well, what of it?" We like him, and wonder what he has that Bela doesn't, youth aside, that makes her father think marrying Bela would be worse than death. He's rich and cultured and saved her life, so who cares if he's older? He's a catch, especially if you're into the macabre and want to dance for a 'living' rather than work. Damn it, Bela never gets the girl, except in Return of Chandu and Black Dragons... but those don't even count.

Maybe it's because Lugosi doesn't know how to be romantic, only tortured for the equivalent of the lost Lenore. It's all right if he had a wife.... but that was long ago... to have one now is... what, somehow not scary?

The previous year's big Karloff-Lugosi-Poe duel The Black Cat is more widely hailed by fans and critics do to the poetic hand of that other divine Edgar, G. Ulmer, but the two films are like mirrored bookends to each other, and of the two, Raven sends me into movie heaven while Black Cat is more enervating. But they need each other with their distorted reflections: in one Karloff plays a sympathetic prison escapee who redeems himself by killing Lugosi; in the other, Lugosi is a former POW who gets revenge and redeems himself by killing Karloff. Either way, they are well-matched and both die, the evil one subjected to a bizarre torture by the other after he makes his dark coded move against the girl, whose 'normie' husband is way-too over-civilized and young to not seem buffeted by the wind of superior malevolence. In each the woman is endangered in a sense only by the censor; because even if they're newlyweds the couple aren't allowed to sleep in the same room when staying over at these strange mansions. If they bucked convention and shacked up together, then these two devilish titans wouldn't be able to take such a free hand.

With its weird Satanic morning chess game and policeman on bicycle next morning comedy, a weird deathly pall settles over Black Cat that The Raven (which never really reaches the next day) lacks; and with the incessant clanging endlessly cycling motifs in the score playing seemingly at random, it's more proof horror never works well in the morning. That's why Dracula goes to sleep at dawn (and in the summer, so do I).  Part of The Raven's appeal lies in that sense of the coming night, which I think I've always equated with very cool slumber parties I attended in the 70s, watching late night UHF horror movies while playing Ouija and 'stiff as a board' while our parents played bridge and wife-swapped below. Vollin's party with Dr. Thatcher as the sensible adult, trying to warn the lovers away, is very like those parties. There's even an electric pony race track! It's like air hockey or 'Pong.' Dr. Thatcher is 'the adult' and Vollin waits til he's asleep to begin the real party, the sneaking downstairs to explore forbidden basements.' In Cat, Peter Allison becomes the de facto adult - they wait until he's asleep to resume their struggles, a struggle neither is in such a hurry to accelerate.

I love them both, but what makes The Raven so much more enjoyable in a totally new and unusual way (especially for 1935 when the code was in effect) is that it isn't mired by any extraneous comic relief, or at least not any 'stand alone' bits ala the two bicycle riding local cops (Italian-esque for some reason) competing over praise for their hometowns: "gaiety if you want a gaiety!" Instead the comedy comes from the relish with which Lugosi lets loose. He's so over the top it's like he smashes the roof of the sky through the sheer oversize scenery chewing grandeur of his crazy Poe sadism. It's my favorite Lugosi performance ever, this oversize Poe-loving maniac is Lugosi's Oscar Jaffe in Twentieth Century. 


WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935) follows the Frankenstein via Whale aesthetic and subtextual template with an added layer of drug addiction: The only cure for botanist Henry Hull's lycanthropy is to stick the stem of this special eastern "orchid" into his vein. It blooms only under a full moon and there's only one other guy in London with his special "problem," the guy who gave it to him, like Hep C from a dirty orchid stem or.... other. A very very telling detail as when the wife gives a tea party in his greenhouse, Hull and Oland share some conspiratorial alienation that's very what the gay subculture must have been like in those dim times when homosexuality was deep underground, probably with a whole array of secret meetings and code words not unlike the French resistance (and guys who work with flowers a secret gay signifier, as in the papa bear type florist whose little boytoy steals Delambre's recipe in The Return of the Fly). And the heroin addiction analogy works just as well With a whole flower needed per wolf per night of the full moon, there's just not enough to go around, so the two jones over each bud like fiends in the grip of a very hairy withdrawal.

As Hull's wife, Valerie Hobson (Mae Clarke's Brit replacement as the other Bride of Frankenstein the same year) sports blonde hair and bewildered concern; she never sees her husband except to hear his excuses and idle too-little-too-late promises. He's too busy tinkering with his pansies and bestiality to dote on her and pretend to be interested in flowers. Lester Matthews plays Paul (he has the same name and basic role as in The Raven), an 'old friend' of Valerie's, filling in for the ever-absent Hull, as sad-eyed dudes will when a hottie doesn't get her husband's affection). As with his role in Raven, Matthews rocks a genial mix of jolly esprit de corp and tall person clumsiness, a stout front struggling under heavy British fog inertia. And then there's a rival for Hull's other precious flower, moon botanist Warner Oland, touching Henry on the arm where he bit him while they were both in Tibet, as he exudes a very gay junkie vibe, begging for a hit from the precious white flower, and/or letting Hull know there's another guy with his 'problem' in London --who maybe knows where the gay bars are hidden.

But the real reason it all works so well is Henry Hull. The most believable of all the Universal scientists, Hull's buttoned-up angular Britishness --his clothes are too small; he seems uncomfortable in his gawky body. It's easy to imagine him boring you in a lecture while fumbling nervously through his texts, his sleeves ink-stained and frayed. His slavish devotion to science makes his obligations to conform to British upper class decorum a challenge he is just not up to. Hull seems like the real thing. And his face, all angles and eyebrows, looks half wolf all ready, and that's the genius of this particular wolf make-up here as opposed to the 1941 Wolf Man's, pouffy hair and doggie nose. The script for Wolf Man is all about whether Lon's imagining his affliction or not, and the subtext reflected America's anxiety about getting sucked back into another European conflict it doesn't quite understand. Werewolf of London on the other hand is about science and drug addiction, the pain (I can vouch for the latter) of watching powerless from deep within the prison of your madness as your beautiful, warm sweet wife settles for her consolation prize of a doting rebound male. I've been through it many, many times and it's seldom been done so well, except maybe in Corman's The Trip or Mike Nichols'Closer. The way the first person she hooks up with after you've gone is invariably everything you're not, as if she's trying to find ballast for her heaving ship, the way the drug's not a cure but a temporary relief, good only for a single night. Oh yeah, I know how that feels. Between the pills and powders, booze and spliffs, a single night's surcease of sorrow, the grand total of that nepenthe to quaff can crest the triple digits.

In case we need more clues, Hull gets quite irate when his wife shines a light in his eyes - another junkie thing - hanging out in his robe all day puttering around his collections and experiments, another junkie thing, and sleeping with (or in this case murdering) girls most like the one he truly loves. I identify with his wish to keep his wife and turn things around coupled to his clumsiness at it, and ultimately his obsession with his ailment taking precedence. He doesn't want to lose her but is powerless to change, and addiction is all about running from pain. What can you do when your drug just disappears from the market, when another mule is kicking in your stall, another scientist plucking your rare flower? Chaney's wolf man doesn't have a personality beyond unconscious random malice, big hairy pouffy fro and animal cunning and aggression wantonly killing anything in his path, mainly gravediggers burying the previous night's victims. Hull's werewolf isn't as hairy and is twice as scary for seeming so human at the same time, closer to Mr. Hyde vis a vis Frederic March. Substitute old films and booze addiction (and a stolen flower the same thing as being unable to score weed) and I totally relate.
Adding to the Whale effect: some great comic relief with the tipsy aunt, who has a strange come-on moment with Oland at her party; the way she wafts around is so expert in a continual flowing monologue is so expert you need a full lifetime of viewing to come to appreciate it: a bumbling Brit cop lamenting his fallen arches; an imitation Una O'Connor delivering a great single breath sentence while leading him upstairs to a room for let in the shady side of town, after cold-cocking another old bat to get his business, and their constant drinking and hiding bottles from each other--Whale couldn't have done it any better. John Colton one of the screenwriters, wrote Shanghai Gesture! Maybe that explains the complicated women in the case, the attention to detail in the dialogue of women characters usually just tossed away as filler between murders.


Lastly - a great reason all these old gems need Blu-ray upgrades: they're hitherto available only jammed onto discs (Raven is jammed in with The Black Cat and Murders in the Rue Morgue on one side of a double Bela Lugosi Collection disc, though they all look great anyway- though they're all avail. separately as DVRs) and Werewolf of London is only on a double-sided disc on the old OOP Wolfman Legacy Collection (though I see it is on Amazon Instant Video in HD!). At any rate they deserve love and care, certainly more than old Phantom of the Opera does. Never did like Phantom of the Opera or understand why they pushed it on kids as part of the pantheon right down to having an Aurora monster model of it. (which I admit I got, mainly for the prisoner down in the sewer). I mean, kids HATE opera.  Whatever. Even my brother loved The Raven and Werewolf of London, back when we'd watch old weird movies I'd taped over and over after the parents went to sleep in the mid-80s. Times never change... for me anyway. I'm losing track of my point because I have an October cold, but oh yeah, get it together Universal, and make this collection:

Universal Horror Blu-Ray Collection Vol. II

1. Old Dark House (1932)
2. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
3. The Black Cat (1934)
4. The Raven (1935)
5. Werewolf of London (1935)
6. Son of Frankenstein (1936)
7. Dracula's Daughter (1935)
8. The Invisible Ray (1936)

I love the ominousness of October, the ever-earlier darkness catching me off guard, as if God was wiping the world away with a black eraser, saving me for last. Hurrying inside like a napping sunbather awakened suddenly by said sun's absence; my grateful sweater weather skin cold with the relentless tick-tock approach of Halloween, as if the entire month was rolled up into a cone, draining the hours towards that hallowed eve. Neighbors in the distance take on a sinister shadowy shimmer in the dimming day and the black decorative window shutters of suburban houses seem like cartoon eyebrows fronting a devil's skull. House interiors become extra dark as twilight tricks us out of turning on the table lamps earlier and earlier; pumpkins and wood panelling; orange shag rug and black witch hats; talking low and quiet to as not wake the sleeping behemoth, or irate parents--these are a few of my favorite things. I love when eerie horror movies capture that eerie uncanny chill, can find the ambiguity in autumn leaves swirling around under gnarled bare trunks. So few movies get that feeling right, that mood of giddy doom, the inexorable tick-tockality of looming daylight savings.

Halloween (watching The Thing) It Follows (watching Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women) Note: black and white TV atop dead floor console -like we had in the early 80s

Carpenter's original Halloween (1978) most assuredly captured it, maybe even defined it, its uncanny suburban home familiarity of being creeped out alone in the house with just a distracted babysitter who tries but can't keep the nervous trill out of her voice when you all hear a strange noise upstairs. The kids watching old horror movies on TV; the pale glow of the screen like a fading camp fire keeping the wolves at bay; Forbidden Planet and the 1951 Thing like a charm against the real threat, like the caged lovebirds in The Birds, or a flu shot..

To this mix Carpenter invented a whole new cool kind of synthesizer score, avoiding the overbearing orchestras of John Williams or Howard Shore, the steady ominous notes that entraining a kind of rapid heartbeat and slow footsteps and capture the unnerving but delightful feeling of ominous October, the darkness coming earlier and earlier, the chill immediate...

Luckily, other filmmakers got that vibe right too... sometimes they've been hard to find, but lately, I saw two!



In the annals of the modern horror/sci fi genre auteurs there are recognizable names (Argento, Craven, Carpenter), up and comers (West, Fessenden, Wingard) and then... well... no one. But with DVD making it impossible for them to disappear, we horror fans find here and there, ready to be exhumed and dusted, also-ran auteurs of no small class and quality no matter how few horror films they've made, like Herk Harvey who brought fly-over state of unconscious poetics (Carnival of Souls) Michael Almereyda, who brings coolness to reflexive homage (The Eternal, Nadja), and Thom Eberhardt, who made two 80s sleepers that have stood the test of time: 1984's Night of the Comet, and a 1983 bit of crafty low budget bit of Final Destination-prefiguring ominousness called Sole Survivor.  

After a schismatic opening with some psychic crank (Caren Larkey, who also co-produced) on the phone and doing automatic writing we have the heroine Denise or "Dee Dee" (Anita Skinner) sitting in her seat (in the upright position) amidst the best looking plane wreckage a low budget film allows. The sole survivor of a terrible plane crash; she's lucky to be alive but something's not right and beginning with her release from the hospital the recently dead seem to be following her around, or maybe it's that she's mixing alcohol with her discontinued antidepressants.

ask not for whom, kitty-kitty

But the coolest stuff is in the clever masterful use of Carpenter-esque tick-tock momentum and the sense of being alone in a world slowly disappearing around you as night falls, conveyed by weird shots of Denise's empty kitchen, living room, stairs; tracking through the very 70s faux exposed brick and panelling and deep red walls (all the better to offset her red hair). And we care because there's some nice warm romantic exposition with her cute doctor, Brian (Kurt Johnson) who worries she's suffering from 'survivor's syndrome', or at least that's his excuse to call her up. In a cool little scene we see their back and forth phone conversation, the way she moves to the bedroom phone to lie down and focus in on her seductive phone stratagem. He's kind of nervous and using his doctorly concern to 'get in there' as the saying goes, and alternating shots of her in bed and he at his kitchen making sauce or something are very well done, and then the camera becomes like that friend who, once they sense their pal has it in the bag, as it were, gives them a quiet congratulatory smile and heads downstairs to get a drink or something but the thing is there's nobody there, and the stillness is broken only by the roving eyes of the pink cat clock.

It Follows (my clock radio at middle right)

There's also the exact 70s clock radio I had as a kid (from which I listened to The Shadow and Suspense reruns every night on local PBS radio) and which is also in It Follows. There's a dripping faucet, an almost Twin Peaks empty road stop light at night ominous as the action shuffles back and forth between Denise's house and the house next door where she presumably babysat when they were both a lot younger; the relationship has left them somewhere between surrogate authority figure and partner in crime. Both houses are great relics of the 70s style, with all the exposed faux stone and dark wood panelling, the deep reds and dark oranges shag carpets and walls offsetting Denise's red hair and blue vein pale skin look. I can relate to hanging out with younger people; going over and drinking Cristy's parents' booze and falling asleep on their couch while she sneaks off to a party? Another uniquely real relationship in this quietly amazing film.

The romance is fascinating- Dr. Brian's a catch, handsome a bit shy, a doctor... and he can cook. And Dee-Dee's a TV producer with the redhead gene making the purple of her facial blood vessels almost visible, pale makeup covering blemishes (not too many) all go with her powder blue bows and sweaters to make her the color of blue blood - which make her busting the first move cool and all very Howard Hawks right down to two lines of dialogue lifted wholesale (along with her hip beret) from To Have and Have Not: "it's even better when you help" and later Cristy's "what are you trying to do, guess her weight?" at a strip poker game--indicating the two may have seen the film together one night earlier.

"read the label - maybe you'll believe me then"

Dee-Dee and Brian's budding pair bonding and the cool Cristy relationship are both very well etched in a very short time, and with all that evocative 70s dusky decor as far as I'm concerned the film doesn't even need to go further. There might be Xmas trees lurking in the corners of rooms but hey-it's California so it doesn't matter--there's an autumnal vibe that makes each formed or renewed bond, each drink and playful touch feel precious with fading warmth, fires all the warmer and brighter for the encroaching darkness. Their first kiss is scored to park sounds--the noise of background cheering over some goal coinciding with their first big kiss in a way that works, while the blur of the kids running back and forth between the camera and the couple great at seeming like all the people around them disappear into the background. But then... some wordless still thing is watching...

I recently caught the original Texas after work, 5:30 PM on Showtime. Whoever's idea it was over at Showtime to put on super bizarre past classics of angry Kafka-esque alienation and prolonged terror in the after work slot for 9-5 automatons like myself, I say this: God bless you and thanks. It was the perfect thing to show my frazzled zombie stress magnet soul that yes, this is life how it really is, modern living's shallow callow delusions stripped off the bone in a girl's solar eclipse pressure eyeball cooker fluids. Even her name conjures pain and destruction: Marilyn Burns. Her wild-eyed constant screaming annoying the girl on the couch beside me as she scrolled through her last hour of work (from home) as the final act ground its course. I still am not entirely sure why this lurid fit of lunatic giggling and incessant screaming--the constant dropping of the hammer into the empty basin as grandpa oscillated between being a corpse, a stuffed dummy, and vaguely alive-- wound up fitting my black as pitch post-work mood, but it gave me a new appreciation for the craft of acting and the way this extended family of inbred all-male killers is treated with respect, the way the three of them (or three and a half if you count the barely not dead gramps) explore the complexity of the family dynamic, and are genuinely insane -- beyond merely Hollywood sadism --and perhaps made that way by having to butcher our meat for us, decade after decade, so we can have our bacon and believe we're compassionate too.

And more than any other thing, I noticed the weird off-kilter but sincerely troubling oscillations from giggling barnyard sadist to concerned compassionate papa bear in the performance of Jim Siedow as the father (?) or older brother, but mainly the cook (he doesn't take pleasure in killin' - he says)--he's so good it took me til this most recent viewing to catch the genius of his constant and sincere Jekyll-to-Hyde-and-back-again shifting. I noticed too Leatherface's (Gunnar Hansen) butcher apron, a 'real Ed Gein' type, going whole hog with a mother's face and hair affixed to cover what is surely a hideous countenance (we only see his disgusting teeth through the mask), he too oscillates though from apparent anxiety to bloodlust (again, he's not a sadist, for he kills with the same dispassionate eye as the slaughterhouse worker, thinking more about the meat in its future form rather than its present screaming incarnation); and the playful joi de vivre of junior, his simple-minded joy of Edwin Neal over a good knife or grandpa's slaughterhouse skills, swinging his razor around, or windmilling his bag of road kill around like Jeeter Lester with a stolen bag of turnips -- a being well-suited to the empty distances of their backwoods rural location. There are no more neighbors for miles, and they eat only what they can catch... if you get my meaning.  Like the Merrye Family, they eat local.

Five dollars!

And when the locals are all eaten, they eat any old thing that washes up along their remote little stretch of the asphalt river...

It's scary because it's true, Ed Gein true, the kind even my aforementioned savagery switchpoint can't combat, because there's no recognizable foe, no malice behind it. It takes a real artist to get there. Shrieking, dilated eyes, their optical fluid sending up solar flares visible as the dilated pupil eclipses the iris; the bloody mess lurking below every human skin true when all the layers of crud are laser-zapped away to expose the world as it really is, infinitely stretched out in a series of 9-5 slogs, 12-8 sleeps, and the rest jonesing for grub and the right movie to contextualize why you even bother. But the right movie can illuminate the full Lovecraftian horror of the universe so it hits you hard, like an ice cold Killian's Irish Red funnel in the dead of a Syracuse winter; the long wide funnel rolling you slowly around and down to the chute of crucifixion and death. But oh lord, the other side, the black hole monster of the nothingness void that awaits a suddenly unmoored soul. Seeing Chainsaw in the hour preceding your own death is not something I'd wish on anyone. "Look" what it did to Dr. X - The Man with X-Ray Eyes? It can turn you into one of those stolen turnips, how human skin seems ever ready to erupt and spill out elevator oceans. All it takes to 'spill' it is some crazy person swinging a sharp object around.

So yeah, hard to believe there was a time I would have run the other way from this film, for I had developed the foolish opinion it was a 'slasher film' - and hence against my teenage feminist ire. For I had been maimed, o me brothers, by stumbling on Looking for Mr. Goodbar on my buddy's parent's afternoon Movie Channel while he was mowing the grass and thinking I was finally watching Annie Hall.  By that terrifying tragic end I was forever scarred. I've never gotten over it, to this day. But I've changed my mind about a lot of things. Turns out Friday the 13th (which I avoided in protest) has an eerie quality none of the Sunday School teachers salivating over the string of murders could have conveyed/ Maybe they didn't notice. And why? Because you would need to have seen Halloween a dozen times to notice it, to feel out just how few blood drops are shown vs. how many darkened corners, the way night and rain in a forest with no street lights or anything makes it seem like the whole world has gone dark and you're the only one who hasn't noticed, your head haloed by an ever shrinking flashlight reflection on green canvas tent flaps or waterlogged wood panels, or capturing the way girls and guys blinded by hormones and a life of never being punched or bitten have left them blind to the possibility. There's them that laughs, and there's them that knows better. It's not just her virginity that sets the final girl apart, it's that she's the only one cagey enough to suspect she's in a horror movie. Her friends admonish her for not being unconscious to the world around them. They're complacent, head wrapped up in dates, telephone cords, post-sex malaise, and/or New Wave music on a 'walkman' --she's different, she's traumatized like I was by Goodbar and the realization that my fellow teens were all lapping up the misogyny of Porky's, Last American Virgin, Losin' it, and that crap on one side and the slasher movies on the other -- all in all a terrible omen of what was to come, we thought, until Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, and Conan showed us we could have more (and outside of rapey HBO, the grim portent of the sex comedy/slasher film glut was never realized).

Friday the 13th (1980) - the darkness breathes at last

The million misogynist manglers that mopped up all the collateral dollar ordinance of 13ths success didn't necessarily see the films they were copying more than a few times either. They just presumed the subject was enough, but both Halloween and Friday the 13th showed--better than anything since Val Lewton--that in horror, the frame is everything. Plus, of course, those dark corners, holding 'nothing', were the first things the pan and scanners cut out. So we never saw them during the days of cathode ray tubes square TVs. Therefore, until HD widescreen came around, they were forgotten.

Well now we can see it all in perfect rectangles and all the time, and no movie is ever the same twice; it changes even as the mood and caloric consumption of the viewer, the cleanliness of their glasses, the blackness of their post-work mood, and their ever advancing age and the every higher definition larger scale format, and the time of night, and the fellow audience, if any. I've learned that horror is ideal seen late at night, alone with big clunky headphones and no other lights, ideally while out in the country with no street lights. But it's tough to get to that level - it takes guts. And the main thing is -repetition. The more times we see it, the less scary, so we begin to own our fear, the corners of the attic of the self become lighted even as our exterior world darkens. We take regular trips to every room, armed with butcher knives and fire pokers, poking them into every closet, every room corner, and under every bed. But then, having completed the upstairs we hear a noise downstairs, so we have to start all over again.

But that's called options - we can save the right movie for the right time - and boom - so it's up to us to provide these things. Time and culture can't be depended on. Therefore we must find common threads in any two films we view, and to argue whether these threads are there or not is the only bad investment of your time. Therefore, if you peruse Netflix or wherever, as I do, and see any two movies back-to-back on a rainy afternoon, chosen hastily so as to not have to cede the remote, then you can be sure you're pretty safe they're an ideal relevant double feature with common subtextual threads spanning decades, continents and Neflix's genre listings. Since there is no past now, cinematically speaking, every movie throughout history is available all the time and most looking better now than they did even on the big screen (if you saw them at a shitty drive-in with too much ambient lighting and honking). You can rewind and pause and make stills prettier than you could buy in 8x10 glossies on the street back in the old days. Those were the golden days, but none so good as these, which include the old amongst them, and every day between. What kind of long term damage this day in and day out carnage will do to our souls and sanity of course remains to be seen...and seen again (and never unseen), until our grandsons are putting the remote in our hand over and over but we just keep dropping it, and only then will we know that we are dead, and then not.

You can pay me now!

Bronson Canyon and its legendary 'Bat Cave' is a magical corner of Griffith Park that's been incorporated into hundreds of films and never more eerily than in nearly every Corman sci fi film of the 1950s. It and the surrounding desert are made swell use of in an unjustly neglected and legitimately weird 50s sci fi rock musical homage from Paul Bunnell. Shot in Kodak's lovely high contrast Eastman Plus-X Negative Film 5231 (Bunnell got the last rolls before it was discontinued), The Ghastly Love of Johnny X can stand proudly in that same super classy gorgeous black and white realm as Tim Burton's Ed Wood  and David Lynch's Elephant Man, which both got their black and white beauty from the same stock. In other words this isn't some Larry Blamire Lost Skeleton-style no budget homage, where it's just HD video with the color drained out, so what's going on? How did such a highbrow reasonably budgeted (two million and it looks it) cult classic in the making wind up in even the margin's margins? Maybe like Plan Nine itself, it's just so far behind its time it's still ten years ahead.

The irrepressible De Anna Joy Brooks

Bunnell may not the first modern day auteur to tap the tar pit of 50s low budget drive-in filmmaking, to realize that there is style and true rebellion amidst the wealth of tail fins, tortoise shell sunglasses, tight skirts, jukeboxes, flying saucers and zombie raising, the black and white, the ginchy, but there's no prize for first. There's a prize for the best. And as far as modern homages of that era go, after Burton's Ed Wood, this is it. There's a Tor Johnson-meets-Bobby Moynihan skinhead named Sluggo, a true love on the run lady who shacks up with a soda jerk. Bunnell never backs down from some misogyny touches, seeing girls with their faces forced into the dirt, and otherwise abused, and there's this strange sense of loss that the big heroine of the hour, Bobbi Socks (the too-cool Katherine Giaquinto) is forgotten as soon as she's off camera, after dying to save him all groovy Johnny can do is mope over the soda jerk too stupid to stay out of switchblade range. Dude, if you did sleep with Bobbi and then let her take the literal fall the least you can do is look down there and see if maybe she's still alive. Maybe shed one tear. I asked Bunnell about it and he says he wishes it had been different --he kind of forgot about her, but Bobbi Socks I got mad love for you! You deserved better than a lonely death hanging onto the foot of a power-surging Sluggo.

I was also a little put off by the inordinate amount of time abusing women as opposed to men fighting fair and square, but on the whole it's kind of refreshing, since the women are all without a doubt the strongest characters. Other strengths: composer Ego Plum (Frieda Kahlo's grandson) delivers such a great score of theremins, booming brass, crashing timpani, wailing harmonies and lurid synth notes I can only hope Tim Burton sees this film and finally gets rid of the overbearing Danny Elfman on future retro projects; there's old, and I mean old, Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as the alien judge in a Devo hat who asks of Johnny X "only a modest conformity" but he doesn't get it so he's exiling the perennial rebel, with his leather jacket and opaque sunglasses and crew of snickering abusive toadies and preening molls and stolen electro suit that gives him the power to control people's motor functions... to Earth.

Cute Kate Maberly as Mickey O'Flynn's devoted fan

We then find Johnny and co. exiting the legendary Bronson Canyon bat cave, trailing after a girlfriend Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks) a badass chick spouting tough girl aggressive maneater dialogue might make Russ Meyer blanche with envy. She's been cooling her heels in Bronson canyon with Johnny "and his pack of jackals for forty days and forty nights" and man, she's restless and wants to take a bite out of Chip (Les Williams) the soda jerk at a nearby diner, or at least take him out for a spin in her "motor roter." There's a recurring Chesterfield commercial, where the shill coughs after a drag, as if to excuse the criminal lack of cigarettes amongst these alleged juvenile delinquents. And Phantasm's own Reggie Bannister is the undead Cramps-zombie version of Roy Orbison rockabilly icon. Will Tromeo Keenan as Johnny X is pretty good in the lead, with those shades and that hair he looks a lot like a young Lou Reed and he has a few good scenes, like breaking down while confessing sad secrets to a literally dead-drunk Creed Bratton (The Office, The Grass Roots) in a truly great back room at a truly realistic looking rock club. The whole thing with Johnny as the leader and everyone else just going where he does is kind of icky, as are the implants Johnny put in Bliss's breasts to be able to use the suit and force her to 'degrading things' but then again, I always hated those toady types when I was in a band, even as I exploited their devotion (much as Johnny does here), though I always made my Sluggo feel special and appreciated, but Johnny takes his for granted and it's crazy Sluggo in the end who turns chicken killer, as the saying goes...

As for the songs, well, the dancing's groovy, the singing voices are properly mixed if thin and everyone's on the same jazzy theater geek page, they dovetail from 'reality' into off Broadway expressionism, with a kind of Grease faux-50s patina (if Travolta's gang were composed of members of the Cramps). But the best is old Creed as a kind of undead Roy Orbison who represents all that's wrong, weird and wondrous about this goofy corner of the desert world. The special effects involving Johnny's crazy astro suit, powered up through the rock club soundboard, are surprisingly solid, both retro analog delicious and deeply felt in the bones and mixed. You can feel the power surging in your belly! In short, Paul Bunnell has his finger on the expressionistic pulse that should make him the Guy Maddin of 50s drive-in signifiers. Do yourself a favor, and submit to the Ghastliness (at the film site here).

The rise of the retro-analog synth soundtrack in recent horror and science fiction films--both in and out of the mainstream--has brought us into a weird wondrous future alternate reality where perhaps, ideally, orchestral scores will stop. Maybe it's a question of age -- if you were an impressionable American child in 70s then the Carpenter carpets and Goblin pulsing, the sounds of yesterday's vision for the horror future, are now like the mystery of death and eternity tied into some deeper-than-nostalgic tugging, like a rope you're following through the Thing whiteout Arctic storm. But the rope itself is just white noise.

random painting from Night Gallery

There's so many overlapping trails you could get lost right quick without the right guide. So pay me five teen dolor and I'll take you to see Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher, and Ghost Box, all enthralled by the same thing, as I am, this moment of clarity, the Memento moment, when we finally remember that we've forgotten the present, that nostalgia and endless proliferation of media make the present impossible in the face of so much immediate, accessible past. Every moment of the present is now spent either shopping for or cueing up the next experience of the past (the next movie, book, track) or vanishing into the same through our haunted ghost shell eyes and ears. Smoke some weed and watch a movie -- the weed erases the movie as you see it so you can see it again a day later and it doesn't even seem like the same film.

When Reynolds rounds up some writers who best sum up the hauntology sound, he starts out with Matthew Ingram at The Wire ("memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics"and ends up with Dickens and then W.S. Merwin ("Tell me what you see vanishing and I / Will tell you who you are") and it all makes frickin' beautiful eloquent sense.

But mainly, I got here because I love John Carpenter and thanks to Netflix showing me The Machine and Beyond the Black Rainbow, where I was like oh wow, I love these movies but 50% of that love comes solely from their pulsing analog retro-futurist synth scores, both of which are on Spotify, and so the Moog crumb trail widens deeper into the black forest of retro-futurist analog Halloween and the analog synth score style of John Carpenter, and the 70s cryptozoological funk of Goblin lead me unto Ghost Box, Scarfolk Council, and now Simon Reynolds and Ghost of my Life author Mark Fisher, who repurposed Derrida's original (Communist-spectral) meaning towards haunted music, via childhoods spent attuned to quietly forward thinking electronics of BBC's Radiophonic Orchestra, and that decade's openness to the occult, carrying over from the 60s, a whole generation of artists who'd done LSD in the 60s now coming to the adult world and taking over the reins, and children's minds right there in sync with them, in ways we lost in the 80s, when videotape erased the mystery from media through the very act of preserving it.



For me the love affair began Boards of Canada's Music has the Right to Children in 1998 and then Zombi's Cosmos in 2003, tapping for maybe the first time into the retrofuturist analog rainy day weirdness of old 70s filmstrip tape accompaniments for elementary school primers on ESP, Argento frisson and druids. With the advent of digital everything the warm pulsing sound of analog was the first time doubly ghosted, and like a double negative became positive, or in other words, the past sounded warmer and more organic, even more futuristic, than the immediate present. That's hauntology, and I'm hooked... at least until November, when those loathsome orchestras will inevitably return right as night starts lurching way forward thanks to daylight savings, and the orchestra snakes across the stand-still city like a rope of sweaty reflective mylar-enshrouded woe.

Here's my #1 of two Spotify lists:
Heirs of Goblin Carpenter



And now here's some of the more noteworthy soundtracks and soundtrack-ish works.
DESICCATED SWIMMING AREA:

THE NICK (OST)
Cliff Martinez (2014)
Soderbergh's Cinemax series set in turn of the century surgery at the Knickerbocker Hospital would be a bore if the score was in the hands of an orchestral windbag like Howard Shore or John Williams, but Martinez realizes the power of hauntology at its fullest - not the actual past music (which was after all, trying to evoke its own past), but the retro-futurist music of remembering the past, or envisioning brutal operations under primitive instruments still screaming through the emotional machine, the amniotic pulse of analog which now seems so welcomingly inhuman in our overly human age that we cling to it like we would a churning life raft in a brutally tranquil sea.

He's not the visionary filmmaker he once was but Lost Themes lets fans of the master know he's still got the gift of making superbly creepy synth-based music. Each track on here could well be the theme song from a classic early 80s or late 70s opus like Assault on Precinct 13 or Escape from New York, and whatever autumnal sights or sounds you see or are thoughts thinking while listening to JC's masterful mix of piano, electric guitar and analog synths are suddenly fraught with a sudden Panavision ominousness.

Steve Moore's big band going for that Goblin-Carpenter vibe with an intensely percussive and bizarro rock 80s synthesizer twist, NNF calls it "electro-satanic Goblin worship."

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Sinoa Caves (2014)
For when your floating down the street at dawn, chased in slow motion by your own shadow looming 60 feet tall and with burning coal eyes or are tripping your face off at an airport, part György Ligeti from THE SHINING and part Claudio Simonetti from TENEBRE.

YELLOW (OST)
Antoni Maiovvi (2013) 
Musik for remembering what it felt like as a 16 year-old driving home at night in the rain after seeing The Terminator at an empty theater in Woodbridge, NJ. As we learn in all the great writing on hauntology, that's what the uncanny frisson memory of the mediated grave robbers from outer space medias are for. Maiovvi's soundtrack is for a 'neo-giallo' short film set in Berlin. I'll probably never see it, but I do like the soundtrack.
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (OST)
Broadcast (2013)

Formerly a late-to-the-trip hop female fronted kind of Stereolab-Combustible Edison hybrid, Broadcast were nothing if not classy, cocktail retro swing-ready, and a touch derivative. Turns out they were just waiting for the 70s BBC ghost documentary childhood analog synth reverie to kick in to become the sickly and glow-in-the dark poster child for the hauntology movement via this merge with amniotic Focus Group. There's presumably some real occult documentary voiceover buried somewhere in this ominous, but always playful mix of tape loops, effect, and poppy little stabs; "the bee colony" is a classic example of their rare ability to bring in vocals without breaking the mood.
In the beginning, as far as this futurist giallo nostalgia went, there was just this bass and drums duo with an intensely percussive and bizarro world synthesizer twist. They've gone on to deliver great neo-giallo work that would be perfect on any Argento or Fulci film from 1971-82.
However you got here, this is where to stay, if  you're me, perusing the Ghost Box catalog, The Belbury Poly can get too upbeat, other acts too newsreel sample crazed but Advisory Circle never waver from the straight up 70s synth analog spookiness. "The Ghost Box aesthetic has expanded beyond spooky public information films full of roll necks and bowl cuts to something involving sharper cheekbones and haircuts. Their palette seems to shift from faded film oranges and browns to black." - Wire (B. Coley 7/15) so true, Wire.

IT FOLLOWS (OST)
Disasterpiece (2014)
From the very first notes of the very first shot, you just know, things are never going to be the same old concept of old sameness again.


COLD IN JULY (OST)



  A FIELD IN ENGLAND (2013)

POST SCRIPT:
And then Shout Factory debuts this the same week I'm writing this post... It's cometh. Who says America's behind the screens when it comes to hauntological excavastalgia?

As a lifelong classic horror fan it gets my arse all in a tether when channels like IFC figure what we need are marathons of crappy HALLOWEEN sequels, or that horror means only three names: Freddy, Jason, Michael or god forbid, Jigsaw. To me that's like bringing a keg of green dyed Bud Lite to a highbrow Dublin wake. It's gouache. The one time of the year the punters might learn something about our rich horror heritage. Well, rejoice brothers and sister. I've made a grand list of 13 horrors fit for even Hiram Walker himself, found only on Acidemic's more coherent and lauded (as opposed laudanum) cousin, Bright Lights Film Journal:

Sh! The Horror! 
13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience




There are real magnificent gems I watch every year around this time, they're laden with atmosphere to the point you can smell the bonfires and first dew of night, feel the centuries of huddling around the harvest hearth in your collective ancestral ganglia. Rather than finish all these half-assed reviews I've been struggling with, here now, some short mentions of all the favorites I revisit every year.



There's so many strange similarities between this Amicus debut feature and Psycho that, were they not made in the exact same year on opposite sides of the Atlantic, you'd swear they were emulating each other. Both feature naive but courageous and very pretty blondes who wear their hair moddishly short and leave their comfort zones on big adventures, alone, against other people's advice or good common sense, and wind up staying at decrepit inns where they are killed, by a knife, in the middle of the night, and the middle of the picture. Then follows the boyfriend and/or detectives to investigate and eliminate the threat, but the damage has been done; our locus of identification is forever shattered. Welcome to the 60s. (from: CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice)

November is the second cruelest month, after April: all my autumnal October ghoulish cheer slides off like a Bond villain off a continental shelf during an underwater chase scene. Glug glug. Down he goes to the depths, just as glug glug this was the month of my bottom alcoholically thrice in the 90s. The month Cassandra brought over ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE on a Friday Night just like this one, and saved my life, for a few months longer...

Bond was there. Bond is here. SPECTRE. Dig.

As whenever a new Bond appears, all the old ones show up on TV, to prep the faithful. I've been updating and elaborating my "Bond by Bond" guide from a few years back, so do revisit, there's a good chap, or girl. Not to be sexshist or lazy, for my keen insights over the years are as sexist, elaborate and thrilling (and grandiose about it) as Bond films themselves.

My Favorite: Elektra King (and she has my initials)

From Father's Day Bond Marathon:
(Acidemic - 6/14)

Following a handful of similar but deceptively elaborate plots that seem to bleed across each other (making each particular film hard to remember), Bond films have always rewarded repeat viewing; as we change from children to men our perceptions of the movies change, too, and new fissures of interest are sussed out. Atomic bomb hijacking minutiae and intrigue, the most boring parts when we were kids, are now fascinating. The giant computers and tracking devices are like windows into a forgotten field of technology, like finding the distant relatives of Skynet.

So many actors mistake genuine wild man edge for just being a dick or bugging their eyes, but ever since he won our hearts by shouting "bring me a knife so I can cut my FROAT" in MOONSTRUCK Nic Cage has had a grip on our darker looney tunes prickly pear hearts of darkness. He once spent a whole movie talking in a joke of a nasal whine I thought totally ridiculous until I met my Italian-American college girlfriends' adenoidal cousin from Yonkers who talked the same way. Sublime. As always, Cage was ahead of his time even then. As I battle my usual post-Halloween sober date mid-November ennui and its inevitable writer's block, I realize there's only one way to go, the past. I realize there's only one man to battle the demons with me, Nicolas Cage. And one reader, and you know who you are. It's you... always you.

If you're familiar with Cage's oeuvre you will undoubtedly realize this role is something of a mid-career capstone. He even finds his way home to the nasal whine he adopted in his uncle Francis's time travel romance, PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986) and branches out all serpentine. Lots of us back then who were in awe from him from BIRDY (1984), RAISING ARIZONA (1987) and MOONSTRUCK (1987) thought to ourselves where the hell he picked up this ridiculous nasal vocal style? Shit was so good it became ridiculous in PEGGY, it was too much. Now we know how he got it, from all the crack he be smokin' in the future!

[...] Lastly is the brilliant way the film brings in sobriety as an option. Going off to AA and leaving your druggie mate behind to drink alone is hazardous to any relationship, an instant point of cataclysm usually seen from the sober person view (28 DAYS, CLEAN AND SOBER), but Herzog would never dream of following the sober person and leaving the crazy druggie behind. When everyone else is slinking away as the abusive crackhead rants and froths at the mouth, Herzog walks boldly in with his camera and asks said crackhead about his dreams. Herzog would be a great "guide" on an acid trip. You can see him getting all up in a cop's face over his charge's right to roll around foaming at the mouth in Central Park or to bite the heads off slow-footed squirrels. And that's how it should be, maybe, in a perfect world. (MORE)



Whenever we think our man Cage is totally sucking, it's probably that he's just so far ahead of the curve we're afraid to follow lest we get hit by a truck careening around the bend. Not unlike the character he plays in the BAD LIEUTENANT 2, Cage's cop in WICKER is brave so far beyond reckless that he comes back around to cautious and upwards towards brave again. (MORE)

Do they still do that thing of growing mustached for prostate cancer awareness in November? My sober anniversary month, November 17th, stained with the rainy teardrops of shaking and quaking and the usual marker between my manic and depressive phases --the pain is all long gone but the tremors linger on. Rough times, man. October is my favorite month, November my least (after April). But what is Heaven if not Hell finally accepted? The flaming beard of the sage is as a nest for the bird of wisdom; rant against cigarettes and condomless sex still the cows come home, Safety-First Clydes. Gives a flying fuck doth the sage? He accepts Hell and finds heaven. Or as Kristofferson put it:

"I ain't sayin' I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.Then I stole his song." 

See, the man Kristofferson is from a different time, his beard is a different breed from the quirky hipster's. It's all there in the movies of the 70s vs. the movies today. Badass country songwriters in the movies today got about two options: twitchy meth dealers who abuse their wives and children as ominous music simmers on the stove score, or serious, hard working sober Christians in flannel who just want to teach the son of the single mom he shacks up with how to fish, whittle, or tune a guitar before he has to ride into the sunset or take one last shady job to pay for his boy's operation. There is no middle ground today, no man who is both reveler and decent guy, spiritual seeker but not a prude, not a cliche'd everyman but a dude, one free to drink and smoke without needing to make a good impression. There's only the Dude left, and he's just gonna keep ridin' - keep takin''er easy. But once upon a time there was a slew. That's why LEBOWSKI would be nowhere without Sam Elliot to supply the narration and Saspirilla drinkin' - he's the sanctification, the link we need for clarity --we'd never see the straight line woven along from Hawks and Bogart's Marlowe to Gould's Marlowe to Bridges' faux-low easy rider, unscrambling the remains of the Chandler Sleep-verse deconstructing around him to, recently, Phoenix's Doc. But what about the less educated, less artsy, more plainspoken and 'real' representations of manly cool? The cowboys, the straight line between John Wayne and Bob Mitchum to football players played by Kristofferson and Reynolds in SEMI-TOUGH? All we got now is Adam goddamn Sandler and his saintly manchild contingents.

Back before that manchild thing, the result of not being able to smoke in public, before the PC putsch that gave rise to unbridled Commie indoctrination in academia, back in the 70s, if you wanted to tell a story about a raunchy team in the flyovers you could make them hard drinking ten year-olds or coaches who'd just as soon call the game off and pass out. Those were real men! I wish to god I was with 'em, but they're dead or worse, sober. For 17 godly years, but I drank the devil's brew for free. 'Til I paid. Fitting that the quote above is an intro to a song about meeting a "great and wasted" friend of his, Johnny Cash in a Kristofferson's "To Beat the Devil":

"I saw that he was about a step away from dyin' and I couldn't help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me. I'm happy to say he's no longer wasted and he's got him a good woman. And I'd like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped show me how to beat the devil."

And so it makes sense, it being November, to honor the facial hair not of the co-op hipsters that haunt the coffee houses of Williamsburg, for they'll never be a step away from dyin', or as Kristofferson says in the great and underseen Alan Rudolph film SONGWRITER:

"Do you suppose a man has to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time just to write a good song now and then?"

The hipsters today don't need to be miserable anymore, they got antidepressants and Cialis, they'd never be son of a bitches, and they'll never get the nicotine and cyprine stained beards of the 70s dads and groovy football-when-it-was-cool older brothers, the goalpost indication, the beard that cares without being a pussy about it, the indication that a man had 'passed' his acid test, was no longer that into looking young and gorgeous, was cured of all his narcissism and insecurity and was, above all, too lazy to shave.

November's also a month of great introversion and isolation and blockedness, so for me the usual cinematic obsessions with wild cool women fades. All I do is sit around and watch World War Two documentaries and Vin Diesel movies (he's our century's John Wayne and don't make me prove it), Tennessee Williams movies, James Coburn, John Huston, Voight, Reynolds and the man with the best beard of all, Kris Kristofferson.

So who gives a fuck about that little pisher Jesse Eisenberg throwing his lot in with the UWS bourgeoisie and their smug piddly ass New Yorker subscriptions and their tired tweed jacket self-importance and knowing chortles? Soon my kind will drop 'em down and the new generation of ten thousand talkin' and nobody listenin' will swallow them up. Kristofferson is still the coolest man on TV. And all you have to do is watch THE VOICE and how regular that lanky Blake Shelton beats his the crushingly insecure and narcissistic manchild Adam Levine. I'm no country music fan in general but between who I'd rather drink and shoot bottles with or have as an AA sponosr, it's old Shelton. You just know he'd be able to talk about more than how you like his hair and what people are tweeting about him.
---
(From SEMI-TOUGH): 

"The "loving fight" concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH. This was the age of bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed with some good old fisticuffs in the grand drunken John Ford tradition. And SEMI-TOUGH has the coolest two guys and a girl group bond since DESIGN FOR LIVING.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex without consensual agreement in writing beforehand, and gloves on all contacting parts, or even the compulsive need to boast, overthink, drain the spontaneous joy out of it, and feel guilty afterwards, second-guessing and self sabotage all because we drank the nonsmoking manchild/perfect man dichotomy rom-com Kool Aid, which is exactly how European men describe the American woman's attitude towards sex. For all it's tossed-off clumsiness and Burt's intentionally shocking freedom with vulgarity and the N-word, SEMI-TOUGH is a rare document revealing that if only for a decade, we had sex like the French and fought like Americans instead of the sad reverse." (MORE)

COOLEST COUPLES: DINA SHORE and BURT REYNOLDS

We can see dim shades of it in Demi Moore and Ashton, but it's far more about, or seems about, two insecure narcissists desperate to connect. And Ashton and Burt in 1974 have a certain immature rawness in common where you could understand an older woman going for it, because she knows she has something worthwhile to give them back, more than money or maternal support. But there's no comparison beyond that because unlike Ashton, Burt was/is a real man. And here on Larry King he's being more emotional than Shore was, and that's why it's so brave, why it brings me almost tomy knees to read that interview above because it reminds me of something our 21st century man has yet to find. Male sensitivity now is inescapable, but it's worthless, it's just passive-aggressive snickering boy nonsense wrapped in high-voiced ectomorphic pretentiousness. Dinah would bitch slap the lot of them, while Burt cracked up in the background, and because she's not here to do it, we all mourn. (more)

M*A*S*H, for three seasons you were maybe the best thing on TV, ever.



We never saw him leave, but at the dawn of season four, the mighty Trapper was gone. And the third and final MASH of the three different MASHes of my clever title, the longest one, had begun. There would be no quick sudden goodbyes now, they'd never miss a chance for Emmy-bidding sentiment, and the whole camp quickly boiled down to around eight people - the memorable ones, with a few nurses and fifth business types like Nurse Kelly and Corporal Igor left as the only supporting fifth business to survive from show to show. I gave one of Hawkeye's steady nurse girlfriends the top photo because the way the nurses, once an array of steady girlfriends and solid supporters, all slipped away along with Trapper over the third season-fourth season break was unfair. When they left, in came a liberal PC wholesomeness, heralded y the arrival of B.J. Hunnicutt and shortly thereafter Col. Henry Potter (Harry Morgan). Alda became just another eccentric nutball rather than a luminous star... less a playa than a perv, more likely to spy on girls in the shower then sleep with them.

I never noticed the difference in the reruns as a kid. I was too young to get all the sex references or to yet know the joy of booze. Coming back to the show now, via Netflix, I realize Alda-- who had stretched out and owned the entire first three seasons--Wayne his equal--both of them both young and starry-eyed and drinking and womanizing and playing golf--influenced my whole childhood and adulthood too. He's so close to my vest, so much a part of what I modeled myself on growing up, that I forgot he was there in my roots, along with dad's prodigious partying of course. I say this so you understand, and if you grew up with this show then you too might find it impossible to be objective.
But in revisiting the entire 255 episodes within a three month period recently, I realize just how much I owe to this second MASH Hawkeye: my association of true patriotism with the compulsion to continually subvert punctilious bureaucracy, my deadpan comedic timing (if any), and my love of the Marx Brothers (when I finally found them on local TV, their style seemed so familiar, having loved MASH and Bugs Bunny of course). With brilliant writing and one-liners bouncing off their foil, Frank Burns (Larry Linville), a wormy effeminate spoiled brat burlesque of military gung ho MacArthur-ism, I learned all the bad behaviors to avoid and how to blow them up in others.  I would be a different person without this second MASH, that's certain.

But there was also the movie... hmmm.

PS - Please forgive the rampant longevity of my third MASH description. I kept it so, as I might mirror that of the show itself.  


I know this is an unforgivable cineaste sacrilege, but the first three seasons of M*A*S*H are funnier and overall cleverer, even subtler, than Altman's original movie. Elliot Gould is a better Trapper in some ways but Sutherland has a lot of annoying little whistles and clicks and his vibe is far less exuberant and playful than Alda's, more skeezy, smarmy, and gauche, as evidenced in his taunting of Burns and broadcasting his affair with Hot Lips (all because of what? He made Bud Cort cry? Who hasn't!) and his pimping out of a nurse to help Painless, the suicidal dentist. These are some truly creepy dick misogynist moves, the latter especially in today's PC climate. It might be more realistic to that most sexually free of eras which became as a sticky male-centric swamp preventing perhaps astute feminists, still wading around with mud boots and trash bags and pitchforks, cleaning up a space for female orgasms to come in too, and old reprobates like Ring Lardner and Altman probably hated that. Compared to the more (relatively) sensitive show, it's far less rewarding in this first of the MASHes to see these doctors and their mix of self-righteous medical muscle and privileged skylarking, trading on their surgical skills as if some rich daddy's influence and money that gets them out of any scrape with the big brass. Their odious frat boy dick moves are 'fun' but in the film (the only character who really deserved the shitty pranks was Frank and he's dispatched early in Altman's film) but the targets pretty broad and just as bad in their way as hick prejudices: Ho-John, the Korean kid, for example, gets taught English via the bible by Duvall's Burns, that's bad, Christians are buzzkills) --but if  Ho-John serves the 'cool' surgeons drinks and cleans the tent, that's good (for they are getting a good buzz.

Altman's film does rule the others via sound design: overlapping dialogue and noisy outdoor recording making it feel much more vivid as far as an actual camp, an actual hospital. And it has the most actual blood, a lot of it. They'll talk about the blood in the TV show, and occasionally they'll get some arterial spray, but it's nothing like the film. These people are awash in blood, and the human body's interior is revealed in all its hideous glory.

Put your tongue in your mouth, "Hawkeye"

Looking at it today, Altman's film is unremittingly dreary --the ground is always freshly misty and rained on; the sun never shines -- the Painless episode and the football segment both drag on way too long. Here are the doctors poised like the last supper but in surgical costumes, a little obvious a comparison, but one the doctors and their messiah complex clearly felt, and why not? For the big football game it's like okay we get it, here are doctors shouting kill kill kill and tackling each other, Hippocrates wherefore art thou, carting wounded teammates off the field, and so forth. The name Spear Chucker is somehow not racist because he's a surgeon. Or something. Now move on to something else, instead of repeating the joke ad nausea over a repetitive brass band soundtrack until our fingers twitch towards the stop button. Some scenes are little more than overlapping shards, slow zooms up on some random bit part player doing nothing but listening (to cover Altman's overlapping dialogue). That's not bad in itself, but if that's all there is it's a problem. Scenes that either go too long or too short leave no cumulative effect other than annoyance.


But on the plus: the evolution of a few side characters: Bud Cort goes from wild-eyed quick-to-cry innocent intern, accused of killing a patient by Frank Burns and 'dumb enough to believe him' -to ending as a smooth lover boy, all while never leaving the periphery; Major "Hotlips" O'Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) goes from uptight military ritual loving stick-in-the-mud, to a chill girlfriend of Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt), one of the cooler doctors (his character doesn't last into the TV series - just as the "O" is dropped from Margaret's last name, and Henry becomes more discreet). As soon as you learn to laugh and quietly plot retaliation when they pull a prank on you, instead of fuming in indignant outrage and running to the colonel, then, madam, you are no longer an outsider. Or would be, in a sane universe where educated white males did fairly use their messianic complex and devilish lusts, instead of becoming Old Testament Yaweh dirtbags.


Skirting the rim between offensive sexism and good-natured tomfoolery, robust antiwar pacifism and broad compassion, the first three seasons showed Americans of all ages the core of sanity within madness, the ultimate Bugs Bunny in Bosch Hell trip. Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce was the combination Groucho Marx and Dr. Kildare we'd been waiting for. He had such impeccable comedic rapport with his buddy Trapper (Wayne Rogers) it was as if Howard Hawks was directing at the peak of his His Girl Friday rat-at-tat-tat overlapping conspiratorial dialogue. Seldom without a broad on their laps, a golf bag slung on their backs, a drink in hand at all times (or scalpel), they still haven't been equaled. And Col. Blake wasn't too far off that mark, either, relying on Radar O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff - the only actor carried over from the film) to handle the baffling minutiae of army life, while he dithered quietly in the nurse's tent or fishing lures. Hawkeye was single but Blake, Trapper, and wormy, effeminate but super gung ho Frank Burns (Larry Linville), were all married with kids at home but fooling around constantly on the side is just how it is, there's never any real remorse, or even condemnation from the show's subtext... of these first three seasons, this "second" MASH.

A classic example of the great dichotomy between these first three seasons and the latter million can be found in this early episode: the boys smear chloroform on Trapper's boxing gloves to win a boxing match against a rival camp's big boxing champ. This kind of underhanded behavior is hardly examplary and yet we're expected to boo Burns and Houlihan when they sneak in a bottle of regular water in place of the chloroform, which is actually the honest thing to do. Also, it's a matter of weight division. One should never fight a person in a higher weight class. But that doesn't warrant chloroform on the glove. In later seasons if anyone did such a thing it would result in a huge crisis of conscience, a public shaming, and so forth.

Season three ended. The easygoing Colonel Blake was rotated home, and his helicopter was shot down--it was a spur of the moment thing at the very end of the final episode. Added in the very last scene of the last episode of the series, it proved an eerie omen. More than just a season ender, it was a rip in the time continuum, a harsh reminder of 'what really counts' in ways for example, that new Amy Schumer movie, Trainwreck (2015) turns out be. I guess in MASH it works in the context, for as I well know, the sudden death of a loved one sends even the staunchest swingers rushing home to their families, seeking some footing on what was suddenly a very unstable fun house floor. As we learned when season four commenced, nothing would be the same again. The eighties would not hear of it.















Thanks largely to the frank examinations of prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic dogma of middle America and the working class via the continual battle between the liberal Meathead and Sally Struthers vs. the implacable Archie Bunker in the show in the slot right before M*A*S*H, All in the Family, the major networks bowed to morality group pressure to institute 'the Family Hour' in 1974, which enforced a more gentle, morally conservative approach to content, at least until 9PM (M*A*S*H came on at 8:30). The unheralded (contract-based) departure of Hawkeye's partner in womanizing, Trapper John (sans tearful goodbye) and Blake's traumatic exit in the last season, as well, not coincidentally, co-creator Larry Gelbart. The arrival of the Family Hour, and the loss of two of the show's extramaritally libidinal characters, led to a drastic drop in premarital sex on the show. The scoring, golf, chicanery, and booze aspects in the first three seasons were replaced by sentimental blarney worthy of John Ford or even Norman Lear himself. The bland 'sensitive' doctor and devoted Mill Valley, CA family man BJ Hunnicutt replaced Trapper. The wizened paternal Col. Potter came in as the new CO, and the show quickly becomes defanged, robbed of its bite and snarl.

I liked BJ more than Trapper as a kid, but now, after my own decadent arc has dragged me into an older demographic, BJ seems hopelessly square, glomming onto Hawkeye like a little brother, full of pranks that prefigure Jim in The Office, with a family that he stays fairly loyal to back home. When Hawkeye sleeps with a now-married ex-flame, well, BJ is not one to tell other people what's right and wrong, but he will lay a sad-eyed guilt trip from 90 paces. Pictures of BJ's baby daughter and letters from Peg his wife (and Blake's wife Mildred) are invoked so often they become characters. Obvious messages like "war is hell" and "Koreans are people too" take center stage over the string of any psychoanalytical anarchy.

Hawkeye's still a prankster: "hardly military issue but he's a damn good surgeon" became also an emotionally sophisticated sage to the naif Radar: "people die, Radar. Even bunnies or little wide-eyed cherub soldiers."




I like Col Potter much better than BJ this time. He's at least a well-rounded character, better able to reign in the military bureaucratic fetishizing of Hot Lips and Burns than Blake could, but BJ Hunnicutt is a dire signifier who makes us realize just how sublime was the comic timing between Trapper and Hawkeye and their interaction with a roster of rotating nurses, including an adorable doe-eyed nurse (top) Marcia Strassman. She was fought for in an early episode, and then forgotten.

Good writers know that the more specific you are the more universal - but the reverse is also true - when the show veers away from the web of supporting characters all working more or less in service of the Army, it stalls out. We get a lot of moral dilemmas solved with generic pop psychology, and the bulk of the actual comedy coming from Klinger's parade of frocks and escape attempts. One is apt to give up and move on but as kids I well remember we loved Col. Potter and found B.J. Hunnicutt a reassuring presence and thought the earlier seasons too unnerving - when Trapper was around the adult themes soared over our heads (I was nine-ish); and they seemed very insular, like Trapper was the dad's drunk friend who crashes our father-son bonding time in Let the Right One In. But now that I'm far older, it's of course the reverse, especially when taking into consideration the way America was turning, impossible to say if the show caused it or just rode the wave... it was just too popular not to have an effect.

At the time the Col. Potter - BJ Hunnicutt seasons began it was still the mid-70s so the decadence of swinger suburbia was still in flourish, but by the time of the early 80s slasher boom, which as you know shattered me to the core, we clung desperately to such stalwart characters as old cavalry man and horse doctor Sherman Potter. Whereas Col. Henry Blake stuttered and hem-hawed around the generals and tried to deal with the Houlihan-Burns burr under the saddle by groaning and trying to make peace, Potter just dismisses them with a country witticism like "horse hockey!" and knows all the old generals on a nickname basis so easily kaboshes Houlihan's attempts to go over his head, usually. A 'career army man,' he knows the ins and outs, and has tolerance for Hawkeye and BJ because they're damn good surgeons, and they have a still back at the Swamp, so can provide him drinks after a tough operation; he's the first character to come along who makes the army look good - like they have some shit together to produce a fella so rounded, so Zen. His debut episode is great -- he starts out very suspect--no one knows if he's going to be a regular army buzzkill or cool like Henry. But by the end he's drinking and singing with the boys, and toasting old starlets: "Here's to Myrna Loy!" He won my heart all over again with that toast.

By season five it's clear M*A*S*H is now unremittingly wholesome, aside from the Burns Houlihan thing --now constantly under threat from his wife (and officially ended when Houlihan meets and marries Donald Penopscott while away on leave) and Hawkeye and BJ are reduced to practical jokers of sophomore high school level gauche innocence. Father Mulcahy's gentle presence, Radar's innocent sweetness, and BJ's letters home to Peg and Col. Potter's letters home to Mildred and growing paternal fondness for Radar and company, and his horse of course lap into high tide sentimental toxicity. Stuff that used to breeze by in a single masterful scene are now drawn out for the duration and the extra characters drift off one by one except for the Hawaiian islander nurse Kelly, the private Igor, and an occasional black person, trailing a very special episode about racism along in their wake. The kind of malarkey most of us overcome by high school but which seems to take the walk-ons and Burns whole episodes to face. And Klinger, who began in male drag going nutzoid from the stress, has moved into having more and more of a major character, a salt of the earth Lebanese waxing nostalgic over Toledo hotspots. All the sexy nurses are long gone. It's not even the 80s yet. But it will be. God help us. By season five, all that's left is drinking, but the drunkenness falls away.

And then... Burns leave, and is replaced by the stuffy but not entirely dislikable Charles Winchester III and the one fly buzzing the joint still allowed to be an unredeemable shit is gone.

The only time a nurse gets lucky now is if her husband comes to visit but his regiment leaves at dawn. BJ smiles with his familial reassurance, and he's not about to judge, yet somehow we spreads a cockblock tentacle through every secret tryst-ing door. If a nurse is around then it's a very special nurses episode. Each character now gets a chance to prove their humanity but it has to go away in order for it to come back. Klinger enters and exits with the regularity of clockwork with his new dresses and harebrained section-8 escapes for a joke - he's the Kramer! He's the freak. He's the tops. He's the Mona Lisa, as he lets you know in song. When BJ finally 'slips' with a nurse he nearly writes Peg about it until Hawkeye has to restrain him. Gradually, as often happens, the originally large constantly changing cast (like a real MASH might be) narrows down to eight. In the end it's just Houlihan, BJ, Hawkeye, Potter, Winchester, and Klinger. A MASH with only four doctors and a handful of nurses seems rather absurd, and one starts to long for the more realistic crowded, constant in and out of people that made the movie at least believable. The pandemonium was good for creating a vivid sense of we were there, but now it's just about "characters."

And worse: the jokes get sophomoric and pun-based: "The only spirits around here are the ones we drink" Hawkeye says, during the very special "supernatural" episode. "The spirits must be exorcised.""Well, exercise is good for you." Alda, now directing a lot, seems distracted as a performer and way too smitten with the hokey liberal malarkey afoot. His eyes don't glisten with the mix of joi de vivre, compassion, wit, and sexual charisma that elevated the early seasons to the pantheon of greatness.

But then, as season six gets to the halfway point, the show finds a way to be mature as well as mawkish: a second wind 'we hooked up and lets talk about it and still be friends' 70s sensitivity feelings-discussion motif rises up, a refusal to just ignore or condemn the peccadilloes that were just lusty fun in the Gelbart era. People hooked up, of all ages and attractive levels, without feeling like they had to get married or write their spouses anymore. We can see the bridge between the unbridled free love late sixties and the AIDS-scarred sexual brakes slam of the early condom 80s. And it's a sign that M*A*S*H is evolving. Even as it recycles old plots ---Hawkeye hits a superior officer but before he can be brought up on charges, the offended officer is wounded and Hawkeye saves him; amphetamine, which my pharmacist dad assured me flows wild and free amongst doctors (those famous 24 hour shifts would be impossible without them, making being a doctor and an amphetamine user almost indistinguishable) makes an appearance only in an episode towards the end of season six in 'a very special episode' where Charles abuses them. Why the hell does their supply include a big bottle of them if Winchester's the only one who ever takes them? Very special.
But it's all good. I had to kind of let go of my condemnation of this new less ribald 'third' incarnation this go-round (my girl and I watching all 255 episodes in around two months), but Hawkeye's nonstop joking was growing obnoxious even to me, Charles' burr under the saddle qualities manifest more overtly but never organically. BJ's early puppy-super ego vibe begins to dissipate as he finds his own way (a little bit) as a violent streaked hypocrite who preaches California peace but lashes out, physically, at anyone who suggests he might have a sprained wrist.

If you stick with the seasons through thick and then, of course, the show changes, evolves, illustrates a profound humanism, it had the ear of the world, a huge ratings share, and it used it. The laugh track--even the 'soft' laugh they used--vanished for the entirety of season eight, which in my opinion made the show suffer mainly due to the writing and comedic rhythms not eliminating the empty pauses after punchlines. Comedians when performing live realizing no one's laughing tend to go for longer stories where they don't pause for punch line laughs at all, until they get the audience slowly warmed up. That's only natural it took MASH awhile to find the right balance: what they call 'single camera' sitcoms, like The Office, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec were only born in the last decade.

But M*A*S*H is too smart not to figure it out: By season nine the awkward pauses so ingrained in comedy shows have closed like sutures; now jokes overlap and build through mounting craziness; And gradually the writing becomes very 'whose Emmy is it anyway?" off-Broadway monologue-ing.
We love it when they occasionally reference past events from past episodes, sometimes even changing the memory, as memories do change, to forget who already knows as they were there when it happened, etc., all in ways not common with 'stand alone' episode formats.

As the show began to stretch far longer than the war itself, or any doctor's tour of duty, winter after winter, summer after summer, it became almost existential, as if there would never come a time when it wouldn't be war in Korea. So real life spilled over, and souls grew - Hawkeye was allowed to have his character weaknesses: always needing to be the center of attention, hyper competitive, self-righteous, we see these unpleasant characteristics manifest again and again as the years drag on. BJ could get very violent, and overly emotional and not apply the same rules of empathy to himself, but they all did their best, sometimes even risking the lives of those around them, as when their self-righteous worry over prisoner safety allows for a vicious North Korean guerrilla female in their post-op to almost kill the other patients and those who help her, and not only do the doctors refuse to stop helping her but they bite the hand of anyone who tries to restrain her, in this case a South Korean officer (Mako) planning to take her away for interrogation as soon as she's well enough. Even so, they don't admit they're wrong, but the audience is certainly allowed to think so, and to perhaps understand that the very same compulsive compassion that makes good doctors has brutal collateral damage. It's a damage they refuse to take responsibility for until it kills them.

Anyway, Radar leaves. Klinger takes over his job, goes back to wearing khakis, is promoted to sergeant and picks up a new trait: he starts trying to constantly find bizarre ways to make money using the army's surplus, bad puns and jokes like "the Two Musketeers" for the abridged version. And eventually who the hell knows? They run out of war-specific material so start to recycle sitcom-ish plots and life lesson illustrations from all around them, and everyone's boasting of immanent satisfaction via some trip or scheme always seems to ensure subsequent failure and dashed hopes--Tokyo is canceled, here come the choppers!

One thing's for sure, we're reminded again and again that eccentric steam-letting is all forgiven if you deliver in the O.R. It's not too difficult a trade-off to understand. But they sure do stress it.
BJ mopes every anniversary without Peg, so a Korean orphan plays sappy harmonica; a traveling cardinal gets Father Mulcahy's beads in an uproar; he's not just some traveling monsignor! Finally, a new character is introduced, a gravel-voiced sergeant in charge of the motor pool named Rizzo, a lazy gold-bricker from Louisiana. He gets the Guys and Dolls crap game going in the back of the chapel for the sake of tradition. Meanwhile Hawkeye overdoes his thing as a mess hall consultant. It's almost as if the entire cast forgets everything one season to the next.

Every so often there's a profound connection to life, its frailty, its be-there and goneness. Every so often there's a 'doctor heal thyself" episode. Houlihan gets all platinum blonde feather haired and perennially sunburned and we sense her awareness as status as a sexual icon of the day, right up with Farrah Fawcett Majors as far as popularizing the wavy long hair look which would then become the moussed up pouffy perm of the 80s. Season 10: the laugh track creeps back in; it comes and goes with a USO tour, "Colonel Potter is a verily happy married man!" - "So were my five husbands, until they met me." The laugh track disappears again later the next episode but the rhythm of the comedy never wavers, it moves into people not leaving space between speakers for the laughs, it becomes a kind of near Hawksian rhythm and more community, so the laugh track is organic, even subliminal.

They get excited over the newfangled thing like a Polaroid camera and it becomes a "shutterbug episode" with Potter reminiscing over pics he took of Mildred. And then there's the magic of regular occurances of camp thieves. The whole camp (all eight of them) get excited over a newspaper, they get excited over a Polaroid, it's the 'mail episode' or the competition over who gets to use the camera. But it's stolen, and a whole series of unfortunate coincidences hook Klinger into the clink (that kind of humor).


By now the camp is so small and normalized they're all like family - aside from the gravel-voiced Sgt. Rizzo there's no more recurring characters, with all the nurses being more or less represented by Nurse Kelly. Hawkeye's philandering is now down to a series or rejections which he seems to bring on himself by coming on too strong and direct and jokey, like he'd be terrified if he actually got a nurse into bed. If there is any flinging going on, it's kept far from the camera and if something happens it's then talked about, resolved, old vows renewed, the interloper let off gently. The trial of Max Klinger, who 'stole' sixteen bibles from some hotel, like that's even possible, or there's a market, makes no sense. There's never a shortage of bibles. Do Baptists track you down when you take the one in the drawer, not that anyone does? That's why they put them there. But I mention it as indicative of the way Fordian sentiment has crept even into the subterfuge. Between Mulcahy and his dumb Christian kindness, Potter's homey witticisms, BJ's ever-shifting mix of blind self-pity and caged fury, Houlihan's bluster and shaken poise, Winchester's snobby classical music blaring and refusing to share his epicurean tidbits from home, and of course Klinger's scamming, the show ensconced itself in a familiar trench rather than advancing over open ground in a forward Patton-esque charge ala Larry Gelbart's original vision.

Later on in season ten it's like the ninth inning of Bad News Bears, when Matthau finally sends in all the losers, so shlubs right and left get to direct episodes. Everything sounds like weak ass Thornton Wilder, or any number of anti-war tracts from the FDR New Deal. Houlihan does a great modulation from bitchy sober to confessional drunk; like a friend we know and tolerate as she comes back again and again to the source of her woe, a feeling of rootlessness the result of being an army brat, forever on the move. But time and again she has to be isolated in the wild with one other person, Klinger, Hawkeye, Trapper, and a bottle to let her hair down so to speak. Patrick Swayze is a loyal buddy praying for his pal's recovery; Larry Fishburne is a victim of Tom Atkins' racism; reliable actual WW2 combat veteran and Fuller's star of The Steel Helmet, Gene Evans is an embellishing war correspondent; Pat Hingle is an old buddy of Potter's; Linda Lavin does an alcoholic nurse who gets hilariously sudden and unrealistic DTs. And on and on into the infinity.

Season 10 begins and ends with some laugh track. Father Mulcahy is all excited about some incoming boxing champ. The peddler sells Klinger a goat and he starts selling fresh milk. Someone steals the payroll. "That's the third compliment you ever gave me," and a lot of bickering- that was no chicken, it was a babyy! oh my god!! Alda's never been entirely convincing in these big Sidney breakthroughs, but he tries, god bless him; and then 'Goodbye' - we were all pretty bummed out by that ending - "goodbye" - what the hell does that mean? Does it relate  to something he said earlier in the episode? How are we supposed to remember that tiny fraction of an exchange between them so far back either in the episode. It's a two hour finale - no one's going to remember something that early. Goodbye, indeed!


CONCLUSION
In some ways the North Koreans are still being fought today, and this show lasted more than thrice as long as the "official" police action, i.e. war. It went from edgy, ribald sexual openness to Apple's Way-Waltons esque moral lessons, presided over by the ubermeek chaplain, androgynous corporals, sporadic jaw-dropping incompetence in order for competence to re-manifest like the second coming; family matters, children being delivered nearly as often as wounded treated, terrible puns and every gun a lethal weapon in the hands of children. A possibly endangered Houlihan as the subject of comedy; a life hanging in the balance as Radar tries to pretend he's made uncomfortable by investigating the ladies' shower. Hawkeye devolving from ladykiller playa with a different nurse every night to a celibate pervert who prefers nudie magazines and peeking into the girl's shower, rattling off the kind of lame double entendres losers use when hitting on a girl they know will reject them. Of course I left a ton of things out. But I said my piece. Now that all the episodes are on Netflix (and the finale isn't there but you can find it online), I heartily recommend you revisit the show in the original chronology, something we could only dream about at the time. Taken together these 255 shows are the War and Peace meets Duck Soup of our time. And in the first seasons especially, Alan Alda is a god, and his comedic rapport with Trapper so alacritous it's never been equalled. As a hardened ex-swinger myself, all I can do is look into those twinkly eyes of Hawkeye and realize he was my older brother, and the show, even in the third incarnation, a priceless piece of American art, a key piece of our pop cultural psyche. See the entirety of it on Netflix and know white liberal America as it most liked to think of itself.

It's been my experience that European and South American women are how American women are only on Halloween and New Year's Eve, and if that makes no sense to you, then you've never watched rom-coms or how Jean Simmons is dumb enough to initially let Brando loose since he's not exactly the square dude she's fantasized about from his Poindexter tie to his six figure Fortune 500 BMW time share or tried to be single and unwealthy or unpretty or alcoholic or not in advertising in NYC and then wound up with Europeans or South Americans or no one. So one wonders why then that the dull dishwater white woman is so highly prized amongst "the Orientals." TCM recently showed the always alluring Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) and also West of Shanghai, (1937) a film I'd never seen thanks to mediocre Lenny ratings and its post-code date, but actually it's much better at linear momentum and minutiae than the bigger budgeted but overall mad dumber Manchu. 

 Like oldBitter Tea of General Yen (1933) it turns out rather bogged down by Hollywood racism the like Houdini drowning in a vat of water while trying to wrestle loose from the handcuffs of racist southern markets, but before drowning it has a strange wondrous momentum all its own. Dashes of big business intricacies and zig-zagging first half denote good screenwriting, the type where we just don't know where it's all going, no groans as the old love triangle cliches line up, so we can soak up the atmosphere like a real solo traveller would. It starts like it's going to be Shanghai Express with disparate first class passengers saying their station farewells, then boarding the Orient Express (or something) where we might think at first that  the duplicitously jolly interrelation between foreclosing banker and Ricardo Cortez's big oil man as they take the train out to a discovery field in the titular Chinese direction, getting accidentally caught in the midst of war between Boris Karloff's existentially grounded warlord and the Chinese government. Cortez is there to get the oil but also visit his flat note little box-shaped missionary wife played with boxy hungover moroseness by Beverly Roberts, who's in love with the guy working the discovery field, a self-righteous blank slate named Gordon Oliver. The foreclosing banker's slightly less leaden daughter (Sheila Bromley) likes Gordon too, and is the better bet, in my opinion (it always pays to marry the banker's daughter) and this missionary broad ain't no Babs Stanwyck, but go figure, each according to his own closeted lesbian tastes.


Forgive my ever peering liberal arts eye. Like I said, intricate business... for an allegedly lurid and exciting slice of adventure hokum with Karloff making a weird mix of Charlie Chan and Willie Fung as an alleged mix of Fu Manchu and General Yen embodier Nils Asher with just the right psychological headiness - i.e. his warlord measure of a man is how well they stand up to the pressure of a firing squad while sharing last cigarettes and pontificating in typically post-WWI sardonic hipster élan about death, which makes the film resemble another JVS-Dietrich collaboration, Dishonored, where cheery excitement about facing a firing squad is such a righteous mark of cool it's worth betraying your country for. It's like boarding a cool train, in a way, going to that no shore no traveller from returneth, and feelin' ready to board.

But that's why I find I like West of Shanghai: the Asian characters are actually far more complex than the cardboard cutout white colonials. Karloff's main henchman is a Chinese American Chicago gangster with a vibe like the evil version of Chan's #1 son, cool and ruthless while Jimmy was a spazz and unbearable; another genuine Chinese actor plays the mean portly officer who calls the feisty redhead 'little dragon' - he bats the girls around curiously like a native playing with a visiting anthropologist's blonde hair --she comes off worse than he does in this altercation. And before he's assassinated there's a touching, graceful performance by Tetsu Komai, who alone in the cast seems to talk in the steadied and eloquent but succinct, polite and honest style of English as a second language, as the general who winds up glad he's surrounded in his commandeered compartment by white folks he doesn't know as they're more trustworthy than his scheming soldiers. We get an example of one camp of soldiers, then the other, but always on the outside, as white missionaries and capitalists are shown less respect then they presume--in their haughty colonialist arrogance--they are due. This is particularly well-drawn in the scene between Roberts and Karloff after Oliver is hauled off to the gulag for punching the guard. The silken pidgin English-spouting warlord brings her into a special room he's commandeered to ply her with drink and promises of grand adventure and the best food, but there's the clear indication she's bereft of alternatives, other than suicide or murder (via the pistol he's left on the table). "If I want," he says, "I take you. It very easy." The scene is rather chilling, and we feel the protean echo of the violent savaging of women in mainland China at this approximate time (1937) at the hands of the Japanese. 

But of course this being after the 1934 Joseph Breen-enforced code, our Androcles Oliver escapes his captors and before he can be killed is recognized for a thorn-out-the-paw favor he did the lion Karloff decades earlier before any deflowering gets underway. Still, we're glad to be spared any further dismay over why anyone would be attracted to this boxy blank broad, and grateful we can spend the rest of the film enjoying the the weird head games as Karloff's snazzy trickster employs as he runs along a silken edge betwixt menace, playful Solomon-style problem solving, and macho existential last cigarette firing squad-style cool. It's enough to earn a place as a ladder rung between Dietrich's smiling exit at the end of 1932's Dishonored (see: Decadence Lost) and Walken's "one shot" at the end of 1978's The Deer Hunter.  




In this case the narc is pushy little adenoidal mouth breather Norman Foster as the most annoying such allegedly 'romantic' Madison Avenue-style antecedent to Elliot Reid in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a type that's thankfully disappeared long ago from the national register of archetypes, the smug, overbearing Pete Campbell-style ad man, pipe in mouth and a weird feeling he has the innate right to annoy cute girls at their place of work, which would be tolerable accept that this ploy actually works, which seems to condone boorish stalker behavior in a very unhealthy way (1). Thank God I finally just realized I could FF past his scenes without missing a goddamn thing (it's pretty rewarding when he loses his life's savings in a stock market boondoggle though). The rest of the Grand Hotel-aping cast are less remarkable, such as Jean Hersholt a Jewish (vot else?) fashion designer smitten by one of his 'party girl' models (Anita Page). She's great, he's a blubbering fool, but it's great to watch him be smart enough to not lose ever cent of his money in the same boondoggle that wipes out Foster.

Guess who makes a killing on that same boondoggle?


 Another oversize capitalist of ambiguous design is the great Charles Laughton in JAMAICA INN (1939), a film I'd never seen until last week when it showed up on TCM finally looking drop dead gorgeous in a cleaned-up new HD deep black transfer which made me instantly forget my long embargo on period costume dramas and the dismally depressing time I had trying to watch it in the 90s on some horrific public domain VHS (and not getting farther than the first five minutes). It was so good on this new edition, by jove, I changed my whole costume drama tune and put the Cohen BFI Blu-ray on my bleedin' Xmas wish list and started shouting "Chadwick!" in a worshipful impression of Charles Laughton as the British gentry/local constable. Unfolding over a few dark nights, set on a big tract of windswept foreboding land along the windswept Irish (?) coast near the titular inn, a more Gothically delicious set-up you'll as like never find. It's another tale of an innocent beauty bringing her antiquated morality to bear upon a scene in which she is but a tourist and in the process felling some smitten tyrant or other.  In this case the beauty is a very young Maureen O'Hara in her first film. Who wouldn't topple?

The stormy adventure eventually coheres as an example of Hitchcock's ever-emerging gift for prolonged romantic chase sequences, but the crux is a genuinely fine mix of unique character actors as the bad guys, full of rich slangy elocution and colloquial dialogue making them the easy rival of the unsavory crew of MGM"s 1935 classic Treasure Island. Each rogue is painted in detailed brush strokes by character actors led by crazy-eyed and haired Leslie Banks. As usual Laughton has a field day, oscillating from respectable if oafish parody of gluttonous British lordsmanship and conniving greedy rogue. In her first movie role, Maureen O'Hara's steely strength and overwhelming Irish beauty is already in full effect. Plucky, warm, brave, going to any length to save lives even of the no-good uncle-in-law (Banks) on account of her devoted aunt (Marie Ney).  The great English dame du suspense Daphne de Maurier proves once again a great choice for the master. Now that there's a restoration wherein we can savor the beauty of the coastline and the deep horror film mischief night ambience, the dirty faces of the wreckers, and the shadowy corners of the inn, it's gone from being a public domain footnote to a very strong entry in Hitch's canon, a sploshing wave of thrilling old dark inn suspense, lovers-on-the-run mystery, colorful black comedy, and ripping action - jolly good show. And Robert Newton is the romantic hero? Well strike me colors. ChadWICK!


NOTES:
1. see CinemArchetype 2: The Skeevy Boyfriend.

Camille Paglia was writing about Taylor Swift's "obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine" of "exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video "Please Welcome to the Stage."

" A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling's blockbuster Charlie's Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a "tits-and-ass" parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration."(Full)

I may have sold my Angels scrapbook when I was thirteen, but I still go back to them now that they're on DVD, whenever the real world gets too much and even the intensity of modern thrillers feels toxic.  Come with me now... to the past, episode by episode, merrily, slowly... even happily, with these smart, bold, fruitful women.

Season I: Acidemic's Episode by Episode Guide (1976-1977)

"There's rarely if ever any overt sexual violence. No matter how compromised our heroines become, they're free of all molestation, allowing for humanistic compassion and adaptability; if they talk a bad guy into dropping his gun or coming down from a ledge, for example, they don't run over and pin him to the ground, they help him up, give him a nurturing smile, and walk him down the hill, his hands in theirs (with another Angel bringing up the rear, with the gun, just in case, but unobtrusive)."
"Every so often Charlie (or Aaron) rewards the girls by bringing them outside the dingy studios of LA. Most of the time they don't end up using any of the footage they shot there, and just having half the scenes on the usual wood paneled sets but this time the Hawaiian stuff is all over the joint. You got Don Ho. You got a luau; a sassy massage parlor receptionist; our first introduction to Kris Munroe, Jill's sister, in her first episode/s--looking adorably like she's going to her first day at my elementary school in a 'windbreaker' (then a new term); and there's a big yacht raid finale in which, among other things, she storms the engine room in a hot brown two piece bathing suit. We were agog and thoroughly convinced, shortness be damned. If you see only one episode/s, make it these two, with some coco de oro in the air. You will be transported."
"Purists say that, like some crooked boxer, Charlies Angels took a dive in the third. It definitely kind of peters off after occasional flashes of the old magic. The Angels had been around long enough now I guess they figured they could take it easy. EASY!? How else had they been taking it? Kate Jackson left afterward, replaced in a stunningly wrong move, by high end London model Shelly Hack, way too skinny and posh for the mellow LA vibe of the other two. By the end of season four she was gone, and in came the very cool and enchanting Tanya Roberts. Critics all say that if she came in on season four instead of Hack then it might still be running today. It was just too little too late."

"She was a genuinely mythic goddess, ruling in the final decade where goddesses still commanded archetypal mystique, before videotapes made the remoteness required for such ascendancy completely impossible, the 1970s. You might even say she was the 1970s."

According to some wide mean streak in American pop criticism--stretching from bourgeois Academy voters all the way to  the soured douchebags of the comments sections--gorgeous sexy young girl artists and performers are meant to be just about anything but genuinely subversive. Never challenging to the status quo in any other way but via shrill feminist rally harangues via the old unionizing, negligence exposing, and/or courageously death-fighting avenue, they can be gazed on but not gaze back, not threaten our place of omnipotent safety in the theater/living room. Medusas in Reverse, we may gaze upon their loveliness (or lack of) at our Mulveyan leisure, judging them for their garb, hair, posture, youthfulness, but if they look at us the same way, it turns us instantly to stone. It's the revenge of Lacan's petit a, when one's persona-accruing object of desire turns suddenly and collides into your grasp, too close for comfort.

If you don't know what I mean, here's an example: you're a regular straight dude gazing at some beautiful woman across a crowded room or street, not even thinking consciously, just spreading some proprietary gaze around like a radar, as one does, especially in our televisual hypnosis where we're conditioned to treat pretty girls as if they're onscreen and can't see us back. So there's this one girl you see, and she's way hot, so you're gazing a little more wistfully, as if she was your favorite new actress. Then suddenly she sees you. She stares back at once, unflinching, smiling enigmatically, and starts to walk towards you, slowly but not shyly. Unless you're super confident, a James Bond type, your instinctive reaction is to look away. Before you can stop yourself, you look up, down anywhere but at her. Now you're angry at your sudden flush of shyness, why did you do that, bro? Married or not, who cares, you screw courage to the sticking place and put your game face on, remember the Bogey, and look back up in her direction, now ready for suaveness.

But she's already gone. It's too late. You're a pussy, bro. You know the drill, girls do that shit all the time, calling you out--and you blew it. You had your nanosecond. Turns out she had a gaze of her own... and it operated on a whole different level, judging your chutzpah, your mettle, your readiness to just start making out with a total stranger. And you failed. The screw your courage sticking place thing isn't fast enough, not for NYC, bro. Not for 2015.

Anita Pallenberg- Quality carnivoral staring

Now you hate her. It's easier than hating yourself. How dare that trollop put you on the spot! With just a glance she froze you. And then she froze you out. You'll never forgive her for this stinging reminder of your own bullshit.

Welcome to the New Depression. For the American critic, who is too high up the bourgeois ladder to look down without getting vertigo, this is where it ends. That hate constitutes sufficient ground for the poison pen to write and having writ, move on... In the words of some pompous bourgeois blowhard behind me at Magno Screening Room circa 2003, "how dare that blonde bimbo imply I'm not a feminist?!"

Isn't this the reason so many women don't gaze back? The average male gaze becomes like a prison searchlight, or a buzzing hornet. The woman mustn't seem like it bothers her, that she even notices, like everyone but her is homeless panhandlers, hoping they don't press the point. This gives her power in its way, as she becomes more and more like an onscreen heroine, a babe on a jpeg, an abstract locus of petit a Lacanian desire.

Kristen Stewart - one of the lookers

BUT if you are able to remember to let go, to let it pass, that initial sting of flash rejection, and even savor it like a Joseph von Sternberg character, the type who lavishes money on Marlene Dietrich and gets nothing in return but that same masochistic sting in a much larger dose, watching her run off with Gary Cooper or Cary Grant. And you also get as a bonus, to savor the movie image she's in, to bask in her soothing charm and imperious aura as she commands the dream screen cabaret.

For some of us it's worth it just being 'someone she can talk to,' and from this vaunted position now we judge her would be lovers as they come stammering past. And when the guy who can meet her gaze head on, and meets her standards moves in, we see up close how it's really done, take notes on the levels three through thirty of that bizarre staring contest you failed so fast. Instead of your stumbling, furious, ham-fisted Scorsese mix of demeaning sex and shrill arguments, she initiates and intricate call-and-retreat-attack from the side style courtship dance worthy of Sun Tzu or Rommel. As long as we don't demand to be the target of that attack, it's quite a show. Most guys can't take the long journey. Some can. They are usually beautiful, cool, or European themselves, film fans, those of us for whom are hot best friend is in ways just a manifestation of our favorite films, meant to be engaged with only on that level, etheral and conspiratorial.

Rot in Hell, "Harry"

We need to erase from our brains certain rom-coms that try undo Sternberg's great work. Today American love scenes are generally written and acted by people drawing on a collective cinematic memory that doesn't reach father back than 1991's When Harry met Sally, which smugly taught us men and women can't be best friends without eventually hooking up, that you can pull some late inning guilt trip and get the girl chick of your dreams. That film, that abomination, left the sexual development of American romantic comedy stunted in a nose-wrinkling cutesy fake orgasm tourist mentality ever since, meanwhile Europe leaves us in the dust. There's only a handful of romantic comedies made in the last 20 years that get the complexity of say Rohmer or even Clint Eastwood's early films like Breezy. AIDS and condom awareness and all sorts of PC corrective shoes on our 70s swinger feet have left us hobbled. There's no Mae West to show us the way, the way plain looking people can find relief from the unending parade of televisual hotness and see a way they too can enter the simulacrum or meet it halfway, or turn it off altogether. Only recently, with women-penned young adult novels like Twilight and Hunger Games still have female characters too bona fide complex for insecure male screenwriters and directors to ruin, and actresses too young and strong to be yet cowed by that old devil searchlight male gaze. They got gazes all their own, these dames, and god forbid they cast their beams back into the camera; the whole audience freezes up like a corrupted share drive.





1. THE REDEMPTION OF THE PLATONIC PAIR BOND: MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING (1997):

You can still find mainstream badass women characters that average critics love but don't recognize for their genius, any more than they do Kristen Stewart (until she was lionized by the French). Julia Roberts is brilliant in My Best Friend's Wedding and people revere her, but they tend not to be film theorists or critics, maybe for no other reason than her popularity. But her a character in this film is so unique to these films we can only watch in awe, her two best friends are men, one an aesthete gay editor (Rupert Everett) and the other hunky blank slate sports writer (Dilbert McDevitt). In the end the film partially heals the rift created by Harry Met Sally's betrayal and proves a best friend of the opposite gender one never hooks up with (either anymore or ever) is not only possible, it's better than actual carnal love and connection, at least for a certain kind of person, a true writer in the sense that sex and procreation are never as important as honing one's craft. In The Leopard, Burt Lancaster says "marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes," but the platonic soul matehood of Roberts with Everett or Mulroney is more like forty years of smoldering coal, continual, giving enough heat to move around the room freely, but with a sweater.

And today we have subversive outside-the-box geniuses unafraid to tap into their own personal hells, the bi-polar melancholia, drug addiction, abusive past, and above all unveil the willingness to sit there, in make-up, furs and write large upon our screens such reverse Medusa gazing as Hollywood not seen since the era of screwball comedy. They are like a relatively young version of Gloria Swanson, continually shedding her Norma Desmond reptilian build up, rather than letting it accrue and become the ascendent ego. It's terrifying to men for they realize just how much damage their gaze inflicts.

For startled bourgeois critics such self-assured brazenness better have a British or French accent attached, or be over 40 and playing a villain. If she's one of ours then she's just being uppity, trying to glorify that which mothers would willingly ween from the line. If these dangerous women try to find the poetry that is there in the abyss, they become a threat to safety-first PC nanny state who keep miles away from said abyss. The Europeans aren't as threatened. They know that just because it's destructive and pointless doesn't mean it's not brave, beautiful and poetic. Only occasionally are there critics in the American press and mommy blogs who can locate and analyze the dark chthonic core of feminine power and celebrate its destructive Kali currents rather than moping like some Fordian Irish scrubwoman.

These brave girls have come amongst us nonetheless, and they're setting up a whole non-Mulveyan approach to gazing. These Reverse Medusae don't get the kind of open praise as the 'little sisters" (Jennifer Lawrence), or old school Hollywood knock outs (Scarlett Johansson)-- the ones who fit inside established persona categories, who talk the walk and wow the interviewers and generally play the game, the kind your parents want you to marry when you bring them home over Christmas (as opposed to locking up the liquor cabinet and shooting you baleful looks). But to swap the genders, in which category do you think Brando or James Dean would have fallen in the early 50s? Hey STELLA (1), they would scare the shit out of your parents, simultaneously generous and miserly, girly and manly, fey and churlish. Mercurial, dangerous, alive, smelling terrible but wondrously pheremonal. These bad girls and reckless boys were all over the 70s, and the drive-in, but where are they now? We need them! Mom, go to bed and let the bad kids come over.

ANGELINA JOLIE for example once had the kind of crazy that scares the shit out of the status quo Oscar-giving bourgeois, but not there was the turning point when she won her Supporting Oscar and when she took the role in Beyond Borders (2003) and became enamored of saving the children. Now she just earns a check on the blockbusters to pay the orphanage bills but saves her real chutzpah for saintly suffering mother roles like Changeling.

That's okay, it's her trip. But her red carpet moments at the Oscar ceremony for Girl Interrupted (1999) is interesting because such crazy is usually only celebrated in men (Jack Nicholson in Cuckoo's Nest, De Niro in Raging Bull). The only way American actresses can cut loose and show their fiery goddess of chthonic psychosexual power is if its contextualized and contained in the psych ward, or meets death at the end. Angelina Jolie could win an Oscar and terrify the Academy by bringing her eerie brother as a date to the Oscars (above, left), and the world could gather around them in awe, acknowledging their otherworldliness without the kind of awkwardly judgmental refusal to notice any difference between them and everyone else so common to today's fascistic PC mindset. The bourgeois were 'safe' in applauding her, loving this growling lion behind bars but ready to shoot it if it ever escaped.

Well, it escaped, and the bourgeois critical consensus has been struggling to reorient its moral compass ever since. Luckily the web has dispersed the manic depression to the point of pleasant numb distraction. The critical world is still loping around behind the web's instant feedback loop like that old Italian guy chasing after Barbara Steele in 8 1/2. They're scared. Trying to suss out the tomorrow of today while fighting over space in actual print publications like wildebeests at a shrinking watering hole. There's no more Pauline Kael to call them out on their cowardice as they pile into any old van marked 'Important' cinema. The old guard critical elite are getting fired off in droves, moving back into their parents' basements en masse. They are replaced on the mastheads by cute interns with six-digit Twitter followers who never even heard of Hitchcock.

French publications like Cahiers du Cinema, meanwhile, once our tastemakers pointing out what amongst our perceived B-movie dross was gold, are becoming more bourgeois, busy praising small proletariat struggle films (for the children of the rich love to see themselves seeing films about the struggles of the poor) that will never even pick up subtitles let alone U.S. distributors (rather than have them praise Ants in your Plants of 2009 as the height of auteurship). And so our White Elephants stampede towards Oscar gold, renting space on the dwindling art house screens for a week to be eligible, pushing the real art, the dangerous art, off in just the same way their editorial champions were pushed off their mastheads. Only a few Europeans like Lars Von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Refn, and Gaspar Noe seem to be still trying to unearth the weird undiscovered worms beneath unturned rocks, but they get very hung up on sex and violence, both to please producers and to get shocked write-ups. If the critics feel something, even if it's just shock and trauma, at least they felt something.

Meanwhile, in America, we just don't get deluges of German Expressionists fleeing the Fatherland to Hollywood any more, bringing women like Marlene Dietrich and Garbo to school us in the return gaze, in seeing both herself seeing you and seeing what she sees, which is not you anymore but the other chump ticket buyers out in the rows. There was nothing sexual in the love of a Garbo widow, transcending even the giant mommy aspect (her silver screen projected face as large as mom's was when you were a suckling child), it was oceanic, tapping into those things and encompassing them and expanding outwards into a kind trans-behavioral oceanic state of aesthetic arrest that includes even her gaze. Now that Laura Mulvey's theory of the sadistic gaze, treated more or less as gospel in academia, pre-empts and denies that relationship, the female gaze has come under fire too. The Femme Fatale is criticized as a male design, and the result has been a case of feminists trying to slap the masculine gaze from out of her eyes and face like a crazy person batting at mosquitos and gnats only she can see.


LANA DEL REY: 60s AMERICA'S SWEET 16mm SUICIDE NOTE

Lana Del Rey's made a string of great sad sexy videos that seemed to prove the ghosts of early 60s Los Angeles suicides are the only thing of substance left in America, and then only because they were shot on Super 8 and 16mm home movie stock. But the negative feedback her schtick received, even from third wave feminist pundits, back in the early days, was quite alarming. It wasn't exactly new (she would fit right in any David Lynch or Don Draper nightmare) but she tapped a nerve, was gorgeous yet strange, with those lips that hovered between seeming real and seeming collagen-ish; a dazzling body and great cascading beehive-ready hair and a never say no policy to drugs, alcohol and bad boys that sent our American Puritan minds racing. She was just doing whatever drugs the bad boys have, getting into cars with strangers, and engaging in all sorts of twisted scenes with hot black guys and middle-aged bikers, much to our masochistic fury. The privilege over-brainwashed by PC Communist infiltrator liberal arts faculty-brainwashed feminists found themselves angry over the most mundane inconsistencies in her origin story. She used to be named Lizzy Grant and have curly hair and sing bubblegum pop or something, like that was new to her. The Jungian mythos and psychomythological natural law-honoring of Paglia feminists like myself were genuinely enthralled by her ability to zero in on the dark dream anima of the American culture dreamscape consciousness, as if she was a succubus from space who'd lived many lives and been soaking up America's broadcast radio, TV and dream transmissions as she flew closer and closer from the colds of space.

In short, if the naysayers had gone in for Jung or even modernism then they'd know their their indignant anger was the correct aesthetic response, the same one response solicited by the girl who stares back and causes us to blush instinctively, look away, and feel like a loser. The anger is correct it's the not realizing Von Sternberg / Bunuel masochism is the purist cinematic experience and how to achieve it that's the problem. Those videos sting like a slap in the face. The blush of jealousy and protective anger, it all  coheres from seemingly nowhere deep inside us. We can storm off and call our lawyers, or our sponsors, or write bad blog posts about it, or use the pain, the humiliation, as a kind of reset button that liberates the soul from the bondage of freedom, that taps into a primordial Stockholm syndrome, to savor the sting and realize all at once that masochistic cinema is the purest form, of cinema, the type where not possessing or controlling the seen stimuli that so affects our emotions is a liberation rather than an agony fought against.

She's got Argento's OPERA eyes...

Trained as we are by today's multiplex cinema now to once again slough off actresses and characters into various boxes (sullen daughter, good girl princess, All-American heimliches dumbmadchen, materialistic villain, traumatized victim / avenging angel, etc.) we feel bewildered when a woman actress or character attempts to step outside those boxes, to encompass them all within a single scene and then transcend them not after third act sulking montages, but within the same bedroom conversation. And if she's young and pretty and worst of all, one of our own, an American, then we reach for out pitchforks and torches on instinct. Even we who consider ourselves feminists of the Paglia school feel slightly like we let Rose McGowan down when we see her looking like a gray alien gollum or neopagan pin-cushion (above) in her music video. Where did we go wrong, as mothers?



But as with all great modern art that's the point. Terrorism's point is to spread anxiety and paranoia, maybe when a hot woman uglies herself into a kind of abject Molloch style alien she's just reacting to the beauty and youth industrial complex that's kept her and her sisters in anxiety and paranoia, to the point they torture their face with collagen and Botox late into the night until they emerge at dawn like Universal pre-code Jack Pierce abominations. Maybe there's something deeper than narcissism and fear at work behind this overthinking and second guessing and overpainting, a kind of counterespionage CIA counter-move, a throwing a Perseus mirror shield laser back against the Vogue-Revlon gaze, freezing it with horror, paranoia, creeping dread. After all, indigenous tribal societies use masks to personify ancient ambivalent archetypal forces in order to diffuse and incorporate their power into their society, which otherwise might suffer at said forces' hands.

And the CIA comparison is not made on a whim: One can think having so many attractive girls in high ranking CIA spots on TV shows like Homeland represents just a Hollywood nod to feminism or that we want to see pretty girls whenever possible, but if you see a documentary, like the one on HBO, you realize it's the truth -- these women are brilliant and brave and better at connecting the dots of seemingly unrelated events and movements into a serpentine whole than men or even less attractive women.  Beauty and charisma are keys to success not only in any field that relies on winning people to your side, whipping up deep loyalty out nothing more than a warm smile. Acting and spying are really more or less the same, drawing on the same skills. Beauty is as valuable to a spy as a photographic memory or crack shot marksmanship. Only an American would think that's somehow 'cheating.'

Sleeping with the enemy of my enemy on the enemy's command

But aren't, as Hitchcock's movies point out, spies not only actresses but whores, only the difference being they are stealing secrets instead of earning money for their pimp/CIA handler? Forced to sleep with the bad guy to get information, evidence, cash, the part, even if it means losing the respect of Cary Grant, if she pretend she's in love with someone long enough, and well enough, so that even she starts to believe it, isn't that the same as falling in love for real? It's the kind of thing that can drive a girl mad, and when the slimy misogynist spiders who run free all over the web find themselves posting your every nude shot in every corner of the world and then hating you for your image's power over them, their inability to get a girl like you in real life, then you've become a symbol of everything wrong with the world. They feel you owe them something, stalkers and paparazzi become indistinguishable. Now the spy comparisons get too close for comfort, and the terrorism of celebrity begins. Wherever you go people stare or demand to be stand next to you for a selfie. If you refuse they hate you forever. The only sane response is to go mad, seek solace from your personal assistant/bodyguard, act in weird ways that are a turn-off to the average People Magazine reader. Shave your head in a bid to turn them all off or turn around and come onto them, flash your bush at every turn, until they run when they see you coming. There's that old koan about the beautiful woman who wanted to become a Buddhist monk but they wouldn't let her because she was too beautiful for the rest of them to focus, so she took a hot iron to her face and was admitted.

They say don't seek enlightenment unless you do so as one whose hair is on fire would seek a pool of water. And if you've never been on fire then what good are you, o uncooked roast, o churlish banal carcass that for wont of heat doth rot and bloat with banal surmise, but impaled on spit and turned on flame to sizzle doth a kingly feast to make?

Hail Stewart!

A César for Kristen...

What a year. Is this the one where time broke? Critics best of are divided and prejudiced by what amongst the zillion new movies out in all media including screen, they can absorb. Whether a movie is from 2014 because it was at Cannes but not released to you until 2015, can you add it as best of 2015 and who gives a fuck? I hate introductions to best of lists where the critic is all chummy and presumptive of your indulgence like he's or she's still writing for fucking Salon. Ah hell....



One of the only films from the last twenty years that manages to be totally scary without gore or torture or a distinct bad guy and sure it's got a great retro-analog synth soundtrack and other neo Carpenter touches that understand the importance of set, setting and tick-tock momentum, but there's a lot more that makes it the best film of the year, or maybe ever. There's kite-surfing champion Maika Monroe as the sweet weary Jay, someone we too want to champion, the way a pretty girl in the neighborhood who's actually sweet to all the kids she's grown up with on the block, the mere mortals, including her kid sister and her friends, will rally them all around her in a protective wall when needed, a kind of chivalrous loyalty we haven't seen since the Victorian age. the way even the smallest, shyest of replies and questions seem to hurt and embarrass the kids who say them, like it would in real life when you're at that transitional age of not being confident in your body and place in the world (or if you are, merely foolhardy and exposing yourself to danger). Beautiful pink and blue lights and 70s suburban shadows, every shot a luminous poem alive with nubile naked legs and feet about to turn old (Mitchell's leg man if ever there was one), every frame an illustration of the birth-death cycle (like the devastating slow pan across the hospital windows) channeled it out into a broader mythic canvas that transcends Larry Clark-ish sex to depict the loss of virginity as the beginning of the ticking bodily clock, where the rest of your life from then on is a constant rush from steadily advancing death. Or there's the way parents are but side plays accorded nary a thought nor beseeched for aid, seldom seen except in hospitals where they talk to the doctor more than the kids; the way lines of Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot resonate naturally as classroom assignments dovetail into profound metaphysical analysis of reality, the treadmill towards the whirring blades of your movie's end credits which running the other way conquers not, and every movement away, the constant tick tock momentum forward, it's all just delaying actions. The moment you get laid is the moment the meter starts running. (full review)

TCM screened the entirety of the alcoholically fluent Thin Man series for New Year's Rawkin' Eve 2016. Naturally I hung around for it, glued, as one is, by the ever-deft blend of comedy and mystery, the natural charm of Powell and Loy as tipsy Nick and Nora, and the colorful thugs. The thing struck me most now for this nth viewing (and maybe I gleaned this visiting my brother in Arizona) is the way rich or upper middle class alcoholics often wind up with slightly lower rungs of friends and mates, the booze acting as a kind of leveler a handicap, but also a plus; their lack of interest in class as opposed to vitality and color. Taken as a whole, over seven films, stretching from 1934 and the end of the pre-code era to the post-war noir jazzbo world of 1947, we see the way drinking mirrors censorship and how World War Two proved a great class equalizer, as well as booze. There's a reason, in the end, for avoiding the low-lifes: hang out with them long enough, and the lowlife becomes your whole life. You suddenly wind up in coach, or packed into third class cars with barn animals, peasants, drunken bums... oh wait, now you're a drunken bum...

Nora was definitely slumming when picking up knight errant Nicky, for she started out rich and to the manor-born. The alleged upper crust, her side of the family, are flighty heiresses with similar longing for the rough trade, dominated on the home front by upper crust tea-totaler drags who expect their son-in-law to drop domesticity and trundle to their FREE aid even though they treat him like a pest, like hired help and lock up la cabinet liquor. (Lucky Nora steals the key).

In the original THIN MAN (1934) we meet that 'actual' thin man, the only one in the series, and while not related directly it's the same vibe with him: Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a crackpot inventor with terrible Gold Digger blonde-fakeness-roitin' up tootin' and powder takin' feminoid chits with perma waves fit to knuckle a Fred down low past the trotters and the truffles and all the googen plazas in betwixt. By which I mean, he lets a platinum wave undercut good common sense. Wynant was first married to Mimi (Minna Gombell) -a shrill, clipped uptight nouveau riche with whom he has a foxy young daughter Dorothy and a creepy-intellectual son Gilbert, and supports them and also Mimi's gigolo second husband Cris (Cesar Romero). And then there's Wynant's secretary Julia Wolfe (Natalie Moorhead) who cheats on him, presumably, with the squat pug-like Morelli (William Brophy) and the dirty little rat Nunheim (Harold Huber).

 The party Nick and Nora throw meanwhile indicates they too like to hang out with the lower dregs just as much as the Wynant family. Their Xmas party is packed with flea-bitten boxers, agents, dumb reporters who don't know what the word 'sexagenarian' means, and a stockpile of gold diggers and sobbing mom-callers. The only sane sweet two girls in the whole rotten pack are brunettes: Nora herself (Myrna Loy) and Maureen O'Sullivan as Wynant's daughter Dorothy. The rest are hardbitten blondes (including Nunheim's 'frying pan juggler' and Chris' first wife).

I might come off as being snooty in pointing these differences out, but in fact I'm arguing that the variations of class-stratified couples in this first film act as mirrors across railroad tracks that better situate the unique chemistry of our favorite drinking couple. The question might be also, what would their romance be like if their classes were reversed? Though in later films this is challenged (in a clear nod to MGM Andy Hardy provincial morality-flattering cleanliness) it's inferred Nick's a tough guy from the streets of NYC (since he knows nearly everyone there). We only learn subsequently he's from a decent small town with a physician father and a white picket fence.

I've always liked to believe, as I've written, that THE THIN MAN is really a kind of Hammett-to-Chandler cross-over BIG SLEEP sequel, or at any rate, a Phillip Marlowe sequel, (he ends up with the nice rich dame a lot). The wry humor and quick back and forth of Bogie and Bacall in SLEEP seems like both a precedent and forerunner to Nick and Nora's and the class differentiation is just right. Marlowe too isn't just a gumshoe, he "went to college and can still speak English if the situation demands it." So by moving into a life of crime solving they take a step down, to mingle with the dregs.

Natalie Moorhead / Edward Ellis

For a contrast, we have the dysfunctional slumming dating pattern of Wynant (he dates downward, and so do the women he dates, making him the Nora in his class divide-crossing relationships). He reminds us so painfully that to be rich and successful is to need either a personal assistant, a detective ("Rutledge should hire you permanently to keep those girls of his out of trouble"), or a 'present' parent (like Sebastian's mom in Notorious) to screen out the riff-raff, do background checks, and otherwise make sure you're not sleeping with or getting rooked by any blackmailers, gold diggers, vamps, hookers, or greedy two-timers just because they remind you of some dame in Kansas City. Wealth does not often equal a clue. In marrying the detective, Nora in a sense immunizes her own wealth from such mooching (Nick says he's "taking care" of it) by submitting to a kind of form of it in what is essentially a job of permanent security and riff-raff shepherding.

And in the end maybe what started out as bored jetset thrillseeking borne out of accidental meeting if, say, Nick was hired by Nora's late father in the past to shake a grifter off her tail, especially is noblesse oblige that separates the cool rich (the kind we love) vs. the snobby airheads (the targets of our scorn). To see Powell especially in these films as Nick Charles is to see that easygoing 'every class treated like the first class' charm that is like a beacon, not just great to drink to but to aspire to. For it's also this classiness that magically roots out the con artists and moochers. Even so at the dinner party denouement he immediate and a priori to his arrival articulates animosity towards an as-yet-unmet sleazy lecher for Dorothy (they're interrupted from boarding a train together, perhaps crossing state lines and allowing her to make "first false step.") The guy she's meant to be with is a young dope of amiable disposition and clearly moderate but not paltry self-sufficiency who understands her perfectly. One of my favorite toss-away lines is when Tommy (Henry Wadsworth) tells her to "pack some clothes and your skates" to come with him to his parent's cabin in the country -- the addition of the skates is so sharp, detailing all sorts of character traits -- he knows her very well and what will cheer her up, so we like him. 2) the skating aspect implies the cabin is near a frozen lake, and that they've skated up there before together, probably under the watchful eye of his parents. In short, from this one detail we appreciate and admire the youthful earnestness of their pairing, compared with the louche "first false step" guy, who basically gets slugged.


AFTER THE THIN MAN (1936) plunges us into more of a 50/50 mix with the (K)nobb (Creek) Hill types of San Francisco, replete with goggle lensed alienist (George Zucco) keeping doe-eyed debutante Selma (Elissa Landi) strung out pills and like Nora or Mimi or anyone, susceptible to some handsome philandering grifter husband (Alan Marshall) to the point of shunning the respectable slime pails in her class (like Jimmy Stewart). He's a real slimeball this grifter husband, but Selma's obsessive doting over him is also rater sickening, though a valuable window into yet another possible facet/outcome of the rough trade/gigolo gold-digger (male) symplex which we see time and again in the series, putting us in the odd position of realizing money is in its way an amplifier for trouble in ways middle class folks don't usually need to worry about. In this case the domineering matriarch Aunt Katherine (Jesse Ralph) is clearly underwriting Selma's case of nerves, amplified still further by quack shrink Zucco's undoubted regimen of mind-altering drugs

Curiosity about the lifestyles of the poor has long been an obsession of the rich. The last few parties I went to have been at my rich ex-roommate's with all his high roller and top shelf model friends. And in each right around two AM the "call" is made, and some sketchy dude shows up to sell the gathered eight balls of cocaine in a different room (which I never go to). Once said sketcher sees the hotties to be had he calls his buddies and within minutes there's a sketchy hoodrat hanging on a willowy model in every corner of the room - it's an old dance, Angel Boobs, and it goes back to prohibition in the 20s-early 30s, when "that man is here" (a phrase that turns up more than once in the THIN MAN series) meant said sketchy coke dealer's ancestor had arrived at the party with a package... and became the apple of every thirsty girl's eye.


We have only a few instances of this romantic slumming after the repeal of prohibition in 1933 made celebrities stop having to rub elbows with outlaws to get their liquor. Today there's weed guys too but soon it will only be the cokehead celebs that have to, and the junkies and they have Hep-C already, so more power to them.

On a side note, I've not only struggled with alcoholism but with my own snobbiness for I've never wanted to belong to a class that would have me for a member, to paraphrase Groucho Marx. I've learned to be the bemused hip side man rather than the worrywart aunt of sulky ectomorphism when it comes to monitoring my friend's and family's mate choices, to trust that everything was OK, that things didn't need to be or couldn't be any better or worse. The amount of suffering I had to undergo to make it to this sketchy truce of peace was/is astronomical. I dated a Cherry Hill NJ girl five years without ever overcoming it, and man oh man, the middle class is a tricky place to be -- what does money have to do with it? It's character, pure and simple, that overrides culture. A rich family might live poorer than a poor one, a rich house in Princeton might look at first like a rustic cottage with an add-on, the austerity reflecting, only as we learn later, some Colonial antique debt of honor to family tradition. Meanwhile a huge mansion next door might be packed with gaudy statuary and uncleaned pee stains from amok puppies while the owner chomps a cigar and insults Mr. Merrill in back by the pool. 

Right as I wrote that I hear Nora behind me on the phone, noting that they had a wonderful time on their cross country trip: "Nick was sober in Kansas City!" as if that's in itself a rare and precious thing.

By the time of the third film, ANOTHER THIN MAN (1939) with Colonel McFee the family lawyer harrumphing that they drive out to his remote LI estate, to find it swamped with security guards "good air for the baby" and overlapping needy characters cramming their way into the smaller and smaller apartments, compartments and set, bearing pages of red herring exposition like trays of hardboiled eggs (and one duck egg). By this third edition, the rogue's gallery giving the gladhand after Nick sent them up the river is kind of cliche, as is the dour humorless relative / uncle, and the MGM treacle seeping over the Breen line ("Gee, a baby!"). Even if it is goddamned Dean Stockwell, saints forgive him an unwelcome intrusion though not much of one--they do have a nanny).  A

Muriel Hutchison

The real difference here, the unique selling point not later duplicated in the series, is the romance between Sheldon Leonard and Muriel Hutchison as a pair of tough grifters (when she pulls a pistol out of her garter belt the whole series grinds to a turntable scratch halt). They might well just be a skeezy pair but wind up the second coolest couple in the place, further blurring the class lines, (there's no real demarcation of rich and low class settings anymore, as the art direction has slid into those wartime fields of uniform gray. The way she says "okay" when he asks her if she wants to play for keeps and make it a duo is like an oasis of sexual vulnerability and streetsmart brass and spritely comedic wit perfectly fused, like Frances Farmer meets Judy Holliday.

Nora is on her way to being totally ditzy but still gets out good lines like following Nick's lead to get rid of the pesky romeos at El Morocco: "I won't stay in quarantine I don't care who catches it!" but then doesn't know to look at the maraca player onstage for her contact instead of falling into trite Lucy Show-style mistaken identity-brand comedy with an excitable gigolo.
Thist time the Dorothy Wynant girl is played by Virginia Grey as the patient daughter of the Colonel
Tom Neal (!) is a chemist, as is b-movie mainstay Patrick Knowles.

THEN CAME THE WAR

The weird boilerplate fascism accruing in the dregs of the slumming cocktail almost heralds the second world war - as if all the decadent art design and detailed underworld flava of the first film has to be sanded down and off so now the crooks aren't drunks themselves but racial stereotypes borrowing their babies for a baby party, with no sense of one another as characters or actors, like they all just met one another on the G train out of Brooklyn, or are lining up at boot camp, the endless blank white surfaces reflecting a utilitarian ease with which the wall of an LI mansion becomes the wall of an NYC hotel with just a change in wall hanging, and none of the lived-in wealth of grime vs. swank in the first film, some of which survives into OY! AGAIN WITH THE THIN MAN but by SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN is just vapor.

And the thrill of drinking while dodging bullets was gone, of if not gone, certainly put away for the moment, eased into storage alongside the west coast Japanese-American population and pacifist humanism until the end of the war, when noir artisans like Siodmak and De Toth would de-mothball the exoticism that Welles and Von Sternberg had overdone the way someone who eats too much of a certain food never wants to eat that food again, at least until, say 17 years or a war have passed.

The frills are on the lily but two things MGM couldn't overbake with a kind of fascist 'return to ze old world' Fordian hick Christian small town provincial weepy moralism were the drinking and the idea of an underworld itself. The grifters might all look like they'd been transplanted in front of walls as phony in regards their lives as a Woolworth painted family Xmas portrait backdrop, but they were there nonetheless. The glorious mansion of the second film, or ritzy apartment of the first, even the visit to relatives in the third is supplanted now there's a maid and domesticity galore, Nick is even goaded into drinking a glass of milk to appease his demanding son. That's carrying wholesomeness too far! As W.C. Fields might say, "It's inhumane!'

Good bits in SHADOW OF A THIN MAN (1941) though include Nora summoning him from the park across the street just by shaking up a cocktail-- he hears the shaker all the way across the street and up in their suite, but the minimal sets and tedious MGM homespun shit, coupled with Nick's dime store penchant for the races seems like they lost most of their fortune and are now just loafing around in an upper middle class boilerplate (i.e. they're now the Muensters not the Addamses). Barry Nelson (holy shit! the hotel manager from THE SHINING) as part of an intrepid allegedly good crime solving couple, are the mirrors this time, all clean cut and sharp. But what the hell, man, the writing coasts on lazy coincidence: Nick starts to just be where crimes are rather than the carefully planned naturalistic flow realistic to a big city life that brought Dorothy into a hotel bar over Xmas at the sight on Nick, who once worked a case for her father and with whom she had a childhood crush.

Stella Adler

Stella Adler is amongst the suspects! And she's terrific. Dig the way she feints forward in her first scene alone with Nick, as if about to kiss him then does a serpentine backslide over the word "threaten" until it's practically an admission that Nick's a reptilian and she's under his sexual enslavement sway. But meanwhile Nora is getting daffy, relegated to all sorts of half-baked in-betweenism of ditzy harebrained derogatory MGM backwards wartime non-feminist and savvy intuitive genius with a knack for stumbling down lazy screenwriter shortcuts towards new inadvertent clues, sussed out of the monochrome sets and cardboard cutout characters by lazy screenwriter tricks, i.e. coincidence.


THE THIN MAN GOES HOME (1945)
(END OF THE WAR)

"C'est la guerre" - almost like compared to the swank hotel compartments they had earlier, this overcrowding train coach nonsense reflects a kind of almost Communist descent, like only seen in so many war pics abstracted from the actual war (there's not a lot of folk in uniform in this 1945 film) .

We also think that Nick must be a savvy big city detective, but like HELLBOY in his sequel, suddenly his urbane cool is funneled into a Spielberg middle class suburban wistful over the old windmill; while in the baggage car with Asta, a box labeled "Limburger cheese" and many goats (I love the family sticks with the dog rather in the freight car rather than just letting the group be separated (and no little Nicky, where the hell did he go? Military school? Good riddance, at any rate.)


But Loy, with her petit bowler hat, now steps up her game and she looks suddenly a whole new mature kind of gorgeous; she's way above the curve while Powell looks like he's been a little booze-battered, old, cross-eyed, glossy, complaining about his stomach lining and bearing a flask full of "cider" (mirroring maybe Fields'Never Give a Sucker" scene in the ice cream store). It's the sort of scene where the father calls the wife "mother." We do learn he's been working making high fees as a detective, her fortune is apparently gone, but really the war has just elevated the common man and dissolved the classes in ways that the war made heroic but would be heresy and red commie propaganda in a little over half a decade, and that's the weird thing with Russia. You were helping America by promoting Russia during the war, and an enemy of the state immediately after.

Meanwhile Loy picks up the balance from the booze-wobbly Powell and narrates the whole Stinky Davis case in a way moderately better than the mystery of the film itself. The lighting, so moody and rich in the original has been slowly fading away into spacy country light, as if the lighting is so incredibly high and bleached out that a person wearing a dark color or sporting a noir shadow would be committed to a mental institution. So now Loy is rattling skeletons hoping a crime will break out in this small town, "so [Nick] can show his father what a wonderful detective he is." Are we hearing this right? The "only you darling, lanky brunettes with wicked jaws" has morphed to this, as if the whole thing has shipped across the line between the first three badass MASH seasons and all the others, once Potter arrives and the wholesome June Moon Spoon "she married a brewer from Miluwaukee" nonsense comes a commencin' - "You might get all sweaty and die," Loy cautions wryly. She's aged way better than he has. Did I mention that?

the only other hottie is a muscular little Mary Lou Retinal scan of a blonde (Gloria DeHaven - left) who quotes Shelly while thesping around her mansion, the first cool set in the film, and then we remember the Tennyson quoted by Edward Brophy (in the "I'm the fella who wrote this picture, screwy idea, wasn't it?" bushes dweller role) and we get the feeling that, hey, them who wrote this went to college. Ann Revere is in a throwaway role as a crazy chorus (in the greek sense) wanderer, as if small towns were all apocalyptic Lynchian Godard's WEEKEND cool with genuine links to the founders rather than suffocated in the MGM small town "Curse of Arthur Freed" crib. (Deep in the Heart of Texas refrains as Nick suits up).

But the end, the final round up exposition, is as deliriously convoluted as we'd like, with the small town maid-playboy adoption and the Bruce Partington Pants, but there's also Nick popping two buttons that day as a lad who finally earns his dad's admiration for solving it all AND using dad's kind of highbrow medical jargon along the way.

The brush, son... the brush.

The War's over now, and the Noir can safely begin, set to smoldering jazz on boats three miles out-ish, though I presume we're not meant to think Prohibition's still in effect, bring on the finale, la SONG OF THE THIN MAN (1947)

w/ Keenan Wynn as the 'young hep cat' they adopt, or who adopts them

But before the jazz, and the hep lingo, it turns all bullshit sterile, with Myrna turned into the exacting old bitter battleaxe she stood against in the earlier films, demanding Nick spank Nick Jr. because he wants to pitch ball instead of lumbering along with his bourgeois piano practice, acting like she's the height of hipsterdom for letting Nick bust out his "last" bottle of Scotch for some special occasion or other, as if Prohibition was still in effect, to celebrate the--what was it?--no one who hasn't decided their Scotch is their "last" can remember or think what the hell that is? By now it's Nick Jr. who's cool, not his drab parents, with Nora's spanking obsession and Nick's tedious jet black  hair dye doing nothing for him seeming a bit bloated and old, and why not? You'd be too if you drank like Nick Charles. Who plays off his non-alcoholic cider like it won't effect his jubilant ease-in-his-own-skin one bit, like an acrobat trying to seem carefree and light on his feet with a ship anchor tied around his neck. Nick's alcoholic métier never quite recovers from his character's booze-related health issues, the inevitable age of his character and the actor, wartime home front belt-tightening and MGM small town mythologizing mirroring and his slow backsliding out of the upper class, dragging Nora and her family fortune down with him until he's just another Bukowski-esque bum at the dog track.


If you've been drinking all the way up to the and including the last film here then maybe you'll wonder if Nick's boozing at all by now. Mainly the drinking is all done by salty sailor types cuz by now a man can not be a dad and MGM A-lot dressing room dregs and still be a lush, aye now there may be something in what all that is about and we must like that the real time between these cases is allowed to accrue, so each time the folks look further aged.