We fans of Welles and of Macbeth dreamt long and loudly of one day seeing a CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT Criterion Blu-ray. Orson Welles' culling of Falstaff bits from several Shakespeare plays, put in a larger English history (circa early 1400s) context via Hollinshed's Chronicles, it was damned hard to appreciate on the old grey dupes that for decades were our only option - and tough to find. The one critic who'd seen it on the big screen assured us it was a masterpiece. But if saw clips or dupes we couldn't get past things like the terrible dubbing, annoying music, muddy transfer, and a pace too rapid and over-edited for our attention to rest upon. It looked from this vantage as if Welles had been editing it over and over to please himself until the only way to full appreciate it was to have edited it, to be so familiar with its rhythms and the story. Enough forgotten words and slang phrases were used that you needed subtitles and a period English dictionary to unscramble it). That you could one day know enough of what was going on in the story to relax and focus on the arrestingly grotesque woodcut- expressionistic deep focus frames, discordant distorted perspective gags, and ramshackle post-slapstick was but a dream of more patient scholars. Certainly the cast seemed to get it, laughing uproariously at every little movement of old Jack Falstaff, played by the big man, Orson, as large as a house. Disconcerting, in a way, to see Welles so ballooned, as if he might bust or drop a sandbag out of his purse and float away.

I tried to watch the whole thing once or twice, but gave up decreeing, I'd wait for the Criterion. Maybe if the full scope and glory of the cinematography could be appreciated, this mountains of icy qualms would unto flattened puddles melt. Well, the Criterion has come. No more excuses. Dive in! Sure it's taken me months to get to it, and to find at last the right mindset for it's odious savors sweet.

To figure out where amidst the din we may plant our flag of comprehension and bemusement, or for other reasons, I relapsed over Xmas. Yea, for other reasons. So I pray thee --judge me not.

I'd learned from my last relapse (1998), watching an old tape of Welles'Macbeth (1948) that Orson ranting under gloomy painted skies as old Bill Shakespeare fit a lost weekend bender quite well. Shakespeare's language comes into delirious focus and the world's weight of guilt and dread for the coming work week find a perfect mirror in Macbeth's ghostly floating dagger. I still have the pages of almost illegible hand-written notes to the effect from that lost week to the effect it was the ideal relapse play, the fall from sober workaday Eden and into the opiate-womb where three meals a day and a job as Thane of Cawdor are as unattainable as even getting up off your knees to add ice to your highball. (see: Hallowed by thy Shakes: Three Macbeths). Into that morass, Welles' deep booming voice, his mastery of Shakespeare's poetry, came a-rolling like a harmonizing deep bass chord. All that emotion the alcohol loosened, coupled to the dread one might feel alone on a rudderless raft being swept out to sea and looking back at the receding shore (knowing the only way back to sobriety is acute alcohol withdrawal, which can be fatal without hospitalization and/or benzos of one's own), becomes so sublimely coordinated when entraining to Welles, his thunderous oratory filling the sail of Shakespeare's words like a westerly gale into the canvas sail of one's no longer-becalmed heart, that a whole new plateau of ecstasy emerges - not on the horizon as some shimmering mirage but as one's current fix. Watching as Welles staggered around the Republic cowboy sets, the feeling of guilt and remorse as my life up to that point seemed to dissolve in tatters behind me like a Cawdor pennant in the gore and discarded branches of Birnam Wood on the fields of Dunsinane. The full measure of Welles' resonant voice and the poetry of the dialogue cohering across moody Expressionist compositions that made all of Scotland feel like one gloomy haunted house; the marching figures with their tall flags and hanging corpses; ghosts and Welles staggering around in his papier-mâché crown and furs like some drunken glorious fool at a masquerade while the court in attendance eye him with concern and suspicion the way my own friend coterie was eyeing me and preparing for another intervention.

So this time, after 19 years of not drinking... wine...  later, after running through my usual suspects (including, because it was on TCM, High Society which stuck in my head like a broken record), I found Chimes and remembering how Macbeth had so grounded me in its repeatable coil of brilliance, I did hope Chimes might at last make sense. 

And all was well for the first 2/3 - that warm bath of Welles + Shakespeare claimed me as if some night-tripping fairy plucking me from my pet bed pillow and dropping me into his hearth-warmed amniotic purse. For to comprehend why Shakespeare is easier to appreciate when drunk is to need to first be drunk oneself. I remember as a kid a German translator friend of my dad's told me once that all Europeans have a drink before a language class for this very reason; it's a bit like running a stuck jar lid under hot water. Staggering into my 8:30 AM French class still drunk from the night before back in my freshman year of college, hiding my stamp-covered hand from the disproving teacher as I once again displayed my lack of studying, I realized alcohol alone may not have been enough. I got a D-, but at least I scared the shit (or "merde") out of her. Vive la France! (un petit mort aussi).


But that was because I didn't study or really care (language was required), but when just dealing with Shakespeare's semi-olde, pun-filled English poetry, it's close enough to our own the loosening of the deeply-whetted brain's linear grip enables a kind of twisty tongue-tripping free-fall that his eloquence catches in mid-air and swings around as if a glowing orange between two high-wire acrobats, and Welles' resonant voice reaches into the bones and harmonizes them like so many low note xylophone bars.

That's good because all the while Chimes is harmonizing and filling thy sails, you're still out on that raft with no paddle being sucked out to the open ocean without a soul around to notice (if you're lucky enough to live alone), realizing you really need to jump off the raft and start swimming towards shore before it's too late to even try- but you're tired and the current is against you, and sharks and the undertow and you'll jump in a minute you're just trying to get ready; and then, presto, it's too late. The shore is just a thin black line against the sun setting in the west (you think). Then you can't remember which way the shore is at all.

When you wake up and it's 6 o-clock on your VCR you can't tell if its AM or PM by the thin gray light outside. If it's AM you're fucked - the liquor store wont be open for hours. If its PM on a weekday you're fucked, as you forgot to call in sick to work... again. You'd try to call now, or sit up, or make coffee, but just turning the channel to the weather/time is hard enough you get the dry heaves without finishing the rest of your warm foamy highball. The more you keep drinking the worse the recovery is going to be.

The convulsions of withdrawal, the sheer human misery awaiting you is going to immense but while you're drinking - ooh lah lah, hallucinations and sheer ecstasy, laughing with joy as Hal and Falstaff trade off on their impressions of Gielgud's dry air oratory as the king. His officers hammer from without like Monday morning's rail-thin skeleton, phone calls from concerned co-workers that go straight to voice-mail. Away to the wars, they probably say. Being unable to even the find the phone, you declare pacifism to the empty air. This must be what heroin addiction is like you think; you're floating in delirious freedom. To go from such degradation and misery of not being able to stand up without retching, to such narcotized bliss is worth all the suffering. The swimmer pushing off from the bottom swims faster upwards, enough to breach the water like a porpoise. Hitting "bottom" is just the Phoenician sailor corpse's word for "a whole new worrrrld."

So... hit play. It's only 6PM on a Saturday. You have all the time in the world to get straight. Feeling good enough to mix another drink, to steady your wobbly raft as it were, you sit down with newly-minted drink for Chimes of Midnight. Ah yes, it barely matters that you've seen it three times in a row now, because you forgot those times, aside from that it now feels warmly familiar.

This is because really, in a sense, like the demon in the whiskey that unites with the demon in your soul, it's the ultimate bad influence friend both diegetic and meta-ly. Sir John Falstaff has got to go, but what are the options? Go home? Though Sir John is a poster child for charm and wit in the service of base dissolution, John Gielgud's sober King is such a square and so ignobly come to crown that his road there carries its own sort of Macbathean guilt -- considering the bad boy behavior of his princely son as the shimmering accusatory finger of his own private Banquo ghost. He'd rather wish that some night tripping fairy would go into the past and trade louche Harry with noble Hotspur than try to understand his own culpable odium in the equation.

That's why, for all its robust glory and rich language, Chimes is really a kind of Adam Sandler movie. Half the film is just compilations of elaborate insults, pranks, bad boy behavior, and real job shirking, and then---finally and with much trumpetfare--kicking the jonesers, townies and mooches out of your life. The sun shines and the clouds part. Adam Sandler grows up, gets a job and a nice girl; Hal gets a crown; you get "some help." Master Shallow goes back to his own ruddy taverns to boast of knowing the man who knew you when, and then they forget you - for more naive and hitherto-sheltered freshmen are coming into town every fall.

RECEPTION

It might have been pitched like that and done well at the box office--the violence of the battle and the lusty sex of the tavern with Jeanne Moreau's Doll Tearsheet played up, but instead, alas, Falstaff AKA Chimes at Midnight was paradoxically too old-fashioned and too sophomoric-- for swingin''66. It proved yet another of Welles' art house flops, the equivalent of Oscar Jaffe's canceled Joan of Arc. The art crowd were flocking to see stuff like Blow-Up and Repulsion. A Shakespeare film starring a grotesquely fat windbag, with loads of overdubbing and complicated history, overlapping ornate dialogue that would be difficult enough to understand if read, let alone spaken in a rush over rapidfire grotesqueries and complexly interwoven fields of bawdy, profound, and historically-specific action.

As you can see from the above, an example of a possible art house marquee 1965-66 (for art house releases traveled slowly across country in a few prints. So 1966 would not be too late for the film to come to your town. Still, looking at the above and imagining seeing all those posters in a row outside the theater, any promoter can see the subliminal issue. Falstaff is the fat kid no one wants to invite to the prom. Seeing it instead of, say, Persona is like admitting your some wobbling bookish unlaid square with elbow patches on your tweed jacket and ink stains on your fingers from years of note-taking and running from the giddy, druggy thrill of svelte or buxom babes in shimmering mod clothes frugging to the latest psych rock jam or grooving down at the coffee shop to some bongo and guitar folk poetry until the (acid was still legal) drugs kick in. Poor Welles, in his clownish armor, seems as isolated as the fat kid in the outfield at gym class softball, while the other posters seem to imply just seeing them will make us cool. Seeing Falstaff (Aka Chimes at Midnight) will be like having to sit with the booger-ish kid who has no other friends.

As you can see, there's no Janet Leigh or Rita Hayworth to put on the poster. No Edie or Catherine Deneuve or Jane Fonda or Raquel Welch. There's no 'sizzle' the way concurrent releases of similar length and film stock, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita or 8 1/2 had.  Audiences would line up for Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg or Sophia Loren, and if they got a little art with their cleavage, hey, sounds great but they didn't have to admit that was why they came - like being able to say you read Playboy for the articles. Not to say it's always needed but (to paraphrase Lorelei Lee) my goodness, doesn't it help?

All Chimes could promise was Welles deep into his fake noses and rotund grotesquery and some passing glances at Jeanne Moreau. A few wives on the opposing side (like Hotspur's lady, played by Marina Vlady), whores and seamstresses in the rafters aside, we rely on the random shots of Moreau's face for beauty--and she is so intoxicating when we do finally see it--her every strand of wild hair brilliantly captured in Edmond Richard's dusky Haxan-ish photography--that her gift for cursing deadbeat cocksman like Pistol and her physical loving nuzzling of the gigantic Falstaff--loom so vivid it's hard not to be touched by it - her face wreathed in spiderweb lines like a cracked painting she seems to pull out some doting delight from deep within his sack-and-gout plagued corpulence. One shudders to think the abysmal state of his 'bait and tackle' after this long and bulbous life --though Shakespeare's bawdy double entendres on STDs, cleanliness of drawers, and full chamber pots--makes sure we do.

For a long time this was the only picture we could find of Chimes at Midnight and it raised a lot of questions as to the age/relationship here, especially since Welles' was in Butterfly bathing Pia Zadora who was having her Bardot-80s / Brooke Shields-70s moment

But great as she is, it's not enough nouvelle vague sizzle, nor is there the kind of violence or psychedelic "Euro" progressive mind-bending that was just getting started. Instead of some kind of Ennio Morricone experimental there's a merry olde score by Francesco Lavagnino, that's far too repetitive and jaunty in its main theme, as if he was so enthralled with Nino Rota's work on La Dolce Vita (1960) he forgot to bring in an actual mood.

MEN MUST FIGHT

On the other hand, there's that battle scene which he scores with wordless female chanting and military drums, so that it becomes an ominous liturgy heralding the giallo eeriness to come in following years. Justly praised in the annals of film history (fitting perfectly between Potemkin's and Duck Soup's) perhaps for the same reasons as weaken the comedic stretches. Freed from the constraints of the spoken word, the sequence is a whirlwind of Eisensteinian movement-based editing: horse's stabbed, clangs of metal on metal, bodies in armor falling, charging lances and waving morning stars, waves of soldiers riding in and archers letting fly, from organized symbolic nationality and cavalry card shuffling to pain and muddy brawl-- as if starting out a Riefenstahl equestrian Olympiad montage and ending a muddy massive post-game on-field soccer riot. With its rapid-fire abstract shots there's almost no gore, just a gradual erosion of imagery--there's not even any judgment or polemic - just a real-time example of how men like to get dirty and deadly. It's also a master class is making a hundred extras seem like thousands, of staging battle without condemnation or celebration but something far nobler-- an in-between recognition of war's necessity for man's esteem, and a sad realizing of mortal frailty.

And naturally, in my cups loved I most that after the field is won Falstaff turns his section of the fray into a massive tailgate by pulling his rotund girth up to a big keg on the field of victory, and pouring out a measure of sherri-sack, chilling around it with a coterie of the unkempt countrymen he pricked earlier. This being clearly a modus operandi for battles he's experienced before, declaring his love of sherri-sack for having such an ability to thicken the blood and he would otherwise be a coward, for it makes the brain "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of fiery, nimble shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue... becomes excellent wit." Adding, that sobriety thins men's blood which is why Hotspur fell, and that "if I had a thousand sons, I would make them foreswear thin potations and addict themselves... to sack!" At that point of course, being drunk and feeling guilty, thou mayest cheer. In Falstaff's sanctioned view, your addiction is a noble endeavor to make any Fagin-esque father proud.

That's the rub in a nutshell: we all wish it could go on forever, but war/the bender must end--a wild free-for-all that's over in a flash, followed by months of recovery and doctor probing. Drinking speeds up time and the hang-over slows it, so eventually--as in The Lost Weekend, the only 'conscious' part of drinking is the pain of withdrawal, as that's the only thing we remember. The rest is a dim blur we can barely visit except in a low-hanging shame. We only have the evidence of the 'good part' left around like cryptic clues -the vacuum cleaner still on roaring by your head on the carpet (which happened to me back in '90), or the stove on, a smoldering cigarette, the TV static or repeating DVD menu, dried blood in your hair, bruises on your leg from you can't remember when, and so on. Sooner or later, the dead must be cleared from the field for the next big show; the booze gone, the wounded too messed up to even call downstairs for delivery.

Me, I could only quietly convulse on the floor, as Sinatra's slightly buzzed-flat reading of the line "She got pinched in the Ass- / tor Bar" from "Yes, Indeedy" kept repeating over and over in my head like a skipped record. That was not fun. I'll never be able to watch High Society again. That is my grievous battle scar.


But old Jack Falstaff, in him have I made roads. Getting past the first chunk is hardest, for it plunges in and doesn't endear us to anyone but Hotspur. Hal and Poins on the other hand start the film laughing with such hearty dubbed relish at Falstaff's cumbersome knavery before we even see him, that we're automatically alienated. Before he even has a chance to stir from his mountainous slumber they're rolling around on the ground, laughing both with him and at him, planning all sorts of teasing jests (including the famed double-robbery) that they--at least-find side-splitting, but leave a bad taste in our mouths (Hal being an example of the rich robbing from the middle class, and thinking he's being a rebel), Falstaff refusing to e're pay his tab, etc. ere he robs a foot further.

1. NOTES:
 Bright Lights -'Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day blackout. .."
1. Corman imported so many of these and one wonders just how much his genius with marketing had to do with the entirety of the art house movement. Sex sells the first ticket and art keeps the word of mouth high. 

At last, the color portion of my promised Hill oeuvre, celebrating the mountain of Hills now available on Blu-ray, framing the golden question of whether Hill "gets" women or just loves them - whatever the difference is, and if a single filmography can answer it. Thanks to great work of the mighty Arrow video, and Scorpion releasing; most everything Hill did is on Blu-ray or at least DVD (see part one of this series, the Hill black and white era). Next to the great JC, he's the premiere Hawksian of the drive-in era. Cherish him.

The following have always been in print and written about quite a bit, largely due (I think) to Quentin Tarantino and Pam Grier, so just a quick pass through of their pros and cons as I have mixed feelings about them.

Made during the Philippine film industry boom (a time when life--that of stunt men, crews, and extras-- was cheap), when Corman's New World youth brigade (Hill, Hellman, etc.) operated down there like a bunch of film school Col. Kurtzes, BIG DOLL HOUSE updates of the Women in Prison genre for a new 'sexually free' generation. Shoring off the 50s gang deb's big hair for straight blonde or afros, changing her switchblades for machetes, and adding erotic nudity, lesbian amor (as opposed to just suggesting it via some lip-smacking bull-dyke guards), horniness, political upheaval, nymphomania, opiate withdrawal, sisterhood, corruption, systemic sadism (The infamous Stanford Experiment was conducted the same year), xenophobia (racism), and existential ennui, using the foreign locale to emphasize the powerless terror any sensible American has being caught in the gears of a corrupt, brutal third-world regime. If that wasn't rough enough for you: Hill stock character actor Sid Haig shows up in a sombrero. Wherever Hill is there, so too the wildman Haig. It is written.


The cast is a veritable All-Stars of New World hottie talent, not only introducing Pam Grier (as the lesbian) but Judy Brown (as the newbie); Pat GIRLFRIENDS Woodell (as the guerrilla); Roberta Collins (as the tough blonde); and Brooke Mills (as the strung-out junkie). They'd all be playing nurses, strippers, thieves, or feminists all through the New World 70s drive-in canon. Here they race cockroaches, fight in the mud, shower, and get it on while the sadistic head guard (Kathryn Loder, left) conducts nightly torture sessions for the pleasure of the mysterious Colonel Mendoza (the kind of character who watches from behind two-way screens --only his cigarette holder and riding crop discernible in silhouette); eventually the girls escape, and all hell breaks loose as they race to join the rebels, machine guns blazing a path through the jungles. Libertad! Wait, what country is this supposed to be again?
Pros: Despite the copious grime and systemic abuse, Hill keeps a nice pro-feminist stance, though the final shot is a downer for sure. Some cathartic violence during the escape; sexy star wattage from a roster of capable talent in their prime; Grier's dynamite song "99 Years."

Cons; The Philippines never look good on film to me -- that vegetation just feels claustrophobically damp, the vegetation waxy and a thin sheen of sweat over everyone and everything, flat gray-white sky outdoor days both hot humid and oppressive even out of doors, with ugly buildings and the ghosts of horrible Japanese soldiers still haunting bullet-ridden ruins, and so forth. Some of the torture is unpalatable (like that 'swirly' trick Hill's so fond of). Still, *** because for what and where it is, it's damned solid.

The Doll House was such a hit that Hill and Grier had to go back to the Philippines and crank out another; this time there's more comedy, more rebels, and a bigger budget (a whole summer camp-style compound is blown up, searing even the celluloid). Now the showers and catfights are outdoors on muddy sloping hills, which is slightly less depressing, and there's even more of a revolutionary angle as Grier's boyfriend is rebel leader Sid Haig, and the plan is to get his lonely rebel troops some girlfriends by liberating the women's work camp. That's all fine, but the real selling point is the the amazingly slender-hipped huge-haired mega-babe Anitra Ford as a free-spirited nymphomaniac named Tory, whose bedding of important political figures has landed her 'on ice' and becomes Grier's sparring/bonding partner.  I dug this the first time I saw it with my socialist rebel Argentine espouse; didn't like it the second, alone and disheveled.


Pros: Grier and Ford are both dynamite with their bad attitudes and skimpy prison attire (Ford may have the best mid-riff in the history of the genre) and Hill is much more about escape, sisterhood, am machine gunning your way to freedom than he is about seeing women tortured (though there's plenty of that too - alas). Grier and Ford are a great team, and--even though he's rocking a misplaced accent--Haig's the man.

Cons: It's a personal thing, but I find the sweaty Filipino foliage claustrophobic. The gay mincing guards (the film's most dated element) are much too flouncy, and there's a wearying amount of suffering and abuse prior to the revolt. Me, I like ten pounds of vengeance to an ounce of provocation, not vice versa. As with the next two films Hill seems to get meaner the second time he covers the same ground (venting subconscious anger at Corman for trying to pigeonhole him?)


Grier rocketed to stardom as the queen of blaxploitation films with this big cult hit-- capably stepping out from her ensemble work in the Philippine prisons and into the big leagues. She's a hardworking nurse out to avenge her smack-addicted 11-year-old sister by waging a one-woman war on Los Angeles' drug/prostitution racket after her cop friend Carter (William Elliott) is beaten up for not being crooked. First step: go undercover as a high-class Jamaican prostitute for King George (Robert Doqui), a super mack-daddy pimp with big-time heroin connections; Grier's white bathing suit is divine, her body bedazzling, her cape delicious (she has a cool cape with her nurse's uniform, too), her hair huge, her accent hilarious. King George as a cape too, and a scepter in addition to the requisite feather in his hat. What's up with capes in this film? Who cares, we love it. But then old King George is being dragged from behind an Oldsmobile by Arab henchman Sid Haig while Coffy swims up further and further up the sleazy heroin dealing/prostitution pipeline looking for Mr. Big. If it all starts to get too grimy and Diane Arbus-style ugly/heroin despairing, Diane's real-life husband, Allan, shows up as a sleazy sheik to put it all in grungy perspective. MASH fans are bound to be pleasantly unnerved by the sight of their beloved shrink Sidney laying back on a bed trying to be sensual while beckoning Coffy unto him saying, "come here, I'm going to hurt you." Booker Bradshaw is Coffy's tall, dark, and handsome politician boyfriend, whose slick-ass roadster is so low he has to step down to get into it. Through it all, Grier keeps her character tough and glamorous like hammered-down nail polish, hard candy shell, warm, sensitive center, even when wielding a sawed-off shotgun.

It's temporarily good to be the 'King'

Cons: The Olive Blu-ray is barebones and in its widescreen HD reveals something not as immediately apparent on VHS, just how cheap the sets on this movie are, something the full screen VHS I used to have obscured. Here we can see the far edges of the cheap plywood walls in mid-warp/decay from the swampy heat of the soundstage lights, every surface has that sad under construction look. The bars and apartments have an airless, sweaty claustrophobia. As for the actors, their wigs appear crooked and misshapen, their make-up runny; it's like a giant basement of Arbusian freaks (or was I just really strung out on cough medicine last time I watched it?); even the outdoor scenes have an existentially oppressed vibe. And just because he's a pimp doesn't really mean King George (above left) deserves to be betrayed and dragged around behind a car like Angelo in WILD BUNCH. Or the fellow stable whores deserve to be all cut up or otherwise abused so Coffy can get her vengeance. She's just slumming but this is how they make their damned living!

The murky Freudian sexuality of dreams sometimes creates a kind of bilateral lurching movement, as if crashing sideways through a row of Natural History Museum dioramas. Each one shallow and dimly imprisoning, static yet evoking the tumultuous prehistoric landscape-- neither indoors nor out, but a strange combination, as if the whole world was now under one roof, yet offering the same limited depth of field of, say, a theater stage or one of those old 3D View Masters. It was the original STAR TREK's great genius to understand this. Their alien planet surfaces never had much depth of field, but in their surreal staginess-- a few foam rocks with a weird tree growing between them, and a strangely colored sky backdrop enhanced with colorful gel spot lighting, and we fell under the influence of its nifty vapors, a bit like sneaking off one of those cool, gloomy Disney log rides that slowly flow past pirates and dinosaurs; it was only when TREK went out of doors, in the desert canyon scrub, that mundane reality seemed to intrude. Those were never as fun--they never tapped into the dreamy sexual current.

This was all brought home to me big time after recently re-watching Universal's original 1936 serial of FLASH GORDON. Instead of masking its poverty with one too many half-assed fist fights and talky stretches, the way so many later serials did, FLASH packs in imaginative cliffhangers, monsters, fights, ray guns, death beams, hypnosis, giant lizards, allies and foes, and most importantly, sex, in every chapter. In its gonzo shoestring madness, this original 13-chapter groundbreaker captures the semantics, lurid subtext, sketchy detail, and tumble-over-itself breathless pacing of pre-adolescent 'ur-sexual' dreams, or especially (as per Freud), a prepubescent male's first erotic pangs - the magnetic jouissance that has no outlet  (the orgone energy and erotic focus is yet to cohere in the genitals, so roams throughout the body, diluted but present everywhere at once, leading to polymorphous perversity). Flash might be aimed at the younger viewer, but it's not aimed at keeping them at the same place, as far as imparting a sense of sexual anticipation that made us 10-13 year-old boys want to sing "Who Knows?" from West Side Story while mooning over girls a few years older than us at the local pool. Just as Zarkov blasts Flash, Dale, and himself to Mongo to save the Earth, the film blasts us off to adulthood at the sight of Jean Rogers' bare midriff heaving, pressed against the throne room wall as the heartily-laughing/leering King Vultan of the Hawkmen advances towards her, as crazed with desire as we are, brains scrambles and entire body alive with rocket fuel jouissance lifting us out of sot-nosed, ice cream truck-chaser phase and into a semi sexually awakened pre-teen, the type for whom just pulling a girl's hair so she chases you around the playground is suddenly no longer enough but we have no earthly idea where else to go from awkward, asking a girl to make out being far more terrifying than being jumped by the local bullies.


Kim Morgan's excellent New Beverly piece on the remake, her startling paise for the color red and the progressive awesomeness of Ornellea Mutti as Aura in the 1980 Sam Hodges' remake inspired me recently to revisit both that film and the earlier original series. Though considered just a post-Star Wars throwback at the time (though really it's Star Wars that's the Flash imitation), it has stood the test of time as a pinnacle in utilizing kinky pulp magazine ur-sexuality (1) in the service of kid-friendly feminism. Capable Aura-- the 'kinky daughter whose 'appetites' are never censured by her amoral hedonistic tyrant father'--makes the film work. 

Alas, the Aura archetype has been all but hounded out of the sci-fi fantasy sphere these last 30 years. Certainly there's no one remotely like her in the Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings cycles, nor Harry Potter --where women are but wallpaper or banal figures of 'goodness' and purity. Even the Marvel universe tends to prefer male super-villains, and though the many female superhero characters are well-sketched in, for the most part - they never occupy Aura's unique 'centrist' position as the engineer of the action, beyond good and evil, motivated by desire for Flash which transcends any concern for her own safety or loyalty to her father. She may be Ming's daughter, but if not for her Flash would be dead after the first episode; Dale is certainly not going to help but Aura risks her own life time and again to keep him by her side and safe, and to pay her back he mustn't kill Ming even if presented with the chance. It's important that neither Dale nor Flash nor Ming nor Aura are ever in possession of their desire, but chase each other around the planet and its various kingdoms, always granting each other a pass due to family blocking - Aura makes sure Flash stays alive, diving into pits and dragon's lairs after him - but has no interest in helping Dale and indeed actively works against her; Flash makes sure Dale is safe from Ming and refuses to the advances of Aura (who is undeterred); Ming tries to kill Flash for cockblocking him; Aura prevents her father's killing him; Ming doesn't want to fire on Flash if daughter Aura in the way; Flash doesn't want to kill Ming because it would hurt Aura, who's helped him escape time and time again, and so forth, round and round the 13 chapters they go. When I see it now it reminds me of similar chains of childhood obsession I was part of, the younger sister of a neighbor following me around while I followed her older sister (my age but more mature) and she in turn the boy chasing her still-older sister, and so on, so as if the oldest cutest girl was the head of a mighty serpent, ending with whatever tyke was loping after the girl loping after me. Here the action is originated with Ming's machinations, then diverted by Aura's desire and courage--a two-headed snake. She's really the most pro-active and ingenious character in the series (Ming can only assign and delegate), while Dale can only adopt a stricken pose and shout Flash's name from the sidelines and Flash can only escape Aura's embrace to go chasing off to her rescue. 

"Because I like you."

This is not say there haven't been female-aimed and centered film myths, but these women are either plucky if regularly endangered heroines recruiting loyal men to guard their honor (ala Mina Harker, Cat Ballou), or--if villains--devouring monsters of narcissism and ice queen bitchiness (Charlize Theron in Snow White and the Huntsman, Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass, Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak, Julianne Moore in Hunger Games, Kate Winslet in Divergent, etc.) If they should, as Aura does, learn a 'better' way, less evolution-based and more sisterhood - then they go 'un-sexed' ala Angelina Jolie in Maleficent or Elsa (Idina Menzel) in Frozen--they don't get to display uninhibited carnality and be powerful, manipulative but ultimately good-hearted. 

Just try to picture Luke's survival if the Emperor was smart enough to send some foxy enemy seductress out to get him? Or the Emperor smacked his lipless gums at the thought of buying the scantily clad Leia from Jabba (who's too fat and abstract to represent any real sexual menace).  That's all they used to do, even back in the 10s! You can hardly say we've grown out of it, quite the opposite. Rather than risk seeming sexist to the blue states or sexy to the red, the current franchises avoid the issue altogether. Women characters with real guts and condoned desire, as in the red queen of Twilight or the nerdy daughter of Vampire Academy get reviled by the fanboys. 

Basically Lucas raided the Flash Gordon serial crayon box and took almost everything except the Aura red. Alone there it now stands, a relic from a bygone era when desire was still allowed to exist in the heart of strong beautiful amoral women who then didn't have to die as a result. But censors needn't get into such hissy hysterics; we viewers--especially as young boys--don't judge Aura for her carnality, far from it. In both versions we judge Flash for being such a prude that he'd deny the desires of a hot babe who just saved his life, more than once, especially in favor of a square helpless Earth woman he met a mere chapter earlier. In the remake, Aura even suffers the bore worm torture (for awhile) rather than rat out the coroner who helped her smuggle Flash to freedom (via the old 'slip the condemned man into a death-like coma' drug), after he tips Ming off to his being still alive by telepathically linking with Dale. Some gratitude. That's what you get for likin' a guy, she might have said, paraphrasing some noir dame who just got kicked in the alley. 

Another 'red queen' - Fah Lo Suee- Fu Manchu's daughter

Aura represents "the Red Queen", the root CinemArchetype, and what's sad about it isn't that she's too adult, too far along on the current of budding sexuality, but that in denying her kind to the boys of today we're keeping them held in a kind of sexual check, the kind that moves from snickering football doofus in junior high to rapey jock in high, and so forth, with never a soul to tell him a sexually active healthy woman need not be crushed like a spider found suddenly under a lifted math book. In Alex Raymond's strip, just as Ming is derived clearly from Fu Manchu, Aura is derived from his insidious, super-sadistic daughter, Fah Lo Suee (most memorably played by Myrna Loy in MGM's shockingly racist 1932 pre-code Mask of Fu Manchu). I'm not sure if author Sax Rohmer himself had a source for her awesome evil,  if she was just a mainstay of kinky "men's adventure" pulp miscegenation fantasies, written perhaps by xenophobic shore-leave sailors too high to figure out how to escape their berth in a Shanghai opium den/brothel. There was the Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates, which always seemed too adult and complicated (she and Terry had a complex relationship), whereas there was a feral purity to Fah Lo Suee or Aura that we could understand. If she had the hots for you, man, that was the best hope you had for staying alive. As kids too terrified of rejection to ever ask a girl to make out, Aura's kind of aggressive no-subtlety seduction was a dream come true and Flash the biggest bonehead in existence. On the other hand, if we were Flash, Ming would still be in charge, and we'd be another of Aura's smitten booty call reserves rather than her main obsession.


One of the reasons I liked Suicide Squad was the Aura archetype's re-emergence in the form of Harley Quinn. You can argue that (as per her origin flashbacks) she was driven mad by a man, the Joker, just as Aura was morally bankrupted by father Ming, so it's all just the patriarchy doing its Trilby sexual subjugation number, but you miss the point- i.e. a display of unrepentant feminine enjoyment outside of the parameters of Earth's antiquated morality is no vice, whatever the road it takes to get there. It's like decrying a straight A student's grades as being the product of abusive, overly strict parenting, i.e. a sign of child abuse, and therefore void as a testament of personal worth.

Dale Arden on the other hand, reacts, purely -- passes out and in some instances runs up to Flash and basically grabs his ray gun arm so Ming can escape; Aura leaps into the gladiator fray - she saves Flash not the other way around. Dale's main contribution to Flash's well-being is to smile like a child seeing a puppy gambol down the hallway towards her, exclaiming "Flash!" And when it should happen he's facing certain doom, she screams "Flash!" Jean Rogers lurches back and forth on the sets like they're rocking falling and twirling from one mark to the other - assuming theatrical poses and keeping them, motionless, as other actors say their lines in a kind of distaff dream theater worthy of Brecht.


Laden as it is with unconscious elemental symbolism--sky (ships) / water (kingdom) / earth (lizards) / fire (dragon)--it's natural that the trappings of childhood trauma and anxiety cohere in the ingeniously frugal art direction, the everyday things a child sees are given nightmare import: Kala the Shark Man's underwater kingdom resembles an ordinary bathroom gone Rarebit Fiend-awry: shower curtains stand in for boudoir walls; water leaks in from behind bolted metal plates as if urgent bladders; windows are laundry machine round. Rather than being thrown into an ocean (and this jibes perfectly with real dreams), Flash is forced into a large indoor swimming pool to fight the shark men (whose fin is just a ridge on their bathing caps) and they come at him like porpoises in the Olympic swimming pool standing in for a Mongo floodgate. This is a universe as imagined by an imaginative but scientifically-limited child, so if you fall off the moon you tumble down to Earth; there's no vacuum or need for space suits; everyone speaks English so there are translator devices, there's no sense of alternate time, no need for food or sleep or bathroom breaks; the ocean is perfectly represented by your bathtub, your washrag scuttles across the bottom of the tub like an octopoid as your plastic army man struggles to escape.

Another dream logic element to the 1936 serial, which always threw me for a pleasant loop, is a weird disembodied male voice that shows up regularly to do all the overdubs (narrating, news broadcasts, and actor voices) through what sounds like a tin microphone from before the age of sound recording. Way afield of the rest of the mix he was clearly added later (by the editor, Saul A. Goodkind [as per imdb]) to fill in common gaps in understanding and dead spots in the action--his attempts to match offscreen character voices are so 'off' as to be surrealistic. Lost in the zone between a commentary track and a regular dubbing, his overdubs work to enhance the otherworldliness, the dreamy disconnect. The highlight is when the bear with the white stripe down its back comes into King Vultan of the Hawkmen's throne room to harass Dale, still in her sex Ming-give dress, her bosom heaving, stomach sucked in with terror - she's a luscious, maddeningly hot vision, especially to a prepubescent boy who hasn't quite made the jump from amoral protean lust to empathic chivalry, making the weird bear so much more disconnected, especially when that disembodied voice comes on, speaking slow and strange saying something like "You don't like me? Maybe you will like my friend, Urso!" Since the voice is heard alongside the bear's close-up, we think, is this the bear talking? Does the voiceover guy even know if he's doing Vultan or the bear? Is it some weird combination? When Vultan opens the door back up so the beast will leave he gives is a playful slap on the hindquarter and the white (yellow) dust making up the stripes flies up, reassuring us the poor creature wasn't actually painted and it will all come off in the pool. Meanwhile all through the bear's arrival and departure, Dale heaves against the wall in a way to drive a boy to a man's distraction and Vultan laughs in a semi-insane impression of heartiness. It really is like a dream has spilled right onto the TV out of a fevered 11 year-old's brain.

"Maybe you will like my friend, Urso."

As for the limits of the effects, we kids (and this I remember from when it was on local TV in reruns) filled in the blanks. We didn't need to see an actual octopoid: we got aquarium stock footage of an octopus intercut with what looked like Flash caught in a nest of rubber hoses at the bottom of a swimming pool, but Crabbe's panicked eyes reminded us of when we felt we were going to drown in swim class, and our imagination filled in the gory details. Though now the footage looks very mismatched and sloppy, his panic (Crabbe was an Olympic swimmer so he knows how to convey fear of drowning) is sharply etched and I remember well my own imagination playing the scene over and over as I slept the morning after catching it on early TV after an all-night block party, my first staying up until dawn moment as a child, so fraught with mythological imprinting. The filmmakers seem to know how to use a bunch of disparate footage to activate a child's imagination so that more is seen than is actually shown.

Sex of course, is one of those things.

I know it's hard to keep this stuff out of the realm of children today, alas, due to youtube. But my generation, and that of the 30s Flash Gordon serial, certainly, could easily spend the first decade-plus of our childhood in complete sexual darkness, so that our sudden urges towards underwear models in the Sears catalogue seemed rapturously unique to us alone, and since they weren't tied to the tedious mechanics of actual sex, they scaled bizarre sadomasochistic heights.


Like dreams, FLASH never 'resolved' or had a distinct climax and denouement; its salient goal, as in dreams, is to keep your attention riveted, unaware you're asleep so you don't get self-conscious and jinx your REM state- i.e. wake up. My local newspaper never got the Flash comic strip; not even sure it was running by then... but certainly we knew, too, that feeling, as long stories in the 'dramatic' strips like Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom and Brenda Starr, inched along, day after day, a few panels at a time, always doubling back to bring new readers up to speed, then stalling out in delirious teasing narrative torture. The Flash strip itself seemed pretty risque (above) from what I gleaned in the comic book history tomes at the school library in high school. It was in those books that I knew and loved Little Nemo in Slumberland via a couple of comic strip history books I'd found in the library, and just as those full page Sunday strips ended with Nemo back in bed, wondering what he's missing in Slumberland now that he's 'back' in the dream of reality, there was the aching feeling, as in our dreams, that our absence was felt. While we were forgetting her, dressing for school, lurching through homeroom, I felt sure my dreamland princess was being ravished by my dreamland monster--Dale was still in the clutches of Urso --but I was powerless to know for sure.


By now you should, being astute, garnered the connection between the cliffhanger's suspense "Tune in next time, same bat channel" or "Next week at this theater!" or tomorrow's paper, and the delirious longing and frustration that comes from being teased, denied orgasm, made out with but strung along, a brother left hangin' - as it were, sometimes for years. This kind of sexual bait and switch is all important for serials for the same reason as it is for dreams - the basic function of the dream being to keep the conscious mind from 'waking up' - as if a movie being made by an internal director who loses his audience the moment the audience realizes he really does need to get up and go to the bathroom or answer the door, that the buzzing isn't spaceships but alarm clocks, so your dream weaver must make the ships sound so much like alarm clocks as to down them out, but not enough in a sense to fool the conscious mind into waking up even earlier than planned.

In this sense too the 'petit mort' of orgasm acts as a 'waking up' - leading to guilt or disgust the way one might have, for example, after eating a big steak and realizing you are now overly full and want the plate taken away asap --three hours later you're still sitting there at the table waiting for the waiter to remove the plate. What was initially so desirable at 8 PM - hhmmm mm hot and juicy is within an hour reduced to a plate of slowly rotting excised fat and grease; the age of the goddess revealed in the sudden guilty chill of post-orgasmic depression, the urge to put one's pants back on and bail tempered by the need to not seem like a douche bag.
As with kids in play, the idea is never to end the game. No one ever walks away from a game of fake war; the last man standing steps on a mine or is shot by a dying man in the bushes and falls dramatically and only then may all the slain arise. In this sense, there's never a need to just kill opposing forces. Flash has a laser beam rifle to hand only to put it down to fight hand to hand with a pack of guards; or a sword to Ming's throat, only to let him bargain his way out, never suspecting he'd go back on his word, over and over - it's a catch and release thing kids understand as that's how you keep the adventure flowing. Once a side wins for good it's all done, the 13 chapters are up. That means one thing, it's time to wake up and go to goddamned school again.

And just as dreams seemed to be largely repurposed imagery from waking 'content,' as if everything you saw or experienced in school, or the mall, or the back yard whiffle ball game, comprised a casting office and scenery storage palette to draw from for the shadowy figure painting your dreams, so Flash repurposed an array of familiar sights and sounds from earlier movies -- particularly from Universal's early horror classics --then in regular local TV rotation as well-- the sets, the Franz Waxman scores and Frankenstein's lighthouse laboratory; a statue from 1932's The Mummy, other weird cutaways to things too expensive-looking to not be integrated with the actors were they made for the serial itself. The many-armed statue with the scantily-clad maidens writhing on it for example, was cut away to again and again in the credits and in the serial but played no part in the evens whatsoever. Still, I dreamt about it- in its dark strangeness it tapped into a vein of dark adult sex I was scared of but drawn towards like a jagged-edged murky magnet pulling me over a cliff.

As a kid this shot (from 1930's Just Imagine), used in the FG credits, seemed the height of erotic maturity- my future birthright giving me the feeling in the pit of my stomach as if going up a very steep roller coaster. It seemed tied in with the weird icons on the Sgt. Pepper cover, which haunted me, too, as a child

This dream logic bears resemblance to the kind of dreams that always seem to end right as they're about to get 'lucky' (4), like an actual dream of someone right on the lip of the puberty chasm. This comes with its own sense of dread, via the symbol for all the choppy surf beyond desire's dilated circumference, marriage.

A kind of Gengis Khan in latter year post-raid repose, Emperor Ming the Merciless (Charles B. Middleton) on the throne, surrounded by brides and daughter, harkens back to a long line of primal father / barbarian kings. We can uncover racist subtext easily but it's never overt so it seems prissy to cast judgment on it for any perceived xenophobia as opposed to a more subliminal Freudian Moses and Monotheism meets a Jungian Hero with a Thousand Faces at the Lacanian brothel of renounced pleasure. Being on Mongo frees Aura and Ming and the other Mongo characters from guilt over lust or attraction --it's part of his cool that Ming doesn't try to scold or censure his daughter's uninhibited carnality, which makes it odd that, though Ming is all-powerful, his lusting after Dale doesn't include ravaging on the spot the way Dale's does with Flash, but instead, even he needs a ceremonial precursor --he's bound to follow the codes of conduct centered around the great god Tao.

Thus, in the code-cum-fairy tale mythos, there's an understanding that once the victimized party says "I do" (or--as in FLASH--when the gong strikes the 13), their freedom is forever destroyed or achieved, depending - but always unchanging and eternal. "Marriage" stands for the entirety of the sexual experience (one is now eternally 'not' a virgin), it also removes its victim from the social sphere / the world of mythic romance (they can't 'come out and play' anymore, as if marriage doubles the parental guard; or if they couldn't before, now they can). If Flash had been a gong too late, he'd lose Dale forever --we take that-- conditioned as we are by fairy tales (Dorothy and the hourglass, for example)--at face value. Marriage is one of the few instances where fallible human choice and time (the racing to stop the aggrieved/hypnotized party from saying 'I do') carries an all-powerful magic, resolute as any edict of nature, standing in for the socially condoned sexual act in the vague mind of a child whose birds and the bees knowledge is (hopefully) as yet relegated as yet to grain-of-salt taken playground gossip pieced together with the vagaries of censored TV shows.


Thus marriage on Mongo however is not to satisfy the church so much as to act as a kind of golf ball place marker for the sexual act itself; the child's evasive parents assure him that all his relentless questions about babies and his own origins will be explained on his wedding day or after; thus a kind of secret society initiation seems imminent; and the ceremonial import of myth and fairy tale (the marriage liberates Cinderella from her wicked stepmother; the Beast from his curse; the Mermaid from the sea, etc) is both liberation from old prison and introduction to new one. You are free from the evil father if you marry for love, or bound to the evil husband if you marry while compelled or hypnotized.

It'll all be over in a minute, Godfrey

As with the three sisters archetype, which includes the three brides of Dracula in the 1931 original, the multiple wives or concubines luxuriating around the throne are a sign of a pre-empathic binary moralism, a disregard for Christian or modern values reflecting a lack of empathy similar to what a child feels before morality 'kicks in' (3); here, love doesn't factor into desire, making it more associated with power and objectification, the hearty laugh and mustache twirl at the heroine's fear, i.e. cocaine rather than ecstasy. There's no 'sin' to the lust felt by both Ming and Aura -there's no missionary to condemn their lascivious gazing. The other wives of Ming for the most part are his loyal agents, holding Dale in place during her hypnotized marriage (above - though maybe they're just happy Ming has shifted focus away from them), which consists of standing there on the old Bride of Frankenstein set, waiting for the gong to strike 13 times - in accordance with the customs and commands of the great god Tao. Flash races through the caverns to stop the ceremony before that 13th gong. It takes a few viewings perhaps to note a small detail. at the anticipation of the last gong, the priest whips out a set of manacles, and holds them up high in front of the old Ra statue from The Mummy - thus mixing kinky bondage and ancient Egypt, but so subliminal we'd just miss it yet pick up the dread idea of marriage to Ming as being sexual slavery.

Luckily Flash barges in right in time to sock the gong-striker. Then again, we knew he would since the main thrust of this minute detail is that there's no time for actual sex in Flash Gordon --no marriage ceremony is completed within the serial (there will be several other attempts with different grooms and brides), so no sex/honeymoon ever happens. That's a relief we can't quite understand. As adults it seems faintly ridiculous that 'marriage' should hold importance to either Ming or Flash - but Ming for all his power is bound to the rules of Mongo; and Flash and Dale are just muttonheaded enough to feel they must abide by even forced or coerced marriage's completed ceremony. That it's stopped at the last minute is the equivalent of saving Dale's virginity, as if that magic 13th gong would magically erase it. The rescue ensures continued survival, in other words, we kids don't lose a playmate to the mysteries of the adult world.

Caught the last half of DUNE on Showtime after a groovy nap and it was good enough I had to watch the first part on demand. I remembered liking its wildly uneven effects and straight-faced self-important trippiness as a college freshman catching it at the Student Union in 1985 but it wasn't 'cool' to show enthusiasm for it. What insecure freshman is strong enough to buck the flow of the masses? But this time 32 years older, unafraid and not fully awake, watching Kyle McLachlan in a sexy ribbed dark black suit riding atop a giant sand worm as the thunder cracked, the sand churned, and finally--like it's been buried under the surface of Arrakis all this time-- an electric guitar from Toto comes cracking through the orchestration like a blazing ray of sun, I knew I was home. Directed by David Lynch, produced by Dino de Laurentiis - a match made in heaven, whether anyone knew it back in the realm before cheap CGI made even unconvincing miniature work forever precious.

Even from the first scene you know you may not understand shit about what's going on, but you've never seen anything like it: a bald sister psychic asked by the emperor to psychically eavesdrop on the thoughts of a navigator (those Metaluna-brained newts in spice). escorted by a flock of austere leprous monks with cracked-egg brains--who file into a wildly psychedelic golden throne room carrying a Grand Central concourse entrance-cum- 30s diner train car betwixt them--then the windows open and the navigator swims out of the murk up against the glass to address the emperor via a translator device that looks like a 20s radio microphone. This, you realize, is not common - this is the kind of thing Bill Burroughs might hallucinate while on yage, watching an old WB movie wherein Spanish ambassadors complain about privatized buccaneers to Queen Elizabeth. In its total otherness i might even be a film actually made on another planet, one where the burnished dusky Art Deco Grand Central concourse oyster bar Illuminati 1939 Worlds' Fair Dali fever dream decor never went out of style, just matured along a separate tributary from th

The guitar of Toto made me think of another pic produced by the great world-builder Dino de Laurentiis, FLASH GORDON (1980), with it's unforgettable rock and roll Queen soundtrack. And then I thought of the 'deliverer' come to a strange new world to free the people in bondage from Von Sydow's or Jose Ferrer's galactic emperor. CONAN too... with its thunderous De Falla permutations. ORCA in reverse, to Ennio Morricone. Dino de Laurentiis did them all. Dino! I feel your guiding hand, and it is holding an electric guitar!

Julie Newmar in the old BATMAN TV show--her lithe playful grace, her tender malevolence with her dopey underlings, the black spangly bodysuit and alluring layer of soft youthful baby fat softness around her easy breezy features, her languorous ease in her own alluring body as she climbed up and dismounted the boxes and thrones in her treasure room cat lair--even as a seven or eight year old I could feel my still-slumbering hormones stir within me like a sleepy behemoth. I loved cats as a result, for they held her magic. Bast, the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, was invoked around playground pentagrams. Was she the boy equivalent of a Pretty pony, or Shaun Cassidy or National Velvet? Our pop culture so often raises us, teaches us as if the fire itself is the old sage with the beard and propensity for myth-telling. We stare, lost, into his magic fire and the opposite sex appears to us first as an animal spirit. Shirtless wolf boys, slinky cat girls. America sits on our bed, fidgets in its after-work tie, and says "this has been a good talk," then runs from the room confident the 'sex talk' has been passably completed. The TV smiles, rolls its eye and returns to regular cat channel.


Alas, Cat Woman fell down a well (see Kitty Kali from Acidemic Mediated). Other ladies took the role, each just fine in their way. None the same; what cat can compare, but genres change, actresses are replaced, boys become old men, graven images are smashed by heretics' hacking hammers, the beat goes on, and cats come back. As Boris says in THE BLACK CAT (1934), "Cats do not die." So can we deny that the crazy old lady with the ton of cats has a holy and unique power?

Lately two film ambled forth and struck my gong in this department. Timeless, strange, evocative, ephemeral, and short. What can we do but cherish them, and never try to put them in little cardboard boxes? You heard me, Ollie, in CAT PEOPLE (1942). That's NOT appropriate.


The story of a strange necklace stolen off of a mummy and the curse that follows it (everyone who handles the piece gets mauled to death by Bast, a mummy cat god), THE CAT CREATURE is solid as far as 70s TV horror movies go--and there were a lot of them. If you were a kid, now you may find you love them, despite their weird shallow depth slow-amble cop show vibe, their general avoidance of anything like sex or gore, low budget and clear reliance on commercial breaks for pacing which makes their video and digital versions seem strangely incomplete, as if 'the good parts' are missing. But for those of us of the right age or adventurous in spirit they provide a kind of comfort food opiate quality. And when done right, as by Curtis Harrington, they're great sources for bits of classic Hollywood, a way to keep fading B-list characters visible, and evoke the bygone classics while following cop show beats and to provide just enough scares and suspense to keep you from changing the channel at the next commercial but not enough to give you a panic attack, rob you of your very-70s faith in humanity, or even bum you out. They trade on ambiguity, which is something that Curtis Harrington, whose NIGHT TIDE revealed him early on as the go-to master of B-list horror poetics for the post-war generation, ably fuses into the dream like proceedings. Harrington is a true fan of the genre, not just his worthy of lionizing for rescuing OLD DARK HOUSE from the edge of the abyss but here, salvaging the gloriously sinister Gale Sondergaard and getting her to really flash her evil smile as she dishes out tarot fortunes (guess what card is drawn for the nosy archaeologist?). He also brings in Keye Luke (hurrah!), John Carradine (of course); lesser-known but strangely familiar B-character actors like Milton Pearson (he played the escaped lunatic in THE HIDDEN HAND) and John Abbott (THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST). As if the pedigree wasn't tony enough, CAT PEOPLE's Kent Smith kicks it off as an appraiser archiving the collection of a recently murdered Egyptologist. Smith is soon murdered himself; the investigating detective Marco (Stuart Whitman) follows the trail of a missing cat amulet and the trail leads to Sondergaard's new age bookstore of Mephistophelean relish and coded lesbian vibery by Sondergaard


Harrington deftly uses that mellow 70s TV rhythm to parcel out the ambiguous details in the intimate relationship that develops between archaeologist named Roger Edmonds (David Heddison) who Marco enlists to help him ID the medallion, and shy cute newcomer 'Rena' (Meredith Baxter), the new hire at Gayle Sondergaard's occult bookstore (jammed with great skulls, Satanic tapestries and assorted items much darker than most - not a drop of New Age healing). Roger and Marco make the scene at the downtown pawn shops and flops in search of the amulet and/or perp Luke. I know this is hard to believe, lieutenant, but the murders seem to have been done by a cat. And then Roger brings up the subject of Bast-- the cat goddess worshipped by human sacrifice making ancient Egyptians--who was then locked away for all eternity because of her blood-drinking and evil.

Suspiria-prfiguring exterior shot

I confess I liked the teaming of Heddison and Whitman, each with a voice deeper than the other's, and manly gravitas long vanished, sadly, from our post-MTV generations. I also found myself drawn to Baxter's shy new store worker --there is a profound sadness to this character that makes her almost like Amy in CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE grown up and out on her own for the first time, history all set to repeat itself.


One of Harrington's great skills is in using the commercial break to muddle the "did they or didn't they" fade-out into an actual supernatural asset. The issue of sex with a cat creature (or mermaid) or having to hold still while being afraid of a small house cat actually kills you, pales in importance next to the emotional involvement, so that one coffee by the shore can evolve into a devotion beyond death through a hazy reincarnation style memory - that feeling of "I feel like we go way way way back" spread along the axis of THE MUMMY and SHE and the endless slog of epochs, all without any clear sense of 'how far' things  have gotten, base-wise. We don't know how far around the bases he got since hooking up with her, and neither-one suspects--does he. Their romance sheathed as it is almost in paternal warmth vs. sexual heat is very 70s--in well-laid LA especially--since once it's had with some regularity, sex becomes just a facet of a relationship, that plus censorship of prime time, it's just a thing that may have happened --as it should be. In this way, these stay fairy tale abstract and perfect for children, who desperately want to have a girlfriend or boyfriend but who neither know about nor want to know nor should have to know about sex yet. Now I sound old, but even the dirtiest of old men are soon washed clean by time's scavenging sponge.

Dig some of Harrington's 'uncanny' extras - the lesbians at the Sorcerer's shop, and the weird old waiter at the hippie-ish restaruant, "Maybelle" at the hotel

What's so haunting is that eventually she turns into a monster being devoured by stray cats, sort of - a scene that was clearly difficult to pull off (a hard day those cats put in - god only knows how their wrangler got them to all attack that poor stunt man) and looks like one of those guys in INVADERS FROM MARS if he fell in the mud and was wearing a big clay cat head (the bandages are all very loose). It's odd as its twice the size of little Meredith and adds a whole extra level of frisson. Roger has been hooking up with this monster? Either way, it's still sad - we feel for this poor creature, trapped in darkness for thousands of lonely years- I would have liked this better if Roger was at least tempted by her offer of immortality, but the cops are closing in by then anyway, and so there's more than a hint of the kiss-off in both VERTIGO and MALTESE FALCON.



Robert Bloch wrote the script; there's a solid Leonard Rosenman score (some meowing violins, pensive percussion, slow sustains and yowling gongs). I even dig the creepy credits with the jagged horror font and the chanting. And at a brisk 75 minutes of so it's over quite promptly, leaving me, at least, wanting more, from the horror movie font to the hand-painted Egyptian 'artifacts' Harrington ensures every frame is a-drip with classic horror fan / 70s childhood manna (it's streaming through Shudder).

Just as CAT CREATURE's low-key success hinges on hazy classic B-movie nostalgia, CURSE's success hinges on the Lewton cinematic language, that low-key visual poetry and gift with extended dialogue-free scenes of young girls making their way through a strange night landscapes, the quiet and sudden rush of trains, zombies, busses or (here) snow tires, the way a strange eerie hush falls over things. What do we remember about I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE? The whistle of the cane stalks in the dry wind. What in LEOPARD MAN? The blood under the door. CAT PEOPLE, the shadows in the pool room, and so on. Each is, in its way, a transient event, ephemeral; the supernatural is always ready to dissolve in the salty brine of rational overhead lighting. Often the story itself is rather inconsequential compared to the marvelous little 'touches' of cinematic observation.

Famously, Lewton was given his lurid titles and had to make films to match and luckily for us he made sure to honor them even while doing his own thing. For CURSE he bucks the RKO brass-mandate of the title to eke out a weird but quietly beguiling fable that moves through THE SECRET GARDEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER-style mytho-poeticism- it's a film with may more women than men, but no shrill gadflies as in THE WOMEN but low-key confident professionals like Nancy Davis in the Lewton-esque SHADOW ON THE WALL. Though it's often avoided in principle by classic horror fans (there's no actual cat people, too many kids), there's much more to this than the casual viewer of the first 10 minutes will suspect. The story is unique among sequels in that is very faithful to its predecessor as far as cast and continuation, rather than repeat the same formula, as RKO no doubt hoped (but Irina's virginity in the previous film made a literal child impossible, so they had to improvise).

Irina dreams in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Kent Smith as Ollie- the amiable square ship builder, whose pawing drove his late wife--the coded lesbian/feline Serbian Irina (Simone Simon) to murder--has remarried Alice (Jane Randolph), the girl who Irina chased into the pool in the first film. We fans of the first film certainly didn't begrudge Ollie  and Alice this belated happiness. Sir Lancelot (the calypso singer from the previous year's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) is there as the housekeeper/cook and they only have one child. Clearly they're affluent in this upscale Sleepy Hollow bucolic idyll --their normal happy life includes bridge games with the neighbors and drinks and songs with the carolers and the compassion is clear in Lewton's and screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen's treatment of their romantic evolution. But Amy, their psychic and inward daughter Amy (Ann Carter), doesn't quite fit Ollie's uber-generic idea of what kids should be. Irina's ghost shows up to help Amy in her loneliness, as a kind of psychic apology (since Ollie's irrational fury towards Amy's flights of imagination are due to Irina's 'madness')-- in other words, Ollie has become Irina's shadow rather than vice versa. In a way he becomes the villain of the piece - he spanks Amy for sayings she has an imaginary friend, which is kind of horrible, punishing her for imagination, since he considers it Irina's imagination that she was a cat. We cheer her running off into the night, utterly abandoned as even her imaginary friend decides to leave her (since she broke the cardinal rule and mentioned her existence to dogmatic Ollie).


We kids could relate, maybe we didn't have a dad who punished us for imagining things, but it felt like that; we related to Amy's desolation the same way we related to Irina's frigidity in CAT PEOPLE. Whether or not she was coded closet queer (the lesbian 'sister' greeting of Elizabeth Russell at the cozy restaurant - though as kids in the 80s that kind of stuff escaped us), her dislike of being touched (pawed, mauled) made her cinematically self-aware. She knew that the only thing keeping her human was the safety of the camera, our gaze, director Jacques Tourneur's simple but elegant daytime shots of her apartment, the restaurant, and the zoo. When darkness comes and the camera is elsewhere or off-- the demons take possession; the animated cats dance in her head. We kids knew this from being brave all day in the sun with our parents around, and then huddling in bed at night, aware of every little sound --without our parents to name and diffuse them, they took on monstrous life. Imagination is--in the land of children and Lewton--not merely some Spielbergian whimsy, but also a place of unfathomable danger and dread. Irina's fear of sex was like our fear of the dark, each tapping a vein of mythic alchemical change of the body; since we don't understand it, sex becomes an important part of a marriage due to its subtextual absence (it's the thing we don't see - at least in older movies).

The Women (reflecting the wartime shortage of men by having a strong mostly female cast where everyone, even Amy, is more or less a mature adult (not a gossipy snipe ala THE WOMEN). As in SHADOW ON THE WALL, the world of children is one where women carry absolute authority. Amy's teacher, Ms. Callahan (Eve March), even corrects Ollie's intolerant behavior; Ollie sends Amy upstairs; Ms. Callahan sends Ollie, but far more maturely.

Either way Amy, the evidence of Ollie finally getting laid, is dreamy and otherworldly- ignoring her friends to chase butterflies (the sort of thing that clearly inspired PAN'S LABYRINTH); mailing her birthday invitations to magic trees and calling Irina (Simone Simon) into being. By day we're treated to an array of exterior shots as Amy goes chasing butterflies and walking past the gloomy old 'haunted house.' Amy's not afraid, an old lady in the window throws her a magic ring wrapped in a kerchief and soon Amy finds herself swept into the drama inside the crumbling Gothic mansion --a kind of GREAT EXPECTATIONS setting with her being swept into a maternal drama between super-creepy Elizabeth Russell (the 'sister' in the first film), whose elderly mom, who an old stage actress (Julia Dean) refuses to recognize as her own. The maternal triangle, the elder lady lavishing affection on young Amy while her older ignored flesh and blood watches in envy, is almost exactly like MARNIE and one is compelled to realize the rarity of it since these are the only two instances (though it shows up on a more sexual note in, say, Von Sternberg's Dietrich films). On the other hand, why is this weird daughter hanging around, taking care of her mom and not, seemingly, having any
sort of a life of her own?



It doesn't matter as it's all seen through the eyes of a child, who's sensitive. Ann Carter is a very unique actress, with something of Veronica Lake's blonde otherworldliness (she even plays Lake's daughter in the last scene of I MARRIED A WITCH). Hers is a heightened cinematic reality, its edges trimmed for B-movie simplification (sketches rather than murals) any fantasy or paranoid hallucination is just as real and vivid as the reality itself - but that doesn't mean it's real any more than its not.  One of the scarier parts of the film is just an old lady telling the tale of the Headless Horseman, but it's the way it's filmed, Dean's commitment to the role, the wide-eyed way she stares into the camera while delivering the oration (and in we hear, through Amy's mind presumably, the thunder of approaching hoofbeats), the nervous fretting of Lancelot who's come to fetch her home, all create a uniquely weird and original mood that won't be duplicated again until the big climax.


Though there's no immanent threat, and it's the afternoon, and Edward (Sir Lancelot) is right there, the mood--one imaginative woman to another--lingers in the mind. Sir Lancelot's discomfort can't compete with that kind of wild imaginative prowess, so fear it (for Lewton fans it's an ironic counterpoint since the last time we saw Lancelot in a Lewton film he was slowly advancing towards Frances Dee in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (below, 2nd down), singing a creepy ballad about the 'trouble' at the plantation, staring into the camera in the same way. Now, a year later, he's shifting with the same unease he generated in Dee (and he's sort of playing the Dee role here, a caregiver to a blonde with far-away eyes).

Don't stare into the camera, lest the camera stare back

Directed with some of Tourneur's visual poetry by Robert Wise, once we leave the daytime shots for the surreal studio snowdrifts and spooky mansion with its rattling shudders and snow tracking into the foyer, the film finally lets go of its central theme of imagination to focus on something like Christian transmutation. We come away wondering if Amy's found a new friend, a babysitter, maybe, or at lest a friendly neighbor, in the form of the formerly murderous Elizabeth Russell and dad comes around at last at which point Irina can safely disappear. THE END flashes in an ominous touch, just as it does in Curtis Harrington's CAT CREATURE, with the feeling the film is still going on, even after the house lights come up but the cats do not die, anymore than darkness.

RELATED:  America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton At Long Last, Lost Lewtons: FALCON AND THE CO-EDS, ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY CinemArchetype 2; The Anima CinemArchetype 15: The Animal Familiar A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou: CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON “What It Takes to Make a Softie”: Breaking Noir Tradition in THE LEOPARD MAN

Corman fans like myself are finding--in golden hindsight and reverence for all things 35mm--that many of Roger Corman's New World produced ALIEN / STAR WARS / JAWS-imitations (the one that launched Joe Dante, James Cameron, and Lewis Teague) have held up and improved with age, and even the 'period-period', the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE wave (BLOODY MAMA, BIG BAD MAMA, LADY IN RED, BOXCAR BERTHA, etc) still pack a wry punch. But we do ourselves, not the man, a disservice by forgetting Corman too wrote the original FAST AND THE FURIOUS, launched the biker subgenre with THE WILD ANGELS and helped craft the parameters of the wacky outlaw race movie with DEATH RACE 2000 and EAT MY DUST.

In the best of them, like TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE, there are sultry glimmers of greatness, and the worst, like SMOKEY BITES THE DUST (1981), there are at least some good crashes. BUT -- remember a few miles back we talked about DEATH RACE 2050 ("the only movie that matters in 2017" - April Wolfe), and talked about how no film could match the original. Well, maybe I missed something - probably not, but there are two movies that explore different aspects of DEATH RACE 2000, a kind of Dougie/Cooper split if you will. Thanks to Shout Factory, whose New World DVD output is one of the great boons to any serious trash collector, we can shuffle back and find out which one has the real juice, if either.

The Paul Bartel-directed 1973 original DEATH RACE hypothesized that in 2000 we'd be living under the thumb of a crazy president (hey!) with a fun old-school (like Roman gladiator) sense of entertainment and population control. In the process all the tenets of 70s life were commented upon: road rage, gas crises, Carter and OPEC; America's big cathartic fuck-you to the next four days of work, Monday Night Football; Detroit demonology, the grease pit grimoire with groovy names like Gran Turino, Corvette, Trans-Am, Mitzy Bishu Gallant, Suzy Bannon the Buick; CB radios (as discussed in the earlier piece on CONVOY)

It's perhaps understandable why one who was a child in that time would return now to the auto wreck bloodsport satire genre as if some rumbling unleaded Rosebud. For our crazy prez, for our crazy country, for the Civil War that turned so cold we grew more Russian the more we tried not to be, and lo! hear the mighty engines roaring for America? Komrade, we need to rev it. Only by blazing fast and furious do we finally not stand stagnant swampish.

Turn the cable on at any given time and there she is, chest deep in sci-fi weirdness: Scarlett Johansson as the KGB experimentally-augmented Black Widow in THE AVENGERS and related Marvel-verse franchises, or as a girl who becomes more than human with 100% brain usage in LUCY; or (voice only) as a sexy Siri Mach 2050 in HER, an alien in UNDER THE SKIN, an alienated Tokyo tourist in LOST IN TRANSLATION, an alienated high-school graduate in GHOST WORLD, and on an on she goes, her wry half-smile and husky voice transforming any ludicrous enterprise into something earthy and tangible while still being never quite of this world. Born in the Bronx, and inheritor to all the tough chick rasp that implies, Johansson's ever ready to use seduction or a mixture of the kind of martial arts (Muay Thai, Kali, etc) that involves swinging around people's necks like an ice ballet starlet, she has a great across the thug-filled room saunter, shoulders low and hunched for a sneak attack, and way with sussing potential trouble out of the corner of her eye without breaking stride or cool. ScarJo seems always a notch above her material, yet at the same time she doesn't step on it as she climbs, and gingerly she brings it along behind her. No easy feat, to redeem and solidify shaky CGI realities (considering how much of that stuff is done in green screen). It's OK too if she can't quite pull off some of the more encompassing moments of grandeur, for she has the brains to underplay rather than ham it up to make up the difference. In this way she has the same fundamental cool savvy we find in, say, 80s action stars like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If she lacks their self-deprecating doofus undercarriage, she at least doesn't wink at the audience or start doing funky dances like Cameron Diaz. That shit doesn't age well, but Scarlett's built to last.

GHOST IN THE SHELL

I'd heard the 'white-washing' accusations (1) before going to (open the Netflix envelope of) Ghost in the Shell but that only helped lower my expectations, which were low to begin with, for it seemed like Aeon Flux meets Ultraviolet x Resident Evil all over again. Maybe that helped in ways I can't foresee, or I'm racist, but I actually think Ghost in the Shell is actually a goddamn great film. For one thing, it's so rich in ambient futuristic detail --from the ingeniously animatronic reptilian geisha girl assassins to the visualized 3-D streams of bit data (they're so cool they make the green columns in The Matrix seem like the dos prompts in War Games --insert snorty nerd laugh)--that all its generic cop vs. corporate corruption clunkiness is forgivable (and certainly no more perfunctory than that in Ghost's most obvious template, Blade Runner).

In a role originally conveyed via an anime pixie, Johansson plays "The Major," an advanced cybernetic cop chick chassis (the shell) housing a Japanese girl's ghost. The point woman fronting an elite group of cops who investigate AI-related crimes, she regularly gets told not to rush into danger by her concerned chief (Takeshi Kitano!), which is almost as tired as M. Emmett Walsh tossing back whiskey and cigars while talking about "beauty and the beast - she's both." As in Blade, some advanced robotics engineers are the target of a splinter group of amok replicants, or something - (shades of Shelley!). Their next target seems to be Major's own creator, Juliette Binoche (which is funny if you've seem Clouds of Sils Maria).

The killer, named Kuze, turns out to be an evil mastermind earlier version of the Major herself, basically a kind of cyberterrorist robot-human melding 'early edition,' played by another gaijin, Michael Pitt. A marvelously intricate character, Kuze seems to be constantly reconstituting himself from surrounding bit rates, only half alive and half virtual at any given time, his tortured voice wracked with auto-tune and static. Once they start talking, comparing notes on their mostly-erased human pasts, Major wakes up to her true human origins, eventually 'going rogue' while the evil robotics CEO turns the bullets their way. Luckily, the cool thing about being a robot, she can get shot to shit and still be ready to dive slow-mo backwards off the parapet and come crashing upside down through a skyscraper window with both automatics Woo-style blazing again by the next beat. The end! Hurray! The future is nothing to fear as long as hangdog toughies like Beat Kitano carry teflon briefcases and can shoot from the hip.
But getting back to the race issue, the casting of Johansson and Pitt as -SPOILERS! formerly Japanese eco-terrorist lovers living in the contaminated zone, interestingly presumes if any Japanese person could create their own ideal robot shell, they wouldn't look Japanese, or at any rate even if the ghost/soul was Japanese, the white (French) engineer would give her shell a white face, and she'd automatically speak English (the universal corporate language) rather than Japanese. This strange but conceivable decision (in the future, colonial history still works its racist mess) reaches a peak subtextual moment in the one at top, when Kuze and Major, remembering each other from their Japanese teenager past, take off each other's facial covers, revealing the circuitry beneath (but not showing the maze of sociopolitical awareness vs. box office second-guessing at work in their mask's lack of epicanthic folds). ENDPOSILERS

In her defense, while Johansson might not be Japanese, but she has experience for the job, including that of being alienated in Tokyo (as 2003's Lost in Translation); having her face dissolve into bits of digital programming in Tokyo (in Luc Besson's Lucy); disappearing altogether and becoming just a SIRI-style AI (in Spike Jonze's Her); or a clone raised for its organs in a Logan's Run style enclosed citadel in The Island). Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee didn't just play Fu Manchu because they were white, they played him because of their resume's laden with successfully conveyed evil megalomaniacs. In the same way, ScarJo has a resume of successfully conveyed artificial intelligences, test tube babies, amnesiacs, assassins, and substantial fight training that keeps the obligatory hair in the face stunt doubling to a minimum. She's appeared around the world, she's gone global. She puts in the flyer miles. She's sanded her psyche down for mass appeal, ready to be on the cover of everything from Italian Vogue to Japanese iPhone keypad ads for fragrances based on the novelization of the German manga.

I don't know why I'm sticking up for the casting decision- except that I, like everyone else, needs to prove he's not racist, even if it's only to himself, and the filmmakers clearly went all out to out-imagine both their holy bible Blade Runner and the anime version, combining multiple viewings worth of layered space and evocatively wrought Black Mirror future shockiness, and I'd hate for all that to be lost like tears in rain just because they were scared Maggie Q. wasn't a household name. The level of artistry and detail on display is jaw-dropping, and for once it actually serves a narrative purpose. We're clued into not only the world of the future but the foreign/alien way that future will be perceived. I can hardly wait until it too is on FX or FXX and comes punctuated with commercials for the next word in high-definition television.

As an anime all the cyberpunk detail tended to get lost in the overwhelming rush of negative and positive space (ink can't be layered the way blacks shadows in HD can) and--let's face it--the internet was just getting rolling back then, a lot of all that future stuff was still just on the page of Dick and Gibson novels, 'cyberpunk' fiction. The anime had a lot of rotoscoping and confusingly conveyed overlap between future, past, reality vs. virtual, and--unless you were an anime devotee familiar with the narrative tics and traits--seemed a kind of over-the-top cartoonish reliance on animation shortcuts rather than segue/linking micro-movement (i.e breathing). That over-the-top literalness in this live action version lives on only in the 'tactical' eye adjustments of Batou (he loses his human eyes and opts for two telephoto / infrared lenses that make him look like Little Orphan Annie's jacked uncle). Aside from those eyes, nearly every image is lustrous and best of all, at least semi-subtle and subdued. Since the actual actors and lighting provides some measure of corporeal relativity, the VR super-impositions stand out yet are so fully meshed it at times reminded me of last February when I had the DTs, watching Veronica Lake beckon to me from below the shining tiles of the ER waiting room. The slow-mo glass shattering and frozen water diving splashes were cliche minutes after The Matrix but here they actually fit the post-modern future on display; the differences between ancient past and far-flung future are dissolved almost as a side effect to the collapse of 3-D space and linear time.


The ultimate takeaway is that when the virtual world is as valid and 'real' as this one, (and the Uncanny Valley bridged), one of the side effect developments will be time travel, and the ability to replay our sensory recording of a single event, which can then be slowed down until the whole world stops on a fraction of a nanosecond for all eternity, and those watching/reviewing can wander into the middle of your 3D retinal projection display and see around corners and read the names of files left on the dresser. We see bits and pieces of this future in various Black Mirror episodes, but in this Ghost in the Shell it all fits together in a blast of subdued overwhelming elegance, like an atomic bomb inside an orchid.

There is one way to watch Ghost in the Machine and avoid any residual guilt over this issue, a way to amp up the subtextual resonance until it rings like freedom's bell: watch it with a Japanese dub language track. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo's shell as a Japanese woman trapped in a robot body will likely make all the difference.

If racial equality gets knocked back a peg by ScarJo's presence in this film, beauty parameters takes one step forward: though she's supposed to be the shell of an android, Johansson's body appears as it might an actual trained female fighter, i.e. solid and heavy, way heavier than any svelte anime assassin girl might have. It's not so noticeable she's unattractive, but solid evidence of her fight training that reminds of Cynthia Rothrock in her earlier films and of Gina Carano in her current ones. Like them, when she walks she has kind of a canny back and forth shoulders movement you see only with actually-trained female fighters, like Bruce Lee, a Thai boxer, and an alley cat melding together in one sultry, deeply present, fearless 'insolent' strut.That may not seem like much but it's pretty cool. Johansson is a big enough name she can steer the whole of our future's global beauty parameter to meet her changing silhouette. Her 'Major' is neither gangly pleasure model like Pris or svelte assassin like Aeon Flux, she's got more gravity and its center is lower to the ground.

Johansson's modulated low-key acting (as demonstrated first in Lucy) fits both this fighter stance parameter and the role of a soul who's basically had her identity stripped away; a "brain-washed white and enhanced with micro-processors, recording and playing back memories that can be, as in the Tyrell corporations' most gifted Nexus edition, Rachel (Sean Young) artificially implanted or removed, but unlike in Blade Runner can be 3-D projected and walked through and examined, her digital eyes catching details so pristinely her handlers can read names on files on the desk she once leaned over six weeks ago. When the themes are about identity and cultural meaning in an era where the digital and analog are no longer separate, where humans can be hacked and turned into weapons just by visiting the wrong sight while doing live action interior chip role playing games, her daringly non-perfect form and whitey-white whiteness become a weird assertion of humanity against the machine its in. In her small indirect but incessant way, her A-list clout works to widen the scope of what constitutes 'perfect' in the feminine form. She ain't no anime pixie. She's not even prone to act feminine. She's a real woman, you tricophobic devils!

What makes Ghost in the Shell work for me, too is that, like Blade Runner it keeps its ambitions and goals for narrative and resolution low to better focus on the visuals, and in the ample cracks all that good white-washing subtext can seep in like drainage from some polluted industrial river; in the end Major's cop team backs her up and most of them defeat the hit squads sent out after them by the evil CEO, and all is well again. There's fascinating callbacks, such as a go-nowhere but still interesting scene where she touches the actual flesh(?) of an androgynous, only partially-human 'mixed race' freckled prostitute (above). In a very touching but not quite sexy scene their faces touch close enough the heat is there, but there's no need to go all the way there - instead we have that curiosity with which a human might gaze into an animal's eyes (as in the cliche'd scenes with Batou's stray mutts) or vice versa, each fascinated by the mystery of a separate, never quite-knowable intelligence on the other side; for Major it's the unknowability of what makes us human, metered out with the fascination by this woman's unusual racial composition; for the girl she hires it's money, plus the chance to spend time with an AI, a lifestyle she's clearly enthralled by. For us it's weird since we're watching a human with artificial augmentation through the eyes of an artificial being with human augmentation. Watching Blade Runner now, on the ultimate edition cut, or whatever, I notice dozens of these little moments, the android equivalent of Hamlet looking into the skull sockets of pure Yorick; which is good because there's not much else to grasp, as the narrative is so wonky. But it's those moments, the monster looking for its reflection in the iris pond, that resonate long after the digital bullets and rain machines have sputtered to a stop.
--
As a privileged straight white male of course me sticking up for a movie other people are piggybacking a valid flashpoint off of should be suspect, yet here I am, wading into the self-perceived sludge of demons. If we were all 100% aware of all our subconscious agendas, one way or another, would we ever say or do anything? No, we'd just stand there paralyzed, realizing at last why the veil between unconsciousness and waking is so opaque. Even so, I hear most Japanese citizens think--if those who've read and summarized their tweets can be a reliable consensus--that we're (in the States) overreacting, but we don't have as many creepy life-size robots, either); the head bad guy, and the two center robots and the cop buddy are all white, but even Scarlett's ghost's mother is Japanese. So though this might be the 'flesh-colored crayon' du jour over here, in Japan but don't think of Shell as part of the Japanese cultural identity as they also know the whole genre comes via the novels of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson, the same authors who indirectly or otherwise spawned Blade Runner, their granddaddy bible, a film full of Asian characters and symbolism (albeit played up for culture shock effect).

And then there's the weirdest part of all: stealing the whole movie is Kaori Momoi as her maybe Major's   mom - this last is such a wow of a performance - it's clear English is not her first language but she attacks it with a stunning, raw innocence- as if in forming these strange words she's creating some new kind of polyurethane fiber, even across the divides of language and digital artificial shell recombination, and even race, she recognizes her long lost daughter. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that. Probably not. Either way, the net has spoken, public opinion has crashed the white-washing festival's invisible omnipresence. It's almost done. Maybe we can finally learn who are Asians really anyway, beyond being Asian, or what that even is, and if they can ever be anything but foreign to us, or when cultural admiration and adoption and approximation and co-opting begin and end relative to racism. Or if everyone sees other races this way relative to their own alienation from themselves, or who the hell coded all our damned genetic racist neural programming. I mean, if it wasn't the admiralty, or the reptilians. Or like, whatever. 1982 called, it wants my wanting to go back to it back, but now it's too late even for wanting directions. The days of loading computer games into the TI99 from a phone modem via cassette tape, that's when it was real. A true north to set the magnets by.

Dig the way her shoulders hunch and move with her eyesight like a canny low-center boxer snaking through the crowded disco as the ecstasy kicks in.

In Lucy (2014) there's a great bit where, after spending the first 1/4 of the movie crying and pleading, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking open the package she's carrying sewed inside, a kilo of high end brain boosting Limitless-style super drugs. Peaking on these blue crystals, she ably escapes, kills an array of bad guys, gets shot, goes to the hospital and--while a doctor removes the bullet at gunpoint--she calls her mom to explain she remembers being in her womb and the taste of her milk and how much she loves her Delivered by Johansson in a flat whispery monotone, Lucy's monologue to mom will bring uncomfortable recognition from anyone who's ever had a mind-opening drug trip / manic high and decided to call their mom out of the blue to 'connect' and show off, and explain they've cracked it wide open, broken the code, that they 'get it now' and can see past the limitations of time and space and realize all the interconnected love etc. etc. I know I've had a few of those back in the 80s-90s, and was always grateful for my mom's sense of denial, for I'd never hear about it later and forgot most of what I said/promised. Even if she did look at me kind of funny for a few weeks. Since then, I've had the experience of younger generations doing the same thing to me or in front of me, and I've been privy to how crazy these sorts of phone calls and explanations sound, both pretentious and deluded, egotistical and full of fragility masked in bravado, as if in convincing me of their discovery their discovery becomes real. It's like they try to etch these fleeting feelings into the consciousness of those around them, rather than where they should go- onto paper, magnetic tape, and hard drives- but just sound crazy--it doesn't translate, just like hearing about someone else's dream never has the same dizzy power as our own.

It's perhaps the sadder truth of enlightenment, especially via the poison path that the more brilliantly the ideas cascade inside your mind, the more the tongue can barely keep pace. Ideas as they flow out into brush strokes on canvas, words on the screen, words from the mouth - but try to talk normal to a friend or parent and--unless you really practice the art of doing it as an act in your down time--you don't quite sound like someone who's cracked it wide open and broke on through to the other side, you sound like an amok egotistical maniac, a frothing lack-of-sleep meth-addled grandiose version of James Mason in Bigger than Life and maybe, a little bit, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy would if she didn't wisely underplay to such a dry extent. She can back it up with remote controlling all media, gravity, and telekinesis and shit in ways that make her more than a match for Neo in The Matrix, but she does it all without leather and dark glasses.

For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula)

Ghost World

It was in 2001's Ghost World, Scarlett J. first showed the world a most endearing smirk that set her in a class somewhere off from/ above the hipster anarchy of her self-destructive friend Enid (Thora Birch); Scarlett would look upon Enid with the same kind of bemused indulgence Enid looked upon Steve Buscemi; the kind of halfway grin that can--in the wrong face-can smack of snide dismissal--when hers finally did, turning against Enid and moving in favor of a job and independence, we felt a chill in our guts like mom had just kicked us out of the house. Not that we blamed her, for we'd realized too that Enid's rebellion was a dead end. Sure her options were all soul-sucking drone work, but she needed to knuckle down and do it, to let her soul die just a bit, to reign in her wild mare in basement art, like some John Cheever country husband, instead of being all smarmier than thou straight into the isolated drifter bin. Scarlett J. was right to do dump her. Enid's world view and attitude is in the end, not self-sustaining. There's nowhere to go, and that--I think--was the film's big flaw, it didn't know how to end itself- to find the right note. It should have zapped the title up to a blast of punk anarchy when the old man gets on the bus that wasn't supposed to come and leaves Enid alone on the bench. Bam! She looks out at camera, Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. A Winner. They probably tried that ending, but test audience asked what happened to Seymour, so the film checks in with Seymour again, letting us know--not that we cared--he's doing just fine, getting professional help, as if we needed that rather than to experience the zero sum game of his arc and Enid's both in that one bus stop moment. The utter pointlessness of rebelling against life outside the beef jerky and numb chucks of prefab American reality while still living within in it, Scarlett mutes it all down and gets excited about a fold-down ironing board in the apartment she's rending with Enid (if Enid gets the money), and that's really the film's one emotional payoff. The terror that flits across Enid's face as she suddenly realizes she truly is alone in the universe.
Scarlett's never really given us that ironing board moment gaze since, thank goodness, and has become instead a global scale avatar of a kind of mirror reverse nerd gaze - reflecting the geeky adoration of the Comic-Con Cos-play Kid back upon itself, with a wry half-smile that says "I know you would run in terror if I came onto you in real life, and I'm not going to, because then when you saw me onscreen again you'd jut get the sting of shame at the memory of when you ran away. I'd rather have you adoring me than upset by my advances, but just know I'm not threatened by your wanting me; since I can believably kick your ass, there's nothing to fear from you so I'm not threatened, and if that's a turn-off to your male instincts, watch me bat my eyes and feign vulnerability, but if you're not a chump, don't buy into it." This is the gaze that boys want to see mirrored back at them, for it acknowledges their gaze as something other than toad-like; even as it gently rejects, it flatters; the male gaze is returned without the Medusa stone surcharge. The fanboy's gaze is not judged sexist, misogynist, evil, gross or all the other judgments women make on men who leer way out of their league, nor is it returned with a come-on directness like a prostitute meeting your gaze across an Atlantic City casino bar, the type where you look away in fear instantly, before you consciously even realize what just happened. If your gaze screenwards is met with an insolent stare it's not the same as the gaze thrown back as a gauntlet, like make your move, Sampson- or don't - either way, in the morning you'll still have the same full head of hair.



Gross.. I just read she made out with Colin Jost at the SNL wrap party. Nevermind. She sucks.

Note: This post is not for the weak. It's bleak. It's too real. It goes to dark places. Parental avoidance is advised. There are fun movies about drunks, high-functioning boozers like Nick Charles and WC Fields, which we drunks love whether or not they're sober, and there are movies ABOUT the reality of being a drunk, which we drunks do not, as they hit just too damn close to home. It's not 'fun' to be reminded of just how 'unfun' the end was (if we're sober) or will be (if we're not).  That's why I avoided DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES for so long - it's not fun. Jack Lemmon + director Blake Edwards equals, you'd think, a high-old time, Billy Wilder-ishly named characters like Alana Sheboygan staggering down tenement halls in their sexy linens to get ice and bumping into the sailor from Nantucket, etc., and it's that expectation that makes it so damned uncomfortable. Booze is a complex issue, so essential to higher mammalian social functions, that we get positively genocidal without it. And it IS funny, I don't care what your sponsor says. It just helps to be on the inside of it, where the warm fuzzy deafness i.

Generally even non-drinkers can all be amused and a little envious of the 'high-functioning alcoholic' - some of us have no will power and some of us just have weak systems, addiction is--in the end--a disease brought around by a combination of depression, access to alcohol and genetic predisposition which makes alcohol the ultimate in self-medication. We didn't even know what we were missing until that first drink hit, and the clouds parted, the sun shone for the first time, like Dorothy walking out into Technicolor OZ. How can she go back to sepia Kansas after that? She can't. Once her gratitude fades the mundane grind of her flyover state life kicks back in. Only knocking back some corn liquor from Hickory's still (that funnel on his head in Oz clearly denotes that inside his hollow chest is fermenting sour mash) gets her shoes to at least glow red, the blue to fade into the sky, the trees and fields to turn green. But then, when it wears off in the heat of the next morning's chores, not only is the color gone, but the sepia tint looks muddier, the aspect ratio screwed up, the commercials endless and shrill, the evil Mrs. Gulch's dog-hating machinations that much more demoralizing. You better believe Dorothy would be tumbling back o'the shed to Hickory's still again, asap, soon as Auntie Em's back is turned. A few years pass and Dorothy has to go rehab, but Aunty Em can't afford it. So we all know what happens next. Everything's up to date in Kansas City, including the brothels and AA still only four years old in 1939.

Thanks be to whatever higher power you choose, the Wizard, Auntie Em, or just the Emerald City door knocker, AA is everywhere today and Dorothy would find a whole new kind of half-color Emerald awaiting her in the smells of Kansan church basements and coffee and (formerly) cigarettes,

In fact, during my slow inexorable slide towards the rubber room I've realized every step of my journey is reflected within a series of films that, held end-to-end, just might help me, you, or some sick and suffering, poor bedeviled soul on fire with thirst, figure out just where they're at, why, how, and who they should and shouldn't emulate, how they'll know whether they should try and stop on their own, or if it's just too damn late to worry. So read on, holy drinker. See where you're at, where you've been, and where you're headed and what it's like now as we examine the cinematic alcoholic scale:


John Wayne returns to the town where friend Robert Mitchum is sheriff when he hears he's been on a nonstop bender for a mere six months because of "a girl." Wayne and "Mississippi" (James Caan) concoct a vile mix of purgatives and stomach coaters that act as a kind of organic Antabuse to sober him up - and after a few days and a bath he's as good as new. He's even ready to drink whiskey again by the coda. Oh, to be this guy again, Erich mused as he gleefully loaded it into this DVD player for the zilionth time. Alas, Erich's problem had advanced much farther down this list before he even discovered EL DORADO.

Let's not forget that the main difference between all these drinkers might not be control so much as biology and habit. If you're relatively sober most of your adult life and then something happens like a girl who was "no good" gets off the stage, or you find yourself famous and surrounded by glad-handing moneymen and women into you just because you're known, your first round-the-clock drinking bender might derail you altogether.

On the other hand, most of us only get a few dozen benders before we turn into pickles as the analogy goes. And once you're a pickle, you can't ever be a cucumber again. And from here on in, that pickling starts.



With Mitchum's JT in EL DORADO, alcoholism is treated as 'redeemable' as in he can drink whiskey again once the danger with Ed Asner's hired gunman and has passed we don't get that kind of coda for Dean Martin. But JT's bender was six months. Martin's in RIO is a two years bender. Trading on Dino's boozer persona, he's seen as a gunslinger good guy who was Chance's deputy until a no-good woman rode into town on the stage and left him a wreck. We find him, in the opening, creeping into back doors of saloons like a mangy dog, fishing silver dollars out of spittoons to buy enough whiskey to get him safely back into the gutter before the DTs kick in.

Note that while his sobering follows a similar arc to JT's (with a bath scene played for laughs that shows a vulnerable mix of catharsis and rejuvenation and that "he has a lot of friends"), Dude's is played much straighter and direct. He's not the main character so checking in with his fidgeting and sweating in the Presidio heat is like watching a man slowly come apart at the seams.

Though played for laughs, there's a very real pain in Marvin's eyes that lets you know just how bad of a shape he's in. The similarity in dress to Martin in RIO BRAVO says it all. If there hadn't been a Joe Burdett issue to sober him up for (or who knows, a few weeks after the credits run), Dude might have gone back on the bottle, gone a-roaming and hiring his gun and contributing to his own legend until... there you go. Let's face it, Marvin won the Oscar for CAT cuzza one scene, and it might be the best illustration of the joys and perils of alcoholic benders ever in any movie, comedy or drama. I mean the bit that ends with that line by Cat's father, "I never seen a man run through a day so fast." Shelleen arrives at the ranch a hungover bleary mess, but sensing an easy mark hits up the old man for some fire water eyeing the targets he set up to demonstrate his aim on, and the old guy realizes it, "you'd like a drink more than a kick in the head," wouldn't ya? A huge swig later and he's filling them with confidence as he fires perfectly, seems to inhabit a cool sober bravado facade (almost like he's back at level one, the Nick Charles charmer) and then finishes the pint, throws it into the air to fire at it, but misses and by the time it lands, he's a wreck again. This is about right for this dangerous level - the one right before the point of no return. And Marvin, a lifelong drinker and no stranger to black-outs and bad choices (including falling victim to clinging enabling women), nails it perfectly.

It's that time of year, a curated list of bizarro cage-free horror films casual classic horror fans may not know of, by me, Erich - and where to find them (they're all currently streaming free on Amazon Prime... for now). Sure it might be harder to get on your Fire stick or Apple TV or whatever, but if you love horror, the classic kind, ya gotta git Prime, man. While Netflix sheds almost all its older movies Amazon Prime has been, year after year, amassing a giant catalogue of weird old shit fin to make Kim's Video rise from its grave. Sure, come Halloween we'll all be watching STRANGER THINGS 2 on Netflix. But until then... am I right?



If the boxes of strange old crap look even fuller lately, it's because some rerelease outfit called 'Sprockets' has added countless lurid, cheaply made 50s-70s softcore sleaze-o-thons, usually barely an hour long, the type that probably packed onto marquees back in the days before hardcore, when underground filmmakers actually turned a profit sneaking their handheld art into smut. They all suck but in the process can help show why Joe Sarno, John Waters, and Russ Meyer are such comparative genius poets. Check a few out and wonder just how girls ever blinked with all that eyelash mascara back in the day. Then promptly exit that theater and come into mine, choose from this weird curated collection and be assured good times. To get the grindhouse effect (the 'three movies in continual rotation, open 24 hours'  malaise) I suggest slotting out three of these films in advance and then starting the first one in the middle, because--if you're old enough to remember--grindhouse marquees seldom had feature 'start' times. They just played continuously, so you'd walk into the theater in pitch dark, feeling your way to a seat, and never knowing which movie was playing when you came in, until the end (which is why so many horror films of the era end with the title, i.e. "You have been watching SUSPIRIA!"). Not knowing what film you were seeing, or what was happening onscreen, allowed for a sense of anything-can-happen danger that's missing when you know what film it is, and what it's about, and what it's rated, in advance. After one film is done, start the next right away, before you can second guess yourself or read what it's about.

Then, when you finish your third movie of the night, start the first one up from the beginning, and when you get to where you 'came in,' you whisper to your asleep viewing partner (or cat): "this is where we came in" and turn the TV off and sashay away (i.e. pass out). Lo! A longstanding grindhouse tradition!

As always with Prime, the image quality ranges from sublime to fourth generation VHS messed, so I rate both the film and the quality of Amazon's streaming print. Some of these reviews have been posted before on this site, they're presented here re-edited (and with new thoughts) but since some of the films discussed on older posts aren't always still avail. I wanted to regroup those that are, all the better to ensnare you. I'm not being lazy, just obsessive! And lazy!

Looking at this now it's hard to believe just how thoroughly the commercial for Torso--which popped up a few times on local afternoon TV in 1973--scared my six-year old ass. The image of a girl crawling pathetically through the mud in the woods while a figure in a ski mask slowly approached, relentlessly, the girl's legs twisting in the undergrowth like she was grinding up against the mud in pathetic but vaguely aroused fearful abandon, hit a whole other pang of my six year-old psyche, the giddy jouissance of prepubescent sexual desire coupled to spine-chilling fear and dread, ala looking down from the top of a log flume, all capped with a freeze frame of the mask for TORSO! (looking at the spots now on youtube, though, he doesn't have a chainsaw which I distinctly remember). It was probably the dawning of my inner final girl qua feminism, though that seemed like a 'locking the barn door after the horse ran off' kind of approach to my sensitive prepubescent psyche. I should note however that Torso precedes even Halloween by five years, and once I saw it I realized it plays more like a giallo whodunnit with little suspense but lots of implied hacksaw dismembership, suspicious male suspects staring at each other staring, a gang of local Italian morons who seem like they could need someone to spit on their grave soon, beautiful coeds talking in the square and disposable Italian boys zipping around on scooters. Once it gets down to the final girl hiding in a bedroom, Torso gets pretty intense. Tina Aumont (above) is lovely, Suzy Kendall is the blonde with the sprained ankle and there's a hilarious cliff plunge flashback. The Amazon image is lovely and captures the old world Roman architecture divinely. Look at that deep burnished wood stain and deep red above, Aumont's lipstick corresponding to the wall color, her haunted heavy lidded eyes and rich auburn hair, the elephant statue trying vainly to trumpet of impending danger. The music gets schmaltzy and there's some terrible wallpaper and you have to imagine a world where no one is allowed to use their hands to defend themselves against scarf strangulation, or why someone with a huge knife would waste time strangling at all, but I digress. No chainsaws but a thin line between objectification (lots of exposed breasts, lesbian posturing, short skirts) and critique of male patterns of objectification (it must be hard being constantly stared at so openly by hordes of shameless leering men in every small town you go to - as with Monica V. in L'Aventura, Italian males all gather in the street and stare openly, hostilely, as if any minute a gang rape might break out --in the light of Harvey Weinstein, this shit's got a whole new level of repugnancy about it.

The age of the Woman has begun and there's no going back. Have they ever? The big Halloween costume pick of 2017 was a true WONDER, directed by a woman, and the best-reviewed film ever on RT is written and directed by a real LADY, and the coolest retro-feminist counter-intuitive mindbender since swingin' 71 was about a WITCH, and produced-wrote-directed-and costume-designed by a woman. Sure, there's been some newly iconic masterpieces made by men this year, but this list will focus on woman-helmed films and shows that are badass, cuz ladies it may be your year, but better believe I'm a man writing it, yes I AM and I can't help but love you so, as long as you're not waiting for me to follow you deep into dystopian oppression. You heard me, MAIDS! In the meantime, rejoice! I, a SWM, have affirmed your right to shine. Let the alt-right trogs and trolls jeer in frustration from the belly of their mom's basement while they may, there's no stopping you now.

PS - I finally made it to Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" on permanent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Here it was, a mere ten minute walk from my current apartment, and I haven't been... ever. It was a moving, spiritual experience, and clearly the right year for it, as the above rant makes clear. If you're in town, go, man, go... Kali gets a plate. Emily Dickinson gets a plate. Virginia Woolf gets a plate. Tons of rad bitches getting a plate!




Neither shying away from the romantic faux pas nor the cool little moments of triumph that come with growing up artsy but confident, here's a Catholic school girl movie that avoids all the tired (albeit necessary) sexual endangerment/obsession we get with all the 'women's coming-of-age' stories (the ones written by dudes). Gerwig allows us clearly autobiographical triumphant sing-outs like the take down of the visiting anti-abortion rally speaker, the brilliant and ridiculous aspects of an after-school drama club, the disillusionment and joy of teen sex. As someone who went to public school and lost my virginity at 17 to a drama club Catholic chorine who insisted on using both a condom and vaginal foam from Planned Parenthood but who is now an anti-abortion zealot, I can vouch that this is right up there with Superstar and at any rate way better than Little Sister or one of those things that seems cobbled together from contemporary lit adult education workshops more than actual life. This feels real, and tells the story, not of some 'average' girl buffeted by the winds of change in her rocky search for the right guy to surrender her freedom to, but of a specific strong-willed young woman, not quite as mature as she acts but totally free of anything resembling a cliche'd trait, a girl for whom the most important thing is not any one boy, but her own dream of going to New York to college instead of one of her local (state-subsidized) California options, despite her domineering-but-loving mother's protests. Lovingly filmed and acted, especially by star Saoirse Ronan, with brilliant vignettes and tiny moments zipping by too fast to stop and praise in any single viewing, its keenly observed connections between family members feels both well rehearsed and totally spontaneous, lived-in, and there's some dynamite sweaters and autumnal colors. It's an amazing achievement that fulfills the halo of stoner grace I saw over Great Gerwig as far back as 2009's Baghead, where she was unfortunately burdened by her inescapable mumblecore cronies, the various Duplasses, Partridges and Swanbergs, and later the self-indulgent and myopic (lately) Noah Baumbach (much as I love Bird I can't stand five minutes of his Gerwig-starred Frances Ha). Sure, Baumbach's ghost influence is to be felt here, but this is Gerwig's Live through This, her Exile in Guyville. It's the writing on the wall outside the gates of Eden, written in the blood of uncored apples.


There's an ingenious long tracking shot about halfway through this film, that takes one's breath away: the camera trailing after Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) and her escorts as they weave through the empty wastelands of WWI France to the front line trenches, across no-man's land, and into the hail of gunfire from an occupied enemy town. Diana's never really let loose before with all her goddess strength before, but now her anger seems to double, triple her capabilities, flipping over a tank, leaping from roof to roof - we're watching someone whom we can't quite fully understand through her adoring man's haunting blue eyes--and her determination to find Aires, the God of War, who she presumes is presiding over the launch of a German poison gas factory (presided over by a creepy female gas chemist, based on the [maybe] real-life French lesbian chemist who had her formula stolen by Fraulein Doktor). The look, time, and feel indicate that perhaps the CGI crew were borrowing steampunk hard drives from Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows and Captain America the First Avenger, both of whom had--lest we forget--badass women in them, but this is a whole other thing, but it's worth noting that this is directed by a woman, and while Gadot is gorgeous all get-out, her intelligence and ferocity come first. She's a goddess, and doesn't take orders from Steve (Chris Pine), It's more like he just trails after her, the setting for her lustrous diamond and that this bothers neither Rogers the character or Pine the actor. We're so used to seeing the old devil sexism come creeping back in the subtext or in the performance (we know from The Mummy how passive-aggressive Tom Cruise would be in that role). As Pine proved in last year's Hell or High Water, he's a superb actor who knows how to support other actors' big moments rather than hog them all himself and here Gadot blazes luminous and uncensored. Hopefully, Hollywood will take notice the right way, making more female-directed, starred (and ideally written) superhero movies, and not take the wrong note, and do a Wonder Man.

It's a few years old but never released widely here, and so 2017 is its real debut, the year its Criterion Blu-ray released, showing it to everyday America for the first time, and what a gem it is, mostly. With a great look, an elaborately realized nightclub full of green and blue lighting, wove through with tracking shots dazzling enough to evoke Magnolia, Polish provac-auteur Agnieszka Smocynska delivers a knockout feature film debut. In fact, I was going to put it at #1 except for the bummer ending, which--though true to the myth on which its based (a variation of the same source material that gave us The Little Mermaid) leaves a bad feeling in the air. Considering the more progressive resolutions of Frozen and the under-appreciated Maleficent, it feels needlessly punitive, like Stalin kettubg the Warsaw uprising partisans get slaughtered near the end of WW2. Either way, it's got some great songs and a special shout out to Aqua-Man, in an early film appearance!


An endearingly-awkward mix of stiff period finery, natural/candle light photography,  wildly disparate performance styles, lack of effective musical score (oh for some eerie drones ala There will be Blood), and sloppy editing, Sofia Coppola's Beguiled is reminiscent of late 60s-70s period pieces by Francois Truffaut, where the costumes never quite seem fitted or natural - more like a dress-up masquerade shot off the cuff with no sense of art direction or framing. But hey that's all OK, Coppola has always conjured feelings of being stuck in the 60s nouvelle vague in her Merchant-Ivory-Hal Ashby hybrid style, coaxing a female-perspective novel adaptation from the raw materials of the boy's club around her, not well but wisely. Luckily, here, adapting the source novel more than the Eastwood-Siegel original film, it has what Smoczynska's Lure lacks, a strongly pro-feminist Dogville-style ending, rather than some dumb 'throw your sisterhood under the bus for patriarchally-manipulated love' sacrifice of the sort censors would have demanded in the 50s, or some 'maybe next season' promise of blood-soaked Atwoodian vengeance - it delivers the knockout blow in high time. At 90 minutes, it doesn't linger much longer than the average Corman horror movie. The moral, like some bizarro mirror to Picnic at Hanging Rock: love and sex may soothe the savage beast, but he's still plated on the ladies' table before he gets a second chance to roar. 

The title is the only bad part of this wild midnight road odyssey of amok feminine carnality, this explores a terrain similar to Scorsese's After Hours or Demme with Something Wild but with far darker streaks of high-octane black humor, as passive but handsome Chip (Mathew Gray Gubler) is roped by crazy hottie girlfriend into robbing one of her clients (of $68,000) and going on the lam. It's never that easy of course and soon Chip's on the run with a different girl, his first in hot pursuit, and it just gets darker and more darkly hilarious from there. I can't reveal any of the strangeness in advance as it's better to just roll with its crazy punches. Full of great vividly etched sex-hungry madwomen - it's got the fuel of a dozen Faster Pussycat Kill Kill viewings in its system, (another Kill at the end of the title might have helped with the weak title and poster art) and evokes Tarantino when he still had dark 90s edges. Haaga got his start writing stuff like Citizen Toxie so you know he knows how to deliver thrills far outside the morality-taste spectrum that so ensnares his fellows and despite its darkness this has a fun summery feel (it's shot on 35mm or has a great cinematographer, or both) and great work by AnnaLynne McCord as the psychotic hottie Liza and Sheila Vand (the lead in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) as the psychotic goth Monica, and Alisha Boe as the sweet but equally psychotic Violet.


Too often these days 'flash mob opinion' seems to so warp the actual film we can no longer see said film as itself, it's tainted. Hopefully not forever. In this case it's the damning label of whitewashing in the casting of Scarlett Johansson as Major, a character who started life as a Japanese anime. Too bad the admittedly-valid cause picked this one to make a stand in, as it's the most underrated and appreciated film of the year, and way shorter than Blade Runner 2050. To avoid any residual guilt over this issue while watching, see it on a Blu-ray with a Japanese dub language track and English subtitles. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo's shell will likely make all the difference, and fit the thematic subtextuality with a poetic eloquence unnoticed otherwise. At any rate, it shouldn't be such a pariah for doing what every other mainstream Hollywood film has ever done, cuz it's fuckin' amazing. (full)



The fusion of Christopher Nolan's three-tier approach (sky - three Spitfire Hurricanes shooting down the Luftwaffe), the boys trying to get back to Britain, and the captain of the small boat on his way to pick up some lads while Hans Zimmer's propulsive minimalist drum and eerie industrial drone score is like one long slow build up to mounting dread that compiles disaster upon disaster. Zimmer's score especially makes the movie cohesive, foregoing all the usual pitfalls (one shudders to think the pompous, anthemic drivel John Williams would have brought), going for a thumping relentless heartbeat industrial drones that seem to fuse with the rivets of the boat hulls and the terrible thuds of bombs and torpedoes. In a weirdly elliptical time unit around a single day-night period - the momentum is relentless tick-tocking forward with wild sights and sounds -- the thickening metallic thud of bullets and torpedoes against steel hulls, camera bobbing in the flaming oil-slicked waves while troopers swim desperately towards one torpedoed ship only to find it's already capsized from an arial bomb before they're all the way there. Nolan's eye for putting us deep in the thick of the action makes it a triumphant love for big rippling sound you can feel in your belly and above all the idea that--even in the throngs of desperate men, in hundreds of thousands of evacuees--the beach still dwarfs them all, the way flying the channel in a Sptifire is just like fishing in a vast blue mostly empty ocean, with all the few other fish shooting guns at you, and every encounter likely to be either your or someone else's very last, and the way life-or-death choices have to be made in the moment- a pilot dooming himself to capture by choosing to run out of gas on the French side in order to save a barge loaded with British and French wounded, or the way the best and worst in each of us can be brought out, organically, in the same hour, kinetically, right on top of the other--using a stretcher as an excuse to force your way through the crowded dock to get on a red cross ship, sneaking under the dock and crawling onto the hull and in on a lower level when that plan doesn't work, and then the ship is torpedoed a mile or two out from shore, and back you go, if you're lucky. All set to the tribal but austere, relentless percussion and droned of the score of the year. Nolan edits on the military ratatatat beat so well you wonder what regiment he served in. And of course, you realize something about your own self in wartime, and the way heroes are not made, or born, but shot.


When white writers and filmmakers try to voice the African-American experience we run into one of two thorny morasses at the end of two distinct paths, in the first we jubilantly fantasize--seeing being black as a kind of freedom and increase in soul power, cool, confidence, and badass gravitas (ala Tarantino) and get called racist; in the other we solemnly celebrate some idealized portrait of the noble, spiritual blackness triumphing over racism and sashaying forth into a sunnier tomorrow (ala Stanley Kramer) and get called boring (but maybe win Oscars) - in each we're objectifying and simplifying in ways that make us feel freer or self-congratulatory, positing our own sense of superiority in each instance in ways we're mostly blind to. In Get Out, Jordan Peele shows us how liberal whites look to a black eye when trying either of these strategies.  You can feel this movie coming together years ago during some similar weekends spent meeting his Italian-American girlfriend's parents for the first time, and dealing with a kind of smiling reverse-racism, where his blackness is as a flag no liberal can allow to pass unsaluted while at the same time leading to undoubted tension. So it's keenly observed, and relatively new territory, for in Get Out the trans-racial identification erupts as a side effect, not as a direct focus. This is how it should be, after all, for lasting change to take place. The conceivably objectionable idea of garden variety racism (i.e. a black man is sleeping with your hot young white daughters, doesn't that bother you?) is hardly broached at all here. We begin the film well past that, and before us loom a whole new set of hurtles. This isn't a movie about the white experience of blackness but a movie about the black experience of the white experience of blackness being experienced by affluent, liberal white people. It's that double meta-shift that makes the difference. Here the lead's blackness is not seen as some abomination or litmus test for white liberal acceptance but something far less obvious. Not unlike Ray Milland grafted to Rosie Grier in The Thing with Two Heads, the overall message is that we can't ever possibly separate, we're merged and the only way to keep our heads on our own bodies is to gang up on terrorists, or North Korea, or in my personal Maryland camping experience from the early 80s, the Goatman.

THE THING WITH 2 HEADS

We see inklings of this in the past, the bristling of the black maid in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner over serving Sidney Poitier, or even the black girlfriend and her uneasy qua antagonistic relationship to the black staff on Ray Milland's swampland estate in Frogs. As with his Comedy Central show, Key and Peele, the insight stems having a white mom and seeing the black-white divide from a perspective that's not quite all the way either one, coupled to a horror fan's familiarity with the way paranoia erupts from small, every day social occurrences and part of what makes the film so enjoyable is the lack of judgment or liberal hand-wringing for either side. With Allison Williams (light years cooler than her character on Girls) rocking what are easily the sexiest bangs since Eleanor Friedberger or Chrissie Hynde and this is first time ever where a TSA agent named Rod (Lil Rel Howery) gets to be the good guy/cavalry --a tougher, more paranoid Arbogast / Dick Hallorann / David Icke combo buddy initially assigned to just dog sit and provide phone call reassurance, he becomes the lifeline of all time, his police car and cryptic announcements about the power of the TSA making us re-evaluate that agency and our perceived indignities going though their airport checkpoints (his citing of mind control paranoid conspiracy theories is so au currant I wondered if Peele's been reading Divinorum Psychonauticus),

This movie saved my life back in January when I was in the midst of a Trump-fueled alcoholic relapse. I came to it in despair, and in my despair it found fuel for a catharsis, and lo, I was reborn in the bloody joy that's always there at the core of our fucked-up nation. No matter if it's the food co-op co-op board protesting the political affiliations of their soy distributor, or the NASCAR beer-necks running up the sails, our great American craft of madness will find some fertile breeze to blow it. And then we'll set in on fire.

Jennings is so good here it makes it all the sadder to realize she'd be dead in just five years, in an accident off the Pacific Coast Highway (at age 30). Here, as Rose, it's her eagerness to betray momma that sets the whole criminal empire off its axis. With a cunning glee that stacks her up with your average primo Russ Meyer vixen, she links up with a mafia-dispatched goodfella "Smith" (John Martino) and his candy-mackin' thug, as a combination hostage, conspirator, and lover. And each side--Anna's and Smith's--start scheming to steal from the stealers when word leaks out about a hijackable load of stolen securities stashed in the back of a cattle truck roaring past in a few days. Anna would rather not rob from the mob, but what else can she do? that money is earmarked for the muscle that would rub her out of business. It all hinges on who knows what and whether their dumb enough to tell Rose. Does she even know? Certainly we don't. This is a movie that plays--like a matriarchal version of The Godfather--all its cards pretty close to the vest. We're dealing with levels of intelligence and subtlety far higher than we're used to in shit like this.

Feminist Side Note: sure, Truck-Stop Women is--on the surface--crassly exploitative (my original post title was "Jennings balls the Jack" or variations, but I toned it down as I got scared of being tarred by what is at the moment a pretty wide-swingin' brush) and there are objectionable montages of uninhibited back-of-the-cab balling and jacking, and leering. But I'd argue that compared to things that do get a pass from a lot of feminists, like Game of Thrones or American Pie, I'd stick up for this movie, and the cult of the Jennings, any day. Don't forget there are as many middle age working gal side characters as buxom hotties here, and the most complex character in the bunch is Annie, a woman of advancing years with bad teeth, fake hair, and a larger than life, uneducated but way street smart savvy that makes her all the more dangerous for knowing how to maximize all the advantages of being labeled a lady. I may sound like I'm justifying old school sexism but as I'll be mansplaining in future (or past) posts, babes like Claudia Jennings, Tiffany Bolling and Pam Grier all showed there's a kind of sexy feminism at work in some of the movies from this era I wouldn't advise you to try and demonize along with the surrounding dirty bathwater, because then even I, your longtime fourth-wave supporter, will turn on you like you've gone rabid. Or I maybe by then I too will have, and we can roam the countryside eating the locals like in I Drink Your Blood.  (End Side Note)


But what makes Truck Stop work so well isn't just the impressively high-stakes in-a-low-way plot but the ingeniously-staged, earthy crowded diner scenes at Annie's truck stop. The joint is humming with interlocking life and there's a great, vivid sense of people coming and going, eating, propositioning, overhearing, coffee refilling, sleeping and scheming, at all hours of the night and early dawn. We feel like we really get a full lay of the land there, that it's really a place, a kind of paradise of vice, where the motel rooms all have secret cameras so Annie can watch her ladies work (including Russ Meyer regular Uschi Dugart) and listen in while they pump the drivers for information on their trailer manifest (i.e. what to hijack later). And what chance to these guys have? Consider Curly (Dennis Filmple above), a lower level Anna employee, trying to hold back information from Rose while ostensibly keeping her under wraps in a motel room. He's going to tell her everything, sure, but did Annie presume that would happen? How many layers deep does this go?

That's the issue - so many of the big trucker movie productions, like Burt Reynold's Smokey and the Bandit or Eastwood's Every Which Way But Loose, presume both the characters depicted and their film's target demographic, are really, really dumb. Everything is so broad and overstated, the idea being the more of an uneducated yokel you are, the fewer things you get to feel superior to, therefore you love any film (or TV show, as evinced so well today) that lets you feel like a relative genius. But the characters here are no idiots. Lester lets them shine with levels of devious Russian doll plotting craftiness worthy of a Corleone.


Speaking of which, the actor playing 'Smith,' John Martino, should be recognizable as one of Clemenza's button men in the first Godfather. He brings far more wit and character than you'd expect, even earning our sympathy in spots, and has some great chemistry with Jennings. Each actor knows just how to play the scene and each other. There's a magical scene in their motel room together in the morning, getting dressed and drinking tumblers of whiskey, and we realize there is maybe no difference between acting smitten for a (criminal) purpose and being smitten for real with a criminal. The actors both convey this complexly cross-hatched devious/ developing love/respect without ever tipping their hands to us or each other. Love and trust and sex come built in with a certain element of performance and possible betrayal and--aside from the thing between Connery's Bond and Luciana Paluzzi's Fiona Volpe in Thunderball--it's hard to remember a post-coitus dressing/drinking/nuzzilng scene so full of commingled warmth and danger, as either side could plunge a knife into the other at any second, even though they just hooked up. It's a true meeting of equals--and you believe he really does dig Rose. Who wouldn't? Jennings, sublime in all these scenes, really lets loose with all teeth and both hands, freely heaping abuse on his gross candy bar-eating trigger man as much as she kittens it up with Smith.



The third great element is the roster of great supporting cast of tough-as-nails women, longtime Anna employees, and their grizzled trucker friends, co-workers and off-on-the-road-again boyfriends, all of whom add a layer of real rootsy Americana sadness that hangs in the wee-wee hours of dawn (reminding me of the opening scenes of Some Came Running. That's not to say it's not Tarantino-by-Russ Meyer-esque grindhouse to its core, especially the scene where Anna pulls Rose out of Smith's pool room, kicking and screaming, throwing Rose over her shoulder like a bag of laundry. From there, an elaborate series of double cross counter-moves goes on, and if you're as left in the dark as I was as to who's got what plan underneath the other plan or why they're all meeting at a ghost town to split up the loot, well, who cares? It's nice to not be six steps ahead of the characters for once. Sure it ends tragically. You forgot it's a matriarchal truck stop hijacking/prostitution ring version of Shakespeare / Mildred Pierce? Crime doesn't pay - but it sure pays well until then.

Recently discovered hiding deep in the Amazon Prime--an interior so vast and tangled one never knows what serpent jewel is coiled below the most innocent flower thumbnail cover: a 1958 TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS starring Boris Karloff as Kurtz. For fan of both the actor and the tale, it's quite a find: Archetypal, potent, pungent, primitive in every definition of the word (picture quality as savage as the setting), acted in a kind of beatnik cafe dream poetry shorthand, following streams far indeed from Conrad's estuary, it nonetheless sings the masculine psyche electric, turning the journey of Marlow upriver to Kurtz into a kind boy's life anti-colonialist/pro-incest version of Alice in Wonderland performed by the residents of some remote mental institution. Some might consider it unwatchable due to terrible image quality and stagy overacting, but for those of us "in the know," one look into Boris Karloff's wild eyes as he dances around shirtless in a jungle leaf crown while a circle of cannibals thump on drums, shake skull rattles, stab goats, and wiggle long feather or vine skirts that look up close in the unshaded video quality like fire (or radar-jamming window), and we know we're home. Add a shirtless wild-eyed Roddy McDowell as Marlow, demanding the whip and being branded with a hot "K", feeding off Karloff's crazy energy, matching his performance art hysteria note for note, like Page and Plant dueling high notes in "Dazed and Confused" coupled to a family trying to be heard on the tarmac of a busy airport. "I celebrate my cruelty!," they shout. "I celebrate my hatred!" Been there, bro. I hereby claim this HEART as wild and true. "I celebrate my lust!"

I celebrate the generosity of Amazon Prime and this great deal they made with some library of long-neglected (unrestored) garbage called 'Sprockets' which supplied this, along with thousands of junky exploitation films from the 50s-70s, many of them too damaged to even be on a Something Weird compilation. I celebrate genius of mixing the potted plant jungle lurid sadism and miscegenation fantasy of Kongo, White Woman, Rain, Tarzan with O'Neill's folk play existentialism (shades of Emperor Jones), undergraduate avant garde theatricality (ala the old Pratt Institutionalized Theater, here) and a Greek-myth analyst-couch bird-swarm beach-boy rending of Tennessee Williams / Hitchcock. I celebrate its Shavian satire, Kafka-esque existentialism, Maugham 'Victorian morality dissolving in the jungle heat'-ism its bounty of expressionist dream poem segues.  This isn't the Congo of Conrad, with its observed landscape and anthropological detail, but an inner Oz for sexually repressed British sailors --no matter how intense things get, the magic coins in Marlow's pocket --like Valerie's earrings, Dorothy's slippers--whisks him home as fast as Thorazine.

Growing up watching Shelly Duvall's Fairy Tale Theater with my parents, studying Jung in college, and finding magic doorways on my own later, have all merged within my psyche and left predisposed me to love something as woebegone as this old Heart. It's similar to the way I love The Love Witch or Valerie and her Week of Wonders, or Lemorra: A child's Tale of the Supernatural. If you love any of those three then you might cotton to this which is like the repressed hammy male version of those fairy tale sagas, only it's more a reflection of going off to college and having your first acid trip and orgiastic sex experience in the same night and feeling like you just opened up from a black and white shell to a prismatic butterfly of awakened transdimensional sanity - only here it's all black and white and scuzzy forever, the basement mythic landscape of the 1933 Paramount live action Alice (see: Reeling and Writhing) rather than the Technicolor Disney.

Subtle, pretty color shit wouldn't translate across the primitive broadcasting signal anyway. Dreams are often in black and white, and of poor quality image-wise, as your third eye antenna can't always get a good picture. I can handle poor quality black and white much better than poor quality color, which tends to be washed out and depressing. In this case the rough signal works: there's an amok charcoal and Everclear madness brought out by the ancient tape artifacts (the grayscale has become... unsound). The weird distortions and deep black outlining give it all a ghostly inked-in appearance as if from some spy camera left in a cavern on the moon crossed with a smudgy charcoal courtroom sketch witnessed by a drunk suffering the DTs being wheeled into the psych ward down the hall, seeing the image trail onto the white walls. The result of it all is neither TV as we know it today nor off Broadway theater nor beatnik theater troupe improv, but a mix of all three as if witnessed by another planet from a signal bounced off the moon. Maybe right now, sixty odd light years away, on some remote alien space station, they're picking up this show (it was broadcast as part of the famed Playhouse 90) as the first sign of life outside their own solar system and they'll be in awe. These alien anthropologists will wonder whether this is some ritualistic indigenous ceremony, a filmed inauguration, live, like an Olympics ceremony, re-enacting of ancient rites, on ancient video equipment, as valuable a relic as cave drawings or Sumerian tablets. That initiation rites from boy to man are such a key part of all indigenous tribe mythologies and so absent from our own, surely says something when dealing with our national crisis of arrested male development. We don't televise wild initiations into the terrors of the unconscious self, but we should. After all, like any other televised event, it's all show.

As in the Off-Off Broadway dream poetry tradition, scenes are connected by childhood nursery rhymes ("Bobby Shafto's / gone to sea"), further making this all seem like a long LSD trip back in the day when it was legal and done on a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by giant potted African fronds and the sound of children playing outside the shrink's window became like tribal chanting reflecting the ebb and flow of one's inner psychosis, the old neuroses dissolving off like a serpent's old skin. Clinging to religion the way some lightweights cling to the ego's old skin, McDowell's repressed and unhinged character becomes a hurricane eye around which scenes revolve in ever tighter loops; each meeting gets weirder, slowly peeling his 'false Buddhist' monk robe skin off. Starting with a ship's hold wherein he's forced to crush a rat in his bare hands (like salty shipmates always be making faux-Buddhists do), through to his returning home alive and reborn to his lady love/sister Maria (Inga Swenson), McDowell's acting is either terrible or brilliant or both, holding the whole thing together with a kind of magical foot-to-the-gas madness as Marlow, reminding me how deft, charismatic and hilarious he was as Tuesday Weld's manager in Lord Love a Duck (there, as here, never stealing a scene but rather using and reflecting the energy of the actors around him, then mirroring it back and raising it again, forming a slow burn duel of ham mania).

Inga Swenson's Nordic alien DNA captured via early TV signal being non-receptive to the alien cover signal (as seen in THEY LIVE)

Indeed in addition to the Conrad text (we do get some of the original dialogue, including "the horror, the horror", there's almost a greatest hits of dissolving theatrical sanity going on. For example, when we first meet Maria, she's running drunk and barefoot through the snow trying to join a throng of passing holiday carolers, conjuring an array of booze and/or loneliness-wracked Tennessee Williams heroines ranging from the Glass Menagerie all the way up to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone ("I have to keep reminding myself you're my brother," she purrs after a long welcome home kiss on Marlow's neck).  Marlow feels compelled to run off and find Kurtz (her dad / his guardian) for guidance before he winds up in bed with his own adopted sister. Before he leaves, Maria gives him some coins for the bus home, and they become his magical talisman, the breadcrumb trail, ruby slipper. It seems rather forced but it does reflect the realization pulsing through the production that this mythic freestyle, not a faithful adaptation of the text, there's a parallel in the psychedelic trip, i.e. Thorazine or--failing that--a Xanax, or--failing that--lots of alcohol or Nyquil. "Pull the string!" The rip cord, the umbilical deep sea diver oxygen line.


The rest of the film is a progression of weird archetypal energies: a 'Before the Law'-esque wife of a disappeared trading company envoy; a blind 'crone' (Cathleen Nesbitt - left) in Queen Victoria /Virgin Mary headdress, signs Marlow up while loudly encouraging him to also join "The Society for the Repression of Savage Custom"; the company doctor (Oscar Homolka - below) measuring his skull against those of previous trading company representatives for comparison (he thinks head size changes after "you go out there to that frenzy, that solitude, that swamp of obscene temptation where there's no policeman, where no voice of a kind neighbor can whisper a public opinion, (ala "don't touch the B in room 237");  pushed through a closet door of the trading post, Marlow winds up in the jungle where a cannibal boy almost bites his finger off, and the weird dark energy begins to really congeal.


Eartha Kitt (left) shows up as Kurtz's silken feline queen. Named her Maria, as are all Kurtz's women so named, reflecting his incestuous obsession (the Elektra complex of the 'gentlemen's agreement' relationship between the three of them) she's ordered to get the coins from him, as if a holy grail relic that frees him from Kurtz's trap.

Of course in this surrealism-on-the sleeve riffing, it's not necessary to glean whether or not there's actual incest or desire between Kurtz and his daughter --this is pure psychosexual dream theater, laying its surrealistic tells far more bluntly than Conrad, there's no time for subtlety. Writer Stewart Stern clearly uses the source text as diving board rather than a podium, he's interested in reaching certain deep Medea / devouring mothers, hoping for coins tossed in by long ago Phoenician sailors, swallowed by the depths of the Kali-tentacled maternal behemoth. It's Conrad the way Coltrane's "Favorite Things" is Rogers and Hammerstein.
As we get closer and closer upriver to Kurtz the mythic resonance gets more and more abstract, the acting hammier, the jungle--blurred and outlined by the primitive video--more and more stage-like. When we finally do get to Karloff's Kurtz, his eyes are wild - sticking through the sludge of the image, fitting perfectly the madness of his character. His features are hideously distorted and blurred, like the final freeze frame of James Caan victorious and subhuman in Rollerball, or a Francis Bacon portrait that's been left out in the rain. The lines between his teeth as defined and black as if he's been brushing with charcoal, eyes bugging, flanked by leopard skin doubling as shotgun holes through copper plates he's a scarier children's book monster than Maurice Sendak could e'er imagine.

And putting other Kurtz's to shame (Welles' radio show version included, Brando of course being the worst), Karloff seizes the chance to really ham it to the rafters and thank god he did, for anything less would have been lost in the splotchy Bacon/rain/Caan smudginess of the distorted video image. As it is, both his and Roddy's eyes really pop out, like mad scientists in the peak of a DOM trip, that bold 13-hour mouth at the froth from which no traveler returns without a jingling secret pocket Xanax ("welcome to Annexia" silver bullet for the Emperor Jones' William Tell routine.

It's worth comparing this adaptation alongside two other mythopoetically dense Stern screenplays: Rebel without a Cause (for Nicholas Ray) and The Last Movie (for Ray's friend Dennis Hopper) there's the fascination with ceremonial rites (Rebel's Chicken Run with its existential fatalism, the planetarium; the straw cameras of the Andeans in Movie) and the terror female nymphomania evokes in the male psyche (Natalie Wood's dad obsession, the weird mom; Julia Adams in Last). Here it's that even deep in the madness of the Congo, the reach of voracious Maria reaches out to both men, via the coins, the portrait medallion Kurtz wears (like a pagan charm -she becomes the yin in the center of all this frantic performance art yang) - he has the bullets! Kurtz and Marlow both driven to flee home to escape her, only to find representatives with her same name (the queen). The lust celebration a reminder that the repression of savage instincts abroad (as in the Puritans, Rev. Davison in Rain) always devolves into sex tourism: "Behold my surrender! Behold my marriage with abomination!" Marlow snaps the whip and Kurtz leads the chant, as the drums pound and the whip snaps, the flames heating the "K" brand and the wiggling feather/taffeta skirts and headdresses all overlap and become one blurry rain of braided white noise; Marlow shirtless on the dais, suddenly swept up in the evil tide, while the natives clatter their homemade percussion instruments and wave their crude knives ala Suddenly Last Summer - the rendering birds of The Birds rending the baby turtle children to Mrs. Brenner's unconscious bidding just as the beach boys render Sebastian in the ruins of the Dionysian sacrificial altar temple high at Violet 'Medea' Venable's (rather than let him enjoy one summer out from under her wing). Kurtz represents the male equivalent of this devouring mother, he's the primal father writ large- mirroring our modern cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones, preferring to wipe out his flock rather than be taken back to civilization.


I should note that as with the source text, there's a rampant racism at work here: all the African natives as savage childlike cannibals, who respect only brute force (the whip). But we should remember that this jungle is in the mind of a repressed virgin who's never been there and so projected his id onto it. Well, isn't that what racism is, you say? True, I retort, but it's even a theme of the play that only by expressing, owning it can we exorcise it. It's in celebrating his evil and his lust that Marlow frees himself from its toxic grip, at least enough to breathe, and to give himself a hug (above), his dilated pupils looking up towards the finally revealed heaven. The last thing that would suit his character is to get all preachy and self-righteously racial activist. What can white authors know of blackness? To try and Stanley Kramer it up would kill the larger-than-life messiness of myth. Myth needs to be neither believable nor logical, true or safe, (nor -as here - even in focus or frame), what it needs to do is resonate below the line of consciousness, become truer than truth can reach, provide a kind of trap door access to the basement of the mind, something to open up the vents and allow for temperature equilibrium. Just as the African tribe surrounding Kurtz use ceremonial masks to reflect their demons rather than hide them, this primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of evil.

That's why it helps in a way that this is so poor and overwrought --the totemic demon mask need not seem real, but almost something to laugh at, a cathartic confession rather than denial, evil the Medusa reflected in the Perseus shield of satire. So let us celebrate our evil and above all celebrate the ability to cherish weird-ass shit like Playhouse 60's Heart of Darkness, celebrate a humanity that could allow this dark plumming of its darkest depths, the bravery in going--as my friends and I used to say--"for distance" rather than polish, decorum and linear clarity. Now our live TV events are tepid musical remakes of movies, as toothless as an old rheumy lion. We won't see the like of rough unhinged dream theater 'interpretations' like this Heart again, outside perhaps of "Le Bad Theater" on SNL reruns (2) and we will continue to suffer for its absence, just as the lack of male initiation trauma (3) it depicts inevitably outs in everything from school shootings, alt-right trolling, and all the other sad last ditch gasps of boys who never found their hideous dark father's compound and so never saw the sad end game of their own dark hypocrisy, or tasted the ecstasy of being shred to bits by a thousand little beaks.

"even the jungle wanted him dead"

It's also on youtube!

Richard Burton's semi-forgotten directorial debut (and swan song), DOCTOR FAUSTUS came out in swingin' 1967 and it's too bad it didn't know there was a whole summer of love going on around it, because, thanks to all its Satanic, illuminati, 'interiority-hallucination' and horror film iconography, it's plenty psychedelic. An adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play, made by Burton to raise funds for his alma mater, the Oxford Dramatic Society (and cast with pretty boys from thar), it's got issues with trying to be respectful Art in its retelling of the classic devil's bargain myth, but like a bunch of twitchy-legged hippy undergrads waiting for class to end, it's got a sensationalist, existential, trippy drug fantasia waiting for it down at the pub. Oh but the trepidation of taking one's first big lysergic weekend step into the Summer of Love. Mods and rockers giving way to Carnaby dandies, Blow-Out winning hearts and minds. Shit was in the wind, troop! And like Roger Corman in the US, Burton the director was realizing how how easily the props from Gothic horror films could carry over as hallucinational markers through the cornfields of the mind.

Though shot in Italy and England using creative crews from both, bringing deep colored gel flavors of Mario Bava and slinky psychedelic and horror scores of the giallo (thanks to Mario Nascimbene), it nonetheless as a very strong AIP Corman Poe flavor, and would make a great double feature with Corman's very California The Trip (from the same year, 1967 - above) and Corman's earlier, yet still highly-psychedelic horror films Masque of the Red Death (1964) and X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963). Which since I've written about all three as part of the justly-celebrated Acid's Greatest series, you know that means Doctor Faustus has things to say about the steep price paid for following the 'poison path' to enlightenment, disregarding the warning label on Medusa's chintzy veil. Be it the black arts or forbidden scientific experimentation in the form of eye drops or pills, the result in the Corman canon--and so here with Burton's Faustus--are approximately the same -power, kaleidoscopic images of painted women writhing in delight, lenses smeared on all sides by vaseline for trippy distortions, time lapse dissolves, crypts, dungeons, caves, cobwebbed skulls, sudden strange juxtapositional overlap dissolves, and copious occult symbolism.

The Trip

In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, comes the terrible price of enlightenment, one way or another. Even in the case of The Trip there are the disclaimer in the beginning and 'cracked glass' ending, both forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage lest the film be seen as green light to a curious nation. In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final - the voyage to Hell being one of eternal DTs, represented by an evil Liz Taylor in green body paint, her hair a bed of snakes, laughing evilly.

"Heyyy, Swamp! Hey Swampyyy!"

It's ironic that--as the star/director and the director's wife/muse and the muse of Faustus in the film, Burton and Taylor--then married and still tabloid gold-are the weakest parts of the film. Like many towering drunk titans of the stage and screen, each could rely on a bag of tricks to mask their various hangover and bloated periods. Burton, especially, as he'd later prove in nearly every role he took, uses tortured booming depth of voice and harrowed stare of beady eye into the ether just past the camera to masking his doleful hangover and likely existential longing for four PM cocktail hour (1).

One particular problem then becomes the mythic-reference-choked language of the text, recited by Burton with great oratory declarations unto heaven that in the end resonate far less cosmically than, for example smaller gestures made in Shrew and Woof. Director Nichols and Zeffirelli, know that true mythic grandeur comes from small gestures not big ones. When Burton shouts or pleads to the heavens in Faustus we're left bored, not enthralled. It's one of the great ironies of poetry and theater - when he's playing a drunken middle aged history professor verbally sparring with his bullying wife, Burton is as large as the cosmos, but when he's playing someone who's supposed to be large as the cosmos, Burton is as small and dusty as a middle-aged history professor. When he kisses her as Helen and talks about her kiss sending his soul flying around the room, it's hard not to roll your eyes and think of that old adage of acting class, "you're telling us instead of showing; you need to make us believe it." He should have used method, and pretended he was saying that to a bottle of Scotch and an ice bucket. We'd be able to feel that passion in our toe tips! At least I know I would.

"the fruits of lunacy"

By contrast, consider how how both Welles in his self-directed Macbeth and Olivier in his self-directed Hamlet (both 1948) give you the impression they love every minute of their character's tortured guilt and suffering. No matter what dour calamity their character wallows in, the actor himself is reveling in the poetry and mythic undertones in small perfect little gestures. Burto is not reveling even in Faustus' moments of revelry. One can't help but wonder if the demands of directing and marriage and paparazzi-ducking--and staying sober long enough to do most of each before the day's shooting stopped-- tanked his energy, and so he let his brown-nosing reverence for 'the classics' undo his natural crazy Wagnerian oomph. The sort of 'mustn't spook the dean of letters' kind of respectfulness takes over. Confident, vibrant auteurs would heedlessly go for a more reckless 'give the dean a heart attack' approach that paradoxically would be more faithful to the material at hand. If you're going to have a respectful staid depiction of a prankster thumbing his nose at staid respectful depictions, then you become the very thing you're against, and that kind of feedback is so exhausting it may takes years of painless deconstructive art history to recover.

Any similarity to packing a massive gravity vape is presumably unintentional

As a result, the play's dense intertextually-lined language unpacks rather flatly, especially since there is --essentially-- so little at stake. This is after all the tale of a very old, seemingly rich unemployed college kid doing tons of drugs up in his study / man cave and getting periodic visits only from his drug dealer or students looking to get high, and getting lost in phantom anima dream imagery when he takes too much, or suffering insane tortures when he takes too little. We never understand why he's so keen to worship Lucifer and denounce god, or sympathize with his bratty deal welshing and second guess antipathy. If you've 'been there' you can relate when his occasional visitors find him on the floor, staring at some unseen phantom, or writhing in the grip of some frothy madness, clothes and brain in a state of disarray, barely aware his friends are here. But as Bill Lee says to his visiting buddies in similar circumstances (Naked Lunch) "the Zone takes care of its own."

Luckily, if Burton the actor is suffering from boozy stress but there's no doubt Burton the director is using that same boozy stress as a subtext for a richly familiar and welcome streak of Gothic horror and illuminati in-jokes, showing he learned some important things from his buddy Tennessee Williams. The popping rich tapestry of colors--lots of dusky deep ochres, blues, purples, cherry reds- glow as if Mario Bava himself were doing the gel lighting, giving many scenes, such as the graveyard a highly evocative atmospheric quality reminiscent of Black Sabbath, or what one might see on an Aurora monster model box or 60s pulp magazine cover. The use of available anachronistic/period sets and costumes evokes various surrealistic historical tableaux (the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Vatican, a king's reception hall, a crypt) as well as the various movies and genres they evoke, creating a sense of stripping away of time's linearity, allowing a stage-like but very psychedelic scene changing (there's similar bits of Gothic horror call-back in Head, and Psych-Out as well as The Trip). Copious occult magic (nice use of made of a haunted mirror), cobwebs, skeletons, candles, alchemical test tubes and conjuring crucibles, volumes of forgotten lore, and astral charts-bedecked torture chamber-cum-Illuminati arcane alchemist sanctuary becomes the home base for Faustus' solitary drug experiments - boldly if callowly going where one might hallucinate yearning naked women inside the flames of a candle or the eye of a skull, the kaleidoscope effects and blurred edges, time laps flowers and occult symbolism, and to see the effects of time and age upon desire's ripe fruit. 


Like its contemporaries in the Elizabethan dream theater era, Faustus gambols freely amidst the arcane iconography of spirits and demons that would previous (or concurrently in Spain) be charge enough for heresy. As it is, thanks to the rise of sane Protestantism, even making fun of the pope is not frowned upon, so long as the knave who dares winds up trapped in the arms of burning hell by drama's close. Thus Burton's Faustus makes fart noises behind the rows of bishops, and pelts the pope with a fancy cake, finally flogging a bunch of empty robes in a moment that seems straight out of Jodorowsky, while the psychedelic college kid experimentation aspect continues with the slow downward slide from seeking truths past the known to just getting lit, and staying drunk enough that you forget the terror that awaits you at the end of this decade-spanning spree - the terror of the cold turkey addict tied to a bed table in a hospital, screaming his guts out like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.

Top: Hopper schools in TRIP; FAUSTUS

In the beginning of Faustus we find Burton as an aging scholar in round owlish glasses and long gray hair -freshly graduated (at his age? Not a strong studier?) advised by one of his druggie friends to "sound the depths of that they would profess."- In other words, don't just say no to drugs, try them first - condemnation prior to experimentation is not wisdom.

Faustus, Valdez Cornelius freakin' over a full decanter of the good shit - shhhh - don't tell Neil

Later, alone in his study, not quite sure which field to expend his academic energies next, Faustus  is soon restless, buffeted by ego and curiosity up against the fences of the known.  "To live and die in Aristotle," seems wise and--to him--oddly sexy, or to study medicine but--as he notes, "the end of physic our body's health." From what new field shall his alchemist's brain next turn? Why to the occult, with his friends Valdez and Cornelius, as sketchy a pair of Satanic drug dealers as one is likely to find, but alas--his closest things to contemporaries. They regale him with tales of all that my be grante a man who summons demons, via footage reflected from mirrors and soon the three trundle off with their summoning gear to the graveyard to raise hanged sinners and summon devils.

But to explore the black arts is blasphemy, Faustus! Turn to the church and repent. This finding parallel in the case of The Trip with all the disclaimers forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage. In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, comes the terrible price of enlightenment, one way or another. (And as anyone 'called' to try these things, even your hardcore hippy friends may warn you off, 'you'll damage your chromosomes, Faustus!") In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final - while in bad trip country it only 'feels' that way and one--if they're smart--knows eventually after timeless aeons of distress, everything will wear off. On some level as many a scholar has noted, the only difference between a schizophrenic and an LSD user is that the latter knows he's just 'visiting' the mystical realms beyond space/time via medication and he's actually safely rooted in linear reality, while the schizophrenic knows he is just 'visiting' reality via medication and is actually in the void, like a phantom signal forever caught between neighboring TV channels.



But it all starts innocent enough when Faustus's friends Valdez (Ram Chopra) and Cornelius (Robert Carawadine) show up at his dorm and the three head to the graveyard like a trio of errant hippie sophomore knaves shrooming behind Sadler in Syracuse University, circa 1986, finding all sorts of universal truths and froth-at-the-mouth delights there (big rolling graveyards being the perfect place in which to trip, both emblematic of the experience you're on as far as death/rebirth awareness, and the way egoic fear keeps the lightweights away). These pleasures, indeed, are the first reward of daring, to buffet manly against the current and enjoy the rarefied air above the superstitious public's boorish din.
No sooner has Faustus found his spot for conjuring though, then he bids his friends depart him so he may work alone. They're never seen again and indeed one wonders about his social skills, for here is a man not cut off from the society around him the way, say, Prospero is in The Tempest, and yet he prefers only the company of his own unconscious projections, vis-a-vis the devil, and his anima, here played by Elizabeth Taylor. Would, in hindsight, those two return, for he played well against their relish in demonic control and would have perhaps ably benefitted from their energy (like the bulk of the cast, they're students and teachers from the Dramatic Society and Burton often flickers to life in their company- too often to turn dour again when sidelined through dark rant that we know in but a second he will deny having said. For he chides Mephistpholis' sadness over his failing soul, urging him to take a lesson from his resolute bravery and "scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." While a dissolve later he's letting a statue of St. Sebastian urge him turn to God, then to let a skull on the desk encourage him back to Lucifer. All he needs is a hard push one way or the other and he not just hesitates but thoroughly changes his mind.


Instead, it's hard to get involved in the plight of a man so wishy-washy and so unmotivated in his flight to Lucifer. He's a dude burning out his brain for pure onanistic thrill-seeking"Magic" and only realizing it's not some dumb heavy metal pastime when it's too late to back down. He assures Valdez and Cornelius he won't back out, he says, "magic enravishes me!" but we're never really sure what his end game is beyond pleasure and sport, to revel in the folly of others. The presence of these two ennablers might have made it clearer (peer pressure) but without them, it's hard to fathom why he sticks to it. Whatever he once thought to know, being known, he'd rather forget fast, so turns to drink - which makes days flow faster especially with a devilish enabler servant at your side to make sure you never wake up without a stiff drink at your bedside.

Drunk writers and artists who sequester themselves for long periods of micro-tripping in service of their art can--with blocking--drift into just the drinking part, as Faustus does here. But as he's not a writer or artist why we should care? Beyond the realization that all pleasure is fleeting and he shouldn't have signed the contract, there's not much he learns. Reveling by proxy too proves a challenge. Whether flatly chanting along with the bell, book-and-candle monks who try to exorcise his spirit or belligerently chanting "he wants his money!" to an aggrieved bartender, we're not amused or thrilled (like we were in Woolf or Shrew) but rather embarrassed by this base schadenfreude and tone deaf infantile prankishness. Here is a man who freely takes more than would befit a man, then tries to weasel out of paying - drinking vainly against the passing of time (his ever-present hourglass) ticking down to his Hell journey. He's a 'bad' drunk!
THOU ART FULL OF HOLLOWNESS:

In his groovy man cave, doth Faustus have the alchemical tools to astral travel the world over and have his heart's desire granted time and again, the only caveat being it brings him no real joy, since there's no strife or earning of the goal, there's none but the shadow of gratification. And as anyone who suffers from depression knows, getting all you want in life might make you more miserable than just wanting, which at least gives you the hope you will be happy once said desire is attained. To attain it and still be unhappy is to be faced with the reality of a no-escape misery, a room without an exit. The gorgeous women you coveted as a geek in high school clamor all over you now that you're in a band, but their affection creeps you out, as it's so counter to what you expected in a girlfriend, this skeevy slutty availability compiling upon you, and the terror of sexual merging with someone who you barely know. For Faustus, his wish for 'a wife' is ridiculed by the devil with an open flower of beautiful women who turn into men or aged crones on contact. This is the Sidpa bardo in Buddhism at play (ala the woman in room 237). Women never stay lovely, and so outside of space/time, beyond the illusion of permanence, sexual allure beckons like a sticky web of flame that evaporates on contact but leaves you just as stuck. Beauty and youth fade faster than the speed of light, leaving us only with withered crones where once were massive babes.

It's in this aspect, the terrors of the DTs, where Burton brings his alcoholic and priapic issues into the subtext: the realization that, when given a chance to be endlessly indulged, the ego flattery resultant from sexual magnetism--being irresistible to women--is an addiction as destructive as alcohol or cocaine and brings with it no joy. And the desire to possess beauty is one of foolish vanity --that not even the most gorgeous of souls possess beauty for long - it's power is in its ephemeral nature. You can argue that movie stars are the exception - Marilyn still looks alluring in Niagara, but imagine you wished you could share a bed with her, and then wake up trapped in her coffin with her rotting corpse for all eternity!


That's what the DTs are like, vs. watching the movie over and over in a state of benumbed boozy grace. You don't get to actually sleep with Marilyn, but isn't watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for a hundred straight times (even with Elliot Reid in it) better than even a single night with the actual Marilyn in her actual current underground boudoir? Movies and distractions then are to the ego what the ego is to the soul, the distraction from the terror of eternity. The lungs, understanding at last their slavery to the body, the awful duty they have, almost collapse from the weary shock. Luckily, the quickly forget again. If they stayed aware, they wouldn't last a single week. No drunk can imagine never drinking again, it's too awful to contemplate. But one day at a time, we can not drink just for
today. Sure, it's a trick to make the abstinence endurable, but is booze's trick any less devious?

Supposedly immortal in itself, a soul is paradoxically threatened when the ephemeral nature of all things is revealed. The space-time order allows the comfort of the ephemeral, allows us to dwell under the protective illusion of permanence. That all things die, that life is rounded with a sleep, wounds heal, flowers wither, traumas are buried in the repressed unconscious, seasons change, nights and days alternate ---these are comforts that deliver us from the terror of continuity. Hell, then, as realized by Marlowe's Faustus, is the waking up from this illusion of impermanence so that the terrifying eternity of existence is revealed and is inescapable. This is trial of the cave crypt hallucination in The Trip, ("I don't want to die, man"), the 'bad trip' every tripper sooner or later must endure, the wave that suck us under for an eternal night, the giant eye at the center of the universe gazing pitilessly through our X-Ray Eyes. This is Hell as inescapable awareness of, as Mephistophilis puts it, "all that isn't heaven", the great flaming void that is left "when all else dissolves."

"The depths of all that thy would profess" i.e. all therein that may be explored

As Faustus will soon learn, the double-edged gift of heaven is the gift of illusion and forgetfulness. It's a mechanism easily frozen into place when we avoid danger for too long. Our way our brain is hard-wired to veil the ever-looming specter of our inevitable death, but to function in its correct aperture (as a veil rather than a window), this veil needs death near enough to cover successfully. If we death moves too far away from our vision, the veil covers everything and anything it can. Soon we can't appreciate life due to this veil creating a thin filmy wall between us and the world. As writers and artists this results in a block and we need to regularly descend to the limits of sanity and traverse beyond, just to feel the appreciation for life's impermanence, for the veil to find something its actually supposed to cover, freeing us to see around its corners at last.

The further paradox is that Hell is a level beyond, the eternity of just the veil, the terror of eternity that makes us long for the illusion of impermanence. When faced with extinction, life at last becomes unbearably precious -- so that each miserable second is clung to like one clutches a piece of floating bed frame in the midst of a tidal flood current. Yet, as he clings, Faust has no love of the life he's led, only fear for what is to come. Not knowing that his fear of eternity is already hell, he indulges full force. These are the types of lightweights you need to avoid when culling a 'set and setting' for your 'voyages' - as they're invariably the ones who can't shake their ego's sticky grip, and foolishly believe all the fear mongering it spreads to keep itself in power. Knowing how to ignore ego's panicky horse-in-the-stall bucking is one of they key skills for successful inter-astral navigation. When God is your co-pilot, you don't need yourself even in the plane.

LAST STASH LOST

Early in their meeting, Faustus asks Mephistophilis where hell is and why he's not there. "Why, this is hell," notes Mephistophilis. "Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?" If you're living as--or have ever lived--as a drug addict or alcoholic, and still think back to your old highs as this magic plateau, knowing you can never return to it, then you might--as I do--resonate with that line and have a special love for Burton's Faustus or if not love, at least unnerved understanding. For to be in the throes of a serious addiction is to know the joys of hell and heaven are as a coin ever flipping, and one may become the other just through the other's absence, and so sooner or later heaven always flips back to hell. Hell is the constant. It's a question of numbers, of days, of time. For every day the horrible shakes/convulsions/DTs of detox are staved off, the worse they will be when they can no longer be staved off.

To wit, compare Mephisto's version of hell ("everywhere that isn't heaven") with the advanced stage alcoholic or addict, whose heaven is absence of Hell (withdrawal), just not being in the agony of hell is heaven. By contrast what delight then, to up the ante, for heaven may become euphoric than just not-hell, with the one caveat that any new plateau of ecstasy may become the new baseline, so that anything less than that same euphoria becomes hell.

The irony of Faustus's deal with the devil--which holds true to for any addict's postponement of withdrawal--is that the decades of decadence he gets back (24 years, as in hours of the day) are all elapsed by the end of the film, they flit by. If there is any enjoying to be had, we don't really get the impression Burton's Faustus has done so, for heaven is in this case not Hell, yet. That's the terrible bargain, the sacrifice of memory: most of a drunk's happy time is either not remembered due to black-outs or slept through. A drunk can tell if he had fun the night or week before only by how messed up his apartment is the next time he wakes up. It could take hours for him to figure out how long he's been asleep, what day it is, or what AM or PM on the clock means. Time is 'missing' in the good parts and slows to eternity in the bad. Sandwiched between black-outs, benders, waking up in strange positions on strange floors, and suffering all the tortures of being departed from on-highness. For a would-be escapee into booze's warm clutches, how unappealing that life suddenly looks from the outside. Burton spares us nothing of the scene's wild guffawing ugliness -yet it's strangely beautiful too, as in the way the walls are painted to resemble both cracks, dirt and trees. Isn't that what it's all about, man, finding the trees in the bar wall filth rather than the other way around?


The converse, for the angel who has known the face of god and lost sight of it, mere absence of heaven is hell - which is far worse. This is more an ecstasy equation. Common among ecstasy users, myself included back in the 90s-- is to have an early peak experience the first or second time - with everything perfect and a sense of oneness, love and belonging so complete that it lasts for a whole weekend and when it leaves, the following Tuesday at work, suddenly, inescapably, suicidally depressed, maybe for weeks. The only thing that keeps us going is the idea that the following weekend, we'll just repeat all the same steps with the same friends, and get that magic back. Vainly, inevitably, we struggle to recapture it by doing more ecstasy, behaving sluttier, dancing harder, but that just makes the absence of that 'first night' bliss all the worse. For this branch of the psychedelic damned, the Hell of heaven's absence takes years to recover from, not weeks or days. No amount of rehab or reformation will do it. One must, simply, forget, and stay away from the music that you listened to at the time, lest it remind you, and send you crashing yet again for memory of what heaven is, when it's real.

"Sweet pleasure conquers deep despair," counsels the demonic voices that guide Faustus towards his decades on a spree. Ah but the fine print, Faustus: the longer thy just measure of despair stays conquered by sweet pleasure, the deeper the accrual of its depth, the compounding interest on the loan against future joy, and the weaker the sweetness.

The Adulation of Future Masses:

Sooner or later if we keep drinking, we die; sooner or later if we keep writing we live forever. The caveat: we're not there to enjoy whatever benefits that immortality may bring. We make a deal with the fates -we get to keep our souls by agreeing to labor in obscurity now, for the promise that 20 years after our death we'll be revered as geniuses. We won't feel the lionizing because we'll be dead, but the idea it's coming is enough to keep us working. Lost in the process of creation, our whole life flits by in a painless brush.

Drinking on the other hand, brings us the adulation of the future masses in advance - hence it's a kind of reverse direction time line of reward from writing, tapping into an ego gratification time machine. Whatever Akashic record crystal teraflop transfiguring time/space device they're accessing to read your work in the future and send payment of their love back through the past, it's as tactile and sweet in our third eye's ear as god's own indulgent applause.

One thinks too of this time travel authorship with writer Jack Torrance saying "I'd sell my soul for a drink," and thus summoning Lloyd. And while he lives forever via his life's work, it's not that repetitive work about being a dull boy, but the real life murder of a black cook and an epic fail of the mission to kill his wife and child - so there you go.

The devil's bargain - Jack would sell his soul for a drink, as if that wasn't the price to begin with, it's like going to the cashier of the liquor store with a $20 bottle of bourbon and announcing "I'd pay twenty dollars for this!"

And beyond all that is the feeling of control that only surrendering control can bring. To have the ability to postpone the anguish of hell and prolong the joy of heaven available to you is surely worth any price even if that price is that sooner or later, you use up your heaven and can no longer avoid hell's ever-increasing tab. It is due.


"Hell hath no limits"

A special high point is saved for that final act: Faustus' time running out and being swallowed up by Hell is done very very well - with the trap door opening and hands pulling him below to the depths; the whole production, set backdrops, actors and all, kind of wheel backwards and outwards, as if hell was there the whole time, flames flickering at the clapboard walls, the whole decadent spree of Burton's just an elaborate stage show, now the real erupting from reality's cracks the way the void does on intense DMT or Salvia highs. Burton's Faustus--surrounded by red/orange glowing embers and a fully green demonic Taylor--is sort of twirled in a bad ballet slow mo spin deep inside a kinky Rube Goldberg-meets-Brueghel on the Corman Poe set Hell. Faustus yelling and pleading, demonic figures writing in overlapping images, reds and oranges contrast and finally, Liz Taylor as Medusa, in greed demonic body paint, comes alive - her mouth frozen in a Norma Desmond grimace -- at last her stoic silent treatment and obedient kissing and many guises makes sense. She finally roars to life with a macabre flaring of the eyes that's thrilling for all its absence hithero. Here is the green absinthe fairy showing her true size and shape. The beguiling voice that--for example, lured me last year around this time into buying a 15 pack of 'All Day IPA' at the grocery store (how it would whisper to me on my walk home from work, "what a great thing it would be to have that around, have one or two once in awhile") and the way that same voice laughed and sneered a month later when I was shaking and convulsing on the floor from alcohol withdrawal.


In her fathomless patience and malevolence, that demonic anima gets us all, sooner or later. And Taylor who seemed so frozen in this burlesque of statuesque refinement in her earlier Helenic incarnations now, finally, really lets loose. Look at her eyes in the above hell shot! Now that's amore! In her eyes I see shades of Madeline Usher or Morella, or those other ghostly/mad women in Corman's Poe films, who go out, laughing and throttling her husband while flames consume them.

In the end, it's Burton the actor perhaps who must hamstrings Burton the director for here, for I can't help but wonder how much more energetic this would all be with a less wearily portentous Faustus, someone who could inject some camp vitality, like Vincent Price, as Burton the director has  welcomely camp macabre eye, with an admirable sense of pacing and with his ability to tap into the then-burgeoning psychedelic drug 1967 culture in a way that's mythic more than flashy.  If Burton the director/star couldn't quite make something on the level of Welles or Olivier, that doesn't detract from the rich Halloween horror festival vibe; on a poetic dream theater level he almost captures the same fairy tale energy of another actor's one-off sojourn, Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter.  And if their acting isn't all there this time around, we'll always have Liz and Dick in Padua and "New Carthage" and sometimes we'll even watch them in Big Sur and Heathrow - and if we're also the same persons who love Bava's Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill and AIP psychedelic 1967 freak scenes like The Trip, and Maqsue of the Red Death then anything that six-degrees them, problematic and stilted or not, is going to get us right in the Jeffrey Cordovas.

Have I gone off the deep end with my alcoholism metaphor and Trip comparisons again, Hannah? Sure I have. But so what? I'm no more repetitive, belligerent and self-indulgent in my fancy than Marlowe here and in a way I relate to Burton's pained hangover more than most- and I appreciate the way he and tried to alchemically transubstantiate it into the context of the central myth. I've given him a hard time tonight for his energy levels but I'm probably projecting. His eyes may betray insoluble weariness but he still has that beguiling mellifluent booming voice, Marlowe's velvet language rolls trippingly off his tongue, and the lighting and spooky accoutrements alone are worth the price of admission. We may not feel much pity for his 'last second desperation' as hell's gorgon arms drag him down into the flames, because hey, we've been there, and found out eternity is only as long as you think. Faust'll get out, if he just lets go. The great rule of eternity is that only nothing is forever.  Except thirst. So drinks, now... let each vicious circle be a signature on our natural habitat's cocktail napkin contract. Whatever the cost, it's already worth it. Valdez and Cornelius, man, they'll hook you up. 




NOTES:
1. That last part seems quite sexist today, presuming a kind of condoned satyriasis is packed kit and caboodle over the hump of spiritual awakening - not no more!
1. I'm guessing, based on my own experience doing the same thing - I may be projecting but, on the other hand, as they say in AA, you can't shit a shitter - not one of AA's best phrases, I'll grant you. 
5. Technically the Hell might not 'be' eternal in the space-time sense, but in Hell, space/time ceases to exist. One comes out the other side of a cold turkey detox--which may seem to have taken less than a weekend to those around you and to the calendar--as if one had been away for centuries of endless torment. Yet you barely remember it, for the brain which records such things was so badly burned. All you remember is that it was an eternity, and eternity is over. 

Black and white old dark house films are magic, the perfect balm for miserable rainy days like this, or the advent of spring (pollen/allergies) contesting grey winter's turgid encore: cobwebs, shadows, howling winds, pouring rain, sheet metal thunder, clocks striking thirteen, midnight readings of the will, lights going out, daggers in backs, seances, spying through keyholes, secret passages, disembodied death masks floating in the darkness, it's all manna. If you grew up at all in the 60s-70s then you remember too the ghosting of the UHF antenna signal (highly susceptible to clouds and bouncing off hills or mountains to double your signal) when these movies showed on local TV Saturday afternoons; how one was almost always, somewhere to be found, Bela Lugosi hamming it up in whatever role he got and--if one was very lucky--nary a Wallace Ford or Bowery Boy to sully things with tired Brooklyn schtick.

Back in the 70s, before the advent of VCR, one's ability to see old movies was tied to the whims of TV programmers and the the cloud systems of a fickle God. With only a circular antennae and rabbit ears to move around in vain, atop the set, every second of one of these films that was visible became a sacred text written on the snapchat wind. At any moment a cloud might pass and wipe out the signal, which had bounced in off a storm cloud from Wilmington Philadelphia or wherever, and leave you stranded, so you basked in the hoary atmosphere while you could, read your Famous Monsters of Filmland like a holy writ and prayed for the cooler monsters to ever come your way, wishing upon wish you could somehow afford a projector, available by mail order from the back of the issue, beguiling me into saving my pennies.

Those days are a memory of course, now every horror movie one can think of it at one's fingertips, even better in many ways than one film (too much threading) and crystal clear-- that dark birthday wish come true, and it's too pollen-saturated or soaking wet and freezing to go outside without sneezing like a machine gun, what can you do now but watch thy old dark house collection, and remember how precious every signal-reception moment used to feel when it was all so ephemeral.

If you don't know what I mean by all that, yet you still love old dark house movies, then you know their narcotizing effect. Nothing makes you gladder to live in a small apartment than the thought of being expected to stay the night in a huge, mysterious, dark house that could be hiding a whole army of killers with ease. Nothing makes you feel dryer than a raging storm onscreen.

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And today the power of Zsa Zsa has merged with politics -- they can never more extricated. And so today our first lady is a Communist 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shawhshank sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. 

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. We forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins''diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke, like the straight woman that Joan Rivers was a riff on. She knew she was playing a 'type' as stereotyped-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet she pretended she didn't - it was our fathoming of the pretense that made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could. The epitome of composed class and elegance, gowns for the ladies and gays, but with impressive cleavage and curves for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you for attention, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.


TELEVISION Today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. Reality stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Moutain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. Smart folk feel superior to so many people we never realize that feeling superior to someone else is a balm to the soul. It's almost annoying if we're surrounded by idiots but it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Luckily a Honey Boo-Boo can make even an idiot know what it is to feel smarter than someone else.

Problem is, those shows are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide. But at some point a show meant for the uneducated yokels written by brainy Harvard snobs starts to show its contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop around Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but you don't want to punch him in the face as bad as you want to punch Matthau. The type of character common in the late 50s-early 60s, that think a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education entitles gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women. They presume their lascivious attention is always welcome, and that their father can help get them any job they want, since their father plays golf with the boss of the boss. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a white male intelligence on their subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of a passive aggressive 'dumbing down' that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. 

Slap the pipe out, PLEASE (from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.
Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation; Zsa Zsa Gabor and empty fame; snobby Harvard writers, what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it) I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

(from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN

I love Cat and tolerate Missile but loathe Queen. Indeed, I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth. It's weird since I like both its writers: Ben Hecht ("original" story) and Charles Beaumont (who'd later do great work for Roger Corman) and love the film from which Queen'borrowed' its male wardrobe (the uniforms from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got all the right ingredients: babes in miniskirts, a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa). But most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, hoping against hope that this accident will deliver him.... like Monty Clift after under a Place in the Sun canoe.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women (and a giant spider) where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of all - the evil space queen (Laurie Mitchell - who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon) who hides her deformed looks behind an even uglier mask. 

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) though Zsa Zsa keeps a tight eye on their hem lines in relation to the camera; and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snark that makes my fists ball up. There's a vibe at work where the makers of the film think themselves too smart for their material. They think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. The smirky douche bag vibe of male superiority has doomed the film to never be a true cult favorite, at least of mine. 


What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moonin particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent. With these films we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something. 
Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite due to drug and alcohol issues, changing times, bad luck, 'lifestyle' etc., and they're all kind of walking on their heels looking for anything they can get from the casting offices, but no calls, so they all take this last chance grab. These oddballs and has-beens are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family - they're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live again through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in under two hours, win or lose. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. 




Maybe this is why the white male losers of the world, the barflies and has-beens, tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for their beloved genres (though on the other hand, I guess some of us like Mystery Science 3000 and I do not) No character in Plan Nine leersat Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women,"I bet you got a real sticky web." If there was, they would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space.

This MOTHER ain't your mom's hardcore psychosexual "puts the bile in bible" allegory so why was I led to be scared of it by a bunch of babies who made me think it was REQUIEM FOR A DREAM TWO? It doesn't deliver a slow grinding torture that anyone who knows the horrors of withdrawal, or the brutalizing subjugation of woman and the mentally ill can't help but seize up watching. There are heavy-handed symbols galore but this film from a long time ago, before the advent of shock value, a whole new kind of crazy, far more traumatizing (to some, not me) than even Selby would think to go. In its relentless forward momentum it emerges as a kind of pure cinema, catapulting Darren A, if he wasn't there already, into the land of the artsy giants of primordial surrealism, a gut-punch Buñuel for the post-irony age, a truly organic flowing biblical message that treads boldly into the thorny maze where very few other filmmakers are daring to go, where just telling the tales of the Old Testament, without sugary dozing-in-the-pew heavy-handed Christian babbling, leads to scenes far more lurid than any Cecil B. DeMille might devise for his Sign and The Cross. Who else even closely comes? There's Guy Maddin, whose work finds weird new Freudian melting points but whose reliance on silent film's shallow depth and clunky grad school dissertations sometimes get the better of him. And David Lynch, although I found his Twin Peaks reboot intensely frustrating for long stretches, which since it was intentional is not to say it was bad. No, there is only Lars von Trier's early work, such as Breaking the Waves. And hey, not to start fights after school, but

Lars, Darren Aronofsky done took you to church
or rather took you out of it, ducking low to pass unseen between the drowsy Canaanites and sacrificial organist, bidding you come sneak giggling out the back of the crumbling edifice, pamphlets flittering in the breeze of the exit door closing, to ride the see-saw and the horses on the giant coiled spring
though you are too large for that ride, Lars -
like the sea is too large for its banks,
the global warming shore, the bombstruck breeze that glows then blows no---.

Look upon this, the Dark Lord's 'perfect' work--tidily summing up His canonical themes thus far--Old Testament mythologizing made literal and messy; self-immolation as the 'perfect' end to a career in the arts--and despair, Lars. Can you top it?
Lars, you've been outmaneuvered on the very tenement balcony of your spiritual sacrificial misanthropy!
Lars, I didn't see your Nymphomaniac, as I'm still recovering from Melancholia.
Lars, it's not that you guys are alone in a race, but you're the only two out this far on the track, no one else is even visible. Lars! Wake!

You're the Evgenia Medvedeva and Alina Zagitova in the biblical psychosexual allegorical cinematic event.

And now you are behind, Lars, behind. We've witnessed the rebirth from the safety of heaven's hellish grandstand that is MOTHER.

We now can see the artist as shock-and-awe Old Testament death rattler,
every muse costs a quarter.
Every quarter costs a single limb.
They all grow back like lizard tails in Grandpa's TERRORVISION terrarium.

"Now, you all right, Eve" - Rex Ingram as the Lord - GREEN PASTURES

MOTHER's mix of allegorical pretension, slow-building freak-out panic theater group happenings, a nice adherence to the Deleuzian Time-Image principle, and a totally gruesome but inevitable conclusion boosted along with strong-as-hell acting, ever-increasing dosed momentum, and a fusion of David Lynch-ish kitchen sink surrealism, Bunuelian biblical dry-humping, and Jodorowsky gross beauty leads to one inevitable result: a grueling/exhilarating parable about the savagery that is the human reproductive system once it's run shy of predators and pestilence to thin its ranks, and the barbarity of nature and nature's vilest most profound creation, religion, or man, or whatever. With the Earth and Mankind fighting a war of cancers and disease. If Mama Jones can't whip up a plague virulent enough to at least halve our numbers, we ourselves become the plague that kills her, as if there's a prize in football for how badly damaged we leave the field, or, on the field's side, how thoroughly its floods and pestilences ravage our ranks. Will we have arrived in paradise when we at last give up the need--running counter to all our environmental evidence--to procreate a foot further?

Chronicling a veritable Old Testament of wrath and vengeance, worthy in some respects even of The Green Pastures, it's not just the bible getting analyzed and reimagined in Mother, but the messianic complex that results from excessive fame and how it affects the creative process. In indulging his masochistic shock value yen so completely, Aronofsky pulls his own mask off, showing the mirror the wormy, decaying corpse therein.

Through many levels of outrage and layers of subtext both personal (fame as parasite magnet; perfect artistic creations kill their creator), and sociological (pretentious, biblical, nutty, an uncircumcised logocentric thrust deep into morass of chthonic madness), Mother! is surely the film to get Camille Paglia out of feminist jail. Darren Aronofsky's love letter to his legions of slavering townie fans, a thank you for soiling his lawn with their disciple-like squatting, tearing up his lawn and garden for souvenirs, it functions the way random pieces of saints long rent limb from limb or burnt on various crosses are preserved in shrines do --a little finger joint in Ireland, a shin bone in Palermo, or the smashed neck of one of Hendrix's guitar enshrined in The Hard Rock Cafe - it all reminds us of our past sins and how we're still forgiven. Quoth the creature from Tommy's Froopy Land play, "eat of my flesh that you may survive."


Ala Christopher Nolan or David Lynch, Aronofsky is one of the names even the most casual public viewer has heard of. He's in the trades. He's currently dating Jennifer Lawrence, a younger woman, and doing so right out in the public eye, the public not being too worried about it, since Lawrence can take care of herself and Aronofsky's films are so twisted it's clear he's a relatively sane, safe sort of guy. (It's the ones who make the sane films you've got to watch out for- what are they hiding?). So hey, if he wants to posit himself as God, I'm all for that. I'm a writer too, and former poet, and can still be a poet if the ratio of flu and Robitussin is just right. Javier Bardem is one of my favorite actors and did a fine job capturing the life of a poet once before (as in his 2000 portrayal of the AIDs-stricken Cuban refugee poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls) and can surely be a god, too. Both poet and god are difficult roles to pull off without lapsing into pretentiousness or just seeming faintly absurd. Bardem never comes close to either. He is a God and his ability to navigate the mounting chaos without losing his fathomless cool is truly inspiring.

But for all that, I still have loathed Aronofsky since Requiem for a Dream. I feel like that movie violated me. Yet I loved The Wrestler and have seen Black Swansix times. I tried to do Noah and couldn't get past the idiocy of the first six hours and The Fountain -good god that's some pretty-lookin' twaddle. But Requiem was abusive. I'm easily traumatized but still. I still haven't seen Last House on the Left or Irreversible just because I know they'd leave me disturbed; don't get me started on Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or Game of Thrones). Not just that part, the rapey part, but the withdrawal, man... that's just handled too damn well. The torture of the damned, sir. The tortures of the damned.

But Mother! is a film about forgiving the people who trespass against you, and even posits the whole reason trespassing occurs is for that forgiveness to have resonance. It's an old trick God pulls on us: making things so very, very terrible because otherwise forgiveness wouldn't have the same epiphanic kick. By middle age you either have to forgive the world unconditionally or open fire on it, though I know that's not 'in' right now. So I forgive Darren his trespasses. And instead I blame  the people who said Mother was way worse than Requiem, which is why I waited so long to see it instead of racing breathlessly to one theater after another, with a dirty stuffed rabbit in my hand, going "have you seen my daughter! Her name is Jenny! JENNY!!!" but then running away, tittering like a maniac before the cops came, you know, my usual schtick.

Instead I was led to believe that people were walking out in shock during screenings for the same reason I had to leave during Wolf Creek. And maybe it is as disturbing if you're a 'normal' family man/woman with a baby instead of a recovering addict or alcoholic, and you're all normal and don't know the profound terror and relentless despair-soaked agonies of drug or or alcohol withdrawal, a feeling that just gets worse and worse, like a hangover that doubles in intensity every hour you don't take a medicinal 'hair of the dog' drink, until you're in such distress that submitting to a night of base group molestation by a horde of filthy old perverts is nothing if you end up re-supplied for the week. You'll even dip your hand in a Rio Bravo barroom spittoon for a silver dollar just to get a drink enough to take the shakes away even for an hour.

That was where Aronofsky went for Requiem, the Pulsing 'in/out-in/out'"ass-to-ass" electro-shock so callously done to of speed freak Ellen Burstyn until she's foaming at the mouth, synced in epileptic seizure cross-cuts with the super demeaning and depressing and terrifying "ass to ass" grinding of dear Jennifer; Marlon Wayans undergoing withdrawal in a southern jail cell, and Jared Leto getting his arm amputated, all done in a series of brutalizing rhythmic crosscuts like being raped simultaneously in four separate time zone orifices.

Walking out of that movie on shaky legs, I was so mad at Darren Aronofsky I wanted to go his house and break some windows. I was not alone in feeling violated, we saw a woman literally unable to get up out of her chair because she had an epileptic seizure or panic attack as we walked past. If Darren had gotten up to take questions and our legs weren't wobbly from the ordeal, we'd have rushed the stage and beaten him up (like my buddy John LaGreco and his brother Chuck used to do when they went to the same elementary school, something I never tire of reporting because Requiem upset me so badly).

When Requiem cam, in 2000, you see, we still had some of our souls left to lose. Though every last scrap was being optioned for whatever shock value was still left to wring from it, every name-for-himself auteur amping up the ultra-violence for their own special narrative purpose, making sure we felt the pain of the victims, the turbulent brutality of a man on speed or coke, his empathy eaten away, relishing in the pain of the other. The more of this stuff we watched the more desensitized we became, until you'd have to watch Japanese hentai or torture porn just to feel alive. And then you may as well not be, because the anti-porn crusaders turned out to be right, and now we're fucked. Nothing shocking, ever.


Am I hero for being sickened by Requiem but not being sickened by the sights on display in Mother!? Definitely not. How dare the 'people' steer me away from Mother! which is clearly one of the best films of last year, maybe this decade's Mulholland Drive? At the very least its Viridiana!

Like Saint Joan of Ark, I forgive Darren; Requiem had to follow Selby's text which, like his Last Exit to Brooklyn a decade or so earlier, had to revel in the ugly seams of New York City's (then) vice-ridden fringe shore and offer little hope of escape. I understand. I absolve. It kills me like the Bad Lieutenant putting those two slimy crackheads on that bus with his cigar box of cash. I scream like Harvey in the church at the foot of the lord. I can do no less than die in my car, once I get one.

2. Jonesers Overrun the After-Party (Fame)

(Semi Slow-SPOILER) - The real show-stopper at work here, what makes the first half with its esoteric bits of symbolism and Lynchian soundscape manipulations worthwhile is the evaporation of time in the second half, wherein a single night moves seamlessly from trying to have a quiet night at home (she's serving a very special dinner for two, with candles and courses), to a full scale riot (and onwards from there to even darker extremes) is one of the most terrifying and exhilarating extended 'real time' sequences since Elem Klimov's 1985 film,Come and See. Perfectly capturing the nightmare vibe of an acid test party where what was once a cool quiet evening 'encounter' with a handful of cool loved ones in a safe space ends up a mob scene, everyone inviting everyone else's friends over too, looking to get in on the psychedelic love session whether you want them around or not, because hey, it's supposed to be a loving safe share-everything environment, so let's share everything we got; I got nothing, bro - you can have your fill. So what do you got? Gimme gimme!


Mother's off-the-cuff savagery is so seamlessly amplified that an ordinary celebration can devolve into a pagan sacrificial rite before you know it, but never in a sudden, noticeable or inorganic burst - one thing builds on the other in a frog-boiling-in-the-slow-pot way that's so ingenious it's paralyzing to think of the amount of timing, work and editing done to get it all so right that it seems to all unfold in one continual burst of madness beginning with a quiet celebratory dinner at home in honor of a completed poem, winding up at an impromptu book signing (with Kristin Wiig as the publisher) and then.... I mustn't reveal anything further, but it's quite a night

With the cops already called (maybe you even called them just to get these freaks out of your house) or tried to but couldn't get the phone to work (this being before the age of cell phones by about 10 years) and soon strangers are saying to you, "hey man, I'm not sure whose house this is, but might as well steal some of their shit while we're here, right?" You can't even hide out in your own bedroom, and you end up having a nervous breakdown for lack of privacy, all without the madness ever seeming to jump an unnatural beat, so that one thief leads inexorably to a ransacking, one ransacking leads inevitably to a trashing which leads to cops which leads to armies and religious zeal leads to combat and bomb blasts and huddled masses yearning for the holy sacrament and forgiveness... but I can't go on. It's too horrible. It's beyond horrible, but through it all, it's a realization that yes, this is what we are like and where we are, joneser monsters.



Forgive them counsels the Man. That's the ultimate thing, through it all, Javier's man is beyond all materialism but how can you share all you have with a bunch of filthy takers who give nothing but their full measure of ruin in return?


3. Psychedelic Encounters are the New N-- /
Set and Setting - Interrupted

One of the more terrible ideas, in my mind, has always been the way acid, ecstasy and shrooms, i.e. the 'major' psychedelics are most commonly taken, which is at college parties. It's the worst place to take them. Maybe, if you're very familiar with the effects, or it's late enough at night that most of the townies, trolls and trogs, normies, jonesers, wallies, and murphs have already decamped and you and the cool kids are all that are left, ready to do some real drinking and staring into lava lamps, it might not be too terrible - but more than likely, alcohol and the desire to stay awake drinking more, underwrites this late night resolve. But considering that any big college party, especially one on Friday or Saturday night, has a stretch of 2-5 hours where the great unwashed filter through, the schmucks all desperate to be seen out on a weekend night, to "get" what they feel the night is there to provide them. Usually this means long chains of nervous boys trailing their alpha like a centipede of nervous, hungry glances, like a 'train' waiting to happen, leaving a choking trail of Axe body spray loud collared shirts behind them. Trying to hide their scared eyes with destructive bravado, but they got no game, no IDs, no confidence (beyond an unrealistic media-instilled sense of entitlement), the best they can do is try and get to the bar before it's all gone but they don't know how to mix a drink so end up chugging and then being sick. The girls come in more amorphous packs, but seldom stay long enough for boys to get traction, so it ends up being a dude fest, with you tripping your face off, surrounded by pale normie packs of jonesers, wallies, and moochers sitting around, taking up valuable couch space, waiting til the night pays them what they think they're owed for coming out into it, forcing their way into your chambers to get a piece of your glory or booze or acid or cool platonic female friend roster.

I know that if you're reading this then you are one of the cool ones. You get it. And you know tripping your face around those creeps and their blank-faced wally coteries, is the worst. You'll either get skeeved out by all their amped-up rapey insecurity and normie blandness, their terrible townie teeth, or their nerdy smarm-clouded insecurity wherein they think a single beer makes them bold, yet their insights are like lead balloons hanging on your would-be airborne dosed soul.

Even more dangerous though, than being skeeved by this ensemble's unshakable presence, is being nice to them, even for a second, thanks to the flush of psychedelic awakening, you lose your discernment and become all Christ-like and forgiving them their trespasses, trying to quickly queer-eye their style, even giving them articles of your cool raiment, for you move so quickly beyond attachment when properly dosed, you transcend the need to own anything. The power of psychedelics being such that it can override your own discerning ego's judgment, their normie plight can move rather than disgust you. Ugh! When that happens you'll be feeling the fallout for years. You won't remember doing it, as you're also drunk, and later on at the bar some slavering idiot wearing your shirt comes along and is all over you, wanting some of you pitcher, or buying you one if you actually did help make him cool, acting all chummy, and embarrassing you in front of your beautiful people clique. You think this is a game? Jesus was nice to these people too, and look where it got him!

I'm horrified by abuse of psychedelics, which are God's special glasses that let us behold heaven and hell in advance. When I see youtube videos of idiot kids smoking salvia in the living room, with the TV blasting some obnoxious after school MTV reality show while the smoker twitches on the floor and the idiot camera person zooms in and out on their face, an offscreen voice going oooooh and everyone snickering, I'm deeply horrified. It makes me understand perhaps why parents worry about their children and try to make everything illegal. How about a little respect for the human mind? Salvia, done right, is a spiritually transformative tool. if not, it's just ugly.

Imagine if, for example at your local church, the priest trains the young in proper respect for psychedelics, lessens the fear, so that when they are old and afraid of dying, the priest can give them shrooms or ecstasy, making the beyond seem beautiful and inviting. Instead, parents, in demonizing all drugs, seeing no difference between good drugs like shrooms and bad ones like coke or meth, give this huge power over to whomever wants to step in and fill the gap. The result? Some scabby hep-C sleazebag peddles ecstasy to your daughter and she thinks he's frickin' Jesus, Manson, and Gandhi rolled into one. And mom, who told her how dangerous it was to even try, is laughed away as clearly clueless. How can her daughter trust what she says about coke and heroin, either? The scabby sleaze becomes the authority figure for he's introduced her to 'the truth' - and mom can't handle that she can handle it.


The thing is, though - there are the 'good' dealers who provide warning labels, recommended dosage, set and setting, etc. and also to come to the aid of those who wind up wigging out. And it's that 'wigging' that's so succinctly and brilliantly captured in Mother!. I've never seen anything remotely on its level - as far as wigging the righteous way, or showing how the throngs of party crashers seem to be, the monstrous hunger of their appetites tearing your soul apart, when all you want is five minutes of peace in your own room to get your head together. Would there was someone like that to sneak Jennifer out of that party and into a nice quiet air-conditioned space.

4. Unforgiven Trespasses (The Gulls Descend)
(Jesus Christ Superstar - Jesus had the right idea, fuck 'em)

I'm glad this came around on DVD and I could post this right before JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR live on ABC, as that musical and MOTHER share that subtext, the idea that at a certain point, as per Mother Theresa, being selfless and being a victim of gimme-gimme beggar mentality, i.e. opening your arms in love leads to having your organs harvested; opening your house to strangers leads to a home invasion that, once begun, never ends until every last thing of value in your house is trashed and/or stolen, including your own children and you are crucified like a broke junky twitching sick and wild-eyed in the four in the morning ER for a shot or sip of methadone that may not even come since you don't have insurance. After Jesus Christ Superstar watch Mother! and you have a real scathing sad truth to any spiritual enlightenment humility trip. No matter how much wine your drained corpse produces, how many loaves and wafers your flesh can be diced into, the masses never stop coming forward making "pan! pan!" gestures like those Suddenly Last Summer beach boy sea gulls.

Of them all only the caustic already-dead Superstar seems to have it on the ball when, in the song "Everything is All Right", when Judas thinks the money spent on fine ointments for Jesus' sore feet  should have sold it and spent on "the poor." - Jesus sing "there will be poor always / pathetically suffering / just think of the good things you've got," - for Jesus, he has no 'responsibility' to the poor just because they glom onto him and keep ravenously wolfing down every scrap of food in sight.

The beggars Viridiana invites to dinner--as she's so Christian and noble, play dress up with her vestal finery (before stealing or ruining it, and her)

I related to Jennifer's pain in this movie, as my roommate for five years outside of college and two inside, my guitarist Dave, of whom I've spoken so many times, was very much a Bardem / Viridiana character, inviting all sorts of people over at odd hours and, I worried about them ruining "everything" and so Dave would arrange it all very gradually, only letting me know he'd invited a ton of people over after a ton of people had arrived and I was already toasty drunk... and that was how our apartment and before then, house, would end up trashed night after night. As long as I had my bedroom sanctuary I was all right, but sometimes the crowd would spill into there and I couldn't get them out as I'd be too high and young to stand up for myself; and of course having 'dry goods' made me popular and that's the worst thing when you're tripping really hard and really need your space.... all these people trying to get you to offer them some. So the girls be all over you in a weird way, tons of joneser dudes all scheming to get their hit from my special wineskin. (3)


5. Art is Violence: Forgiveness is Divine in direct proportion to the unforgiveableness of the Offense

This is the "it" at the core of all truth - the art, once created, turns back around to rend the artist with its inconceivable needs, the Frankenstein Monster, loosed upon the world thus changes it, and the reaping returns to the artist - Oliver Stone sued by the victims of a child who rampaged with his girlfriend after watching Natural Born Killers; Kubrick working to pull A Clockwork Orange out of circulation in England after a rapist sings "Singin' in the Rain", Judas Priest dragged into court by the bereaved parents of a hideously burned child who heard the Satanic messages in their music. Is this the takeaway message here? Be careful of what you create, for be it a child or a painting or a poem, it will destroy you. Better make sure you forgive yourself in advance for the sin of having made it. Madness awaits the judging sober critic at the loud raucous rock show. Take it from me, who wound up rent to the marrow by the ceaseless thirst of his own pain-wracked body. For god's sake, thank you for your own advance forgiveness of this horrible devouring.

Believe I am sincere in my desire to forgive the seagulls of my own addiction and past trespassers by visiting my meditation / holy babble poetry site: MEDSITATION

See also past Easter Acid Holiness:
GREEN PASTURES (1936)
JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977) 
BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON (1970) 

And the Psychedelic Scrooge Satori. 

And the entire chronicle of my 2012 galactic alignment deliverance (and subsequent carnivore disillustion here): Remembering my 2012 Galactic Alignment Euphoria, Non-Duality, Quetzlcoatl Visions, Cult Leadership, and Inevitable Fever

I love you, always.

Like a gust of vaguely moldy stale air-- the sort we used to breathe before cell phones, age, rehab, kids, whatever, curbed our kamikaze habits, the sort of air that flows through shallow uneasy breath and attempts to look nonplussed while being lead from the safety of the cracked sidewalk into snaking maze of backyard broken fences on the off chance a score with a stranger wouldn't go south, the sort of air you smell again only at AA in those permanently-rented church basement "workshops" and half-condemned storefronts that never quite not carry the smell of cigar butts soaked in urine, but fully and always the mold that grows on heater coils and poorly-stored winter jackets--this is the sort of air that fills the sails of the Safdie brothers' kinetic chase scene thriller GOOD TIME (2017).

Occasionally saturated in the kind Day-Glo psychedelic eeriness that somehow heightens the gritty yet warmly soothing dream-like reality of Bronx streets in the dead of night, and of crowded holding tanks, closed amusement parks, public hospital corridors, and bank teller windows, rather than making them too cartoon-like. Amok on 'anything can happen at any time' energy, the molly-shiverin photography (35mm!) of Sean Price William sends it over. Chris Doyle himself could surely no better do than does "eye to the grindstone" William for street-deep GOOD TIME.

From the first moments of Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive ambient score we feel we're seeing part of a wild new direction in cinema, albeit one familiar enough from past decades (but not this one), a hyperkinetic snapshot of logical but inexhaustible desperation, one bright little fucker's off-the-cuff quick thinking, the power he derives in his pursuits from being white and attractive enough women give his wild-eyed madness a pass through certain needle eyes. So catastrophic in its real time results is his effort that it perhaps makes a fine reflection on America's meddling in third world affairs, so insanely desperate to keep their kid brothers away from socialism that we all but destroy their economy. I'm sure that's not the Safdie's intentions but so what. It's the tale of sketchy quick-thinking newly-paroled ('good time' being shorthand for 'out on early parole for good behavior') Connie's (Robert Pattinson) whose afternoon-through-to-dawn nonstop hustling efforts to 'rescue' his mentally-handicapped brother (Benny Safdie himself) from the mental health system, and then from jail after a bungled bank robbery, start after a dazzling rave-style magenta dye bomb goes off in their escape Uber, the boys go racing down the streets of Queens as real-life passers-by (the Safdies didn't steal their shots, but sure made it look that way) gape at the psychedelic blur, and as Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive retro synths and drowsy ambient pulse drops surge like a cranked up heartbeat guiding them like the current of the third rail guides the 4, 5, Q and R trains.





First winning critical notice with Heaven Knows What, the tale of a junky crustpunk and her quest to score and/or break up with or get back together with her sketchy junky boyfriend, the Safdies obviously know their milieu, the busy urban streets, dilapidated apartments of twitchy girlfriends always starting to crash on whatever was the last of her sketchy stash, and grandmothers you just met on the bus and now talked your way into something between a quiet home invasion and "just being there to use the phone." High-lowlights include a frazzled Jennifer Jason Leigh finding out--in the midst of a panicked Mamet-style shout at the credit card company--her mom canceled the credit card she stole from her purse before Leiigh could even use it. Leigh's escalating tantrum-sub-junky desperation is masterful - she's trying to play her mom and then the credit card company as assiduously as Connie's playing her, but she's too emotional, too panicked. Also sublimely vivid: the testosterone-packed precinct holding cell, busy late night public hospital corridors, the kind of place where there are so many people on so many different shift schedules, and with no windows and no closing time, the sleep schedule so disrupted that rather than be awake and then asleep at a certain hour, everyone is half and half all the time; if you know where you're going, you can go almost anywhere; arcades where kids drop acid and play video games; and closed amusement parks, it's got it all, even a momentary pause here and there for some random termite humanity, or a barking pit bull.

This is a certain strata of outer borough living a lot of us 'aging hipster' New Yorkers don't really get to know anymore, not since the advent of cell phones made drug buying a "we come to you" thing, not a "let's take a subway up to the shadiest section of the Bronx and see if that guy who knows that guy is still there' kind of thing, the sort born of wearying teenage sobriety. And as rents rise, the lower world dregs are continually pushed farther and farther uptown, and marijuana more and more decriminalized, whole generations of will never know the way these sorts of hustlers sweep you up in their drama so fast that what started as you buying a dime bag and getting the hell back to your friends downtown winds up in you putting up your car up as bail for someone you barely know after running from the police through a neighborhood you don't recognize, with a head full of angel dust you didn't know you'd smoked, and taking another of your dealer's friends to a hospital ER waiting room, hoping to get him admitted before the cops show up and you have to run all over again, and you're too young and/or naive and/or nice and/or stoned to figure out how to make your goodbyes and extricate you from this hustler's Jenga hodge podge of quick fixes before it topples down into handcuffs or a bullet. It's a thing that happens to us all, once. If we're smart, we soak the lesson up good and never even visit that same subway stop again, even if the "sticks" (Xanax) and Oxy seems to flow on tap.


On the other hand it's far more entertaining than most such evenings, more riveting and propulsive, druggy and psychedelic while being utterly real (most scenes shot on the fly in real locations with passers-by who just happened to be in the shot) without the consequences or interminable length or waking up with your wallet and TV gone. It's a headlong zig-zag firefly race into the abyss that shows the devastating dry wit and talent for fly-on-the-wall naturalism the Safdies are second to none, locked in on a street-level substrata that few genuine artists quite penetrate deep enough to feel anything other than a pose. Christ, who would want to go this deep? Only real artists who, unlike so many others, actually may have a flag to plant.




The big psychedelic payoff is what puts this movie into the pantheon, including a wild inherently disturbing scene that trades on one's familiarity with the drug so in question. I.e. if you've ever done liquid or blotter LSD ever, you know that pouring a a goodly third or fourth of a full Sprite bottle of pure acid down some poor security guard's throat to render him incapacitated is a Black Mirror kind of evil, the soul trapped for all eternity screaming, even long after they finally come down. If you don't even know you got there or what just happened, you basically ensure they never come back, jumping through fifth story windows to stop the insane visions, even if they pump your IV full of enough Ativan to drop a mating season moose.


Hmmmm - moose-dropping Ativan IV - almost sounds worth it but no matter how much you may love it, if you know its force, the strength of a single drop to send grown men screaming into the ER begging for a 'stick' to ease the demonic rainstorm tearing their flesh and mind apart, then that Sprite bottle reverberates like a the mouth of Hell itself. Suddenly we look around at the glowing, surreal landscape - both beautiful amniotic, terrible and we are totally unmoored. We've let crazy Connie warp our world around him.


In the end though there are four elements that make Good Time work so indelibly well, the first is Pattinson, proving once again he's been criminally underrated as an actor (see this the same night as Cosmopolis and see what I mean). As he did in 2014's The Rover, he knows how to convey the half-strutting/half-defensive body language of a far too tightly-strung marionette hoodrat, but this is a whole new hood for him - you can tell he's been doing research hanging out with ex-cons and visiting prisons as this is leagues away from the usual Hollywood "street"kid. You can see it in the shots below - the wild animal aggression and just fucked-up tiredness of his hustler - the way everything from coming onto older girlfriend Leigh, to scaring people into line his way of thinking - are all just means to an end, something he's so convinced is 'love' for his brother he never questions it even as it turns everyone's life he runs across inside-out, brother included. He doesn't even realize how animal crazy his eyes look when peeking up from the bushes to clock the five-oh. He'd at least be nominated for something for it, but he's too good and too young and famous to be noticed. He'll have to get lionized in France first, like his ex, dear Kristen. 

The second is Williams' photography--35mm, blazing with rich saturated druggy colors that never deviate from the expected but get Day-Glo powder and paint mileage out of the inside of cars and spooky carnival rides at night; third is the sheer momentum, the snaking cool of all-night anything-can-happen urban amok mission following; fourth is Oneohtrix Point Never's score, both nostalgic to the horror films of the 70s and 80s and forward to the post-clubland post-industrial urban Black Emperor future. Never incorporates the ambient sounds of the narrative, the city sounds into the music so much there's a feeling of reality and this ambient post-rock score fusing in ways I usually only feel when driving to the airport at night in the rain listening to trip hop. For example, he incorporates the key of the hydraulic bus lift into part of the score for the scene it's used in: "My thought was that if the music could somehow be in concert with the key of the hydraulic lift, it's going to be subliminally cool. That kind of sonic language embedded in the film also refers to those New York textures. It makes New York feel like this bioluminescent, science-fiction, sentient being, even though it's real brutalist."

Dude's as termite as it gets. So's the film. But beware, it lingers in the mind until its genius closes like a velvet trap around your cortices, illuminating a strange redemptive figure eight over the holy cross of anonymous acts of selfless kindness. You never know what form it will settle on,  but in the meantime, beware smooth-talkers, for they have agendas layered deep and inextricable, unknownst even to themselves. And for god's sake, fear the liquid like your were not just sober, but rabid.

NOTES

1. see also: Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser - my review of The Big Cube - for more on this scary subject)