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Condoms are for Quitters: XANADU (1980) and the Death of the Naked Rock Musical

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


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


But in the midst of all this came the arrival of my least favorite drug of all time -- cocaine. And if the hippy love-in zipless f-ck era was winding down, well, there was always the other extreme: disco and tawdriness. With its dance-friendly music and glittery fashion, disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan neo-decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for children of all ages could revel in disco, the homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to TV, and we kids loved the costumes and tinsel. Even if parents wouldn't let us see it because of its R-rating, kids like me were dancing at birthday parties nonstop to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.  And whatever 'free love' had represented before was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and nostalgia for the earlier decades, before the counterculture's paisley rise, i.e. the 50s-40s MGM era.


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

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


Meanwhile we kids also found the sudden relative sexlessness of, say, variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie (above left), and Shields and Yarnell very soothing. I recall that towards the end of the 70s sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I molested two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was ten years-old. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges.

And mind you I had no orgasms during this stretch -- I had been led to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. Masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act that only degenerates would even try. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, but if they happened it was out of our control, so no harm, just foul.  It was only natural with all that stored venom, that when the right bad influence friend came along, I would give up girls and turn my attention to WW2, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, the sort that wouldn't make my 'situation' any more painful than it needed to be. And so.... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

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



GREASE (1978) and its late 50s greaser milieu helped kill disco and was helped by the enormous popularity of Happy Days. Henry Winkler aka Arthur Fonzarelli was wanted to play the part that later went to Vinne Barbarino aka John Travolta. Some angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums! They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years and years, comparable only to Fleetwood Mac's Rumors and Frampton Comes Alive! But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar Bronx-ishness, GREASE was smartly moved to the sunny safety of Burbank, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming. Fine with us, we in the suburbs didn't know the difference, only that the environment of Grease didn't make us want to kill ourselves from depression over graffiti and urban blight.

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


However, 1980 was not 1978. And while great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta. They made him a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in FEVER) and put Olivia Newton John in as a muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly to open a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and big band fads like zoot suits and Tommy Dorsey collide like a roller skating accident with ELO, The Tubes, discomania and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop.

Just compare the two stills below - top from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade. In EARTH, Rita Hayworth is Terpsichore, a muse who comes down from Olympus when she learns a Broadway show is mocking the old gods. 

Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?
Just because GREASE worked, though, there was no reason to think you could 'modernize' the 40s as easily as the late 50s. The glamor and elegance of the 40s big bands are forced to collide in one particularly painful number, with the raw energy of the Tubes, signifying the emerging hair metal scene, and everyone, old Gene Kelly included, end up on roller skates. You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors, nearly empty sets, and cocaine, that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time, literally here as ELO and The Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" The rockers do all right belting "Won't take backseat / tonight!", but this aint no marriage made in heaven. In fact it's a disaster, like a remote control fight between your older brother and grandmother while your mom's off at a bridge game.
 
Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)
It could have been a tie-in of sorts with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, NEW YORK NEW YORK (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NEW YORK, NEW YORK -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg.


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

You're dead sons, get yourself buried: Sgt. Peppers, Can't Stop the Music
So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool, and everyone was invited to the roller rink, so we dutifully trudged as massive multple family packs to see it. And then fell asleep trying to make it to the big finale. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) we in the too young for R category had dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just went off towards the screen and rode on the swings and then fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape. When we emerged, half-asleep, dizzy from the round and round roller rink musical scenes, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John treacle, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede. The concrurrent style of rock and roll, i.e. the Tubes and ELO, would survive the disaster, to mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco began to implode. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.


Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind the huge hit GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed far worse. And in the case of both of them, very little of that money is visible on the screen. Sure there's dancers and glitz, but the blocking, pacing, and acting is a mess. Now I'm just speculating, understand, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr. But cocaine is all over the 1978-80 wave of films and the budget for a decent DP seems to have gone nostrilwards.

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

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

Natasha Henstridge versus the Coordinated Cockblock Quintet: SPECIES (1995)

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


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


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


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



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


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

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

Bella's Big Bounce - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN - PART II (2012)

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


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


With my  first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09,  I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me."  But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just keep coming, as did new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grows at an exponential rate and I can no longer keep up.

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


In this fifth and final installments the Cullens need help to raise an army of their fellow beings to fight the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, who've to Washington to wipe out the clan. This leads to a gathering of other tribes in the Cullen's defense, all with special powers and stories of participating in everything from the Civil War to the days of the Romans, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. The film is carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the vampiric dark he or she fits right into the mix.

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


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


And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding: Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as anyone who hears about reacts in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and that's so punk rock!


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


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

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


Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby, such as Renesmee, the child of Edward and Bella. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being supposedly cute. Her smiling face has floated in a CGI mist over enough younger bodies that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy. The total effect works to make her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley. It serves the story, though, as well as in a probably unintentional but nonetheless valid metatextual frisson. The drama centers around the child having to prove it's not a vampire but a vamp-human hybrid, but she's also a hybrid between digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback... even in the simulacrum there's a devouring simulacrum, and Renesmee is like the kid at the end of DEMON SEED.


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

The Period Piece Period

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


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

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

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

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

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

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






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





The Great Depression became a chance for heroism and stickin' it to the man. There were true stories not just of mobsters but of legendary hobos, tortured artists, social activists, writers. and chicanerous mountebanks:







In the interest of keeping it fresh, there was also going farther back, to the turn of the century and the era of Ragtime. When the film RAGTIME came out there was a lot of hooplah not least for Jimmy Cagney's return to acting (he plays a racist fire chief). A biopic of Scott Joplin predates it, as do other films set in this era. Coppola also visits the era for sections of GODFATHER 2, but he avoided the mistake of those awful checkered suits.



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



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


Short List
ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE - 1967
BONNIE AND CLYDE - 1968
THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY? - 1969
HELLO, DOLLY - 1969
A BULLET FOR PRETTY BOY - 1970
THE BOYFRIEND - 1971
 LADY SINGS THE BLUES - 1972
CABARET - 1972
GODFATHER - 1972
GREASER'S PALACE - 1972
THIEVES LIKE US - 1973
THE WAY WE WERE - 1973
THE STING - 1973
NEW YORK NEW YORK - 1973
PAPER MOON - 1973
 CHINATOWN - 1974
THE FRONT PAGE - 1974
GODFATHER PART II - 1974
THE GREAT GATSBY - 1974
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS - 1974
CAPONE - 1975
 DAY OF THE LOCUST - 1975
THE FORTUNE - 1975
LUCKY LADY - 1975
AT LONG LAST LOVE - 1975
HEARTS OF THE WEST - 1975
THE WILD PARTY - 1975
 THE RITZ - 1976
THE LAST TYCOON - 1976
BUGSY MALONE - 1976
HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK - 1976
WC FIELDS AND ME - 1976
LEADBELLY - 1976
BOUND FOR GLORY - 1976
SCOTT JOPLIN - 1977
JULIA - 1977
THE BETSY - 1978
DEATH ON THE NILE - 1978
1941 - 1979
AGATHA - 1979
LITTLE MISS MARKER - 1980
UNDER THE RAINBOW - 1981
POSTMAN RINGS TWICE - 1981
CANNERY ROW - 1981
REDS - 1981
MOMMY DEAREST - 1981
HAMMETT - 1982
VICTOR / VICTORIA - 1982
RAGTIME - 1982
EVIL UNDER THE SUN - 1982
FRANCES - 1982
UNDER THE VOLCANO - 1984
CITY HEAT -  1984 
COTTON  CLUB, THE - 1984

If I'm missing any, let me know... I deliberately left out war movies and westerns to not cloud the issue -but as long as there are tommy guns, fedoras, cigarette holders, lame dresses, forgotten men, flappers, and/or antique cars, it's here -- I think.

CinemArchetype 23: The Wild Child

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So often kids in movies are insufferably nice, or else no-neck monsters with no real awakened soul power, just dumb glazed-eyed obnoxiousness. The fact is, until they are socialized, most children are monsters.  Pregnant women are often kept away from the crops and gambling tables in small villages because children are considered to be demonic (bad luck) until old enough to be initiated into the tribe and thus recognized as actual people. The only equivalent we have today to those initiations is christening and that which goes beyond the symbolic, circumcision, but they guarantee nothing, and even if empathy is developed, it can often be stunted, intentionally or otherwise. There are those who only care about themselves and their family, and 'God,' and every other living organism is either food or an enemy.  At the other extreme is me, crying in the meat aisle at the carnage the asleep trogs around me see only as food.

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

No matter what the root of it, we secretly thrill to see amok children. We all still harbor resentments against the adults who symbolically castrated us--teachers, cops, parents, neighbors, bullies--we have a secret stash of inner savagery just waiting to come out, as evinced by the amount of young men who harbor big stashes of automatic weapons. We're expected to lay down our arms and surrender to a system that, in the end, expects us to follow rules it itself doesn't follow, to be truthful even though it will never believe us anyway, and to make no fuss or argument when our basic human rights are stripped away in the name of our own 'safety.'

But these archetypal children embody much more than balls. We exorcise and exercise our repressed inner child vicariously through them, and the result is both cautionary and exhilarating. Like our previous entry, the Outlaw Couple, we go along for the ride like nervous virgins in the back seat of some older kid's Trans Am. These children are not all vicious or violent, but all are 'free' more or less of the confines of the social order. They either openly attack, exploit, or avoid the adult world. They live out our secret wish to blow things up, to kill, and steal in the time before things like guilt, empathy, and responsibility for our own actions soured up our sense of freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 5b. Jean-Pierre Cargol as The Wild Child (1970)
 "Taking The 400 Blows to another level, François Truffaut's 1970 feature considers a child who is literally wild, with the filmmaker himself starring as an 18th-century country scientist molding his charge in civilization's image. Shot in neat black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the historically based movie is measured out by Dr. Itard's orderly account of the experiment, even as his momentous study finds an opaque mirror in the near-mute boy, never truly knowable. Shaggy Victor (Jean-Pierre Cargol) starts off not fierce but blindly wriggly, like a penned-up puppy, before assuming more control and becoming a piece of silent cinema under the reserved scientist's direction. (His solitary learned word is emitted in an unforgettable squeak.) He's both pure—communing with rainfall, unexpectedly showing affection—and something incomplete, a tension echoed in the film's regimented path of discovery. All is fodder for Itard's journal transcriptions (a remove later tweaked for comedy in Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist's optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in." - Nicolas Rapold - Village Voice
6. Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark - The Bad Seed (1956)
..How we love to hate little Rhoda. And for some of us (myself included), how we love to love her…she’s just too damn full of vicious personality. I even go so far as to nearly (I say nearly) champion her actions and wish she would invoke more harm (film wise) before her inevitable demise.

Living with her mother Christine (an understandably neurotic Nancy Kelly) and mostly absent father (William Hopper -- Hedda Hopper's son) Rhoda's life is one of privilege and attention. When kissing her father goodbye he asks “What would you give me for a basket of kisses?” Rhoda coos back: “A basket of hugs!” Landlady and supposed expert in psychology, Monica Breedlove (Evelyn Varden) dotes on Rhoda, applauding her out-moded manners and showering her with presents -- one being rhinestone movie star glasses that Rhoda, of course, loves. As she prattles on about Freud and abnormal psychology, the rather ridiculous Breedlove cannot see the freakish behavior in front of her. She's blinded by all that bright, beauteous blonde. (Kim Morgan - Sunset Gun)
7. Macaulay Culkin as Henry - The Good Son (1993)
Henry: I feel sorry for you, Mark. You just don't know how to have fun.
Mark: What?
Henry: It's because you're scared all the time. I know. I used to be scared too. But that was before I found out.
Mark: Found out what?
Henry: That once you realize that you can do anything... you're free. You can fly. Nobody can touch you... nobody. Mark... don't be afraid to fly.
Mark: You're sick...
Henry: Hey, I promise you something amazing, something you'll never forget. Where's the gratitude?
8.a. Leo Fitzpatrick and Justin Pierce as Tully and Casper - Kids (1995)
"Virgins, I love 'em!" Tully narrates with a mouth gone to mush from endless deep tongue kissing and cunnilingus. The film follows him and his buddy Caspar over the course of a long summer day and night and they're a terrifying duo - one a half-asleep alcoholic rapist, the other HIV positive, anti-condoms smoov-tawka who's always fixin' to deflower yet another virgin. He'll never run out of them, because these kids are always recruiting new kids to their clique; all the parents in New York are never around so the kids raise themselves; the old teach the young how to roll blunts and boost 40s.

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

that's a foamy 40, not milk, playa
Parents didn't like having this movie around, and producers felt obligated to contextualize it as a "wake-up call to the world." Truth is, these kids aren't evil; they've never been taught any better. They've been cut loose into the jungle as firmly as the kids in Lord of the Flies. Except here there's drugs, girls, and idiots who talk trash and need a skateboard to the dome. Larry Clark captures something that's slippier than lightning in a bottle: these kids grow and change before our eyes; we see the way ideas and energy spread among them like fire; the way a couple of girls kissing in a pool can almost create a wilding gangbang riot; how a group of ten year-olds can turn each other onto grass and lingo and suddenly begin to grow into looking like each other, talking and sitting the same way, as if there's some Satanic group mind that sucks them in like coke through a straw. Sure it's disheartening.... it may not even be 'real' - but its awesome to see, and its never really been seen again. Except with...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

Children are not sequestered today. In fact if anything the world has become theirs and adults are seen but not heard. Adults can often not be heard over the din of children in restaurants, theatres, museums and funerals. Babies and children are not so much integrated into adult lives, as adults are integrated into the lives of children’s. We’ve created retail empires for babies and children. Broadway has discovered the steady income stream of children and the white way is dotted with flying people and talking teapots. Infants and children unfamiliar with the term “indoor voices” are dining out at 7:00, 8:00 and even 9:00 PM. They don’t shy from the highest end restaurants either. A simple dress code of: No Pull-Up Pants would put an end to that; but we digress. The point is that the world has changed tremendously since Mr. Williams created those no-neck monsters. Yet they still have the power to horrify. That is partly due to the scenic background of their terrorizing. They are clearly in an adult environment. The house in which they are running rampant is stately; there is no great room, there are no toys. It is clearly adult space. (more)
12  The Lord of the Flies (1963)
The original, the classic, written by William Golding based on his own WW2 experience and a report from a teacher about how allowing his students total freedom in a debate led to a violent altercation in class. Peter Brook's film adaptation uses scintillating black and white photography to create a naturalistic mythopoetic beauty wherein you could see how the ambivalent strangeness of unbridled nature acts on the boys' vivid imagination (a small boy expresses fear about a demonic figure in the woods, the boys' own symbolic WMDs if you will, and its this fear that overrides Piggy and Ralph's common sense and leads Jack to a Hitler-esque rise to power. It's funny how our current situation in this country hasn't changed overmuch from this sad dichotomy - the republicans (Jack) whipping up things to be terrified about and sounding the war drum while the Piggy/Ralph democrats try to keep things calm and rational.
 

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

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

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

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

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

---
See also: WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD (1933)

CinemArchetype #24: The Fisher King

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"It's not a question of where he grips it!" - Knight discussing coconut-importation via swallows- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The cinema has done wrounght or rongt for the Fisher King - wrong and right mixed inextricably together -- until body, mind, and soul bled into each other (and if you doubt Gregory Peck makes an astonishingly great Ahab, just dig the way he elides that sentence); the wound of the fisher king is what sets the search for the holy grail in motion, you silly English a-personne! For without the blood of Christ there can be no cure, and so the land in turn is turned to waste, and the day is wasted if you're not. Up, sluggard, and waste not the drinking day!


The grail in these cinematic contexts I here now present can be read both the ultimate in deliverance and the final abandonment of the futility of hedonistic pursuits. Imagine being, say, a rock star in the early 70s, living a basic porn movie come to life existence--a nonstop drug-fueled orgy--well, if you spent your painful pre-rock adolescence dreaming of such a life, then what ever will you dream of now, old man? Child rearing? To paraphrase Colonel Rutledge, any man who engages in child rearing at your age deserves all he gets! When one's desires are fulfilled beyond measure one is put in the painful position of being forced to realize one's desires were idiotic. Or as Mick Jagger says, "Financially dissatisfied, sexually satisfied, philosophically trying." For he was debauched enough by then to know debauchery is only useful as an artistic tool, a perspective widener, rather than something that builds long-lasting happiness. The alcoholic, like me, the poor bedeviled guy whose whole life is spent on fire with thirst, vampirically chasing the next drink, and dreading the holy day blue laws would be destroyed within weeks if he one day inherited a fully stocked bourbon bank. The fisher king's wound--a mirror to Christ's own wound from the Roman spear in the thigh--reflects this, the agony of achievement without God, for no amount of gold can match a hunk of rock if the lord hath tossed it, so sayeth the fans.

My own spin on the myth is that in reality Christ never would have approved of grail and spear worship, though; when the grail kingdom finds the spear that wounded Jesus, they sayeth therefore let us wrap it in gold and silver and deliver it unto the high priest with all due pomp. Dude, that kind of idolatry runs counter to every word the man said! It's that golden calf again, the people all but begging for another plague of pestilence!

Depending on whether you're reading Wagner or Wolfram Von Eisenbach, Maria Franz, Carl Jung, the fisher king's own wound is from mishandling the spear, or having it stolen by a Muslim warrior (Parsifal's own long lost brother, in one version), or he's just stabbed in a joust with a visiting Muslim knight and the spear and grail come later. There's way too much of that stuff in different forms to go into, but I think there's a separate archetype here for the modern age, for enough of cinema's most memorable patriarchs are effective partly because of some visble wound or weakness that mirrors their nation/family's current pestilence, something that can be symbolically healed and thus heal the land, for the king and the land are one. So we are given an unconscious purpose in life. Gandhi made himself almost die of hunger to give the newly freed Muslims and Hindus a purpose, to stop fighting, a more noble purpose then escalating reprisals.

Watching Lincoln (2012) the other night made me aware that while the fisher king archetype may inspire only a single Parsifal on a hero's journey, what are world and national and any other kind of leaders, as long as they are smart enough to display their wound, their symbolic groin castration, to exploit the Jungian collective unconscious? For true men are not inspired by the heat of the mob, the social contagion of mass hysteria. True men, the best of us, must be reached on personal, mythic level, if we are to risk our lives in defense of something, to walk, unarmed and unblinking, into the bloodied batons of salt mine sentries, or the spray of redneck fire hoses. The leader must activate their warrior confidence, their bravery, their willingness to commence war, or  peace, or reconstruction, even at risk of losing life, happiness, savings account, and freedom. FDR had this gift, as opposed to Hitler or the Emperor of Japan, who brainwashed unquestioning unthinking obedience and hero worship, rather than free-thinking, free-speaking, royalty-free democracy... for those free countries, convincing someone to lay down life and limb in pursuit of your goals takes the kind of touch where a single TV broadcast can galvanize a million individual human minds and hearts, like Martin Luther King, or Kennedy, or Bulworth.


Sorry. So yeah, I'm the fisher king, too. Wounded by age, loss, irrelevance, and my world's a wasteland--Park Slope Brooklyn with its infernal stretches of brownstone front lawn flower bushes, willowy fairy children and their adorable mom with no make-up, organic red kale jutting up, accusingly, from her co-op cardboard half-box, walking in out-of-order duck disarray as I rush past, abhoring their comfort and ease in their own skins. Some of us are born for war, and if we're too lazy to fight we have to make-do with internal vigilance. Tis a poor promoter of peace who can't get their own inner war resolved. We see such people all the time, the seething rageful feminists sneering at any lusty male who just wants to say what's up and love those shorts, the racist furying at his designated hateheart... wait do I mean me? Dear Lord. In hating racists and misandrists misogynists, what am I?

1. Charles Waldron as General Sternwood
The Big Sleep (1946)

"You are looking at the result sir, of a very gaudy life." General Sternwood isn't being self-pitying here, just rueful of the way wild women and whiskey has taken its toll without even leaving him much in the way of pleasant memories. Hell, I am rueful too, and a little fisher king-y myself these hot summer days. So is Bogart, who takes an instant shine to the General, though alas he is only present in this one scene. But once he meets daughter Vivian he realizes he's "beginning to like another one of the Sternwoods." Sternwood is a capital fisher king, inspiring the loyalty of Marlowe almost at once, with the blackmail letters concerning his wild daughters hanging over him like a painful wound from an errant Muslim warrior.

2. Bill Murray as FDR
Hyde Park on the Hudson (2012)

The movie itself is one of those anemic too-pretty art flicks, the style Merchant Ivory inflicted on the world cinema like a cancer of good taste, one where tiresomely reticent hearts and sunshine fields of flowers, arrays of butlers, polished silver, antique cars and lack of anything meaningful dialogue all come together to annoy anyone who doesn't subscribe to the New York Times Sunday section. The only characters with any balls are Bill Murray as FDR and emily mortimer (it seems very disrespectful that the sexuality of the president is once again relegated to an off-the-wrist HJ, poorly and confusingly alluded to --is this proper, to focus on a great man's indiscretions? Of course, because the writer and director have no idea how to film a friendly genuine social interaction or demonstration of Mad Men style masculine authority, the bitch of a mom ordering her son around is just irritable, only Olivia Williams as Eleanor has any spunk, the visiting king and queen are portrayed as two insecure pompous twits, afraid of their own shadow, as if in referencing Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, they now go off to reference The King's Speech and Lincoln (insane shrew of a wife trying to make his few moments of home life as miserable as possible, now that's something feminists should mind). I confess I had to give up after 45 minutes. The music score was unbearably trite, as if rummaging through John Williams most corny and obvious passages while he's in the shower. Laura Linney seems like she's rehearsing for an upcoming audition rather than acting a part. Bill Murray fails to represent the full width and power of FDR, at least as far as I saw, though this is him at his most un-Murray-ish; he seems subsumed in mannerisms though, he makes some impressive monologues while hauling himself from his wheelchair to the bar, but in the end it seems like a painful memory from the eyes of a very bored child stuck watching grown-ups talk, and remembering them only as a bunch of strained, uncomfortable simpletons acting important, and waiting til all the bitchy women finally go to bed so the men can drink and talk and tell jokes. Of course Murray's a fisher king in and of himself, and FDR inspired an entire nation to rise up on a bloody hero's journey from his wheelchair --you don't get more fisher king than that.

3. Nigel Terry - King Arthur 
(after departure of Guinevere and Lancelot) 
Excalibur (1981)

My interpretation of the fisher king might differ from various texts, for many his archetypal connection is to Parsifal, and he is the grail keeper, not the grail needer. Parsifal needs to answer the questions of the grail correctly to win it, but the variants condensing in Boorman's Excalibur posit Arthur as the fisher king, wound not be a Muslim warrior but by lightning thrown from his evil sister, timed with spotting Lancelot shacked up with Guinevere, leaving behind the sword of power - stabbing the earth in his sorrow, and having the sword run through Merlin, all timed to Morganna's betrayal. "The king without a sword! The land without a king!" Percival finds the grail at last by recognizing the fisher king is Arthur, who is synonymous with the land, and the stuff of 'future legend.' Arthur sips from the grail, is restored, retrieves his sword from Guinevere, who has kept it all these years after naked Lancelot bravely ran away away. And when Arthur and his nights ride forth to battle Mordred, the wasteland is turned into abeautiful flowering kingdom as they ride past each tree it bursts into life, a beautiful brave scene scored to De Falla and bursting the stitches of Jungian archetypal symbolism into a paroxyism of perfect inetersection between myth, psyche, music, and cinema. Boorman never made a better movie since.

4. Max Von Sydow as King Osric
Conan the Barbarian (1982)

Conan is the ultimate teenage alienation movie --- If you were my age--15--seeing it in theaters you never forgot it. The dark dad comes and kicks you out of your home life, shackles you to the wheel of woe (school), and you go deep into yourself. When you finally make a friend, the movie's 1/4 way through. Before Subotai shows up there's no banter, no joy, just unrelenting grimness, we feel the release of a lot of tension when Subotai shows up, Conan finally has someone he can talk to, who's not out to kill him. Conan gets a girlfriend after that, and the three of them are off and running, they get brought before the king after robbing a hippie serpent-handling church, and rather than punish them, he laughs. He seems not quite "now grown old and sotted" as Mako narrates, but he does have two babes at his side. And he hates that church, his daughter ran off and joined them. They're like Woodstock if everyone smoked salvia instead of pot (if you don't know the serpentine menace lurking beneath the smoke of the sage, then you won't get that joke).  Osric isn't notably wounded, he has lost his daughter to a shady Eddy Mars of a grifter named Set (James Earle Jones) and wants Conan and company to steal her back. Conan agrees because he's sworn to kill Set (he stole his fatha's swoahd), which right there tells you that Excalibur the mighty phallus is alive and well and we're in a swell realm, and the character of Conan is thus presented with the second father so essential to a fairy tale, and Conan's path to helping Osric is his path to confronting the dark father, Vader-voice made flesh, James Earle Jones.

5. Jack Harvey as Jeffrey's Dad in 
Blue Velvet (1986)

The sudden mortal vulnerability of the father is a terrible thing for any son to witness. Regardless of how mature the son may be, he is never ready for this, as he can't help but realize that he is next. The son will soon be in this exact spot, dying, wounded, vulnerable. The son will then perform the phallus, as it were, enact the father's stiffness. For me, for example, that consists of mirroring my dad's home life, sitting on the couch, drinking, smoking mounds of cigarettes, and yelling at the TV. The severed ear Jeffrey finds is the glimpse of the grail, the start of the breadcrumb trail, the purloined mail that Jeffrey returns to his quail's male. Too much? Soon dad is back to mowing the lawn, and the beauty and banality of Lumberton is restored, all indirectly because of Jeffrey's dogged detectivework, i.e. he's Hamlet if the dad was just in the hospital and the brother sucked on laughing gas.

 6. Charles Durning - Warring Hudsucker
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

There are a lot of fisher king archetypes in the constellations of the Coens, from the Colonel Sternwood-riff of the 'other' Lebowski (also Durning), to George Clooney's machine and oxygen-tube dependent old boss in Intolerable Cruelty, but the best for me is Durning as Waring Hudsucker, because though he may jump out the window he's always present, his death a mystery but a sacrifice, his letter, that would have saved the company or ruined it, the grail in this case, is hidden until Parsifal (Tim Robbins) figures out the riddle, at which case the angel Warring doth appear.


Katherine Hepburn is evoked (flawlessly, at first) by Jennifer Jason Leigh (with dashes of Marilyn Monroe, Vivien Leigh later, even Stanwyck); editors spitting out questions in the manner of the news reeler in Citizen Kane; two bum taxi drivers at the lunch counter do Lady Eve's Stanwyck talking to her mirror while discussing her rivals in snaring the Hopsy; Paul Newman chomping on cigars and showing off his incredible 70 year-old abs, a living connection to the invoked studio era. The only drawback is Tim Robbins' discomfort with playing such a reticent spazz; he seems to amuse the Coens, they give him long loving takes to do his business, but it takes a lot of forgiveness on our parts to stick it out and just appreciate the unified field theory, geometric symbolism, those horrible dreams you have that you're still at your last job and ordered on some unfathomable mission, and Waring's triumphant reappearance, playing ukulele and singing "Comin' Round the Mountain" like he wrote it. He

7. Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab
Moby Dick (1953)

He turns the holy grail myth on its head; instead of a potion to cure his pain he seeks the strong venom of vengeance, but in this case it's far beyond mere retribution, and that's why I think Peck's strange performance is so great, and I fie and foo and even fum those critics who call him a confused Lincoln. I know Welles wanted to play him and wound up playing Father Mapple instead, wherein he does a grand job. I think the combination of a difficult water shoot and difficult Welles would ensure they'd STILL be working on it otherwise. What makes Peck so great is that he seems like a pretty normal, capable guy, but the combination of having been struck by lightning in the past, and losing his leg to Moby Dick has left him with a kind of unholy power. He won't be cured until Moby Dick is dead, so in this case the grail is filled with the blood of the whale, and when it comes, he gets a chance to drink deep ere he departs, if not of the blood then at least the salty water Dick calls home. He in effect becomes part of the etchings around the lip of the grail -- in addition to gold letterings of harpoons and scars, thar he lies, a skeleton caught up in mariner's ropes beckoning... beckoning to drink deep.


8. Daniel Day Lewis - Lincoln (2012)
While Spielberg makes sure Lewis is as penny-and-portrait-and five dollar bill-like as possible, Lewis makes Lincoln gentle and full of biblical anecdotes, speaking in a Walter Brennan voice modulated like the ebb and flow of a leisurely incoming tide, until the zero hour at which point he becomes a paragon of democracy, fire and brimstone all but roaring out of his ears and eyes, and when the canons fire and the celebration hits the streets he becomes gentle once more... ebbing and flowing. This kind of long game rhetorical strategy should of course be in any decent politician's schtickbook. Lincoln also uses his terrible posture, his tall thin geekiness, the ache in his heart over losing his first son and having a bi-polar harridan of a wife. None of this is ever cured by some Parsifal grail. In fact, the bullet from John Wilkes Boothe may have been that grail in a dark hue. Men with mentally ill spiritual drains for wives often succeed at their jobs because they never want to come home. The office becomes their place of comfort and relaxation, they dread weekends and five PM. When he dies in Spielberg's film it's almost a triumph, as if his spirit moves into every five dollar bill, painting, and film about him, his death is a rebirth into a holy legend, one of the greatest of Americans, now free from his crazy wife at last, as democracy steers its lumbering will into existence.

His Fisher King's wound (slavery) effects his kingdom (civil war), and each man must rise to his aid, each a hero's journey intwining into what we call democracy, a giant rugby pile where one man can set a massive change rippling the fabric of history and finally smooth out the god-awfullest rumple even if it's over mounds of the dead. As children we're brought up to think that 1776 was a long, long time ago, and that democracy is solid and inescapable. But it was constantly in jeopardy then, and so is today, both from within and without. In that sense we were a lot like Israel is today; Israel is only 70-ish, right? That's approx. how old America was circa Lincoln. This is how I imagine history, through such leap-frogging. I try to be the fisher king for the seventies, to remember a time of sexual and experimental freedoms, which we have renounced now, the way the free can't wait to return to the yoke.

9. Bill Nighy as Viktor
Underworld (2003)

Vampire Kate Beckinsale's mentor sleeps upside down and vertical in a giant ornate bronze tube and isn't scheduled to be revived for another 200 years. But she needs his help because her lover's a werewolf and her ex is a vampire out to gun him down. This is really big! To her. How dare she wake him up? Does it turn out he's evil and whatnot? Of course it doth. He's got dark secrets, and when your dark secret lord takes a drink it better be Christ-level blood if you wake him early, i.e. from the grail! When your thousands of years old and like to slaughter whole villages and drink everyone's blood, and spared your mentee after killing her family and never told her it was you as she was just a little girl and probably pretty fetching if her adult cheekbones are any indication.

Whatever you might say about the Underworld films, they have a great coherent if dark blue look. There hasn't been a ray of sun anywhere in the series' four film run. Beckinsale is beautiful and can act, as can the mostly Shakespeare company-ish cast, so the only drawback is Scott Speedman whose a little too heavy-lidded WB hunk slackjawed, with that weird mix of constantly wet shoulder length rich kid hippy hair and puffy gym muscles we associate with 80s porn stars, or the kind of guys Syl murders in Species. 

10. Gabriele Ferzetti - Morton
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

If you got into Italian cinema via Leone, you may have wondered why you instinctively didn't like the romantic lead in Antonioni's L'Aventura (1958). That's because Ferzetti was a corrupt railroad baron in Once Upon a Time, a fisher king tycoon gone to seed, crippled by polio and losing control of his body, and his men. He needs his champion to bring him the cure, which in this context is the sea... to know the railroad made it all the way across the country to the Pacific. But this is no Jungian self-actualization but the scourge that is capitalism, big business, ambition and naked greed at the cost of decent wages and fairness. BUT we got the rail road didn't we? Men needed to be corrosively driven. Apparently their odyssey started out pretty well back east, where towns are towns, but out here in the endless wastelands of Monument Valley it's a bit like Aguirre Wrath of God or Apocalypse Now, only the darkness-infused hearts can survive. In the end, Morton has to settle for a painting of the sea, and a nice little Morricone death cue, and a few final good-by bullets from his angel of death, a brilliant Henry Fonda. Such is life, not every fisher king, even if he's evil, never gets to live through his own wound's cure.

 13. Burl Ives - Big Daddy - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof  (1958)
(from Mendacity A-Go-Go):
The family basement is packed with souvenirs and statues from a Cook's tour to Europe Big Daddy took with his wife, who takes after the mendacity side of the family. What could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole basement becomes a mythic underworld, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king, and cobwebs on tall lamps draped to resemble stalagmites. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most - genuine feeling and human love. And you know that to Williams a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. mmmm-hmmm. 
I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a fellow aging human, ever trying to escape his future by ignoring his present, just as you do, and if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made. Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!
12. Jeff Bridges - Jack
The Fisher King (1991)  
Man, if I wanted to see an alcoholic artist slacker in the late 80s taking advantage of the kindness and fierce protective instinct of a good Italian-American business owner, I would just look at my scrap book! Twice! That's why I was happy to see Jeff Bridges finally becoming.... Jeff Bridges, as you can plainly see above. He does a great job of the slow transformation, with Robin Williams acting super crazy, very well, in prime 'who's crazier, the crazy guy or the 'sane' one in an insane world?" Terry Gilliam format. Williams gives an interesting version of the fisher king myth, where the grail is finally granted the king via a fool rather than all the searching knights. Of course this is Williams, making our friend Jeff, the dude, the fisher king. Look at him there, above, aren't you proud? Grail achieved! 

Death, Italian Style: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA

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"Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day.
Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."
-Camille Paglia

"Son? I wish I had one! He's a bum!"
--Mama Mantana (Scarface)

 You can argue that gangster cinema began at Warners with Cagney and Robinson, but a few pre-code masterworks aside, the gangster never hit his grandiose peak, never became an Italian art for an Italian form of criminality, until his Italian-American story was directed by an Italian-American. Robert Evans knew this, and so insisted on Coppola for The Godfather. This may sound defamatory, but the Italian-American Anti-Defamation league was founded by one of the heads of the five families, Joe Colombo, so who can you truss? Me, ass who. I mean this as a compliment, for with an Italian director you ideally have the sense of Italian flair and artistry, the Scorsese drive, the Coppola beauty, and the De Palma opera. 

The Italian-Americans don't all necessarily love opera of course, but it's emblematic of their artistic genes, right up there with the poetry of Dante and the Apollonianisms of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the masochism of vivid analysis of each centurion lash upon the wrecked torso of Christ so inherent in Catholicism. All this and more pumps, drives, the flagellant Italian heart, which stretches back in its beating history through countless decadent Roman orgies. Thus the murders in Argento and De Palma and Scorsese and Coppola play out like operatic fugues of the damned. They present characters who are laid, who are adults, men, who sometimes joke around but never about business, and when violence occurs to or through them it's always painful. They see death coming, and they make sure their opponents get the same luxury. There's a feeling of what's really involved with killing people with Italian and Italian-American directors, the way few non-Italians can capture. And as in all the good De Palma films, in Scarface, death may be cinematic and beautiful at times but it also hurts and no one dies easy. His characters get time to register the horror of realizing their whole life is about to end, suddenly and with no good reason, and so much left undone. In normal gangster films people just get shot, blammo! But when being true to Italian operatic schematics you need time to die - in slow motion, while Ennio Morricone strings play a semi-mocking eulogy overhead and you look at your killer with a slow turn from pleading to fear to anger and oaths. And if you can't make the jump from fear to anger, the way Lopez can't, for example, then you don't even deserve the top shelf bullets.


It makes sense then that De Palma has no real interest in capturing the Latin rhythm in his take on Miami, filling the score with the boss Italian synths of Giorgio Moroder, and the gaudy architectures of the Italian disco. Hawks' 1932 Scarface bounced around with merry good-cheer and mocktalian comedy-team rhythm that made a stunning counterpoint to the violence. Paul Muni showed that thing we all love about our Italian-American friend/s, that their good natured life force is always on, never wavering regardless of circumstance; only ever half-conscious of how humorous they are; even when breaking your thumbs for not paying your debts they can joke around and make you feel like a regular guy and ask you how's your mother. And if you dated one then you know how nurturing they are, cradling your head when you throw up, and only crying and freaking out when they realize you are never going to stop drinking long enough to be much of a take-home-to-the-parents style boyfriend.

Scarface's ice princess blonde, played as a bundle of nerves snaking themselves through sheer brass will into the shape of a svelte cat-eyed bombshell (Michelle Pfeiffer, making the grade) is the opposite of the Italian girlfriend, the kind of woman an Italian man eager to transcend himself might go for. If you can get her to laugh, a woman like that? Ah Manolo, she break her contract with Lopez for you. Plus, she's forbidden. That's the boss's lady, ogay? But Tony values only that which he cannot have. If scoring the boss's wife off him and taking over the whole organization still leaves him hungry, he has to look inward, towards that hot sister, the final taboo but for a man who hasn't seen her in a long time? zazoom! He break his contract with the social order for her. 


As Tony, Pacino is filmed first in long shots, his musky tan face paint dripping off when he's hot or stressed or being bathed in Angel's blood with a gun to his head. In the early scenes where he's bluffing his way up into Lopez's good graces he seems to fold in on himself; his terrible bangs and loud shirts, short frame and hairy arms, make him seem small and stiff, a peasant trying to cover up his innocence with tough talk and bravado. De Palma's camera doesn't circle but rather observes him from on high; he seems like a freshman on his first day of high school eager to be accepted by the cool kids but determined not to show it. As Tony increases in stature and drive, De Palma's camera moves in for medium shots at the club table, such as the shakedown from the narcotics cop, and Pacino quickly but imperceptibly mutates as well, oscillating back and forth between tough guy killer and loyal clown, gradually losing the clown aspect along the way and replacing it with self-absorbed money-obsessed paranoiac.

We learn from books like The Devil's Playground that De Palma knows something about cocaine, and if you look at this movie and the bloated satire of Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Untouchables (1987), as a trilogy, you get a saga of desire, loss, and how empires might be built on the underbelly of America's endless attempts to inflict the morals of senator's wives onto America through prohibition and unconstitutional drug laws, not to mention the importance of not getting high on one's supply that's understood so deeply you can feel De Palma's good judgment slipping away as the film goes on, as it does for Tony (In Untouchables, Connery is shot at almost as soon as he pulls a shot from his stashed bottle of Scotch, for example). And like Tony, and Tom Hanks in Bonfire, De Niro's massive wealth in Untouchables as Capone (the original Scarface) unlimited wealth doesn't change one's roots, so much as gaudies everything up and gradually sucks off the bulk of that amiable life force - so you're getting shaved by your old barber but in a beautiful palatial space under twisted dark manly flooring. This is wealth spent by the man, to realize his aesthetic, not the rich woman's drive for respectability, flowers, white tiles and dinner parties with all the best people. This is the nouveau riche bachelor in full flower, wherein the dark sleek look of the Corleone compound expands outwards, forward and back through ripples in time. 


To get back to the sister, Tony doesn't really understand the way desire for her as merely a hot young stranger is mixed with a mix of brotherly love, paternal instinct, and narcissism. I know the effect of seeing your relative whom you've only seen every five or six years suddenly showing up in your neighborhood as a bona fide hottie, your own flesh and blood; it's so so wrong, and for the mentally aberrant, like Tony, it's the ultimate. Just as it was for Caligula, another crazy Italian powermonger. Yeah, I know Pacino and De Palma may be Italian, but Tony's supposed to be Cuban, and as I say that's part of the problem with Pacino's performance: Michael Corleone seemed uncomfortable with the mantle of Italian-ism in ways he wasn't about killing but Tony Montana is uncomfortable in just about anything, except shouting in such a way as you're as gradually worn down by it as Elvira.

Despite all these problems, Tony lives on today, 20 years later, as a kind of living god. As a character he has aged less well than the the emulators might think, however. If there's something heroic about a last stand it's tempered by his stupidity, his blindness to his monitors, his letting his security team get slaughtered, his own impulse killing of Manny, and of the assassin in New York City, and refusal to accept responsibility for any of his actions.  His final shoot-out can be read academically as a zero point tantrum of grief and self-absorption. We know he was in the Cuban army and in jail and has an assassin tattoo, but we only see him kill a few people until the big finale and it's inferred he's killed no one else on his own time; there's no montage of shootings and take-over violence that we got in the original. Instead the montage is of bling and success: wedding, tiger, money counting, a dated synth anthem "Take it to the Limit," and success but then--once he has enough gaudy toys and can get no higher--he quickly stalls out. Mired in cocaine and confusion, he pulls the plug on his existence by blowing the hit, letting his coked-up ego and repressed love of kids and guilt over his mama--"sensitive weakness"--knock him into a winner-lose-all blowing up in his face world fugue.

Fade to Black, from sun to setting sun image to dark marble death
Scarface is one of the few 1980s films that comes out looking less expensive on widescreen. Sets seem to end just short a few feet from the side edges of the screen and the backdrops often look like freestanding dry-wall with cheap wallpaper hanging over the top. Loepz's BMW dealership back office with its tropical sunset wallpaper (above, middle) cuts off into a blackness on every side, with the setting Miami sun wallpaper giving off that flat chintzy feel of a direct-to-video porn film. We start with close-ups of his face enduring grilling over  his tattoos by an off screen Charles Durning Immigration cop, then crowded sweaty scenes of dishwashing and stabbing, twilight phone booths, and the gradual closing down around him, there are few places that are seen twice in the film, and fewer actors as the scenes tighten up in a forward Apollonian arc that begins to wither into a fecund limpness, sunshine devolving to images of sunsets, then marble night, before the final red hellscape. The architecture even starts to resemble an Italian horror film, with all the black marble (a symbol of death like the 'X' markings in the 1932 version) and the gaudiness of the sprawling jacuzzi bathroom, and then, for the death knell, a room with marble so black that when the messed up Gina comes in with her flimsy negligee and gun, she's not unlike the fish-eyed demoness at the climax of Suspiria and then, finally, say hello to my liddle fren!



But this crazy "Fuck me Tony" scene is where De Palma truly comes into his own - mixing that Argento color and slowed down time with the queasy sense of post-modern sexual displacement of his master Hitch, but not until this final bloody love scene does he find the pitch black death rattle wide-eyed in the face of horror wit that Hecht and Hawks did, maybe even more, for with them the preparation for facing death was great and then the actual death a bit of a joke, De Palma's deaths stay as keenly felt and faced as they are in the grimmest of Italian horror films. 

The big separation line between Scarface and Italian horror is that death is where the gangster film would stop, but horror doesn't stop with death, it has a few more places to go. And the brutal circumstance, the violence of going out, is everything. If you look at American horror of the same approximate time, death doesn't dawdle. Even most slasher films, the American ones, like Halloween, are really about the stalking and POV camera: when death comes it's almost a relief, since as I pointed out in "A Clockwork Darkness", we now know where the killer is (on the other end of the knife) there's no more worrying from where and when he will strike, and no onscreen death can match our dread of the potential for it. But Argento's murders, like those in De Palma films, are the exceptions to this: the moment of the first bullet, stab, or slash doesn't necessarily disrupt the previous stalking, one flows organically into the next, for the death throes might go on for a full aria of blows, near escapes, feeble cries for help, and chances to look up pitifully at the uncaring sky or (as in Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling) busy highway.

And architecture plays another part in prolonging the sense of helplessness. In the Escher-covered apartment building where the first murder goes down in Suspiria, the multiple reflective frosted windows, the bizarre wallpaper, strange vertical angles, unholy lighting, and the howling, strange music and unusual angles, the sorts of things De Palma creates by nature, wedging it into any shot not nailed down by a pre-set story.

Top: Suspiria / Bottom: Bonfire of the Vanities
A filmmaker who can recognize his own mom-haunted apron-string slashing anger as something other than a source for shame, of "yes, dear, sorry" kind of continual apology to both women and the social order in general, who can just say good-bye to fear and doubt and the sense of pointlessness and say hello to their little friend --this is balls. These ballsy directors can go farther into the sad twisting architecture of the last breath, the byzantine nightmare realm where this world becomes nightmarish right before it disappears. Since life is more palpable to the Italian than, say, the Swede, death is as well.

Many of us from the northern skies, the Nordic lands, keep death away by doing the same for life. It's easy, with nerves dilated, eyes closed, got tits, need a bra, to avoid ever thinking about it. Italians, with their open caskets and operas of fabulous grief, vengeance, feel perhaps more rooted to the earth, to the inescapability of death, for though some may avoid it like a sore subject, it is there, in your face, and it's coming closer. He who chooses hell is, alone among all others, truly free. He looks at the modern reverence for life, health, the family, and winces. He knows these gym rats and granola moms are all just scaling heights to nowhere, preserving their mortal husk as if some entomology award is immanent. Deference to health, to government, and most of all to women ("yes dear, you're always right") overtakes them like a disease. As men, especially, we are trained to apologize for our own measly drives, to follow some vague plan of being 'good' or even 'true' that we never made, ever working to compensate for our inexcusable appendage. Missing the brass ring circle of light on the swim up out of merry-go-round abyss and winding up trapped in Lucifer's pool filter, all we had in this world was balls, but this world didn't want them, and now our balls are yours, Cook's Tours. Take them to the limit. 


Cruel Intentionlessness: THE CANYONS (2013)

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Among the sex-drenched sights and retro-slick sounds of the The Canyons are, Lohan's voluptuous, bruised body aside, interiors and exteriors of closed, water-damaged cinemas and a stroll through a near-empty Amoeba video section, and lots of talk about how roles in nonstarter slasher films are coveted by two bit rent boys looking to make a dollar other than through d-list beefcake centerfold shoots. When two poor people fall in love in this environment, look out, because their current partners--sugar daddies, girlfriends with cushy PR jobs, and rich trustfund Ellisian psycho studs in glass houses--won't be too happy, and they're just the types to do much about it.


But we're not renting this film off cable pay-per-view for any of that, only for Lindsay Lohan, resuscitating her career from its woozy downward spiral, which means she's launching herself off the bottom of the pool via short zero budget shoot off the backs of establishedly disreputable names like Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis, the way Robert Downey Jr. launched off similarly debauched-and-guilty-about-it James Toback's no budget Two Girls and a Guy back in 1997.

The sleaze element is a carryover, because Lohan was all geared up to there for her nonstarter Inferno (see my analyses where I compared her to Downey back in 2011, here). Kudos to her for the ease with which she sets about displaying her now somewhat sex-and-drunkenly-falling-down-a-lot bruised and fleshy body, which seems to oscillate in weight over the course of what is supposed to be a few days; bruises come and go, and her arm hair shines in the sun like a twirly halo, but her hair looks great (except when she has it all pinned up in a gross bun in the beginning, which I found to be the most obscene thing in the film and is unpictured in this post). It's a daring display, a reminder reel that erratic behavior on set has nothing to do with final results. Wilder hated working with Monroe for the same reasons Lohan gets such a bad rap these days, but he worked with her more than once, because in the end the final product is the only measurement.


But the film itself adds up to little. Director Paul Schrader's been subjecting us to post-Calvinist morality slippage since the 70s, this being the man who gave us Taxi Driver (1974), Hardcore (1978), American Gigolo (1980) and Auto Focus (2002), each in their own way about the evil lure of pornography, daughter-stealing, taking Cybil Shepherd to 'the movies,' and a beloved TV WW2 sitcom star's slow fall from amateur pornographer to a messy murder victim in a Hawaii hotel room (a result of a Hawaiian Brady Bunch-style curse?). Ellis has of course given us the source novels for American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less than Zero; they are the right choices for a film that claims to be all up in on the disaffect of youth, but which generation's youth is that? As Scharder said in a Salon interview:
My generation — we thought we could make a difference and make the world better. Bret’s generation thought they could make money. I don’t think that this current generation has any real aspirations. They’re making money, but I don’t think they’re that crazy about money. The characters make movies and they don’t like movies that much. They’re hooking up and they don’t like that much. The difference is, my parents and I always believed life would be better for the next generation. The current generation believes life is going to be worse for the next generation. It’s such a change for the future of humanity — the future is not something, now, that guarantees a better life."
That's pertinent of course, but you run the risk of being made to seem, what is the word, prurient? I like that word because it encompasses both desire and condemnation, like the old pastor who works himself up into a sexual froth ranting about some girl's halter top. Or there was that film by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Dreamers (2003), wherein you wonder who old Bernardo thinks he's fooling by having these gorgeous naked young entwined beings haunting the la Cinémathèque Française and pretending they can understand Cahiers du Cinema circa May '68 and otherwise justifying (in his mind) the big budget version of Auto Focus-style leering. At least the guys are just as exploited here as the women here, as befits the semi-invisible hand of boymongers like Gus Van Sant (who appears as a therapist) and Larry Clark (Kids) who, regardless of what you may think of them as dirty old people, have made some great films about their boy toy obsessions and seem to have bothered to plum the depths, such as they are, of the skater and homeless kid cultures the way most do not, including Schrader and Ellis.


There's no May 68 to defend the actions here, of course, and Lohan isn't a young thing so much no more - she's only 27 or so but the constant hounding of the paparazzi furies have left her as scarred as a hot bitch Orestes. Even so, by 27 you should be beyond letting yourself get sucked into menage-a-quatres to flatter the closeted vanity of your rich loser boyfriend, for whom obsession means thinking you're inventing sexual mind games by acting like a character from a pre-revolutionary Paris novel. And having Lohan just be one of an ensemble of cretins trapped in their downward spirals of apathetic oversexed and drugged ennui should do either one of two things: be a turn-on or turn-off (Two Girls was both) or far enough over the line to be either profound or traumatic or both (Two Girls was that, too), i.e. really good, bad or ugly (Two Girls was at least the last two), and this film is none of the above. It strives for meta resonance with the empty cinema shots as comments about how nobody goes to see movies in the theater anymore ("premieres don't count") and showing the subterfuge that arises when all the characters can't stop arranging intrigues on the cell phones long enough to even realize where they are. Now that they even watch their own messages on "Text TV" why even watch the film they're in?

James Deen, and a portrait of... Herbert Marshall?
The lead douche is a porn star named James Deen, and the arrogance implied in his galling porn name (unless he grew up on Deen St. and had a gay cat named James) means he thinks he is pretty special. And hey, he does a grand job, of course you can't really do a bad one when in a pinch you can just seem pretty vacant and hold a pose. But he never relies on that, so bravo, James. The film's best scenes are strained bouts of lying about where they've been as we're meant to muse on how sharing each other in bed together is okay but actually seeing someone else on the side is unforgivable, and lying about it grounds for psychotic tantrums. But this is nothing new, again, or particularly traumatic. It was a similar weakness that brought Valmont/Sebastian down, and there's not even a cathartic Verve Pipe-scored coke-cross bust!


I remember partying with these sorts of people in the 90s. I could feign strained poses of Adonis-like disaffect with the best of them, but now I can finally admit how miserable I was, my every pithy comment a dying flutter of faux-carefree flirty abandon. Just because you can capture that misery in a film about the younger generations doesn't mean you're inventing it. And especially with the excellent retro-electro tripahol score by Broken Social Scene lynchpin Brendan Canning moodily pretending like the 00s never happened, we have to take some old people's word for it that kids are still putting out for bracelets, so to speak. (and was it LL's court orders that ensured we only see one little coke bump snorted over the course of the whole film? Take it from me, orgies are impossible without coke, or "e" as the kids call it now.

I don't miss stepping over the myriad entwined forms on my loft floor on my way to the bathroom at four in the morning during the days I was getting sober while my roommate was getting into coke, trying to sleep to the incessant thud of terrible Euroclash from his in-house turntables, but I do miss places like Amoeba music and good theaters with no bedbugs or texting-addicts. But those plastic things they couch the DVDs in to stop you stealing them always left my sad fingers grubby, and since I tended to go there when I was lonesome and needed to get out of the house I associate them now with the depression that Effexor took away for good back in '04, and I have Amazon Prime, and cinemas now have that unsettling feeling you're not in a 'theater' so much as a giant bed, dreaming a shared dream with deformed fellow earthlings who have lives and bodies and gastrointestinal problems all their own, which they now carelessly reveal to their fellow audience members, accentuating how we here in the trenches are vastly different from the gods and goddesses out in LA, especially in The Canyons. These kids look like they all smell divinely.


The references to no one seeing movies anymore, Schrader's own quote that kids today are making movies but don't like them, and the closed cinema cutaways all allegedly add up to something in Canyons, but if you saw this at one of its festival screenings these things would make no sense. Luckily you can probably go on your TV right now and rent it off the box for $5.99 and then watch it on your computer while trolling through online dating sites, and then groove the meta; but then you're still going to want to get out of the house, walk around the block and then come home, just to feel you've done something. My girl and I were going to go see The Conjuring up the street at the Pavilion, but we rented this instead, by a click of a button, for 1/4 the price, and no smells or blue screen peripheral annoyance or itchy feeling causing you to burn your clothes and take a second shower afterwards. This is the future of cinema, where the cell phone is the weapon of choice as well as the entertainment, which is to say, distraction... but from what? When you forget even what you're using sex, drugs, and intrigue to escape from, you're in real trouble. In case you're not aware of that, Paul Schrader is here to help. Fucking Calvinists!

Luckily there are still a few demographics who go to the movies to keep them in business - kids who still live with their parents and need to get the hell away from them as often as possible. As you sit down as a family to rent The Canyons be glad you don't have to live alone, hustling from one easy mark to the other, adrift in your world of decadent luxury and meaningless sex. Even working on a movie, it seems, is no escape from the inescapable pull... of rehab. Stay with your parents, forever, so at least you have something clear cut to escape from. 


The Tick-Tock Initiation: PHANTASM (1978)

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Tick-Tockality: (pronounced tick-tock-AL-itee): The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of slowing down real time, originally created by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours or less until the climactic anticipatory moment, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. and the blood red setting sun disappears much more slowly than we are used to, creating a sense of inescapable dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness, thus capturing the primal fear of cavemen that survives in all children and some adults (i.e. the nightlight)
Maybe you need to have gone to drive-ins lot as a kid to understand the weird power of the setting sun and how the onset of darkness meant the start of a terrifying initiation, depending on the film being shown first. We'd congregate by the swing set, bolstering our courage while discussing other terrifying films, the R-rated ones none of us could see. The sun took forever to disappear and we'd fret. Our fear fueled our imaginations until these R-rated movies glistened with vertigo pelvic dropping terror in our minds.

At home, older, in the digital age, one must improvise, go the other route from a crowded audience of scared teenagers, and go it alone, at 3 AM, with headphones and a darkened room so anything could be right in the room with you and you'd never see or hear it.

I mention this because prior to Phantasm (1979),Don Coscarelli was shooting children's movies, like Kenny and Co, which I started to watch awhile back and found pretty good. Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace, the kind where children are eaten, kicking and screaming. It was okay if we weren't old enough to see the film, the drive-in trailer was creepy and mysterious enough to tug at our lower chakras like serpentine gravity. But we kids loved being scared of these films, we had never been fooled by the illusory sameness of modern civilization. We swam in the wide-awake fear that separates the final girl from her oblivious pack, the fear that made us able to see danger lurking even in the smallest corner of the room, to discern the malevolent spider invisible to adult eyes.


Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand imitations, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on a fun, subconscious tick-tockable level. They just showed the topography--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the full inherent sense of vulnerability and unease in the everyday home environment of their target audience, which takes a good, patient, wise, talented filmmaker who's studied the masters, Hawks and Ford, to learn how to connect shots and dialogue to create a seamless inexorable flow, from which a sense of real community and thus danger can occur. It's that real-time-or-slower pacing that Coscarelli captures, the way autumn nights come early and twilight lingers forever in a vanishing orange glow while the sides of the screen concede to fuzzy darkness, huge twisting trees looming over empty streets, vulnerable yet imposing suburban houses with tons of windows and that incessant but patient score like the slow unwinding of a life.


Like Suspiria, Halloween, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Phantasm has found a new cult in the digital age, studied and adored in endless pauses and rewatchings, none of which was possible in 1979. A masterpiece of fuzzy horror - meant to grab you even through a drive in windshield, loud enough to be heard through a fuzzy window box, Phantasm is durable, and now can be used to weirden out a self-curated all-night horror binge, the perfect choice, I've recently found, after JC's Assault on Precinct 13 and before The Fog. Maybe critics who don't like this film never watched it at five AM while coming out of a K-hole. Well, they should, because part of the genius of Coscarelli's whole mythos is that below all the seeming illogic and dream surrealism in the whole series (there's been three sequels.... so far) is an underlying well-thought out mythos based on a kid's twisted notion of what happens after we die, connected to the legitimate fear of some alien conspiracy theorists (i.e. David Icke, Nigel Kerner) that our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light. The Tall Man creates underlings by separating body and soul from his corpses, crushing the bodies down to survive in his home dimension's deeper gravity and then transporting them through a tuning fork gateway (the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, underlying the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states). 



A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people
"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."
"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)
I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs, perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted) truth of life after death comes creepily cohered into an impressive mausoleum guarded by balls in the middle of some small American town where the vegetation creeps like darkness at the edges of the screen, little jawas scuttle behind gravestones so fast you wonder if you even saw them, and the Carpenter-esque syths haunt the bones, carrying some of the Halloween dread within the simple slow-build melodics. Because it's all one massive, crazy dream, the sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of being cheated one gets from films like American Werewolf in London with the Nazi werewolf dream, for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' For example, in the first film, Mike stops off at a neighborhood fortune teller to consult about his fear's brother Reggie is going to leave him behind in this creepy town. The old lady makes a mysterious box appear before Mike, one of those Dune fear-control tests. The lady's granddaughter is a cute blonde surfer-looking chick. Dude, bust a move! But he pussies out, pays and leaves, and you can tell he goes there a lot, on his bike. Dude, this is some Argento fucked up shit Carpenter would never mess with ('til later), the way the supernatural might exist hiding in plain sight merely a few doors over from your boring life.


Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. We see the myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit Hell cops, fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after his kills, nursing the bad habit that had gone out of style with the bombing of Last Action Hero. Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo... and thank God.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV
Reggie, god of tuning forks
As a guy who has now seen this movie at the age of every character but one.... the last and final one, I feel it now deep in my coil when the last one says at the end of Part III, "it's never over..." Revisiting the series this past week I felt the chill remembrance of when my family (including my then-alive dad) last visited my 97 year-old grandmother for the holidays. She was in a rest home so we rode out the usual Xmas Chicago storm at the O'Hare Sheraton (see my 2007 post from there) a vast, impressive edifice, startlingly empty, the wind howling outside, coyotes ranging across the highways, and impressively inescapable through the giant front windows, and with my dad drinking and staving off his prostate cancer, and grandmother 97 but still able to drive him crazy by merely taking an hour to find a single photo. That horror, the horror, Marley's Ghost Inescapable chain, connecting us all, inextricably along a line of people sitting on a speeding boat, the great grandmother and grandfather already over the side, the chain running out, my dad next, then me, then adieu, "it's never over," though, both the feeling of being keel-hauled underneath the proud tramp steamer of age and time is never over, the powerlessly sliding along the conveyer belt towards the buzz saw. No 'finally over' cowboy for any of us, ever.

I have to live with this horror of death because the thing that would eliminate the horror would kill me even quicker and more horribly. Booze, man. Booze, the magic elixir of temporary immortality, that makes adults useless as protectors but great as heros, and brings a nation low under its wondrous heel.

The Tall Man ages
But the beauty of Phantasm is that it's frozen on the surf of childhood, capturing the biggest fear of all for the young, being left utterly alone. We want parents around who leave us alone, but we want to be able to yell for them if we get scared. When there's no one to yell for, no one but the bogey man, that's our worst fear.  Mike's parents are dead but he has a cool big brother. The dad is dead of course but a dad in a horror film was very rare by 1979, and if there were dads around they were drunks, or mean, or scoffing at the supernatural, even when--as in Poltergeist--the supernatural is staring them in the face (see my look at Craig T. Nelson as the transitory figure between good 70s and bad 80s dads here). I had both a dad and a mom but I still rode out the slasher craze years (80-82) terrified to even go upstairs alone. I had to insulate myself with DC WW2 comics, old radio shows, and droning fans and air purifier, to drown out the deafening silence, in which my ears attune ever more precisely as I sleep, until like Roderick Usher I can feel every mouse-sized slasher's scraping, even two buildings away. I like the city because it excuses small apartments with big locks, doors meant to survive any amount of kicking, where the windows stretch far higher than any automaton would climb.

Phantasm would be too wild and weird to trily scare like Halloween were it not for Coscarelli's absorption of Carpenter's method as opposed to his madness. They both are auteurs able to understand what 95% of horror filmmakers never do, how to create the sense of something being at stake, which most filmmakers presume means backstory, origin issues, if you will. Coscarelli and Carpenter know that we need to see whole uninterrupted minutes elapse in their presence, to synchronize ourselves with their rhythms, rather than jumping around in eight different directions like so many horror movies today. No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens. Carpenter and Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house is free of parents at which time, checking in on the phone with each other, etc., it all rolls slowly into late at night, and that's the tick-tock momentum, it's a mirror to the ominous quiet late afternoon that is suddenly black night, as in the scenes with Laurie and Annie driving to their babysitting destinations in Halloween. Without that level of tick-tock involvement there can't be the catharsis. Without the feeling of helplessness engendered by watching people oblivious to danger, there can't be a relish of that helplessness's opposite, the empowered joy of driving with your older brother in his '71 'Cuda with a shotgun in your lap. No wonder that kid got so easily talked into becoming his older mentor's sniper down in DC! I remember feeling invincible going to Phillies games with my best buddy Alan's cool older brother. I felt brave, even when he took us to see my first R-rated movie, Outland (1981) even though I'd been warned about the exploding space miners I was brave, because with this older brother figure around, nothing could harm us, not even a movie.


Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they. And their first R-rated movie gore is where they benefit from that suffering training. And maybe at worst a kind of group fascism erupts from this boys against the monsters philosophy, ala the 80s or Hitler's Germany. I would have followed that older brother anywhere. My generation was unique in that respect, unique because in our parent's youth R-rated films didn't even exist, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. But in the window before then, just knowing this stuff was out there, at theaters, that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop thrill in our spines. The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing two-hand touch with the neighbor kids. No amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with the dread of what we had imagined these movies would be like. Instead of a build-up of dread and then catharsis we had the catharsis first, and then a long period of sustained if low-level depression, as if we had already seen too much, and were losing something we barely knew was there in the first place: our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind
This might be okay on some levels, but what we've lost is the rite of initiation, which gives symbolic end to the fearful skittery angst of childhood through one final endurance test, which turns out to be realizing fear of the unknown vastly outweighs fear of the revealed. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so it's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis, just one more scene in a never-ending media barrage. You might be building a tolerance, but for what? Maybe it will pay off in the end, but there's no ceremony to mark your courage, the way seeing an R-rated horror film did. It was something you could boast of for weeks to come in grade school. It was meant as a communion of sorts, something you saw in a big group, daring and bolstering the more timid in the crew.

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but most frat boys were smart enough to know it was really about engendering the fear of what the hazing might entail that was important, if there's no fear there's nothing, no guts, no feeling of transformation, no need for sticking place-screwed courage. Generating fear helps us escape the shitbird plywood barriers of self, to realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place, and now that we know there's no one behind the curtain so to speak, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see also: Dazed and Confused.) Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 
Though they never specify which small town Phantasm goes down in first, it's awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, all conspiring into the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, not a soul to ask directions as the road darkened down deep valleys and twisted around corners dotted with cobwebbed 'under construction' pylons; followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and are grateful to see another friendly face, grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countrysides know. You feel delivered unto Him by the smell of gas, a uniformed friendly lady cashier behind a counter, who takes Visa and calls you "hon," instead of a demented yokel chewing tobacco and standing too close and grudgingly peeling off your change from his roll of limp singles. No offense.


To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies used electronic synthesizer sounds, like Morricone, Nicolai, and Carpenter, and in doing so created far more dread with a single keyboard than a dozen John Williams-ish overthought orchestras. Return to the time the R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, a time kids were all master storytellers, describing events from films unseen but heard about from someone else, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he tries to sleep the night after his family's first funeral, and keeps embellishing the details of the day at the graveyard; it comes to us already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, and yet it still feels true.



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NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up. 

Cinq au sept vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL

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Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night it was presumed someone would be pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more you try to control something the more paranoid you get, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their misguided sexually repressed fear leads this warped idea that men change into monsters as soon as bedtime looms, as parodied in this hilarious 2008 SNL sketch:



If someone did sleep over in a post-code film, for example if there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, we can never go right to the next day or morning, the scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR you could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking, and later that night, and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving nonetheless, later that night, and leave room for reasonable doubt. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch.

 

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossip next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Taliban rule?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would do with no idea of what's involved. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But this baster Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and sex maniacs to think something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.


In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent directors and screenwriters (excuse the redundancy) use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience. Here are some worthy examples:


BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. As the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal, hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies sex.  And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they:" the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? Yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to control things, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression, a flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex he forces her to sign the statement against her husband. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly - one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards-- and then move on with the story. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that blackness to an entire film.


LOLITA (1962)
A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)


LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s. (Wilder was a enraptured fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank stud Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenadng gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull boyfriend, homework, etc.


I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq au sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and meeting the wife for a 7:30 dinner. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:
Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)
Damn straight, age-conscious world, you suck! I've been the subject of malicious gossip on the subject -- May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than that - an older man is a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired).

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old girlfriend (I dimly recall, a friend of an old girlfriend) and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq au sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...


 In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from or be rejected by if they ever actually found. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're one screwed-up nation of hungry ghosts? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq au sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.



The Slashological Strata of Fate: HALLOWEEN to THE TERMINATOR (1978-1984)

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The early 80s --being the decade of the slasher craze --was for many impressionable, alienated teens like myself, a time of great personal fear, paranoia, isolation, and in our frightened half-sleepy state, a budding militarism. Even if you never went to see a Friday the 13th in its original run, and thought those who did were Philistines, the type who got killed for sex with their cheap dates rather than the virginal nerds awake the mundane despair all around, --a 'final girl' before the phrase was coined. The slasher films were an inescapable part of the landscape: TV commercials, newspaper print ads relentlessly ogling cowering girls from the perspective of killers; and it was before internet, so we couldn't really find like-minded people, the dungeon masters and Atari nerds beyond our immediate circle of societal rejects. While we suffered for the women, we sneered at humanity in general, and how sex and booze made them sloppy and indifferent to their own self preservation. We'd later get sloppy too, but for now, age circa 12-16, the borderline to such knowledge was heavily patrolled by a legion of masked, silent, shambling butcher knife wielding, unkillable automatons.We who saw the line dared not cross. Instead we carefully quietly armed ourselves for future battles, preparing for the time when we would need to open fire on the shambling army of Jasons and Michaels due any moment.


The automaton killer who won't die visiting suburbia en masse originated in the scared imagination of anyone who saw Halloween, which was everyone, really. I hadn't even seen it but I was traumatized from when Siskel and Ebert showed on the special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to "Dead Teenager" movies, wherein they taught me to turn my queasy dread onto outraged feminism, where it would remain until I read Carol Clover's Men Women and Chainsaws and learned that was the whole point...

Feminism or not, we all thought of what we would do if Michael or Jason or some version thereof came home, and the thought he was never going to stop coming held us in a giddy grip that made it necessary to keep the TV or radio on, and a nightlight on, while sleeping, to drown out the scrapings of trees against the house, and the creaking footsteps we couldn't be sure we heard. We had butcher knives stored under our mattresses, the 80s equivalent of duct tape and a flashlight. I learned after watching Battle of the Bulge one night that just thinking about WW2 erased my fear, stopped me thinking about slashers. If that's not an encapsulation of the rise of 80s action movie militarism I don't know what is. So, retrace the steps and wonder... did Halloween cause the Iraq war?


The thing you have to remember is Laurie Strode didn't have a Laurie Strode before her to teach her to not drop the knife by the killer just because he's temporarily playing dead. Myers was the first of this type, this emerging breed of mute, indestructible automaton killers patrolling suburbia and Jamie Lee doesn't yet know he's got nine hundred lives and you need to take drastic steps like defenestration, or what I eventually determined was an unbeatable and less messy course of action: thumb removal (no thumbs, no strangling or holding weapons, all he can do is lunge and snap like a turtle).


Every kid had their own late night strategy for tackling a Michael Myers / Jason variety killer and in hindsight it's clear Laurie Strode's ignorance was the root force for the 80s action movie surge. The new heroes killed their enemies eight dozen ways at once, obliterated them. Sometimes they even tangled with indestructible psychos personally: Chuck Norris went on a round of futile karate kicks against an modified killer in Hero and the Terror (1988) and Charlie Bronson struggling against liberal laws trying to protect a freaky psycho who kills while buck naked in Ten to Midnight (1983) and Clint tangled with a kinky leather man in Tightrope (1984).Let's not forget Schwarzenegger whose career had seemingly nose-dived after Conan. Seeing the original previews at the drive-in for Terminator (1984) while waiting for Christine we thought it looked like an low budget Italian knock-off slasher/action sci fi hybrid; Arnold dressed like he should be riding a scooter in Rome, using a laser sight at a phony looking 'Tech Noir' bar. We were stunned with incredulity when we read the glowing reviews and heard the record box office. Seeing the film we understood why: this time the opponent knew all the unstoppable killer's tricks before the movie even started, so it was like the final girl finally had a guy who understood her. There would be no more dropping butcher knives, not anymore.

Get thee to a gunnery: Blue Steel, Escape from New York, Aliens
The idea that kept us up at night was there there might be some crazy killer who has us earmarked for death for reasons beyond understanding: maybe your friend called him a creep when he drove past you on the street, but we could take hope now that for every Moby Dick monster there would be an Ahab and vice versa. In Halloween the same essential dynamic takes place, just substitute Donald Pleasance's quiver-voiced shrink, with his pistol permit, for Michael Biehn.


To help lay all this out I've assembled the following horror strata map Most crap horror film directors never get past the topography, while a few get all the way down to the bottom, which is the universal top, for this pyramid:

Topographical:The male in overalls, axe, chainsaw, screaming woman, corridors advanced down stealthily, shocks around the corners, cowering, rising up, sudden face in the mirror, closet doors. A killer presumably killed sitting slowly up.
Textual:Condemnation of lustful behavior; warning to never take your security for granted; taking the 'safety bars' of first world social order consumerist entitlement for granted  (i.e. Marie Antoinette letting them eat cake).
Subtextual: Feminism; homophobia; collapse of the American Family; critique of sexual repression's inherent evil; man's inherent savagery; castration anxiety; psychosexual pre-genital jouissance
Structural:The uncanny rhythm of slowed down time and sense of danger erupting from even normal things - closet doors, darkened laundry rooms, cars, darkness, bushes outside the house, staircases, mirrors, telephones, porches, windows (only classics get here - the first four Carpenter films
Core:Death Drive; initiation from child to adult through endurance and conquering of fear; the learning of aggression; rise to violence / fascism inherent; the encouragement of militarism; distrust of neighbors and people walking past your house (i.e. itchy trigger-finger neighborhood watches)
It's in this last one we see how, in its way, The Terminator, Rambo, and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, are all illegitimate sequels to the slasher movie craze, and just maybe so is our modern trend of abducted girls, torture porn, and NRA zealotry.
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You can't say that era didn't have long term repercussions for those of us who survived. Maybe we never had a midnight visitor with a laser sight or a knife but it hardly mattered. I still can't sleep in dead silence, I need a white noise machine, old radio shows, a whirring AC, the TV left on all night on low volume, or all of the above; I moved to the city that never sleeps--which after seeing The Warriors and Escape from New York I vowed to never do, but the crime of the 70s was my boon, because dead bolts, steel doors, small apartments on high floors all made one's safety from outside monsters easily secured; even here Park Slope I live right across the street--the the point I wave to the flower guy sometimes when I close the window for the night and turn out the lights--from one of 7th Avenue's few 24 hour bodegas; the only thing missing would be a big guard dog but on the fourth floor of a tiny place it would just be too much hassle. My little brother though has two, and a gun locker and lives in a city that encourages concealed weapons permits. Is this all the fault of Michael and Jason?

I would say, maybe.

The 70s was a time of great personal freedom, for both kids and adults, which began to end in the early 80s, coincidentally the same time slasher movies were widely available on video, where moms and little kids could see them and gradually lose all faith in mankind as kids could easily procure movies never meant to be seen outside of sleazy NYC grindhouses, but which were exhumed from in droves to cash in on the slasher craze. Most of it was innocuous, even laughable, but the cumulative effect--the sheer number of them available, even just looking at a shelf of the covers--was traumatizing.


At least one good thing came of all that fear and mistrust: Woman got a gun and learned to be her own Dr. Loomis; she kept watching the dark, and would never fall for a killer playing possum ever again. By Terminator 2, she had arsenals stashed away in Mexico just waiting... the fan was shit-caked and the Blockbusters were busted. There was nothing left now to save us... not even the bomb.
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For further reading on the Tick-Tock Momentum and the Halloween: A Clockwork Darkness: Hawks, Subjectivity, Halloween

Language of the Living Dead: PONTYPOOL (2008)

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In PONTYPOOL  the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends' in a ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism. It is spoken, the words lead to death, unless they're in French. No time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, as emergency broadcasts (in French) and mass confusion envelop you and your crew, especially in the early hours of the morning on typically white blizzard of a a middle-of-nowhere Ontario town. But there they are, shaggy cowboy with a yen for linking anything out of the ordinary with the collapse of civilization, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), cute blank of an intern-assistant, Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos, beginning with riots outside a doctor's office, random attacks among family members and neighbors, groups chanting meaningless phrases over and over as they devour each other.


The stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard fisherman locals and it's not until BBCI phones in that Mazzy realizes his town has become the news, and what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave rebellion) becomes the chance to make a name for himself, which he's totally too spooked to do all of a sudden. These three haven't seen any of the things described after all, and they are hard to believe in a town where nothing ever happens. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast station. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio, leaving them an island in an already island-like town, where they know most of the residents by name, winters stretch forever, and isolated souls move from heated tiny house to heated tiny car to heated basement studio, with windows reflecting an opaque wall of darkness and snow, to paint a horror film that works almost purely with power of suggestion to trigger vivid, weird flights of the imagination.


What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story. There was a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock; now it's the opposite. There are still countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago, now only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power, the news broadcasts on the TV the survivors find upstairs in the farmhouse.  It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times but makes terrific use of uncertainty--are these reports just drunk ice fishermen raising hell?-- and trenchantly delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, the calm but thrilled voice of an reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own.


Where else would we turn for information if society crumbled? We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant --careers are made in such moments, ala Wolf Blitzer during the Gulf War--and for once no one can predict what will happen. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon.


What really makes Pontypool a delight beyond this gimmick is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ --- begins to think people are all fucking with him - so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. In other words while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it.


"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard




The news' secret agenda has always been to cast off anxieties and fears about the prevailing social structure's omnipotence off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise and in the process strengthens the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's main problem in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors in less interesting but bigger budgeted films. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron.


In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion, devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to directly see it, such as the black intellectual in the final news show, commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. The opening events all take place at the crumbling Philadelphia local TV station, ending with the producer escaping with her helicopter pilot boyfriend, and a black SWAT guy they find who seems pretty cool, and his buddy. When they're later able to find a TV, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. It was like that once, maybe. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our neighborhoods, connected to our family and the world only by cell phones, wifi, and TV and radio signals. 


Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and co. who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent. This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, maybe. It rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan and the sorts of things most people in country's with socialized education know in their popular culture the way we know Michael Jackson and Disney. McLuhan's concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" backs a post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.


While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, meditation) or  drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) or both (dervishes). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this power, and does not use his DJ opportunities lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire that concerns him). And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a Canadian in other words, a bit of a rotgut and cigarettes-style innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary is tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him feeling grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.


This is perhaps the film's key concept and also perhaps its one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy burt the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy, which is very Cronenbergian, making us wonder if his themes are somehow as much related to Canada itself as to his own clinical doctor experience. The movie seen on streaming masterfully sets itself up as a virus, through which there are no coincidences in whatever you happen to be doing as a passive viewer. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a  phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed during my viewing this past week that I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.


In that meta sense, the film reminded me of both the NYC blackout in 02 and the 9/11 smoke plume days, though only in the blackout did we really not know what was happening. I could only pack a small bag with my passport, a flashlight, and some granola bars, and take my dog to Prospect Park, not sure if we'd ever come back, and finally find someone with a transistor radio instead of an iPod. On 9/11 I was at work that morning, and after the images on AOL stopped coming we found an old clock radio in the supply closet, tuning in to Brian Williams who gave our TV-less office a riveting radio narration of the towers falling, and all sorts of reports about attacks on the Pentagon, bombs taking out the state department, etc. He stayed calm as he described the towers coming down, but I imagined them falling horizontally down upon the surrounding buildings, causing a chain reaction domino effect sending whole rippled of skyscrapers tumbling all the way up to Midtown.


The surreal apocalyptic insanity that the radio broadcast created in my imagination reminded me of the 1939 War of the Worlds broadcast, which I used to listen to constantly while driving around NJ, regularly winding up on the same roads the Martians were using. I knew the tower bombing wasn't fiction, but my mind made it so, expanding the bomb blast damage to take out most of lower Manhattan and all of DC. When I was able to cut out for lunch and go to a friend's house with a TV, I was almost disappointed.


Sure that's sick, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on, you don't know what is real because you can't see it so your imagination fills it all in and does a much more apocalyptic job of things. You need electrical power, devices, connections, reports, and images from far enough away that you can see what's been destroyed and what hasn't. None of that is possible without a vantage point from far enough away yet close enough to see. Because there's one thing that can reach even the deepest of burrowing loners and isolationists, the media, the radio waves, thought, sound, speech. Pontypool's climactic moment of inter dimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!

Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville
But the French, as Godard's Alphaville (1965) computer with its croaky belch of a voice cutting in and out of the soundtrack, are to stubborn and contrary to be as ingenious and post-modern as Pontypool, which does for the 1939 Martian broadcast what the Blair Witch Project did for found nature films, i.e the very lack of reliable 'authorized' source information gradually reduces the one on the microphone to the sole remaining authority. John Connor at the end of Terminator 3 achieved this but with nuclear certainty (in the next film he's not only replaced by Christian Bale but is no more than a soldier in the armed resistance, communicating via radio with a submarine commander), while Grant Mazzy ingeniously understands that, unless the revolution is televised, it does not exist, so as long as it is only chaos, a mere riot, he can talk it out of existence with nonsense. Without a pundit chattering out in the cold and another one warm and looking at them from a screen, and us looking at them, then there's no certainty about anything. Let go of language and everything is revealed. Not even the credits can end your transmission. So stick around for the end credits very very....



















Raiders of the Found Stash: From Flint's Treasure to the Crystal Skull!

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Age makes even your fondest films subject to bitter pill analysis and changing, some might say hardening, crusting over, perceptions. One thing I've learned, you can link anything to anything profoundly if you crust over far enough. The jaundiced way I see West Side Story (1961) for example, now corresponds to a metaphor about Syria: instead of letting warring tribes settle their differences in an organized rumble, Tony barges in and ends up killing his lover's brother, dooming himself to die in turn, and so forth. If he had just stayed out of it all the differences might have been ironed out in a simple brawl. But Maria wouldn't let him. Bitch!


Similarly Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) used to be about awesome fights and solid thrills. I saw it eight times in the theater! Now, some 30 years later, I see that its innocence and 'matinee spirit' carry a steep price on the social science major market. It's innocence itself is the culprit behind a covertly pro-colonialist--even fascist--message. Spielberg and Lucas apparently woke up to this, too, because the 'where are they now' saga of growing old and passing the legacy and zzzz  begun in Last Crusade (1989), which I despised despite the zeppelin, continues in Crystal Skull (2008) with Ford now in the Sean Connery role, i.e. a know-it-all curmudgeon. Traveling the world and brawling with stakes far too high for his age (do we think this is pleasant? No average  kid wants to watch his grandfather getting socked in the face!) he wants to grab that skull not for his museum of alien research or curiosity but to return it to its rightful lost city from whence it came. The only reason he goes after it is so the Russians don't turn it into a source of 'limitless power' or was that the Nazis and the Ark. Either way, at least Indy was young and had that fun Han Solo charm.


I'll just touch on the difference in approach here between grabbing the Ark "for the museum" and the skull "for 'the return!'" --this amazing skull with its alien grey oblong headshape and odd powers is clearly alien and yet Indy still scoffs when the only 'awake' character in the whole thing, Russian agent Spalko (Cate Blanchett), mentions its unearthly origins or expresses a personal desire to learn the truth about extraterrestrial experience and intentions. Even if its true, Indy would never believe it coming from, you know, a girl. And even if early after Roswell, (why the Roswell alien is already in deep storage by the late 50s is a mystery, and in what universe America would just shelve all its coolest stuff and never tinker with it?) people didn't used to mock witnesses of aliens as much in the fifties: that came later with the closing of Operation Blue Book, when the Air Force began to aggressively encourage ridicule as a means of silencing witnesses, which America has bought into hook line and sinker, even, apparently Indiana Jones.

The first film is set in 1936, with the Ark found and fought over in Egypt four years before the Italians invaded; five before the Americans were officially at war. It's convenient that the Ark and other buried treasures don't seem to be considered the inherent property of Egypt, a lawless land (in the film) where might makes right and big brawls can go down in markets without a cop in sight. The Ark belongs to whomever can grab it first, provided they white; it becomes a hot potato mcguffin fought over by Indy and his allies and the Nazis and theirs, but never Egyptians or Jews as a culture or country. The early scenes in 1936 Peru with the Hovitos and the golden head is another example: the natives aren't brave enough to enter the mystery cave, even though they defend it. Whomever brings the gold godhead out is apparently their new king, but it helps to speak Hovito, which Dr. Jones doesn't deign to learn, so he loses out to the crafty Belloq, who merely follows Jones from a safe distance and lets him do all the dangerous stunts, then grabs the prize.


Consider for example the way De Gaulle went and took credit for the liberation of Paris while the American and British troops continued to push the Germans back to the Rhine in 1945! Or the way we forcefully took France's colonies back for them, from partisans who had been fighting the Japanese, like Ho Chi Minh, while they sat around and gesticulated in their little cafes! Mon dieu!


I think one can also stretch this idea of crafty Frenchman stealing our thunder back even further to link the Carter administration to Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with its own Belloq, i.e. a short French director (Francois Truffaut) conducting an arcane metaphysical ceremony to communicate with the ancient ones, . There's no Harrison Ford role in CEOT3K per se, just a Goldie Hawn if she got away with her baby at the end of Sugarland Express (1974).

I should mention that in the 90s used to work for a short, good-looking French Jewish art dealer who got into steep debt playing futures markets and wound up on the run in Brazil, leaving me holding the phones and various lawyers and feds and Mossad agents to sort out a morass of who-owns-what and owes whoms, and so forth, giving me a good insight into the workings of ownership, provenance, and extradition within international law. So naturally I can't see the presence of these characters running through the Spielberg mythos as any accident! Mon dieu!

Richard Dreyful though was no Indy/Han older brother archetype, that was maybe the hole at the center of Close Encounters, the way the whole in Star Wars never really closed up for us kids until that Cantina bar and Han Solo. Of course the aliens in CEOTTK were interesting looking, but a little too friendly perhaps, and Spielberg's films since then have led the way in presenting two alien agendas--being cuddly and angelic or being ruthless corporate raiders--ruining us for any future alien visitations that might be more complex, with secret agendas that eventually traumatize the few men who hold this dark secret from our innocent hearts, you know, like real things are. Our innocence depends on this dichotomy staying firm.


And that is why we aren't ready for alien reality or true racism-free harmony! Spielberg fucked us up with his candy coated heart-ouchiness! We can only do 'good' (E.T., the CEOT3K greys, John Rhys-Davies) or evil (Nazis, War of the Worlds martians, CIA investigators, Tom Cruise). So for Reagan and Raiders we had to bend low and lunge forth at a bull china clip through the Cairo markets of complex realities, trusting if we just keep our eyes closed it would all come magically right in a bath of hand-painted light and wind. It did! And here we are.


Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) follows this self-imposed blindness as it moves into the atomic age, replete with Jones surviving an atomic bomb test by hiding out in a model home fridge, and getting caught up in a greaser vs. jock fistfight set to Elvis songs, driving around on a vintage motorbike, but scoffing at the idea of a real alien presence on earth, once again avoiding destruction by not looking into Medusa eye of the true unknowable Other, the one who would explode his cute/evil dichotomy.

That's one of the reasons why the whole time I was rooting for Madam Spalko, who at least treats Jones and his doofus family with some compassion without losing her ruthless edge. She's dicked over by him time and again because he can only see this good/evil dichotomy, hence she and the Russians are evil, period. Surely by now Jones should know to just let the enemies have their tchotchke and then merely avert his eyes to avoid being fried by the unleashed power. He's just fighting in case the skull should grant her ESP. She, at least, has an agenda beside being a stubborn academic bitter because being embroiled in red fighting's gotten him fired from university. So what if she's a commie? At least she plays the game with good sportsmanship and is awake to the mystery of the skulls, at least she believes in something! Indy doesn't even fake a sporting interest for the purpose of his job, the way Sam Spade did over the falcon. Say what you will about the Russian, agent Spalko is a woman, sir, who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. But Indy can only be as tiresome and rude as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, a show I find distinctly unpleasant as a result. Maybe that's just me, I trust a hero to act pleasant until his time comes to turn the girl over to the cops, not to be a mopey bore.


But the main tell in this version is that the academic deconstructions of Jones as an emblem of bull in a china shop imperialism have taken hold. Now Jones can only take the skull and bring it back to its rightful place at El Dorado; when he tries to take so much as a small sword - a knife from a mummified conquistador (because he needs one) his doofus son makes an 'ahem' voice, like put that back, that's not yours, that belongs to the dead conquistador's family, or... he doesn't have a specific reason, and it suddenly casts all of Jones' past acquisitions for his museum in doubt. 'Grave robbers will be shot,' the sign says going in, which his son points nervously a-towards. "Well, we're not going to do any grave robbing," Indy says, but of course his whole life has been one long grave rob.cConsidering the modern age legal battles over cultural ownership of relics (see here) of late, perhaps Lucasfilm and Spielco have begun to realize that the casual American arrogance underwriting Jones' grave robbing in the first films might be unconscionable but they should realize that this arrogance is what makes it so eloquent as a metaphor for 80s amok capitalism. Jones is a badass because he's so heedless, so obsessed with acquiring whatever ark-shaped jet ski catches his eye. Imagine how great the film might be if Jones was a heroin addict thanks to a dislocated knee? Instead Indy can't even borrow a dead conquistador's knife for his future endeavors, because his son--leather jacket and motorcycle signifying only conformity in rebellious trappings-- clears his throat in a way so pussy proper over 'stolen' antique weaponry it makes me want to punch him in the face and steal his switchblade.


This question of who gets the loot started to flair up for me a few weeks ago while watching another of my first world favorites, the MGM 1934 version of Treasure Island. Whose treasure is it, rightfully? Whomever has the map? Whomever paid for the expedition? Or whomever stole it in the first place? When Jim Hawkins and his mom go to look for the money Flint owes in his chest after he dies, mom plays the moral cuckold, saying first say they will collect only what is owed "and not a penny more!" But the treasure map makes it okay to in fact take Flint's whole savings account.  Maybe he stole it from his fellow pirates who all stole it from Spanish lords and ladies from centuries before: Spain, the enemy of England, Jim! Like stealing the Nazi gold from Kelly's Heroes or the black bird from Kemidov; it's hard to say anyone really has a right to it if the current possessor stole it from people who stole it from (and killed) the previous owners, yet try telling that to the Mossad, am I right, Wildenstein?

The status of the treasure as up for grabs offers a very peculiar notion of 'white makes right' in this case white being the clothes and the powdered wigs of a gentleman born and bred sez I. In the MGM production there's no mention of how the treasure will be divided up, presumably in equal parts between Jim, Ben Gunn, the Squire, and Otto Kruger. But does the crew get a share? Presumably the pirate crew would get nothing for their efforts other than some measly pay. Are they really the bad guys for wanting to seize it for themselves? In reality the only ones with any right to it are the relatives of the victims of the pirate crew's piracy, and after that, the pirates themselves. But the right of Jim and his gentleman born to have all of it and the devil take the pirates is the way things seem meant to be.

"Three more stout and loyal men you'll never find... in this room, Jim."
Luckily MGM changed the ending somewhat, so that Long John Silver escapes with his shirt stuffed with gold coin sacks. He probably worked the hardest to get it, and is not just the craftiest of the lot, but also the only one in the whole cast with an infectious wit and easygoing charm (Beery!) so for that, at least, I am glad. There are some who might call Indy what he is, a pirate himself, only disguised as an academe. We kids knew he was really Han, so the prof thing was a kick. A fun disguise. By the time he's chasing the Skull though, he really is a professor, the worst kind, and far too old for this shit. In the Treasure Island comparison the Indy of Skull wouldn't be Long John Silver --that role would go to Cate Blanchett-- but the crusty Captain Smollett (below, center), good to have on your side when the shit starts going down, but an awful drag at a party.


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1994: The year Fiorentino and Tarantino saved us from Vampire Morality

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Now more than ever, we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror golden age, and it turns out to be the 1980s. We had it so bad that two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story, the same year, 1987:  Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain teenage hunk--in a single parent family with a younger sibling-- ready for his first big mistake, falling for a hot young vampire who lures him into her weird pack, which includes a small child vampire and a wildman. And lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing one's first drop of innocent blood. Ugh, there's the rub.

I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres. And seeing them now they're fun and brooding in their measure, but man, I've had it up to her with these cute youngsters who dig the percs of being vampires and don't mind blood if a hot vamp girl feeds blood to them from her own wrist, but won't go around killing humans for food, because that would be 'wrong.' Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend!

The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark)
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The buzzkills (top: Near Dark)
Yeah man, Jason Patric in Lost Boys, and Adrian Pasdar in Near Dark: two doe-eyed hunks used to getting everything they want through manipulating hot babes, relying on their motorbike or horse to wow them into submission... each too 'good' to kill his own food, preferring to whine and shake and cling to their vamp girl like she's his new mommy, one of perhaps a long string of blank doormats

Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys --but boys who aren't doe-eyed hunks and used to getting any girl they want aren't about to identify with these clowns--and we're the ones who watch these movies 100 times instead of going out on dates. We end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase, lingering on the edge of our beautiful manipulative older male swan phase, and re-surging in the old reprobate phase, where it gradually dissipates only when we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandsons'.


Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A for me, as I've written in the past. When he sees Jami Gertz in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage, he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away from him without falling onto her knees and kissing his ring. He acts like his physical beauty is a sacred church and therefore there should be no laughing or running around in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach moped race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood.  These scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the warning signs going off deep in your sacral chakra.

Star it turns out has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan, with Kiefer's approval - but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground, man maybe he's right. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away.

Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark, but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, pumping anthem rock, and ingenious literalizing common phrases of parents at the dinner table (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness. Vast fields like skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos.  one of the more realistic looking biker bars--caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly, drip by drip from the numbness of time's passionless faucet and the emptiness of the landscape--and seedy motels.

Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend rather than nut up and kill his own dinner as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores, who get super indignant when confronted with evidence of their butcher's slaughterhouse crimes. They'll eat all the meat you can serve, provided as they don't have to look into its eyes. i.e. serve the brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're a serial killer, just the usual rump stake, and you're simply a nice host. Serve honey roasted grasshoppers, you're a freak; fried shrimp? A true surfside chef!  If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!


Amid this hypocrisy it's indicative of the filmmaker's conscience in each how this moral high ground climbing hunk is handled. I'd love to see one of these films wherein the girl vamp deliberately turns a tortured nerd instead --he could struggle the other way, killing off his old bullies, bad teachers, employer... finding out only too late the fantasy of revenge doesn't quite blot out the reality of existential guilt.? Hell, that guilt is something else. I feel it every time I leave my cat in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back I wince at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Even knowing its faked for the movies, it's too easy to imagine it wasn't. Rules of the Game is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real? And though the characters don't flinch, you can tell Renoir does.

I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman, and my site Pswar of the Saints for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. One simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook, or a lot of money, patience, and interest. And whatever happened to the apocalypse? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream. Going back to dairy and meet took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me.

Tony Scot's parallel lines 
The Hunger, Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys, the list is endless. It makes me wonder... is there any vampire movie (Twilight aside, as they're all vegans) where the newborn actually does kill a human or two without moping about it for the rest of the story? (see my post on Vampire Morality Blues). Damn I need a drink. Oh wait. I can't anymore. I'm like one of these vegan vamps, but for booze.


But then... a miracle happened. The year 1994 came--back when I was still drinking, with a vengeance--and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction. 


Looking at them now they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed innocent, not-so-innocent, and other people and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free.

There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired in The A-Team without one guy being hit; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious buzzkill.  But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah. The next step was 1994, the year phony moral killjoy mania bit the dust!

Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!

Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture referenced didn't make the films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid, the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying, zipless. Can't you even learn to let go of the handrails, even in a dream?

Thurs. the Looking Glass: NIGHT OF THE COMET, LIQUID SKY + Mary Woronov

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INTRO:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: a new series covering 1980s science fiction and horror films which may have crept through the myriad mirror mazes of time and eluded deserving viewers. Many are being rediscovered now, thanks in large part to the stunning work of Shout Factory's new Scream! offshoot (see my praise piece on Bright Lights) which has been giving these half-forgotten treasures snazzy hand-painted new covers and the kind of film-specific attention to detail only a fan could bring, conceive, and appreciate. Scream Factory, we hail thee.

Preface: To be a teenager in the 1980s was a terrible nightmare of dwindling freedom and choking sameness. We started out the decade as children running wild, puffing our Winston Lights and Marlboro Reds at the designated junior high school smoking area, engaging in unprotected everything, wiling away the hours at Spaceport or just driving around in our inherited Ford Mavericks looking for empty parking lots to make out in. We ended the decade miserable, busted by over-eager cops for so much as drinking a beer in our own backyard or having a joint stashed in our sock. Watching our freedoms dwindle one by one in the name of safety there was nothing to do but go to the mall... again.

1982 ad for Montgomeryville PA drive-in, where I saw too much. 
But we had the movies. Horror and science fiction films in the 80s didn't have to shell out zillions for nationwide ad campaigns just to occupy a multiplex box for a week, or else go straight to video in shame. They could launch a few local TV spots and just ease on into one independently-owned theater or drive-in and stay for weeks, gaining box office rather than losing it as word spread through the neighborhood (by mouth). Enough oddball films had become huge hits, from Star Wars and its sequels to Alien, Terminator, Road Warrior, Conan, Halloween, to inspire a slew of imitations; some derivative exercises in contempt for their audiences, sure, but they were still miles better than Resident Evil.  Some we didn't like then but love now and vice versa. Looking back through the Thurs. looking glass, they're of different value according to their facets, but all are gems.

What's most to love is that there was no CGI in the 1980s, no rules, no format to follow, just a plethora of imagination. Compare that to now, where everything is just the same old zombies and moody vampires, and wince. So let's take a drive then... as Malcolm McDowell tells Cat person Nastassja Kinski in one of her kinky dreams, "you must go baa-a-a-ack."

NIGHT OF THE COMET
1984 - ***1/2

One of the stealth coolest 80s heroines, Catherine Mary Stewart (above) looks like a tougher teen version of Linda Hamilton, and kicks ass thanks to growing up with a Special Ops father who taught her and her sister self defense before heading off to deep tactical cover in Nicaragua, leaving the sisters with an uncaring step mom. The apocalypse here comes around offscreen, with the arrival of a long-heralded comet. The survivors are the ones who for some reason missed the show, and kept safe behind metal walls - in other words almost no one. But the partially exposed are devolving into zombie mutants and/or Omega Man style crumbling vampire zombie types, such as a homeless black guy creature behind the theater, the stock boys turned new wave machine gun killers, and a cadre of underground bunker scientists pretending to care about survivors when actually they just want.... ah, I shan't spoil it.


The empty LA orange and red skies and streets post-apocalypse are amazingly beautiful, casting a mysterious, lonesome glow over everything, unusual in this sort of picture. A few zombies and evil scientists putter around (this is not a film that can afford zombie crowd shots), but the film's too good-hearted to really ever get scary. It is however continually engaging, with cozy use of an automated radio station and a theater as backdrops, with lots of 80s neon, and Eating Raoul's Mary Woronov as a good scientist and Robert Beltran as a truck driver. Beltran gets top billing credits but it's clearly Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney who carry the weight as the sisters, displaying a believable rapport that includes cool sister banter, rivalry, shared laughter, commiseration, sororal support, petty bickering, and Mac 10 target practice. Stewart (top) is a total 80s nerd dream girl who works at a local theater, dominates the high score list at the lobby Galaga-imitation, eats Twizzlers for breakfast and sleeps with the projectionist more out of boredom and not wanting to go home and deal with the comet party her stepmom is throwing than anything else.


As the little sister, Maroney shreds every line wavering from girly cheerleader one minute, telling off the stepmom the next, realizing slowly and believably the world's over, and coming to terms with grief over her dead friends and blown possible lover opportunities-- you can see her growing up too fast before your eyes, yet still able to rock an amok consumer post-apocalyptic department store montage set to "Girls just want to have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. But hey, it had just come out the year before, and shopping montages set to it did not yet exist. Unfortunately for us, that montage has become inescapable while super cool and self-reliant girls like these are almost impossible to find in any film, Hollywood or other. They can have a bubbly sisterly reunion deep in an evil scientist bunker and never take their guns off their prisoners or let down their guard; they're emotional and sometimes frivolous without being flighty or whimpering. They're like Hawks heroines as teenagers in the 80s: Maroney the Jean Arthur/Marilyn Monroe type, Stewart the Lauren Bacall/Jane Russell  type. They'll steal your gun, knock you off the high score list, jack your whip and kick you in the nuts if you sass back, but if you're cool...


The weirdest part of the film is that nowhere in the credits is there a sign of Paul Bartel or Penelope Spheeris or Joe Dante or Alan Arkush, all of whom worked for Corman and inherited his flair for feminist but sexy dialogue, racial equality, beatnik wit, and knack for conveying their films are part of a larger film world, almost like connectors between other, bigger-budgeted films  (i.e. Cameron's Terminator was what connected Blade Runner to Halloween). If no Corman or Bartel connection, why are there two leads from Eating Raoul, and a conspicuous movie poster for Death Race 2000 on the theater door?

Oh well, the film has a genial mellowness is all its own, or writer-director Thom E. Eberhardt's, or maybe the cast's. Before this film Eberhart only did one film, Sole Survivor which prefigures the Final Destination films by 20 years, and afterwards a film called The Night Before, starring Keanu Reeves. This tells us nothing. Maybe we can just chalk it up to something intangible made flesh by the mere presence of Mary Woronov, the Patti Smith of the quasi-mainstream neo-underground horror-sci fi-comedy genre, and chance.

LIQUID SKY
1982 - ****

This is a rarity, a genuinely great performance art science fiction hybrid  experimental 16mm oddity from the downtown NYC heroin chic fashion poseur scene, what Bowie probably hoped The Man who Fell to Earth would be like. Russian ex-pat Slava Tsukerman co-wrote with the star, Anna Carlisle, who plays both Margaret (a sleepwalking model with a fondness for bizarro face paint) and a perennially sneering male model in the Ziggy mode named Jimmy. If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality, but Carlisle brings a depth of wry sadness that's almost Germanic, belying her being just 26 years-old at the time, though she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes. She crushes it! She takes both roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly.


Man, those effete women and manly men who spend their nights milling around tiny black box apartments and boutiques, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-withdrawal-driven wild clotheshorses. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a tiny spacecraft about the size a closed George Foreman grill to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd, below).


The plot follows Margaret as she tries to do some coke, but winds up raped by a sleazy goombah who force feeds her goofballs --it's not a traumatic scene like some because she fights back and engages but at the same time barely gives a fuck --she knows she'll get him back eventually and she's patient as a cobra; Jimmy meanwhile is withdrawing from heroin but has no money and Adrian won't front; a fashion designer promises Jimmy some if he shows up to model the next night at a shoot on Margaret's roof. Meanwhile the alien is floating his giant solarized color style eye thing around, observing all like a mix of the aliens in It Came from Outer Space and ourselves as viewers. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of Margaret's weird neon hula hooped painting. When her lovers have their selfish orgasm, a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume high fashion moping. Good deal! Her own inability to have an orgasm saves her life, and allows her to notice her little alien guardian. Though she never sees it (them?) she falls in love with it and forms a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!


In short, a beautiful time is had by all, especially if you don't mind repetitive synthesizer percussion that resounds on high decibel pitch-shifted soundwaves like an angry filmmaker is just learning his first and only melody on his first and only Korgi synthesizer. Highlights include Adrian's inspired spontaneous poetry rant delivered while beating Margaret's dead naked acting teacher as a bongo drum; the odd but natural way two people hanging out in bed can devolve into attempted rape and/or stabbing without either one particularly feeling the need to get up; and Margaret's inspired final monologue, delivered as she applies intense glow-in-the-dark face paint in pitch darkness, like Kali, Warhol, and a stoned Annette Haven wrapped up into one tall WASP fashionista **** But there's also the coolness that is Susan Doukas as Jimmy's sex-starved mother, who seduces--or tries to--Johann when he uses her apartment (its opposite Margaret's) to spy on the craft and check out all the deaths and sexes. He continually ducks out on her, maybe saving both their lives in the process though frustrating her to no end, which caused me the most discomfort in the film, as I hate to see a lady go hungry and Doukas does a hell of a job at conveying the homey warmth and welcome forwardness (even if its tinged with desperation) one hopes for from sex-starved middle-aged Manhattan foxes with big apartments in the 70s--80s, the type who know their Chinese food deliverer by name and with whom you can probably crash for a few weeks while you pretend to look for an apartment. Dude, I'm grateful to dames like that and they deserve to have their needs gratified if for no other reason that they are bold enough to admit they have them and to pursue their quarry and this film is a gem.
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Mary Woronov, with the Velvet Underground and her co-whip dancer, Gerard Malanga
Lastly, a shout out to the beautiful and tall and cool Mary Woronov, the living link between the great 70s-80s rock and roll sci fi-New Wave-Punk-Corman-Canon cineworld and the Warhol Velvet Underground joint. Check her above, snuggled up with mighty Lou! Edie Sedgwick may be the one everyone gushes over but its Woronov, more than any of them, who's a true rock and roll survivor. She's still got it! She sheds some insight on why she's seldom left the niche cult market and taken parts in big Hollywood films: 
"Let's face it: women's parts are gone ­ women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies." (1990 Cornell Cinemas)
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Damn girl, it's their fucking loss and the gain of all weird movie lovers... 

Postscript: I wasn't sure why I put these two films together for this inaugural Thurs. the Looking Glass entry, but Woronov is the key. Sure she's not in Sky but her girl strength and Warholian style is, and both films are rare in that they star women with boys way, way to the side. In fact the genders are almost reversed - the women are in charge in both films, recalling in their way Star Maidens and Norman Fell's almost-forgotten All that Glitters! Release them! (See my article about them in Acidemic's Nordics issue)

Thurs. the Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

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THE KEEP
1983 - ***

Director Michael Mann's so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they Chariots of Fire their way through the fog, their white infantry ponchos fluttering behind them as they strive towards no finish line in particular while a haunting two chord synthesizer tune repeats over the soundtrack, that any semblance of story sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow is sufficiently war weary as the jaded Wermacht officer assigned to a remote Romanian fortress that was built into the side of the Carpathians thousands of years before recorded time. Colorful villagers bring the food and sweep up and wear crosses for der mudder's sake and never visit after dark or explain what scares them so. Since the Keep's been there longer than their remembered time, they don't even know why they're so freaked.


The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls, and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film is blown as well, like dust in the slow motion wind, sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light, illuminating mysterious spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls.


Soon the soldiers are all disappearing, fog machines are working backwards, and a mysterious shape is materializing Hellraiser-style through osmosis from the vaporized bodies of evil men. Prochnow hits the bottle as his platoon dwindles and bloody graffiti in an ancient text prompts him to send for an old archaeologist-linguist (Ian McKellen) currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp. The linguist brings his hot daughter (Alberta Watson), leading to attempted rape by some mean German guards who are promptly absorbed in a lengthy shot of backwards fog. Is this being the fabled Jewish golem? The original Dracula (this being Romania and all)? The thing is forming into a giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids, and is offering vengeance against Hitler in exchange for a small favor. The professor can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking. He's soon hopping around like the proverbial mountain goat, as old Nonno would say.


As this weird creature is so muscular he begins to resemble the Terminator, which then awakens the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn). From far away he senses a disturbance in the force and takes a slow mo boat at dawn up the Elbe at sunrise, scored to hypnotic synths as the sky streaks red, letting you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series, which began the year after The Keep.  Like so many shots in the film there's really no point to it besides future placement on Mann's reel. Of course if I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop from Amazon Instant Video (it's not on DVD) I might have just swooned away as I didn in Mann's Miami Vice feature film.

Anyway, Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep and now he's back to finish the job, even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, and maybe shag McKellan's daughter in the process for he is no sourpuss Christian god, and everyone knows the Hebrews have never considered sex a crime. No wonder they're so damned sensual!


The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school and it was too slow for my ADD brain. It's almost too slow even now, but Michael Mann's career is such that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation even if its ultimate hook, that all the bad guys are done in by their own unconscious manifesting their darkest fears and desires in the rarefied realms of the foggy backlit stony corridors, has been done to death (it you substitute the keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft, in such films as Galaxy of Terror,Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray juicehead square with shoulder muscles that make the average linebacker look like Ichabod Crane and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme. 

Maybe if it was a shade less opaque or Mann used less slow motion it would be a classic, but still, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of him! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste a minute of him!


Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. Horror fans who are also WW2 historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane German infantry and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, here led by the evil but at least consistent Gabriel Byrne (with a Crispin Glover haircut) and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis, just to have someone to help them fight off the Soviets --which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen's linguist. I'm a big WW2 fan and used to read a ton of comic book and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics'Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a horror-war trilogy and could cut down to 40 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry if you agree to help in the escape. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what what was holding Mann's attention so glacially.  


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I COME IN PEACE (DARK ANGEL)
1990 - ***

Speaking of thick necks, what about Swedish Fulbright scholar and Karate champion Dolph Lundgren? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace. There are some cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend who is angry at him for not calling, and a cliche uptight yuppie partner. But the killer is all kinds of awesome, a kind of German Alec Baldwin on stilts with Wuxa hair, shoulder pads, and possibly stilts. Turns out he's a drug dealer from another planet here on earth to harvest our opiate-spike pituitary chemicals which fetch a high price at his home planet. He kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, then uses their supply to shoot up random civilians with a crazy wrist snake device,  drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing dopamine gushes, and accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as cool a deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as I've ever seen. And brother, I've seen it all. I got lucky having not heard of this before the great Shout Factory blu-ray, so my first viewing is in crisp HD widescreen where the neon and explosions shine.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci fi fire power. There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies in a satisfying side plot that allows us to see them getting shot to pieces, and exploded, always a comfort in these harsh economic times, and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant, or something, ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown in to an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar in engineering, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase saturation. The drive-in era was dying by then, and where else was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the Hong Kong neon blue hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.


All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien being on earth to siphon the brains of people getting off on drugs (he avoids junkies, since their glands are often burned out). It works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example, that kind of thing, and it becomes a bit distracting. There's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense; if your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the 80s. Or rather, it was the last of the 80s, the final in a long line of films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension.  It's the same formula used in The Keep, though in that instance it came out the year before Terminator's release. So... maybe it all really began with The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) with Gor vs. Vol. Maybe... you seen that? Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver, descrambling this mess of alphabet called a post. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar in his dark contacts, ranting about world domination under the possession of Gor, that's something even a highly advanced brain like Dolph's can get behind.


Zombie Apes, West is True: LORDS OF SALEM (2012), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

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"Only bad witches are ugly." - Glenda

Much as I love WIZARD OF OZ there's something messed up about Glenda's shallowness. Look at these bangin' old broads (above) bringing tea and cookies, and hell yeah the tea's probably spiked with tannis root but when these sexy evil bitches show up at your door you should be fucking honored. They're not there to get all petty on you with who's good and who's bad in the witch department. Glenda's the ugly one for perpetuating a stereotype started by the church to keep a sister down. In Salem, for example, a horde of hot witches were hung for presumed evil, including some of my ancestors.

If they weren't evil before you hung them, they are now, o paranoid projector of your own subconscious devils!

Now they're coming back, in my DNA, arm in arm with every kid whose life was ruined for getting caught expanding his mind in the Reagan-era 80s. Fear us, then, o descendants of the evil and corrupt Salem and Texas judges, all smug in your hypocrite robes and stetsons. We are watching you as you sleep, through Meg Foster's crystal blue orbs. And your time shall be soon.


In other words, sons of sinuses blocked and lungs a-resinated, hail the new flesh and toad of newt, hail MacBeth, Vane of Cawdor! All hail Val Lewton, the Cramps, Bob Dobbs, Nic Cage, Sammy Davis Jr., Lamont Cranston, D.H. Lawrence, and Mike Watt.

LORDS OF SALEM (2012), Rob Zombie's nearly abstract, post-vaguely-modern 70s devil film, tosses cauldron-ward the old 'conspiracy to impregnate unwitting chick with the devil's child' thing already tossed a few years earlier by Ti West (HOUSE OF THE DEVIL - 2009), adds the actual Salem and spoon of film references, heats to overflowing, goes in the other room to change the record, and never comes back (1). Does it work? Well, what is it trying to do? If it was trying to do for devil movies what SCREAM did for slashers, then it failed. If it wasn't trying to do that, if it was trying to be a SHINING for New England instead, then why the tattoo parlor ambiance, the vintage punk thrift store symbolism, the EXORCIST-cycled dialogue, (they're bringing "cunting" back here), why the carny ride haunted house tableaux that go nowhere, as if we're meant to see them and walk on through to the next ghastly static scene? Aside from the goofball cranberry juice elevator flood, and the climactic gold room of dusty corpses, Kubrick would never be so obvious. So what is it trying to do? It's being Rob Zombie, the Kubrick of the Daytona trailer park, the neo-pagan who goes on a killing spree at Burning Man, and everyone mistakes it for performance art. Dude, they were so high. But is that even a real movie?

Left to its own devices, without all the post-modernist jazz, the film does generate some great hypnotic power. The opening witch ceremony builds brilliantly to a palpable abandon, the psychic force of the gathered actresses, heavily and picturesquely filth-encrusted, creates a combined psychic release. Compare this with most lame attempts to create a Satanic ceremony, where snarky directors and half asleep actors gather in black robes, read Latin, light candles and splay a virgin on the dais, all because they haven't done research on altered states of consciousness. Or like Ken Russell they just show flashes of weird sick images and Jesus mixed with a dosed pupil...

Only bad witches are ugly...

Zombie does well in portraying this ugly, but for ugliness to have any shock value we need a stark contrast of beauty. In THE SHINING, the movie Zombie apes, the beauty comes from the devouring omniscient ambivalence of the Colorado Rockies, like the Overlook is in the mouth of a giant arctic Venus flytrap, and from the awesome geometric splendor and unfathomable coldness of the cavernous hotel interiors. A gold-flecked theater shows up at the end or SALEM, referencing Overlook's 'Gold Room' and MULHOLLAND DR.'s Club Silencio. And though it's quite a show it conforms always to images of evil that are speckled with the cruel dust of the demonization process begun a thousand years ago by the Catholics. As Moncure Daniel Conway's Devil Lore book notes:

The great representations of evil, whether imagined by the speculative or the religious sense, have never been, originally, ugly. The gods might be described as falling swiftly like lightning out of heaven, but in the popular imagination they retained for a long time much of their splendour. The very ingenuity with which they were afterwards invested with ugliness in religious art, attests that there were certain popular sentiments about them which had to be distinctly reversed. It was because they were thought beautiful that they must be painted ugly; it was because they were—even among converts to the new religion—still secretly believed to be kind and helpful, that there was employed such elaboration of hideous designs to deform them. (c. 1879)
Of course that damnation is applied equally to the hideous Puritan torturers, re-imagined with big pointy caps and excessive facial hair, but as there can't be suspense or forward momentum generated from them, the judge's descendent bares no ethical resemblance, we have to believe these torturers of witches were genuinely under psychic attack. There's no clear 'side' you necessarily want to be on in LORDS, so we're just admiring all the artsy detail of the tableaux. It might keep our interest if the lead actress is stunningly beautiful, like Jocelin Donahue in HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, or Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY, but the leading actress in Zombie's film is of course his wife, Sherri Moon Zombie. And she's gettin' too old for this shit, as the Glenda might say.


Decked out like a Williamsburg hipster, Moon's character, Heidi Hawthorne is an enigma, and way too old to either believe in the supernatural or stop dressing like an extra in ALMOST FAMOUS. She considers herself a badass clearly, and has a good job as a Salem DJ, but still snickers like a dirt bag middle schooler at any hint of genuine insanity, balls, magic and/or evil--such as when the metalhead from the band Lords of Salem is a guest on her show.

And of course we know why we're supposed to be so intrigued by Heidi, the director still loves her, and presumes us as bewitched as he is. Well we were, Rob, ten years ago, she was freakin' sexy as all hell, but we're fickle. And that's part of the problem when you cast your wife in everything you do: sooner or later she's going to be too long in the tooth to play the nubile babe and you're going to be the one to have to tell her, and then you'll have to start auditioning younger leading ladies, and dodging hurled frying pans.


The films Zombie likes--the devil movies and Kubrick's work-- are present in the style, tone, and look of SALEM, but he doesn't seem to know how to read deeply into them, to figure out why he likes them, so he imitates the surface and adds his tattoo parlor aesthetic and crosses his fingers. He goes for an Antonioni/Miike vibe in longly held static long shots of Heidi walking her dog on a lonely street or in a park in late afternoon or playing records with her bearded buddy, but fails to inject genuine observation and complexity into these long looks, or even killer POV unease, rendering them little more than attempts to make Salem the goth Austin with just a hint of Detroit decay. He misses the chance for some great 70s-80s Italian synths in the score, and instead goes for an annoyingly minor key two-note piano. He misses the chance to make Heidi interesting, to make her recovering drug addict persona resonate. She even drinks at one point! Super dangerous from any kind of addict. And her apartment is way too clean for someone in recovery, and why isn't she smoking or chugging coffee? I got a headache just watching her get up and walk her dog without a coffee first. If Heidi's an addict I'm John Paul Jones (the Zeppelin bassist, not the seaman, you got a dirty mind).

Moon Ages: From top: 1000 Corpses, Rejects, Salem
I mean no disrespect to Sherri Moon. I love her in DEVIL'S REJECTS, like a sister. Her line after bluffing a room of hostages with an empty gun ("it's all mental!") is my personal mantra. As that character she displayed a great relish in evil and had great stringy-sexy hair and a flash of eye and nice curves and an ease with using them to drive a man so crazy he forgets to defend himself. You could see why Zombie married her. Her thin lips weren't even an issue then, but looking at them now, they're even thinner, and she seems tired, and way too old to be riding on a goat in neon flames, or going down on strange priests in the midday pew. She seems middle-aged woman trapped in a tricked-up spiral of horror iconography, like her next stop is working a booth at a Philadelphia monster convention. Man, I know how that feels. I've made out with lipless women before, and it was like kissing a skull. You think I'm fucking lippist now, but if not me, whom? I'm no fan of collagen or botox, but just cuz some girls overdo it out of insecurity doesn't mean it should be shunned by those who need it, even if only to get back to their former level of lip fullness. Her later skull make-up helps, making her look like some death metal kid who got caught in the rain, which is better than trying to be sexy. Looking at the posters before seeing it, I had no idea this was even a girl:

Problem 3: Pastiche Without Purpose

Maybe SCREAM auteur Wes Craven had it easier since he focused on 80s slasher films, so ignored horror history prior to HALLOWEEN and after SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Zombie goes back to the silent era's HAXAN through to the occult crazy 70s, Kenneth Anger's LUCIFER RISING, ALUCARDA, every Spanish and Italian Exorcist rip-off ever made, THE HOWLING, and various old films Heidi watches while asleep in her apartment like KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL and CAPTAIN KIDD.

Burnin' down the Streets of Everyone
There are a million ways these textual links could have been made to resonate, such as having Heidi actually evince some knowledge of any of those films, to be able to quote them or talk about them, or explain why she likes them. Instead they seem like they were all left behind by an ex-boyfriend. I would have loved to hear some famous quotes peppered into her dialogue, something to go with all KING OF THE ROCKETMEN print perhaps, any sign she'd done the homework.

That's what made SCREAM so unnerving; these characters knew what was coming, like we all did who were kept awake at night after scary movies all through the 80s, vowing in our anxiety that we would never drop the knife or any weapon by the killer's prone body, or trust he was dead until the head was fully severed. SCREAM used the dread inspired by earlier movies, which had by now settled in our collective dream unconscious, and re-activated it.

Zombie can only admire it from a safe distance, a fan not a player, he's the R-rated Tim Burton, i.e. for a director he makes a good set designer. They both gravitate towards familiar narratives-remakes because they have no gift for story structure or pacing -- they just want to create their fantasy bedroom. Luckily Zombie is free of the awful whimsy-packed orchestral pomp of those Danny Elfman scores Burton uses. Now you think I'm whimsist!? Fuck yeah, because it pollutes the real madness. Whimsy is the way an insecure artist of the macabre chews your food for you.

Oddities / seems such a lonely world
Sadly, what the mise-en-scene of Heidi going through her day most resembles is the Science Channel's ODDITIES. I've got nothing against the Oddities store but the customers and employees all seem desperate to be abnormal. They cover themselves with tattoos and piercings and wear red white and blue dreadlocks and tall stovepipe hats and fang implants but when push comes to shove perhaps some of them might be overcompensating for an inner lack of... what? balls? crazy madmen nastiness? True insanity? Nic Cage only needed one symbol of his individuality in WILD AT HEART, but he's 'really' a badass. Some people choke themselves with symbols of badassedness and yet run when they encounter the real thing. They would have freaked out going to CBGBs when they saw the filth and smelled the smells and viddied the icky crustpunks, and been too scared to use the bathroom, but then they'd be wearing the T-shirt proudly for the next 20 years, nodd knowingly when the bathroom shows up at the Met, and recall the good old days when music mattered... man. Now you think I'm a faddist. It's just that I'm really crazy. And I don't trust carnies, even though I love their haunted house rides.

CBGB's: What... a dump.

Rob Zombie's clearly a real wild man, but he covers every inch of the territory with his signature hillbilly blood chic until you wonder what lack of true insanity he's hiding. As Nelson Munz once said, "the whole thing smacks of effort, man." None of it looks like a real place, with age and use proper to an old city like Salem, the way the sticky thickness of 30 years of rock band promo stickers and graffiti are layered like redwood rings at CBGB's. And that much detail all 'of a piece' as they say, isn't scary. Less is more for scary. Carpenter created the first HALLOWEEN with a blank white mask, a trash bag full of painted leaves, "a couple of knives" and a few suburban houses.  Zombie had carny parents. He lived on the road. Carnies are excused from needing to vouchsafe their authenticity, and their oddities pay the bills, a carny's oddities are excused for that reason, like sheepdogs for a sheepherder. And who cares if the more obnoxious gawkers get sewed screaming into the next exhibit? They are artists Zombie understands, ala the Firefly films. But Heidi is a tourist.


There some indications here that Zombie can make the post-modern jump, and that's what's frustrating. He doesn't. He just decorates the jump-off point in a real punk rock black. But in one great scene, Heidi is chilling at her friend's house and suddenly she's coughing up blood, and faceless doctors appear in the room and Charles Laughton's voice on the TV which, right at that moment, is playing CAPTAIN KIDD, jibes with the demons almost as effectively as in MYRA BRECKINRIDGE or gthe films of Nicolas Roeg or Alex Cox. "This just may be to your benefit," Laughton says, as the merciless CAPTAIN KIDD (above).  Later her bonding with the weird fat devil baby whose lopsy-topsy mutatedness is a perfect dark evil mirror to Laughton's leering image onscreen, mirrors that of TV and viewer, umbilical extension cords plugged right into us and hell, and with its embryonic red eyes and slit middle you'll wonder if he's a metaphor for an abortion or if his froggy face is supposed to be the ski mask in TORSO, and the priest looks like he might be a reference t the stitched-into-eternity Dr. Freudstein in Lucio Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)... but we have no clear idea why or if its conscious.

Top: Salem / Bottom: House by the Cemetery
My Mary Easty/ Rebecca Towne Nurse Connective Genealogy 
(on my Dad's Mother's Mother's Side)

I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that it's fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island):
The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children:
1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)
The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft)

I have other relatives farther up the years worth mentioning: Joseph and Ichabod Perkins, who "were in Capt. James Jones' Company which marched to Concord at the alarm of Paul Revere in 1775. And 34 other Perkins of Topsfield and Ipswich and cousins of Goulds fought in Revolution (MP)." Etc. I didn't even know Ipswich was a real place! I wish there was a reason for me to research a paper there, and find the population to be a hideous bunch of fish god cult worshippers.

This branch of my family tree owned a lot of property and decent fortune up in the Boston area, but lost it all when it was inherited by two brothers who whored, gambled, and drank away in a few years what it had taken their forefathers five generations to accrue. If women had been allowed to inherit property, I might be a rich scion making my own damned horror movies today! The same streak of olde Enlgish alcoholic mysticism that would help me be a 'good' horror auteur prevents my actually getting it together to do so. My whole freaking life is jerry-rigged in this fashion.... how is that, o Rationalization Guru?

Top: Horror Hotel / Bottom: Alucarda
I know that in all likelihood these ancient aunts of mine were not really witches, but falsely accused by the children of a family wishing to possess the Perkins' wooded bordering acres. But like most Fordians I say "Print the Legend." Maybe my ancestors and the other witches were likely just sexually repressed settlers who found an outlet for their pains outside in the darkness at night, dancing and humping trees. But that's not fun to imagine, and what else gives history any interest aside from the possibility for something still unknown, something still hidden from us by the dry, dusty historians who get to mould our past? We wouldn't even care today if they were just falsely accused of, say, adultery. So if they weren't necessarily witches back in the day, time has made them so, time and three dozen and one horror movies, everything from crisp little low budget Brit thrillers like HORROR HOTEL (1959) to bombastic nonsense like Ken Russell's THE DEVILS.


From top: THE DEVILS, SALEM, SHINING, SHINING, SALEM, SALEM, ROSEMARY'S BABY, Ruth Gordon publicity shot.


Another redeeming trait of the film is just how GILF-ish are the three witch sisters (see CinemArchetype #20): Judy Geeson (GOODBYE GEMINI) has still got it and delivers her bloodthirsty lines with relish, as only a saucy older Brit lady can -- you should check out her amazing half-forgotten 70s sci fi TV series, STAR MAIDENS (my analysis here); also slamming it home with crisp hot fire, Dee Wallace (THE HOWLING) and Patricia Quinn (ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW) as the irresistible palm-reading sister Megan. And as the dirtiest and most evil witch coming back from the past, Meg Foster as the older witch girl Margaret Morgan. As we've seen them in younger incarnations their aged state seems temporary, as soon they may drink the blood of the young and become their former celluloid selves. As a great writer once said, "film is black magic."

WELCOME TO ARROW BEACH, 
I also like that Zombie's main idea of 'a devil' seems to be the aforementioned Baby Bok Choi, a two umbilical cord-cabled Weeblo of the highest order, with red wet, cunting up the idea that Satan is in the sense of the original Nephilim rebel, the James Dean of our ancient creators, Lord Enki to some, maybe Merlin, maybe Im-Ho-Tep or Amon Ra or Set or Odin, the one who decided to do his own thing and be nice to the creations and set them free. Hey his mother still lives up on the moon! Don't believe me,  feast your ears and eyes here!




From top: Moon Maiden Mummy Mother of Lucifer; alien grey, LUCIFER RISING, 2001, LORDS OF SALEM, TWILIGHT, Aborigine drawing, 2001, SALEM

Also, check out my review of the History Channel's documentary, The Gates of Hell, which I loaded with pretty intense photographs from the 70s occult revival.

As for actual Hell, Zombie does well imagining the way our own death is linked to rebirth and transfiguration instead of just the Heaven/Hell polarity of Catholicism. In Buddhist mythology, Hell the place the dirtied souls go to be cleansed by fire. It's not permanent. Submit to the scraping with compassionate non-attachment because beyond these demons' door is paradise. There's a little of that concept floating through Zombie's film, but it would have been better if he'd bothered to have one unsoiled image, aside from the scholar and his wife, who barely have time to register as more than rich people living in an apartment that looks like it will resume being a Brentano's as soon as filming is finished. I'm just jealous of course. An apartment that cool would be worth leaving NYC for.
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I'm no fan of Ti West after he subjected me to the awful hipster hair and cheap shocks of THE INNKEEPERS (2011), but HOUSE OF THE DEVIL has a few things going for it which Zombie might have gleaned but didn't. The main thing is tick-tock momentum, wherein dread builds through the careful setup of a particular place over a single evening, in linear time with no flashbacks or disorienting cuts across time and characters. It usually starts in late afternoon as the sun begins to wane and cast ominous shadows and the editing seems to slow the progression of time down (CARRIE's climb up the steps to the stage take like ten minutes). Rather than the constant flashing back and forth and sudden wake-ups from nightmares that 'cheat' on situations, tick-tock momentum is a style of storytelling most horror filmmakers never pick up on when they rip off HALLOWEEN but West does and Zombie doesn't. Their films have such similar plots they warrant close comparison. They should get together and compare notes as each has flaws the other doesn't share.


For example, in HOUSE the places seem pretty real, normal in that sickly unironic way (dig the couch and painting below, all the believable little early 80s-late 70s details, and are twice as creepy because of it). We know her new apartment is cool and we like the saucy old lady landlord (Dee Wallace in both), but there's something a little too lush in all Heidi's upstairs private space that makes no sense - it's too big to believably be part of a quaint boarding house style abode and unless she has a maid, there's no way a recovering junky like Heidi's character should have such clean floors. And she would smoke cigarettes and drink a ton of coffee, or something other than booze. The girls in HOUSE are believably tied up in petty matters that seem huge to them because they're poor and/or just starting out taking care of their own finances while trying to finally move out of their dorms. Heidi is mature and old enough to have a job and an apartment but she's too old to be laughing when there's some that knows better, to paraphrase the hitchhiker in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1973).


The 70s-80s Satanic panic tick-tock momentum vibe of DEVIL is undone in an instant however with the sudden arrival of a distinctly modern crustpunk (A.J. Bowen), who comes rolling up Gerwig's car after it breaks down like an angry Williamsburg hipster fresh from teeth gnashing class. And another blow follows with the old man played by Tom Noonan who is just way too mumblecore, too naturalistic, with that 'gentle' voice no actor in the 70s or 80s would ever use. The women fare much better: Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sports shirt and in her late afternoon fast food joint scene with Samantha (Donahue) you feel the ache of an upstate New York fall winter in your bones and want to be able to curl up with her in a fire-lit dorm room and not have to go anywhere, so you feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha for needing to take this babysitter job so badly. I went to school in Syracuse, so maybe I relate. The evenings there are so oppressively gray they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous. Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace are on point of course, they were born to this, as was Gerwig. But add the boys up alongside the insufferable twerp in THE INNKEEPERS and you get the feeling that Ti West has a stand offish relationship to his male actors. They seem like they didn't get the memo of whatever the film is about, or acting really, about projecting themselves into a room or situation. Ti West should just keep all men out of his films, like I do, until he's emotionally a man himself. (I'm still not, but hey, I seem to have stopped making films).

The Right: Greta Gerwig 
The wrong: A.J. Bowen
Both the scores do well, though LORDS has moments with kind of making like a Morricone and other times of just sucking with a banal two-note minor key piano. But the hypnotic devil album they play is pretty interesting, it sounds almost like it's trying to break your sound system and leap through the room and crack open a cold-brewed abyss. And a whole slew of great ideas that could be played off the radio as a way to impregnate listeners' minds with Satanic brainwashing come washing across us like a growling Juno synth wipe, but then Zombie shuts that aside, too. Maybe he presumes we've already seen PONTYPOOL? I would love the HOUSE OF THE DEVIL twice as much if it had some Goblin-style synths instead of its creepy but familiar orchestral passages but they're not too bad, nowhere near as lame as that piano in LORDS (as Zombie borrowing the inane and headache-inducing, incessant two note piano refrains in EYES WIDE SHUT).


In the end, West may be too cool for his own good, and Zombie is still a music video maker who hasn't yet figured out the rhythms of narrative, but hey, kudos to both for their subject matter and attention to detail, which is impressive in each. West of course wins handily as the post-modern devil pastiche of choice, though LORDS is solid and gorgeous to look at with more consistency in the preformances. These old Brit ladies give it their all and make us gradually lose all interest in the by-then scabby and deranged Heidi as she moves forward into the Satanic mass as via airport moving walkway. Indeed I can see this film ruling like hell if 40 minutes were cut out, and the whole thing was timed to the complete Velvet Undergound and Nico like LUCIFER RISING is timed to Bobby Beausoleil's masterfully celebratory soundtrack. But otherwise, what are you left with, in either film, besides admiring Zombie for finding the true Satanic Mass sturm und drang of "All Tomorrow's Parties" and admiring West for his loving recreation of a time and genre and being able to plunge deep and impressively into tick-tock momentum?

West, don't be afraid to put some real men in your films once in awhile, and Rob, that narrative momentum thing will come your way yet. You're already better than the late great Ken Russell. Almost. At any rate, you're already way better at mix-tape movies than Cameron Crowe (see my rant on mix tape movies, Aural Drag). And West, you're the only guy doing tick-tock momentum these days, period. Not even Carpenter still does it. Be proud, as the shrouding darkness crowds the grave mound and the score carpets and the sisters all wake and bait, be proud. Your heritage is ours, brother in the cauldron of Satanic panic culture and 70s-80s homage cinema, so boil the newts and stir that literal baby! Your witches are proof of the black secret by which no witch or cultist ever ages, except between shoots (or after shots).

The problem with it all is, of course, that video prevents Satanic magic from actually happening. My ancient aunt's accusers said they saw Satan in the form of a blue boar jump through her window. Nowadays we'd just say oh yeah, why didn't you snap a picture with your cell phone? Bigfoot never comes to those with cameras, and the magnetic field of most aliens knocks out all electronics, which almost goes without saying. What soul is worth stealing once its stolen a million times over by the spectral reduction of the camera? Only one place is left where the black arts still occur, the wet hot pitch black jungle corridor deep within each of us, as long as we're women.

PS - The dog lives!
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NOTES:
1.  A descendent of mine, a Boston seaman in the War of 1812, was also almost eaten 'first, due to his young tender flesh' when he and his crew were shipwrecked on a foodless island. Apparently that's what one did back then, ala the Donners. Luckily they were rescued almost at the last minute before they killed him. I'm sure the rest of the trip was plenty awkward. Anyway, I can joke about it now.... because my family lived through it. 

ROOM 237 Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal off, Baby.

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from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.
ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head; all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious; two because the film is terrifying in and of itself; three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective.


In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of ci madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with too much time on their hands and a good education who've read too much of the world. Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time with their paranoiac collage that Kubrick did with the source material, and so the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, especially when far too crazy to take seriously (and the editing makes even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, his getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.


Hey, if Kubrick did put that little touch in there intentionally, how nice that it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe silver fox shawl)-- will also be recognized. Artists do these odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal touches we leave in our art or writing will be recognized by someone, or something, and that they will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see.

But the really trippy moments come when one fan plays the film backwards over the film moving forward simultaneously, so they overlap over one another (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows, it might be, as we learn here Kubrick had a 200 IQ and was very well read on all sorts of horrors and sought to encode a lot of subliminal information. At any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, so I did too, as in the many collages on here (only the below is from the film).

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl
Even if it's not intentional, does it really matter? In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots for Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

"Pull it Togetherless" (note phallus fingers)
The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite." I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer on some level to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconsious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use tools, not to build bridges but to crush their enemies skulls.  so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. We as humans are evil murderers, it is who we are, our genes, the mighty procreate and endure, the weak die on the roadside. We can discuss the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' is that we did what they did and got away with it.  We were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN.

"We're going to make a new rule" 
That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us those trees and mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar.


In Kubrick this 'help' is revealed in all its terrifying ambivalence, the behavioral modification techniques as in CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are about a dehumanizing conditioning process that has backfired; and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. But better blind than to be able to 'see' and not be afraid (the last words of JACKET's narration) at the cost of... what? Of blood-free hands? Through evil parents a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward into the unknown (such as going to space, or writing a novel). Where would our moon landing be without the Russians for example (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russian science writers in 2001) or war without a divided self? Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (while Jack has made contact with the 'inside party'), in other words, the boy has 'talked' to those socialist science writers; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  

"Maisie Squared" 
Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 
Even ROOM 237 seems to be snickering at some of thsee more loco ideas, such as, the singing of The 3 Little Pigs wolf call as a link to the Holocaust. The Onion in its snarky surmise spoke to Kubrick's assistant on the film to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct:'
"the suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)
"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 
This is of course imbecilic When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery... in the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, ONION!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"
 Call the lunatic critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenics on some level, but at least they know how to look properly, and the lunatic is, in the end, merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface at every given moment. He goes crazy because he can't shut it out of his mind, it doesn't go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts... stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day. It's only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's face used to really bother me as Wendy, but seeing THE SHINING out of context in the film shows me just why she was so ideal, and Danny too, their faces are fleshy and almost elastic - when they scream their mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure, and THE SHINING itself shares a lot with that figure, the sheer overwhelming horror that is the only 'sane' response to an insane world. Apparently one of his quickest shoots, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001, happened largely because of Malcolm McDowell, who once answered the question what was it like to work with Kubrick that it was great, "if he trusted you." If he doesn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, it is a living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way or maybe to just be a sadist or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot.


Hitchcock certainly got his insanity out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by film's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy fear. Malcolm seems to tap into that madness no problem for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, both of whom  apparently got favorite treatment. No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that Jack's Jack starts out crazy so has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always farther to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. 


In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy is Nicole Kidman. She's the caretaker, and has always been, and as such is Kubrick's first 3-D female character. She likes to have sex and Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, so he can ogle his own perfect body. We try to get under the skin of Cruise in EYES and what we see is narcissism at its most complete and idealized. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the way most actors secretly do, that is to say, their inner cell phone camera is always reversed so they never see, so much as see themselves seeing.

The actor with the shine in his eyes is the one who can do both. Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the one that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims for, for there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. And if it's there, it can go further. 

The gold room in The Shining is where Jack experiences his relative distance even from the majority of ghosts, who ignore him, as he wanders around with his drink (which he doesn't ever sip from), and has the advocaat spilled on him. Nicole Kidman's immanent desirability means that she is never safe from being hit on the very minute she is alone and seems bored. This smooth talking yet vaguely sinister figure is her own private Lloyd the bartender, an animus of dark mystery and overt sexuality, providing the direct connection to the unconscious core of sexuality the Cruise's character lacks (i.e. her bourbon is named sex).
 Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic; all of his films are about the cold break of time when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality and the inner and outer merge. Even BARRY LYNDON focuses on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after winning a duel and being robbed by a highwayman. PATHS OF GLORY and its endless trenches and the break with reality there occurring in the transitions between the ugly grim reality of the men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the two duels fought in LYNDON, the charge and subsequent summary execution in PATHS. Kubrick brings cold, clinical reason deep into that murky homicidal core of man's decision-making in these areas vs. the messiness of actual practice. Jack continually lets his family get away, the troops refuse to charge, HAL refuses to admit his mistake, and only our brave flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, Heee-Yawing all the way down to armageddon. This is because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see the ants.

Gearing up for some lashings of the old ultra violent, Wendy. Gimme the bat!
For LYNDON it's the duels that allow for the setting up of the precision into the madness. Kubrick takes ample time in reading the rules, obeying the formalities, and so forth; in CLOCKWORK there is the lengthy prison induction process, the guard snapping off each order, from receiving Alex's possessions and clothing to issuing his new gear similar to the dehumanizing of the troops in FULL METAL JACKET.

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. The stress of 'faking the moon landings' and the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.


Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between four AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and camels have all gone to bed, as it were, and the miasma of dream overtakes one's location, the tiresome curtain of tedious convention, the collective guise of sanity, or decency and normality. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They all vainly struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For we who are truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction. The sane are now the insane ones, and oh how they danced... at Stonhenge.


NOTES:
1. As one of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes, most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact

ALSO ON ACIDEMIC:

ON BRIGHT LIGHTS:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: ELIMINATORS (1986), THE TIME GUARDIAN (1987), Long ago... before CGI

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1986 - ***
"There's no gold, this is some kind of science fiction thing, isn't it?" 

This question asked by ELIMINATOR's Handiana Jonesolo river guide, explains in a snap the magic of crappy 80s sci fi movies: if the cheap 'science fiction thing' masquerades as gold, well we love it for trying like we love our kid's school play. We can enjoy spotting all the 'influences' on the sci fi thing's sleeve, those footsteps so eagerly tread in--as if a son following his ALIEN-TERMINATOR-STAR WARS-ROBOCOP dad's overflowing pocket change-sprinkled tracks-- if in addition to the look and plot elements of those movies they add engaging characters, dialogue that's witty and wry (rather than winky-leery and slapstick-spastic), strong female leads who aren't just eye candy, imaginative special effects that aren't CGI, bad cops and stingy bartenders getting their idiocy thrust up their noses like yakuza chopsticks, and good 80s synthesizer music instead of just half-heartedly coasting on breasts and explosions.


And lo, here is a 1986 science fiction adventure bullseye in the above target criteria. It's a CROCODILE DUNDEE OF THE LOST ROBOCOP TERMINATOR CLASHING WITH TITANS, with Denise Crosby (PET SEMATARY) as a foxy robotics engineer recruited by 'Mandroid' (Patrick Reynolds, of the R.J. Reynolds clan) an amnesiac Robo-Lancelot with cool weapon arms and an attachable half-track who wants her help destroying the rogue scientist everyone thought was dead, who bootlegged her designs, the rogue!  Turns out MANDROID was sent back in time by this evil guy to kill a bunch of Roman soldiers. If he could only remember!

Rounding out the team is the above-quoted charter boat captain of African Queen / Millennium Falcon-style shabbiness, Harry Fontana (Andrew Prine), who has a great gift for delivering meta commentaries without breaking the narrative flow: "we got cave men, we got robots, we got kung fu." His face oscillates between resembling David Carradine, Joel McRae, and Kevin Sorbo in a pleasing, hallucinatory way. And he's crafty enough to reduce his rival riverboat captains to a bunch of smoldering wrecks along the shore as he's pursued by both an Emma Small-style rival and the evil mastermind's sassy henchmen. In the eleventh hour, a skilled martial artist (Conan Lee!) joins the band and there's even a reasonably tolerable cute little purse-held R2/Bobo the Owl. The scenes where he's allegedly floating above/behind the shoulder of the Mandroid are pretty endearing... maybe not in the way they intended.

Alas, this being kid-friendly there's some bad faith nonlethal assurance: "You didn't have to blow them up!" - "They only jumped over the side!" - Oy Vey.. here we go again, safety-first Sarah Connor. As expected the tone rocks unevenly but if you're like me you didn't come to ELIMINATORS for even tone. You came to laugh, and relax and even fall asleep while enjoying a narrative with no CGI, fake breasts, rape or daughter abduction. Amem... rest easy gentle robocough, I mean Mandroid.

THE TIME GUARDIAN
1987 - **1/4

ELIMINATORS only looks Australian TIME GUARDIAN is. And yet, the cast includes Carrie Fisher. Why? Is this her cocaine binge era? She seems to be hiding in the opening action scenes many dark patches, like she doesn't want her mom to see her doing such tripe. But she's Oscar calibre compared to Dean Stockwell as the elected official leader of a time-traveling electric city that's being pursued across time's spectrum by a group of evil "half machine, half human" underground combinations of Cylons and Shogun Warriors.

Remember them? I forgot all about them until this movie I'm still not sure why Transformers wasn't sued by the Shogun clan, or the Micronauts. 


Anyway, the big time-traveling city is coming--where else?--to the outback in present day to duke it out with these monsters once and for all. Carrie Fisher and the titular hero, Ballard (Tom Burlinson) a frowny-faced warrior who goes by his own code and all that--are rocketed ahead as scouts for the new location where she winds up wounded, and is thus allowed her to sit most of the movie while he tussles with paranoid local cops and falls for a hottie anthropologist who's been examining ancient cave drawings that represent the very same domed city on its way. They've been here before, and the local Aboriginals remember them, and the welcome Carrie and Ballard receive from the handful of local tribal residents is moving and subtle and should have been developed more. I mean, how cool that they don't even blink an eye when Carrie and Ballard emerge from a pond at the conclusion of one of their dreamtime rituals. I would have liked to have some didgeridoo added to the soundtrack, and maybe some explorations of these 'ancient astronauts are future time travelers'tangents, as the whole tweaked and disbelieving trigger-happy sheriff thing's been done to death, and the battle scenes are, well, incomprehensible.

Costumes are--as with the finest Ozploitation--a fusion of the macho and S/M emasculating
But hey it's got a lot of Ozploitation-style craziness, an admirably deadpan integrity, and no CGI. The lead women fight like the braves and the geologist is cute and can handle her lines like a pro. I enjoyed it, though I skipped through some of their more idiotic run-ins with the law which I could see coming a kilometer off, and I'm painfully aware that it gets no love from the press: it's "an example of Australian cinema at its most derivative and dull," notes the NY Times. Well, they should know!
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Both films are on a 'Sci Fi Marathon Four Pack' from Shout! which I acquired for like $5. Each looks pretty good though is clearly remastered from a 16mm full frame print. Maybe neither ever was ever wider. Neither film looks particularly cropped. So... I recommend it.

The other two films in the set are ARENA and AMERICA 3000. I haven't seen either but love them already.

Make up Your Mind Control: 33.3 Ways to Read EYES WIDE SHUT

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"In regards to the title of this film, Eyes Wide Shut is said to be a code phrase used by members of high society that translates roughly into --- you have not seen any of my misdeeds, because your eyes are wide shut. This allows such people to run amok above and beyond all laws, and without the threat of ever being caught. We see this happen time and time again in our lives, where if one of us broke the law, we would be dealt with in a prompt manner. However, we see on the news and read in the newspapers and news magazines, where globalist figures are constantly walking away from serious crimes without so much as a slap on the wrist. - The Kentroversy Papers 
"At the opening party at Victor Ziegler’s house, Alice Harford meets up with and dances with a Hungarian man. The name of this character is Sandor Szavost. This character shares his name with the creator of the Church of Satan, Anton Sandor LaVey. This would be an accurate analogy, as members of the global elite are all dedicated to either Lucifer or Satan. Their religion has them believe that both Lucifer and Satan are good, and the God of the Christians has forsaken these so-called fallen angels, and is therefore, an enemy God. This type of thinking is extremely twisted, and represents what some have called a Satanic Reversal --- evil is good, lies are truth, death is life, and darkness is light." --The Kentroversy Papers
"It may also be significant that the film's director Stanley Kubrick died suddenly. Mozart, a mason, died soon after revealing masonic mysteries in his opera, The Magic Flute. Author Stephen Knight, whose book,Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1975) revealed Victorian London's Whitechapel Murders as the work of ritual masonic killers, also died mysteriously. And William Morgan, author of Freemasonry Exposed(1836) was kidnapped and allegedly murdered by masons. -- Uri Dowbenko (Steamshovel Press) 

"During his dark night of the soul, Dr. Bill travels through the seamy underworld of his disturbed psyche, searching for sexual release, haunted by some insatiable hunger driving him toward unknown ends, along the way encountering a woman he hardly knows, who swears she's madly in love with him. Add to this collection an HIV positive prostitute, as well as the daughter of the aforementioned costume shop owner--who's apparently being pimped out by papa--and what we have is a trinity of lost souls, caught up in the grinding wheels of a powerful machine that eats people up, then spits them out in tiny, fragmented pieces. All of these woman could easily be Monarch victims, and even if they aren't, each is a prisoner of a system of control prevalent in our society; a system which exists on many levels, and in all strata of society, both seen and unseen."--The Konformist

"According to "Treee," a young Las Vegas woman who claims to have contacts inside the secretive club [The Bohemian Grove], a ritual sacrifice of Mary Magdalene takes place Tuesday July 21; and the ritual sacrifice of Jesus Christ takes place Wednesday, July 22. A human body or effigy is burned in front of an large owl symbolizing Moloch, the pagan Canaanite God...
If having our world leaders belong to a satanic cult weren't bad enough, the Las Vegas woman says the Illuminati are actually an alien reptilian species that occupies human bodies and feeds off our energy....
She says: This reptilian species is called "Sangerians;" they are a "fourth dimension race" and make up 3% of the world's population. She claims to have met "more than one, more than once." They have three-hearts, shift shapes, are cold blooded, but are developing human feelings from devouring human flesh and blood. -- Henry Makow
"The reptilian-illuminati hybrids are obsessed with sexual aggression and domination, which is evidenced by their sex magic rituals. Humans are routinely taken and programmed to serve them as familiars and sex slaves; more evidence of their desire to control and "own" others. 
Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is probably an accurate representation of what takes place in one of these rituals. He was certainly involved with some of their circles and must have been exposed to things like this on more than a few occasions.

As a side note, he was apparently killed because he refused to cut a scene which contained subliminal triggers that were intended to break the mind-control programs of the people in the audience. Following his death, the scene was cut and never made it to the final film." ( -Carleee (Prison Planet Forum)

And so it goes, ever deeper and more perverse... I was going to just keep quoting for this whole post, let the paranoia mine its own irony, but the sinking feeling in my poor stomach was too much. Because, you see, I am easily traumatized, and this shit gets disturbing... Trauma-based conditioning? Torturing children to create multiple personalities? Count me out! I'd prefer to think it's not true, or real, and that they're not the same. I believe the above craziness is true without necessarily being real. I need to believe it's not real, for my own thread-dangling sanity, but the way my lower chakras spin like frightened tops when reading it means there's more going on than just schizophrenic hallucinating.

So how can it be one and not the other, you ask?

Say you drop a jam jar on the linoleum floor of your kitchen. If you wind up cleaning the whole house, scrubbing top to bottom, and still see the jam, floating like a ghost imprint over the now clean floor, is it still there?

The only answer is. What. Do you mean by "it" ---?

The answer is, of course, the jam, the dried MacBethian spot of sangria etching its Rorschach butterfly way across the linoleum lining your subconscious' ceiling. Of course it is still there, because you still see it. Is the tell-tale heart really still beating just because Poe's narrator hears it? Of course. Well... maybe not. What do you mean by "really"?

These Satanic conspiracies, based on 'recovered memories', are like the ghost jam, the beating of its hideous heart. They point to a zone horror authors have been delving into for centuries, but which Freud and Jung both missed, the collective subconscious. Freud had his personal subconscious and Jung had his collective unconscious, but neither thought there could be a collective subconscious. Why would there be?

But what do I mean by "there"?

I believe all paranormal stuff is true but not real as it occupies these dimensions outside our reality, the fourth dimension referred to in the quote above. I am learning how to be a good adept in navigating this fourth dimension, I think, learning how to approach the idea of grey aliens and bigfeet scoping us out every now and then without quite merging wholly onto our material plane for any length of time, but the Satanic conspiracy stuff runs so dark so fast it's like slipping off the continental shelf and feeling the ocean turn 30 degress cooler in a heart-stopping snap. You exhale sharply, down you go and when you come up, you're ashen and transformed.


But this conspiracy started long before Kubrick, the CIA, the Masons, the Annunaki, or the Triassic. And it already reached full flower in the Satanic panic of the early 1980s, where like we did back in Salem, we ignored physical evidence and let a bunch of disoriented children accuse their parents, nannies, teachers, daycare workers, and neighbors of witchy ritual, until it became obvious that there was no logical way some of this stuff could have happened without time for meals and lesson plans. After all, these kids had no visible marks or scars and according to their hypnotic regression testimony they'd had limbs removed, they'd given birth to winged cherubs, and spent a longer time in the coven then they'd been alive, and so forth:
Recovered memories of early sexual trauma, satanic ritual reconstructions, and the development of multiple personalities satisfy the wish of both patient and therapist to understand a bewildering array of symptoms that plead cautious study. Until the 1970s, multiple personalities were considered extremely rare. Although almost entirely absent from the European and Japanese literature, more cases of multiple personality have been described in the past five years than collectively in the past hundreds of years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has not found one single case of satanic cult ritual burial remains, although tens of thousands of individuals every year are purported to have been victims. - JAMA (1995 abstract, Making Monsters: False Memory, Psychotherapy and Sexual Hysteria)
The hypnotists were getting at a truth, so were the Salem judges maybe, but it was a truth unrelated to any physical reality. It was a truth related to the subconscious of a developing child's mind, where everything dirty and only half-understood from adult coded conversations and stray X-rated imagery is translated into ornate fantasies of dominance and subjugation built larger and more terrifyingly bizarre with every session. Some of the less grisly of these reports of abuses resembled my own prepubescent fantasies involving girls from my class in elementary school and some of the cast of CHARLIE'S ANGELS, but scrambled, like all America's most twisted suppressed dark desires from childhood were still floating around in the ether, ready to be received like radio stations direct through the unconscious mouth into the headline-grabbing hypnotist's tape recorder.


I didn't really understand it until I read Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld which points out the science vs. religion vs. occult arguments are all failing to encompass the way our perceptions change the perceived:
As with all anomalous entities, the very act of observing the particles disturbs them. Observer and observed, subject and object, cannot finally be distinguished. Particles whose existence is predicted obligingly turn up. If we didn't know better, we might almost say that they had been imagined into existence. The so-called New Physicists smelled a rat long ago. They began to compare the whole enterprise to oriental religion or to suspect that its reality is primarily metaphorical, not literal and factual. This is not to say that daimons cannot manifest concretely, as we have seen. In fact, the smaller they are, the more powerful they can be, viz. the atom bomb. (more)

Harpur also points out the similarity of Satanic child abduction to the indigenous tribal initiation practices through the centuries, practices we would consider barbaric and illegal today. But these ancient tribes understood the importance of trauma in enabling the symbolic death of the child and his rebirth as an adult. Note the astonishing similarities that in the tribal ceremonies Harpur describes below with the recovered memories of children that led to the Satanic panic (as well as the Salem trials):
 They are snatched from the safety of their homes in the dead of night by tall entities with extraordinary faces --slit mouths and noses, large eyes, for example -- and carried off to a dark place, sometimes narrow and subterranean like a grave, where they are left for days at a time. Deprived of food, exhausted, they are periodically visited by the entities, who torture them, slashing their penises and scarring their faces. At the same time they are given amazing knowledge --secrets they must not reveal -- before being returned to their villages in a blaze of lights where their families no longer recognize them. (231)
Harpur writes that the children kind of know what's going on, based on tribal scuttlebutt, but are still terrified beyond all measure, not only of death but of the now confirmed suspicion that their parents and relatives have been transformed into demons:  "The children themselves are painted to look like ghosts... for their former childish selves have to die through the initiation before they can be reborn into new adult selves." (231)


It would explain a lot if we took this into account alongside the sole non-PG remnant of the tribal initiation rite in our modern age--the losing of one's virginity -- to explain the sordid sexual nature of the Satanic panic and mind control sex slave EYES WIDE SHUT mythos.

It might seem like I'm saying this stuff doesn't exist.  The tribal initiation, the paranoid schizophrenic fantasy, the Salem witch Sabbath, the Illuminati mind control conspiracy are of course all part of the same phenomena but I don't think it's 'bunk' or 'made up' entirely. There is a vast wilderness beyond what our ego-- that intolerant, abusive killer in our psychic constellation-- allows as 'reality' (a term the ego doesn't even like to examine, as like HAL 9000, it refuses to see itself as it truly is --a fantasy).

Seeing ROOM 237 last week (review here) is what set me off on this tangent. If you see that film you naturally have to see THE SHINING right afterwards, and then keep going, applying the paranoid deconstructions from 237 to his other films. But I warn you, keep out of EYES WIDE SHUT with that ray of paranoid layer uncovering! Just stay out! A few luridly detailed mind control analogies you might be wishing you could put the genie back into the bottle.

I don't know why I was so shocked by all that SRA (Satanic Ritual Abduction) business. Reproduction is a nasty brutish business, even without the Illuminati still stealing all the hot women, and the idea that mind control frequencies in TV broadcasts turn girls super slutty if you give the right code word ("Tiffany's! Cartier!") might be a comfort to the broke, lazy slob in his easy chair seething with resentment that his wife isn't Victoria's Secret level hot. Me, I poison myself with straight white male liberal hatred against myself until I feel literally sick because no matter how cleanly feminist I think I am, there's another layer of self-awareness  under that wherein I realize it's all an act, dating back to my Penthouse forum-reading virgin middle school days, foolishly believing my sensitive new age guy routine would enable me to get girls while still sucking at sports.

It worked! But then I would objectify her, lose that pesky virginity, and split. By the time I unearth that layer and lay foundation for a deeper level of sensitive self awareness and wise up to my six foot deep playa tricks ("the best agent is the one who doesn't even know he's an agent," said Bill's insectoid typewriter) the girl I'm trying to win or impress is off having children with a stable husband. Naturally I think she did all that just to spite me. And that kind of solipsistic paranoia seems to me at the heart of some of this Satanic recall. Just read a ton of stuff on the Monarch MK-Ultra conspiracies out there and then watch TV, any TV show or movie, and you can feel the truth of it.

For example, as I'm writing this, CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM, with an automaton girl standing before a series of mirrors (which I've learned they use in mind programming), singing that she's under a spell--an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including occurring before an assembled audience of mysterious attendees, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked in a class we forgot to study for, etc.). In reproducing the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, the programmers tap into the control state, programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend. I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference.

Staged Programming (note raised hands), from top: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Clockwork Orange, Manchurian Candidate

And it's a rabbit hole we're hardwired as children to be attracted to... scared to go in, yet unable to look away. Part of this is our secret masochistic projection, the proxy agony of the hypothetical abductee, the way Cruise's cocky doctor uses the image of the wife being ravished by the naval officer--an image to something which she admits up front is only a fantasy--as a tool for paroxysms of masochistic acting out that would make even Josef Von Sternberg go "whoa, bro."

The naval officer theme is no accident, appearing as it does in the dream 'cover memory' in ROSEMARY'S BABY and straddling as it does the oceanic with the military industrial complex - the dream captain, the "master" of the ocean surface as the subconscious to the unconscious' deep waters. Cruise's doctor might explore the feminine depth, but always with a glum matron present, always with sterile gloves. The navy man goes in deep because he is master of the ocean!

Row Row Row! (from top: Eyes Wide Shut, Rosemary's Baby)

In the end, the extent to whether or not all the hotties in the world are mind controlled sex zombies for the rich and powerful is an ingeniously masochistic tool to explain why you can't have one. And for that and other reasons it makes no difference if it is real or just the subject's subconscious id's favorite childhood bondage scenario remembered as real through hypnosis. In other words, even if true it is still a paranoid fantasy!

As per Lacan (as analyzed by Zizek):
"Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce German girls), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological - because it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. So, in the case of anti-Semitism, knowledge about what the Jews "really are" is a fake, irrelevant, while the only knowledge at the place of truth is the knowledge about why a Nazi needs a figure of the Jew to sustain his ideological edifice." (Looking Awry, p. 71)
Translated to the Illuminati codexing of EYES WIDE SHUT, the only truth is that we need to project our latent masochistic perversity onto figures who freely practice what we won't even allow ourselves to fantasize about. If they are real it is only because these dark fantasies, which we are not even conscious of, structure the fantasmatic dimension of our social order.

If we could prove these evil secret networks did exist, with names named and figures arrested it would merely be a hum-drum scandal once the public interest moved on, and the worlds of paranoid schizophrenia, narcissism, etc. would be without their dark support structures. If you know any people with these conditions, maybe you have heard them talk about ex-boyfriends breaking into their apartments while they're at work, moving objects around, planting microphones in their teeth, sending strange numeric codes at the bottom of seemingly meaningless SPAM emails. They can sound very very sane and convincing, and you may even believe them when they're in your room having coffee, but as soon as they leave, you roll your eyes and think they're insane. As per the above Zizek quote, even if these things are really happening, that eye roll has just kept you from being dragged down into their pathology. The idea is to not believe it but at the same time to not deny its possible truth, for the more we try to scoff at or downgrade these experiences the more we drift into the role witch hunting style crusaders.

Missing the Orgy

Part of the paranoia of all this which I really resonate with is the feeling of being left out of something. Somewhere, somehow I'm missing the orgy. I remember being super sick with a fever and trying to sleep in my college girlfriend's apartment while she was painting in the other room - it being around 8 PM. As I lay there in my deliria, I became sure that she had another man over and that she was cheating on me with him; I could hear them laughing. I would stagger into the other room to confront her, but she'd be alone, not even on the phone. Then I would go back to bed and begin to 'know' deep in my gut that the guy was hiding under the bed, I checked. No one. Then I was sure he was in the closet. I checked. I checked under the bed again. It didn't matter I found no man (the apartment was very small and easily searched) but I knew he was there. I was ready to start a massive fight over it because I was sure he, or they, were hiding, mocking me, from every shadow. The moment I closed the door I heard my girlfriend begin to laugh quietly and him whispering. I whipped open the door, nothing. Even knowing I was just having feverish delusions didn't help.

At any rate, it proved a valuable experience for me. When I later saw RAGING BULL I knew why he was so psychotically jealous of his wife: head trauma.


We can see the end result of this delusional fantasy in the case of Richard McCaslin, Who "planned a heavily armed assault on the exclusive (and alleged site of sadistic Illuminati-reptilian Satanic abuses and human sacrifices) Bohemian Grove men's club for more than a year," believing "it would take something dramatic" to draw attention to human sacrifices he feared were being held there":
"In a jailhouse interview Monday night, the well-spoken, lucid and clean-shaven man said he "wanted to make a point" and was prepared to kill people at the Monte Rio resort if necessary. 
McCaslin said he thinks he is sane. 
"They might beg to differ," he said with a laugh, pointing his thumb behind him into the mental health ward." --- The Press Democrat (1-22-02)
Was Kubrick the filmmaker version of McCaslin, confused by the mix of suppressed subconscious fantasizing, exclusion anxiety, and "somewhere a child is being sacrificed" or "Somewhere my love lies sleeping (with a male chorus)" neurosis?

OR was he initiated into the weird world of mind control and sex ritual due to his being hired to fake the moon landings? Did this dark secret prove such a burden to him, not being able to tell anyone, that he finally snapped and told his wife, who was pretty freaked out, mirroring Bill's late inning confession to Alice? Is everything in EYES WIDE his trying to come to terms with realizing his wife was also a victim of mind control?

OR did Kubrick just read a lot about it in those 'recalled repressed childhood Satanic abuse trauma' and MK-ULTRA books and eventually it warped his mind? '

OR is this all just an isolated neurotic's lame conceptions of how rich oversexed people behave at parties?

The case of McCaslin and my own fever jealousy should illustrate by now that there is no real difference, the answer to all these questions is yes.

Part 33: Antahkarana Kadabra!

The weird irrational behavior of the two models in the opening party, for example, along with everything else that goes on, can be explained through the maze of the mind control theory, as they want to take him "over the rainbow," presumably a code for the world that is shown to subjects of the practice, leaving them a way to explain all the bizarre things that seem to happening to them, THE WIZARD OF OZ being one of the source texts for this kind of conditioning:
"The Rainbow--with its seven colors has long had an occult significance of being a great spiritual hypnotic device. Constance Cumbey, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, which exposes the New Age Occult Movement, correctly writes, "The Rainbow (also called the Antahkarana [left] or Rainbow Bridge). This is used as a hypnotic device (p.261). 
"The Supreme Council of the 33rd" of Freemasonry has used the rainbow on the cover of their magazine. In a book teaching Druidism (as in Illuminati Druidism), The 21 Lessons of Meryln, the Rainbow is described as "A true sign of Magic...it exists in both worlds at once!" Elvira Gulch is a woman who owns 1/2 of the county where Dorothy lives in Kansas. She is shown later in the Land of Oz transformed as a witch.
Many of the Illuminati elite are rich and lead double lives. People who meet them at a ritual will see the dark side of these rich people. At the rituals, people are tranced from drugs, chanting, and mind control; they are "over the rainbow."- Fort Refuge
On the other hand, the two girls may be there to just set up the future problem between Bill and Alice, whose mutual attractiveness has surely caught them the attention if interested parties before, but like the single night of misadventure that opens A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, their marriage seems to begin at this party. (No one from Alex's violent misdeeds prior to the home invasion night gets revenge, for example.)

The figure who separates Bill and Alice, Nick Nightingale, has a name that symbolizes sleep, and immediately after Alice is hit on by her animus-representation, the Anton La Vey, Bill gets drawn into a menage a trois any man would melt in his bones for. Now, in my book any good looking young couple is going to want to mingle and flirt and bask in the adoration of others at a party, and then they go home together and no harm done. What, are they supposed to just canoodle all night? Why even go to the party if not to strut?


In the end there's a weird symbiosis between that orgy and Kidman's dream and the idea is what is worse, a sex-saturated dream you are enjoying (she's the center of attention -- she 'belongs' there) or a reality in which you are out of your depth?

As someone whose had a panic attack after being hit on by two spooky models at a 2006 Halloween party, I no longer envy and hate Dr. Bill the way I did when I first saw the film in 1999. I hadn't read Lacan then, and couldn't stand the fact that Bill's uncertain fog lets these two hotties go, and all the subsequent ones, or even got them in the first place, or was so easily picked up the West Village streetwalker--that just doesn't happen; this isn't Atlantic City! But now I'm beaten down, broken on the wheel of time like a scarecrow. If I had another encounter with those two spooky models I would still run away but wouldn't hate myself so much later. Why? Because now I've read up on EYES WIDE conspiracy mind control theorems.

Here's a detail I remember about those two girls who tried to pick me up but gave me a whopping panic attack instead (and this after I 'tested' my psychic powers by requesting in my deep meditation to pick up not one but two girls for a menaga trois that night), one was dressed as a dominatrix, the other wore a black bikini, had a perfect body, AND REPTILE EYES, though they were presumably contacts for her 'costume.' OR we were meant to assume so, just as we are meant to assume that all of the masks at the orgy in EYES hide human faces. Are reptile contact lenses on Halloween the perfect cover, allowing reptilian-human hybrids to show their real selves?

Now that we're talking about it, I'm remembering a run in or two with another pair of spooky girls, hippie chicks (and one guy) up in Syracuse in 1987. They were gorgeous and way too sexually advancing, to the point I found myself backing up away from them and was not sure why, as I was hardly a virgin, or sober. I can barely remember what any of these girls looks like now. If I did hook up with them, would I even be alive today? And are all my subsequent peccadilloes just my long night of the soul trying to get revenge on womankind for making me feel all itchy and strange missing these encounters? Were these girls even human? Was their whole mission just to seduce men and steal their DNA, and/or leave us with a lifetime of sexual anxiety that they could siphon off with their orgone harvesting matrixes?

My roommate Eric did sleep with one of those hippie chicks and was super weirded out afterwards. He told me that something about her vagina didn't look right, though he couldn't explain exactly what was so wrong about it.... not a writer. One of them came onto me at an outdoor concert while I was tweaking out on way too much of something or other and my dog acted all afraid of her and her beauty carved into me like talons; I could feel the emanating waves of open sexuality calling to me but I could see the scythe and crossbones as well. I heard myself muttering an incoherent apology and felt my legs carrying me away even as I tried to take up her offer.

Plus, Bill getting called away before he can go 'over the rainbow' to deal with the OD seems to be implying those two girls meant shooting him up as well as whatever sexual stuff... and he may have wound up as comatose as she is. Even metaphorically it means he is spared the problems that plague a man beset upon by two hot women, a kind of all-encompassing panic-inducing mix of dread and desire that confound his ability to walk or think clearly (the awkward nervous banalities of their conversation reflects this kind of flushed disorientation). It is like a drug in and of itself, draining normal humdrum reality, the way, for example the music dies down and changes and the rest of the world becomes a blur when Maria and Tony's first spot one another in WEST SIDE STORY.

What's in that champagne?

Hey, so naturally fitting in with my life experience I read EYES as a metaphor for addiction and recovery. The name Dr. Bill is even a hybrid of the founders of AA, Dr. Bob and Bill Wilson. AA can get very cult-like, despite the founders' best attempts. The drug downstairs at the party is champagne but they all act like they're on heavy duty opiates, or maybe expensive champagne is just so expensively good it acts as a moral inhibition quasher.

Even so, I've never seen anyone act as bizarrely as they do at that EYES opening party, except at gatherings of sexy friends where everyone was drunk and super high on ecstasy and/or roofies. Did someone tell Kubrick that people at parties talk super close (because of loud music) and act weird on ecstasy, so this is what he was going for? Maybe he should have actually gone to a few parties. That's the problem with all these cultish mind control readings, maybe they're true but their behavior is also very close to the ideas of what a person who has already missed all the orgies would imagine orgies are like, someone like a doctor, who always has to keep his mind relatively clear in case there's an emergency call.

To someone like that, and I should know, there doesn't even need to be an orgy going on to feel they're missing it. They come crashing in armed to the teeth like our poor friend McCaslin, shocked to fine an empty grove instead of the full-swing Sodom that was causing them so much unbearable Freudian anxiety to imagine.

Awake, sleeper, from the dream of Cruiselessness

But if that's his desire then Kubrick messes up, again, because upstairs the comatose hooker Mandy looks nowhere near pale or blue enough to be believably OD-ed. Her skin glows. He does a good job of 'reaching' her through her head in a way that might mirror deprogramming: "Mandy, Mandy, are you in there. Can you hear me? Move your head if you can hear me..." shining a light in her eye, you can feel almost what it's like to be lying down hearing him far above you as you die, and maybe that is a parallel with Scientology's work with addicts, but when he says, "you can't keep doing this... you're gonna need some rehab" it's a joke. How does he know? She could easily be just dozing off from too much of that roofie champagne. Probably she won't need rehab for the very reason that her tolerance is way way down otherwise she wouldn't have passed out so early in the evening. Maybe she got the good stuff at this party and it's usually cut with B-12 so she overdid it and passed out for a hot second. She should just tone it down and keep her tolerance way low by under rather than overdosing. And she needs to stay the hell away from Ziegler and has super-potent supply. He's like that producer whose underage girlfriends keep OD-ing in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Ding!


The next scene, their post-party clinch to "Baby did a bad bad thing" by Chris Isaak, seems a little shady, too.. The joint rolling (it's dried shake, yo) is cool but then Alice goes back to talking in that close druggy whisper and you're like damn girl, you ever talk normal, like a normal person? Did Stanley make you take roofies all during the shoot? Was ecstasy a cough drop? Did he stress you guys out so much that roofies were your only escape? I've done roofies and let me tell you, you don't pass out (if only you take a half like you're supposed to), you float around on winged angel Roombas and talk real close to people without kissing them, in a whirl of abandonment and inhibition-free jouissance.

But to take the paranoid conspiracy theories quoted at the top to their inevitable conclusion, all sexual openness and ecstasy is a product of hypnotic mind control. And that's sad. I believe it is mind control behind desire, but it's not Satanists or the CIA or the Illuminati at work. Power is enough of an aphrodesiac, they don't need to get all drastic to have chicks swoon for them, No, the culprit behind all this is far more evil than any inner circle of hooded power brokers, and more serpentine and twisted than any 4th dimensional reptoid.

Of course I'm referring to DNA.

Call it alien programming, maybe, why not? Our DNA after all wouldn't have survived this long had it not liked to throw condoms to the wind. The genes that survive through millennia are ruthless in their goals. They can make you think not using condoms just this once is going to make it sexier, and keeping the baby is nobler, and that your lover is "the one" you should raise a family with forever, and ever, and ever. But that's before you climax and plant the seed. Once you've dropped off the goods, that drive now tells you to split. Hahaha that voice wants you to be a tomcat whore when ten minutes ago it was preaching at you like the bishop of Canterbury. Sucker! The genetic con job is the oldest trick in the book. We're like the tip of the iceberg thinking it's moving of its own free will when all the while the bulk of it is below the surface being drawn hither and yon on murky currents. Thinking you can really ever know how deep below the waves you go is, in the end, the very definition, in the end, of "fucking" madness...



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