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RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR

El Rey has delivered the great trashy 1970s-80s Italian goods like clockwork these days, and the best so far is Rats: Night of Terror (1984) -- which is different from Willard or Food of the Gods, or Rats, as in the Frank Herbert series about giant rats: Rats, Lair, and something else, which Stephen King recommended in Danse Macabre, and I found at the school book fair and bought and read avidly and so was crushed by the lame movie of. Whew!Anyway, it's the post-apocalyptic land wandering phase of junk 80s Italian cinema, the time when Escape from New York, The Warriors, The Road Warrior, and Conan the Barbarian all swirled together in the Italian trash auteur mind.

Since the advent of DVD a lot of these once-maligned gonzo Italian trash classics have found a new vibrance, as instant nostalgia for the era - even though at the time we'd just sneer at them, and with the glorious El Rey channel, we don't even have to seek them out. And you can feel the love and eye for deep blacks and deep color restoration on a lot of these, not all, but Rats: Night of Terror looks amazing, and that helps us get over the general grimy look of all the abandoned buildings where the film was shot, and our natural displeasure seeing masse of rats congregated in a room with no clear direction from their alpha leader what they're expected to do in order to seem menacing. The rats don't seem to have anything better to do than hang around though, so why not? Bruno Mattei, el director, makes sure there's other subplots as the events unfold, and so why not? Were rats harmed during the production? This is Italy, mate. So yeah. Probably. But in a hellscape like this, the dead are the lucky ones.

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Clik here to view.More than just the rats, it's got sci fi futurism as a Road Warrior style biker gang with tricked out vehicles that must have been left over from the 1983 Enzo Castellari film I nuovi barbari (The New Barbarians AKA Exterminators AKA Warriors of the Wasteland) which were from his classic 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and its sequels. In fact, in Germany, Rats: Night of Terror was billed as the Rifts III - Die Ratten von Manhatten i.e. one of those sequels, billed as third in the Bronx Warriors trilogy--hey, there were others still to come, and hey, they borrow from the best, and probably used the same cast and vehicles -- these guys use so many Anglicized names in their credits, how would we ever know unless Tim Lucas was interested enough to find out?

So these Bronx "Rifts" (yeah, "right!") pull into a deserted (bombed out in WW2 and never restored?) Italian (not supposed to be) villa and soon are besieged by shots of nonplussed en masse ratten, never funnier than when being pulled via an 'unseen' carpet towards our terrified post-apocalyptic biker antiheroes and their molls. There's a room with futuristic radio equipment and an opening scrawl that delivers a whole series of post-apocalyptic upsets, evolution amok, up and under.

This biker gang though seems to have dropped into this world from an amnesiac nightmare, initially super psyched to eat uncooked flour, soon enough wondering where it came from, and how to protect it from the rats. There's a long stretch where the camera urges us to think killing the bigger white rat will end the hostilities, and gang members lock eyes with it, but do nothing. Mainly, it's just gonzo 70s-80s Italian nonsense, the gang killing each other as much as the rats, with the fake Charles Bronson going up against the fake Richard Chamberlain; but the music is great, it looks foxy and retro-chic all tarted up by El Rey (or someone) with a lot of drive in fan geek love to the deep blacks and dusky dusty ratty colors. For those of us who saw the Escape-Road-Warriors trifecta over and over and over as kids, it's enough that this film tries hard to look like them, at least on some level. Could-a done without the rats, though. Twist ending!

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

If you love to see men the target of feminine violence, then for you, almost always, lurks Jack Hill, the auteur behind SPIDER BABY, COFFY, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, but second most importantly, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, a loonys cross between the old Warners gangster pictures, and a preconfiguration of what was to become a street gangs/amok youth craze that fused HAPPY DAYS/AMERICAN GRAFFITI-style do wop greaser nostalgia with the urban grime apocalypse of 70s New York:  ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), THE WARRIORS (1978), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE WANDERERS (1979), THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH (1974), GREASE (1978), HEY GOOD LOOKIN' (1981), and the likes. So of course there's Lenny Bruce's daughter Kitty as Donut (lower right), the gang member who gets picked on regularly by doll-faced, sweet voiced but tough-as-nails Lace (the great Robbie Lee).  No one fucks with new girl in town Maggie (Joanne Nail) though. She don't back down. Lace isn't threatened by her spirit, though she should be. Lace's consigliere Patch (Monica Gale) may have only one eye, but she sees the writing on the wall: Maggie's gonna steal Patch's man, the goomba Alpha of their male counterparts, Dominic (Ashner Brauner). Maybe she's just jealous of losing her beta spot in the pack, but ole Patch is right, the sparks between Dom and Maggie are real, and even his breaking into her room to rape her can't change that. In short, this is Jacobean tragedy of the first order, with a roller rink subbing for the town square, and enemy houses in the form of a drug dealing bunch of smartasses posing as a local political group who run up against Dom's operation.

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Anyway, it bombed. The film's original title THE JEZEBELS made drive-in audiences think it was that hoary old Bette Davis southern romance (maybe?).  SWITCHBLADE SISTERS as a title is also a little tacky. By the time the distributors changed the title, word had gotten around JEZEBELS was the film to see, but now they couldn't find it. D'oh!! If it had been called  I'LL SLIT YOUR FUCKING THROAT, it would be talked about to this day.  Hill's other great film, SPIDER BABY had the bad luck to be made in black and white right as drive-ins didn't want black and white movies anymore (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD had broken the mold the year before, I guess). That title was dumb too, making it seem like some ditzy Andy Sidaris softcore lesbo thing it should have been called THE SPIDER GIRL GAME or I'LL SLASH YOU TO FUCKING RIBBONS!

Anyway, you can guess the story, SISTERS is great when you're really pissed off, like I am right now. It goes all the way and keeps going long after other films pull back and say 'that's far enough, laddies: we don't need, say a feminist black militant ghetto uprising with a badass armored Cadillac or a shocking Cagney-by-way-of Lorre raving mad closing monologue, or an Othello style jealous mind poisoning or the foxy Daryl Hannah-prefiguring eye patch of Patch and heavenly blonde jawline of Bunny. But Hill gives us all that and more, and Quentin Tarantino brings us to the Hill by way of Miramax, looking damn good by way of Netflix Streaming. Forever.


Maybe I'm really pissed off right now, and taking it out on the infinitely carvable idiots in my mind who kept us working until four on while a blizzard raged because they had a meeting with Girl Scouts. I sulked in my office, blasted this movie on Netflix, felt like a badass, then tripped on my snow boot shoelaces like a four alarm ponce. But either way, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is the shit, see it when you're in the mood to stomp on someone, and that it's on Netflix in HD with gorgeous colors is one of cinema's current great gifts. See it when you're super furious at the world, or just strung out with the shakes because your dealer never showed, and bask in the film's gonzo cathartic powers of the fabulous Joanne Nail. She'll be back all right! In the fascinating drive-in capstone, THE VISITOR!

Am I crazy to have had to get this on Blu-ray? I had to see what was going on better as all early videos were notoriously too dark in the mine scenes. And I knew that, and having known that, waited until the Blu-ray to see it at all. Which wasn't hard, as copyright disputes seem to have sunk it in limbo off and on since it's brief theatrical release. It's got a pretty dopey title too. "Boogens" is like what some gross kid in the cafeteria might call the peas he stuck up his nose, for example. Another reason: it came around during the slasher boom and seemed part and parcel with all the bland baghead movies coming out of every corner of bleeding indie filmdom and sending my alienated tweenager fledgling feminist pose all a-kimbo. I told you about how I suffered at the hands of imagined slashers in every shadow and branch against the window sound at night at the time! Eventually I realized the slashers probably weren't coming, and then drugs and alcohol wiped all fear away. But in 1981 I was right in the thick of it, and Boogens then had the double whammy of slashers +gross cafeteria mental conjuring. Well, maybe it just needed 30 years for us both to get our shit together, because now I think it's fucking great. Okay, good, okay... good enough.


The monster stuff is all pretty rote, which is great for lovers of said genre, such as myself. What really sets it apart is the snowy environment and the relative cool of two young men (Fred McCaren, Jeff Harlan) fresh out of engineering school taking a job re-opening an old silver mine, and the two young women--one the girlfriend, the other just there to be set up  visiting them for the weekend for sex and skiing (Rebecca Balding, Anne-Marie Martin). I've been on all sides of their foursome and the casual but mature hookup between the girlfriend's friend and the guy's roommate is amazingly well etched. Unlike most scripts, the dialogue has to voice of two separate people, which makes sense considering it was written by two dudes, and then re-written by still more. But for once that works pretty well and we're so used to the usual geeky virgin nerds and hunky alpha bland lotharios, sluts and final girls, that we only realize here in Boogens how under-represented is the gap in cinema between those polarities. Boogens asks: What about the guys and girls old enough to know what they want and not care about their reputations, but young enough they're still a little insecure when real emotion intrudes on the mechanics of a weekend stand? I went into this because I needed as many 80s monster movies I could muster, but what won me over was seeing the dudes and girls who are little nervous about hooking up, but not to the point of geekiness and who hook up with each other without it being about sluts or virgins or getting lucky to the date rapey snickering of baseball cap-wearing douche bags, but just connecting casually when the lover of one roommate brings her friend up to the cabin for the weekend? We must be in Europe! Or Canada. Or in a John Carpenter movie. But we're not!

This was filmed in Utah and Colorado, out there in the woodsy wild. And the monsters have an ingenious connection to all the homes in the neighborhood. The monster are hilarious, cool, and even a little scary. I shall not reveal them here, because the film takes its time not showing them too early, which is how it should be. And by my troth, I shan't be the one to break that most sacred bond for you. You can dig it, right, literally? There's some real terror with a girl in one of the girls fresh out of the shower getting chased around the basement and an explosive ending and some good (presumably real) mine scenes, which we can see and appreciate.... now.

While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs-- a Hollywood stoner comedy about killing a dictator vs. a dictator whose constructed his own fantasy that's stuck in the past-- we have on a TV mini-series about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION!

The latest astro-swinger pad fantasia deftly commingles MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist classist intrigue on a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, post-modern indoor beaches, nice space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers ala SNOWPIERCER, and so on. This ain't no NOAH-in-space ark and this ain't your daddy's space ark. Rather, it is exactly his space ark. It took off in 1963 and neither their sexism nor clothing has changed since. So while we're all post-post everything down here, up there they're stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue. In short it's a ginchier bigger-budgeted better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming! In short, it really is retro-futurism's time, and if that wasn't enough of a post-modern anachronism (see part 1, and part 2), it's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.


I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit, got the 'Mr. Fourth of July' tag, but it's just as much Goldblum's movie. Both are in tippy-top form and bring out new depths in each other, and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft. Prez Bill Pullman's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom / Will Smith girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox). Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - totally off-brand sexy in oversize flannel shirt tied at the bottom). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed-up general, with no buffers. And most of all, it's Reagan's dream come true, at last, the nations of the world putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.


I was going to change the channel after but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before the credits of ID could even start rolling. It's its own blast from the past 'we're all one planet now' speeding locomotive or space ship crucible and I was crying too hard by then--'not until the fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes--to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint. But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing these past weeks, how could I switch away? I liked right off how they explore the idea of how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never go outside and play, or learn to drive. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, STDs, and racism, though with a rigid class system of the oppressive sort most white people only ever experience walking angrily past first class to our miserable G27 aisle seat.


Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband like a Lady Macbeth in space. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe to make her a fitting TV sci fi cult ruler, she's great but it's Laura Palmer--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone--who becomes the focus. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the mysterious killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers while his scarred mom (?) works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! Not a lot, though.


There's an overriding fantasy in ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER,  NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY, which is to smash through the TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un/Jaweh-ishness of our miserable overcrowded lives and feel some direct control of our own destiny rather than being ruled by hypocritical far-off governments. It's an idea common to dreams and science fiction: one day being able to scale back the overpopulated, polluted, fucked-in-the-head society we live in, but not in a fascist brutal fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Amish or Hassidic or TEENAGE CAVEMAN-style way--to go back instead into the locally sourced and small business past wherein the future was hip as the 60s-70s hetero-white-patriarchy could dream it, to somehow recapture the essence of what we lost as a tribe, we heterosexual white dudes. If we're just old enough to remember some of the shit our MAD MEN-ish fathers got away with in the 60s-70s, we feel resentful we can't get away with the same shit but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. But oh me brothers, to have the social order openly privileging us again! To live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside, isn't it worth it even if we have to wear ties all day? It's like Windows on the World or Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered"skidoo... hard to resist if you're disenfranchised from the tools of the system, como yo. And ASCENSION's pilot has a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway, or LSD or ayahuasca is like if you don't. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?



It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of intergalactic exile DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never see the green.


Another example:  I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in which a bald ectomorph named Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic retrofuturistic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on elements of gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my morbidly acute imagination, I can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life. That windy sentence said, if you're the type who can handle scatological humor, and loves retrofuturism , then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a Dr. Strange-ish neighborwho holds ayahuasca parties and keeps close eye on his sexy narcoleptic daughter and whose spirit guide is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes; and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy. That's just off the tip of my head. And it's been years.


So savor the rich attention to retrofuturist Johnny Questian detail, the weird streak of faux-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation. And most of all, let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.

Or super cool South Koreans.

SNOWPIERCER (2013, but released in the states this year) is directed by South Korean son Bong Joon-Ho, who directly addresses the brutal need for mass murder at the core of overpopulation and global warming, and how pulling the plug on the whole damned tub of foul humanity may just be the most heroic thing we can do.

In the film's post-apocalyptic ice age landscape, the only surviving life is crowded onto a giant speeding train that rarely slows down and just races around in crazy circles across the frozen tundra, mile after mile, years measured by laps around the course. Like a solar-powered silver bullet serpent pecking order, the lower classes herded like concentration camp detainees in the rear of the train, fed bricks of gelatinous gunk and subjected regularly to harsh brutality by a police force led by a bespectacled Tilda Swinton. The front of the train holds the elite, and the very head of the train holds the 'engineer' - Wilford (Ed, 'it's all for you, Truman' Harris) who makes the rules and lives high on the hog. The rear is presided over by filthy leftist John Hurt, and his right hand muscle, Chris 'Captain America' Evans.


They stage a revolt, which involves fighting (in Bong's favorite style: claw hammers in tight quarters) from car to car, each new car a shock or surprise as--among other things--the filthy urchins get to try sushi for t the first time, and see just what sort of micro-livestock they've been eating all their lives. It's a brilliant, existential critique of everything from the rigged 'real truth' behind war, to conservative brainwashing, jet set decadence, reproduction's insidious con job, and class warfare. Watch it on your Kindle before boarding your Xmas plane, and see if you don't want to take a swing at one of the first class douchebags you pass on your way to coach. It's better to go down swinging, after all, rather than sitting cramped in your seat for another 30 years and not lighting up your Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum victory dance cigar because they don't allow smoking on planes. You think Kim Jong Un wouldn't light that cigar? The 'No Smoking' sign went out as soon as the aliens attacked, General!


Bong's film didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until this year, so I'm quietly folding it in with NOAH, INTERSTELLAR and ASCENSION to make grand points about our longing to get some friends together, pack up, and head off-world, for a chance to begin again while the whole shit-house below goes up in Rekall-implanted digital flames behind us. Witness the latest slimy moves of Wall street and Republicans and tell me they all shouldn't be frozen by reverse global warming or burned in a sea of fire, or at least left behind in a shower of Matthew McConaughey sparks! Instead they'll probably have golden ark tickets and we won't. That's the depressing reality- that even in our imaginations we're third class citizens forced back into steerage, like John Cusak and his 2012 band of stow-away freeloaders. But at least if we're in the right movie we can maybe bash those first class passengers with a hammer real good. As long as we remember to do it onscreen, of course, and have the wisdom to know the difference. 

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from top: TOTAL RECALL (Promo); INTERSTELLAR

NOAH even agrees. In Ridley Scott's film, Russell Crowe's plan is for his family to be the last surviving humans, and die out with grace after setting the animals post-flood free, because humanity is a vile plague, with greed and malice fueling a continual destructive turbulence wherever it flourishes.  But even then, his liberal shit of a son is sheltering the vilest of humans in the back of the ship. "My father Enoch told me that one day," Russell Crowe says, "if man continued his ways, The Creator would annihilate this world." Well that's some Creator you got, Russell, blaming all but two giraffes for the crimes of their cagers. This almighty Creator should really look in the mirror, or stick to something like a human-only plague next time, ala the forthcoming TV series version of 12 MONKEYS or the PLANET OF THE APES series, so the animals can roam free down the city streets rather than being cramped up with each other, seasick and with no room to even take a shit for over 40 days and nights.

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NOAH's virtual water

Let 'The Creator' suck, then, on our own willingness to wipe ourselves out (at least virtually) before He gets a chance, or can stop us, yet again. Let us get the last laugh and a middle finger raised, the 'victory dance' cigar (or cigar wrapped blunt) smoked before we're wiped out by His humorless petty wrath. If He can't take a joke, it's by jokes we defeat Him. The fat lady sings do do doo dooo.


How bitter the fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to, goes the garbled threats to Sony. But, if terror's all we ever get, then terror better learn to loosen the fuck up. Because we're coming for it, with all the CGI and stoners we can muster. We put the props in propaganda, Kim, and we will bury you in unsold DVDs of THE GUILT TRIP. Activate... Mecha-Streisand... and George Burns forgive us.


POSTSCRIPT 12-18-14: Sony backed off. The real has been eclipsed by the virtual - and watching it unfold on CNN, followed by BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS and the final episode ASCENSION was a post-modern triple threat that has completely broken my sense of self, America, Don Geiss, and hope. 

If the old adage is true that no one ever thinks about you as much as you think, then and only then, Bad City, Unreal City, the City of Devils, where you can at least write about it, and like so many here before me in the swamps of the East Side and Brooklyn, I've submissively followed my vampire anima like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from harm only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my neck, "for your mudder's sake." Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries, aging and dying as far back as the modernist vagabonds being ejected from the White Horse Tavern but all of us old, decayed, drug from one Annexia to the next, while the same vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid.

Artistic communities are druggy communities or they're hack communities. The East Village now can only be afforded by only NYU students, old bastards with rent controlled apartments, and rich young German or Japanese ex-pats. The rest of us, the Allies, chased across to Brooklyn, scrounging in the cracks between the ghetto and the rich hipster zones for a cheap rent that doesn't involve getting jumped when coming home in the dead of night, drunk as a lord, and often. Guided through the dark only by our Metrocard and our weedy little journals, even as early back as the mid 90s there was a clot of female druggie vampire artists as metaphors for both AIDs and drug addiction; the thriving anonymity and the mad dash of youth through the gates of decadent pleasure that is downtown existence lent itself to both. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to, and can barely afford a fin a day Coke Zero, cigarette, and coffee habit.

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the black and white vampire urban druggy denizen dream lives on, in a sub-section of the Interzone, where LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) the paradise of an eternal spring break in a town one step away from the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. In Persian with English subtitles! Tiny damn things but they're new!



"Dependency is a marvelous thing," states Lili Taylor to her doctoral thesis advisor as a segue for shooting up with him. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than a taste of the white horse; she's going to drink that opiated blood and bask in a double craving being satisfied. The point is, this girl's got interesting things to say, both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis in action courtesy longtime Ferrara collaborator, screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of zonked conviction to his words; never pretentious, always cognizant of word's inadequacy, the ideal doctoral candidate who's following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, embracing the madness and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts). It all starts when she's accosted on the street by vampire Annabelle Sciorra who throws her into an alley and gives her the bite while telling her to say go away, which Taylor just can't do. Sciorra's hot, exotic, who could say no? Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part, or one of those things like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?

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Too zonked to care, and so I relate to Taylor's subsequent journey, her rapture over her newfound abilities and widened perceptions, even if they compel her to confront the horrors our usual sensory blinders obscure; her later decomposition similar to, say, Cronenberg's Fly remake, watching their own slow motion decomposition with a scientist's dispassionate eye.  They're in it for the knowledge, for the cracking it wide open, like true investigators. They don't cling to outmoded parameters of self. I remember scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own rants about how I could see through time and space was an illusion, foam flecking from the sides of my mouth. Her fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is pretty horrified by how far off the deep end diving board Taylor's going.  Taylor all but sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." She's right, and it's clear just who's gonna ace the thesis dissertation because she's seen beyond the veil and waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny. Taylor's addiction, her disease, has organized her life, broadened her perspective, and made her as quintessentially New York as Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction (1995).

With its artsy black and white photography, The Addiction would look great on Blu-ray, but like so many Abel Ferrara movies seems mired in royalty disputes with international consortiums, so all I have to remember it by is my letterbox DVD of dubious origin. Even under such primitive conditions  it's a stunner that manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and Zoetrope mirrors, to create a piece of durable horror pop-art cinema with mythopoetic Murnau roots. The hydra polyp magnifying glass lectures and plague likenings of the first Nosferatu are here reflected in microfiche revisitings of the My Lai and a visit with Falco to an Auschwitz exhibit. No one just dies in this vamp universe, there's no time - and they were never living anyway, not in the sense you mean below 14th Street. Instead, their cool undoes them, as being artists and academics they're smart enough to know that unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis, and wind up just another flyover hack. Victims are told all the time that receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth.


Taylor is so good in the lead its almost supernatural. She's low-key, sexy and very convincing. She owns the role, the film, the city, and with nothing but a low purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from lack of experience with either STDs, drugs or philosophy or New York and its druggy artsy undertow, the stolen shot seediness Abel captures better than anyone else, the NYC that's still wild and woolly, every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers. You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's black and white Edie Sedgwick, Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits' factory footage and not miss a mink-lines "beat."


Re-watching it lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script. So many great lines that are like manna to any starving college graduate alcoholic or drug addict: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion along with this movie. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I would try to get to and from the liquor store, literally right next door, and one flight of stairs, a twenty taped to my shaking hand, trying to get my 1.75 of Ten High and make it back up to safety of The Thin Man without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim.

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"... little turkeys in straw hats."

So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores while Taylor wrestles with her habit's thousand dimensions and finding a way to excuse and forgive thd self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments, luring Taylor to his apartment, draining her nearly dry, while boasting how well his habit is under control and urging her to read Naked Lunch. What a dick. Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through a blunt and a half: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the sticker-and-graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a goddamn scrapbook. Meanwhile, your city is gone but the buzzy flashback of that first e and c stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers decades in the blood, which is why Taylor wants to drink it. Like all good druggie downtown vamps, she wants the blood rich with opiates and pheromones, the double nice secretions once the drugs trigger massive release from the pituitary gland (just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace). That's the best there is. By comparison, sex is strictly for the tourists.

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Galaxy Craze

At last there's an Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in "Bad City," actually amidst the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. A place where rock anthems are still and forever relevant, it's forever the 80s, all while Madonna stares out from her poster and the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. "The first western Iranian vampire movie" has a startling doppelganger effect in Sheila Vand's similarity to the film's writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, as she's an amazing character, a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed women in Iran's repressive milieu, wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way; most of the men in the film yammer away like spoiled vain children, figuring out how to come onto her or why she's shadowing them, all but young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a Lynch-ish young go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer (Dominic Rains, below), a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (which turns out to be a big mistake). Thanks to a chain of events, Arash gets his car back, and a suitcase full of drugs and money. Even with his blood rich in ecstasy, though, after a costume rave, our girl holds off indulging, instead engaging in a slow motion moment, beautifully set to a madly whirling disco ball and White Lies'"Death," a perfect song to bring them together as it builds slowly from just another click track into emotional sweep and grandeur all the more special for seeming to come so guileless and true, the Let the Right One Inverse of Sixteen Candles: "I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas / I can feel my heart beating as I speed from / the sense of time catching up with me."


A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady impressions deep tissue pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song? Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, i.e. not very many. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where not only does a song enhance the mood, pages of dialogue are being beamed silently outwards while characters barely move and the music plays.


Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely between the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, the Jim Jarmusch-Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of town tramp vibe, and the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement from the early 00s in South America, films like Bolivia and Suddenly (Tan de Repente). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down, but I'm always hoping more films will try that. Or any, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969). God damn it.


Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like via the rush of blood in the ear sound editing and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come hither only to brush you off in an instant and send you reeling, with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's film does it all one better, because she brings real storytelling to scenes that in Jarmusch's hands would just be actors waiting around inside skid row shots for some clever improv idea to strike them or until Jim's film can runs out. Instead there's some clever use of the slow motion to really reflect the temerity of the moment, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment and the slow drone music drives us onwards, we move into the future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, as loyal as Oskar, and as doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned fly at a time... and no drug ever so sweet as to turn the city back to color.

This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. So, while he may talk gentle and folksy, and heaven may be just clouds and an endless singing, fish-fries, five cent ceegars, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, it's still no place for buffoonery. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid in order to pull myself out of a spiritual tailspin and instead wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell opening up before me. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be healed. "Nothing dies forever," probably a misquote I heard while in the other room during Expendables 3.  But ain't it apt?

Because, children, for all its folksy drinkin' mammy wine stereotypin', Green Pastures won't stay dead. At its core it's not about the black experience, it can't demean what it admits it can't understand, in its clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, darker than blue even as it goes down sweet as vanilla extract bottle downed as a last resort on a blue law Sunday. When situated twixt Boop's Max Fleishcer animated, Satchmo-scored surrealism and the Frederic March-starred "Hurrah for the next who dies" love story, all three personified great archetypal forces in play and provided a soulful comfort to a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times. It was surely meant to heal this way, for 1930, the year it was written (as a play) was a rough year for this great country, a whole lot of once middle class white folks--many decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, and forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered. The market crashed, the Depression was on, and you couldn't even drown your sorrows, thanks to Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was coming right on into view.

I'm sure there's a weird undercurrent of unconscious white liberal condescension in my affection for the film, but like a lot of us who were white suburban PA kids in the 70s, I was used to black people only on TV, via Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening! and of course the radio via the popular song. Our sense that the racist jokes and cartoons we saw and heard were wrong didn't really sink in until Roots came along, and we were all like, holy shit. 

Even today a black actor can't just be an actor, they have to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with every step and word. To quote one of the Angels near the end as he watches Jesus down on the cross, that's a terrible burden for one man. But a great actor uses every ounce of whatever he's got in his DNA. He finds deep soulful power in his blackness, rather than perform whiteness he performs the blackness that is there at the core of the entirety of mankind. He recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it denies them. White fans like myself look at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize it as something we lack, and feel it in our bones, long to absorb it. We know that it's wrong in a PC sense, but in an artistic sense, it's universal to first admire, then imitate, then absorb aspects into one's original voice, and move on, absorbing more and more of what other artists have done, other visions, ever-widening, past one's own parameters in the social order.

And so it is that The Green Pastures was written in 1930 by a white man, Marc Connelly, one of the key wits of the Algonquin round table, from a source text called Ol Adam and his Chillun by Roark Bradford. Both the play and the book have been criticized by black intellectuals and they're right, but the criticism is no reason to avoid the work, which instead of being dismissed as racist might be seen more as folk art, which was big at the time, especially on Broadway. Don't forget, in the same era the popular books were savage satires of white hillbilly poverty and deviance by eugenics proponents like Erskine Caldwell. Relatively speaking, Pastures is socially progressive, wise, and humorous, if some of the black actors embody exaggerated grotesques, it should be remembered that the source text basically chronicles Eden, the Flood, ancient Egypt, Babylon, and so forth, and the idea of humanity ever-oscillating between humble reverence and depraved decadence, between higher human and bestial indulgence, is something America still struggles with today.

We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are those deadly dull ones that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play the biblical figures. Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be North African. Where else in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are biblical characters black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam, or Noah for that matter, and that means everyone else in the damned burg should be some mix of Northern African and Middle Eastern heritage, Jews included as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)

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Right

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Wrong!

Now, I'm no fan of the bible and its obtuse user-unfriendly 'folk' language, but when its folked up even more and in a more homey direction by old man Connelly, it suddenly becomes clear as a powerful vehicle of myth that, alone amongst biblical films, works to cohere God's actions throughout the Old Testament--God's periodic visitations, judgements of wickedness, and raining destruction to start anew, over and over through the ages--to find a common thread. And in its folksy way, Connelly's work actually manages to make sense of the huge difference between the Old Testament God and the New. "Maybe we was tired of that old God," notes Azrel, who doesn't notice the guy he's talking to is actually God and played by the same actor as himself, and he's feeling wrathful. But Azrel lays a trip on God that cuts deep: He needs to be a god of mercy, and to understand the concept of mercy, even God must suffer. Suffering brings forgiveness. Azrel won't even acknowledge the wrath of the old God. The new God is merciful and kind, and God doesn't have a say in the matter.


So in a sense this movie does what my lame Christian Science Sunday school teachers never could, make sense of what is, in a literally biblical sense, a bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing. Having it be a folksy narrative along the lines of something Mark Twain or Carl Sandburg might write is perhaps the 'truest' way to tell the story.

If all that doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love as racist, then just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style or stodgy Catholic classical; the choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of my clan. The film is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes, as God meddles with or just visits the folks on his Earth, then comes back up and decides whether or not to wipe out this latest version and start again.

And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)

Jeezis that's bad speaking on old God's part. I far prefer de Lawd's version:

"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".

Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, tall tales in a sense, ala John Henry if crossed with the historical fact of Joe Louis, Leadbelly, and Cassius Clay. You can argue its accuracy all you want, but the text is full of magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later the children of Noah. Did they mate with some prehuman life form, or in the case of Noah's progeny, mermaids? Or with each other, and if with each other, and this goes for the two of each kind of animal, how with such a small gene pool are we not all (and all the animals) deformed inbred monsters? I get no answer... but in the context of The Green Pastures I don't need one. We're not here to blindly obey some nonsensical text with a wildly inconsistent and petty God. We're not making literal interpretation ala Chuck Heston. We're here to understand what it all means. And what it all means is that even our extraterrestrial old school God of Wrath and Vengeance can learn new tricks, and be taught by his own creations, to recognize and value suffering as a tool for self-transformation. The no atheists in a foxhole or a hospice vibe includes God too. Once He winds us up and sets us off into the world, He has no control over our actions, just hopes you find Him again, even if He's hiding, like Irene Dunne with a broken leg at the end of Love Story.

 For first world white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as depression, or our own drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace, because if you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus. Here's a little mantra I wrote about it:

Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan soul to hammer it into a mighty sword. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied.

The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
you pay him for the privilege. So it is that
the infant is forgiven his filthy diaper,
the old man his soiled bedsheets,
but not the vagrant, drunk, obscene, stumbling reminder
that no pursuit of pleasure escapes its counterbalance misery,
and so to vice versa.

If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna's flow shall soon cease,
Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from thinking about tomorrow, worrying on
the punishment from father, the trouble you'll be in, the missed finals, the repetitions
already seen as tedious, before they're starting
um...

Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward, the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets, shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny glistening like freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern light revolved in orbit patterns as you lie down.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, that tower, encircles us no more,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us,
out of reach, above the crib prison crypt.

The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings
girls of equal height, their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now
stirs a guilty shiver that giant crib mom absences's harrowing equal.

Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
to where, with such a naked neck?

And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions all speak to a great evolutionary quality, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a Pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a jealous God who demands fidelity, to a God of love and forgiveness. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and Hezrel, a name that appears nowhere else.


During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4)  I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in Plant's hair has two meanings. But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns it. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying of dehydration in the desert. And to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, God made men into desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome vintage. Because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, I became a psychedelic surgeon. But when I accidentally sew my ego into the soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it (by going below it) via transcendental alchemical process. It remindeth me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where you left it. Aummm.


A final word: 
Ingram also played the devil's son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits the negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a decent, God-fearing Christian or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). Here Ingram is de Lawd and we never see the devil. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad, in short he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness.' He genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Yes, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Yes lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation his main request is that he honor him on Sunday, obey the commandments, and not go "fussin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Jewish angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm a take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought (as an academic advisor I see the damage done by over-protective parents who work double time to prevent this independent thought in their children).


During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, and to merge into the godhead obliterated all separateness, and can be dangerous - like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. In this case it was a ground zero of infancy - the sun being mother's breast, her love, her giant presence, for when a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness. She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I feel this comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures. And that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries He creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. Do I bow mighty low? I do.

Until the drugs wear off.
------

NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.)
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) is drinking and passing out sips. See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)

Most soap operas are trite, cliche'd and overwrought but doesn't mean we should dismiss Douglas Sirk; costume dramas are often barrenly obsequious but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Jane Campion; fairy tale monster under the bed tropes are often overly whimsical and hackneyed but we can't dismiss The Babadook. A Sheila, a quick Sheila, can take the Gorey-Addams-Grimm signifiers overused by Tim Burton and go deep into nightmare parable, where men (and boys like tim Burton) dare not go. She can reach down for the unpopped black brass kernel of the genuine Jungian nightmare of 'the return of the repressed and make pop-books scary again. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) ia out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, a Shining-Repulsion (1) collapse of the consensual real, as a mom and son come to fear each other and collectively engage a poltergeist-ish manifestation and if--with its magician's hat and bony fingers--the title monster can come off a little This Way Kruger Comes Depp-ensian Dr. Caligari Cat in the Hat high on mercurochrome on-the-nose, it still has more than enough originality and genuine menace to make it closer to Kubrick than Disney. The pop-up book Amelia (Essie Davis) starts out as some whimsical blueprint for a future Disney attraction but a genuine, disturbing threat. What starts out whimsy ends up being creepy and then a direct personal threat with drawings of Amelia herself, possessed, stabbing her child to death like James Mason almost does in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life. (1956). The Babadook said Abraham kill me a son, and/or turn the page and pull the tab to see the knife go sincker-snap. 


At the core of the archetypal mysterious ghost intruder archetype present in Kent's gutsily straightforward Jungian fairy tale horror lurks the unassimilated animus, who waits until you're almost asleep, or trying to spend a little me-time before thumping on doors or rattling chains, hammering away at your nerves as you try to repress your inner rage, until it breaks off and comes back in poltergeist form and your sense of reality shifts and the border between dreams and reality collapses. And Kent gets--probably better than any filmmaker yet--how nightmarishly gigantic adult caregivers loom when beheld by small apprehensive children. Even Kubrick never quite dared deal with that monstrously large element. The one time Jack Torrance seemed bigger than normal he was looming over a model of the maze, but in that case too large to resonate this way. Children don't just look small to us, they look from a small position. In Dook, Amelia gradually seems to grow, not like a giant but that our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at her seven year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who's ruined her life in a million different ways. When I was very young I used to have nightmares about my mom creeping into my room like a vampire to drink my blood. I woke her up a lot as I'd be super scared to go the bathroom by myself in the dead of night. Once my fear came true and when I worked up the nerve to wake her she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low, she seemed like a different person. I buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" We joked about it later. She said she felt bad. I'd never felt such extreme despair or terror. Is there anything worse a very young child can imagine than his mom disappearing and/or attacking them? Turning on them all of a sudden? It's easy to forget about that fear once you get past the breakwaters of adolescence; the passage of mom from benevolent giantess to a sweet if nagging allowance-payer is a one-way street. We modulate our perceptions so that we presume we've always seen from the same height, but a Babadook can remind us, as good horror movies do, of all the terror we grew so hard to forget. 

As I wrote about The Shining, cabin fever is a very hard thing to study, as just being showing up to study it rapidly cures the subject is either killed or sucked up into the madness, as with the semi-sympathetic father whose poor brain oscillates between giggling sadism and paternal sympathy for Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Those kind of characters are so rare in horror that when they show up we take notice. Like Frederic March becoming Mr. Hyde halfway through the terrorized Miriam Hopkins' plea for help, Amelia in The Babadook or Ray's ogres in Bigger than Life and In A Lonely Place exhume that fear our source of comfort will turn on us. Having very little (adult) experience reading children's books I can't be too scared of the Babadook book in theory. But I have relied on The Thing (1951) for most of my life to save me in times of trouble, and if I put it on during one of my regular dark nights of the soul and saw Captain Hendry beating up Nikki and helping Dr. Carrington bleed his men to feed the baby pods, then I would be utterly lost, that yawning terror of my mom sitting up in bed and moaning like some beanstalk vampire giant in the dead of night would come roaring back. 

But the Babadook terror rolls in both directions: The vulnerability and trust involved with familial love hinges on acceptance of uncanny extremes, for a mother must love even the most loathsome of creatures, the beast, the frog, the rat, the touched and wayward Richard, all requiring, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow into a prince, just until we can get a new geek. If the mother can't provide this, the child snaps and begins to darken into something worse, trying to create for others the terror he feels as a result of his mom's ambivalence. And the mom, via the uncuttable psycho-umbilical root that connects them even past death, that root no machete or pill can sever, comes tumbling down the well after him, barking at him not to put her in the root cellar. 

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Coraline

But while, for example, the horrors of cloistered sexually dysmorphic animus shadow-projectors like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (or Mrs. Bates in Psycho) ended their isolation with their murders and sins exposed, pinned to the patriarchy-enforced consensual reality cork board like still-twitching wasp wings, and old Jack Torrance never quite made it out of his maze, the mom in Baba passes through the Repulsion needle and out of the Overlook cabin fever, past even Ring 2's child services and suspicious neighbors, into the safe "hero" clippings of the Taxi Driver "hero" fantasia; all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to, madness, fully harnessed, is inseparable from genius, from self realization. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, the traumatic separation from the giant glowing orb of undifferentiated consciousness where one isn't just oneself, nor just "Human" but all things from ancient monuments to the weedy parking lot of a long-closed dollar store. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking cloyness, just raw Aussie gumption and the power that comes when you finally get down so low, as the saying goes, you can touch off from the bottom and shoot up faster than you would by just flailing about to keep at the same approx. depth. John Ford had the Depression, war, the harshness of the era, and drink. Spielberg though, had only his childhood, traumatized by schoolyard bully anti-Semitism and saved by the power of fantasy and Ford's westerns. I've got a history with drugs, alcoholism, recovery, decadence, years of undiagnosed depression, spiritual enlightenments and disillusionments, W.C. Fields, Camille Paglia, and Howard Hawks. 


In the end, it's that more than the admittedly children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick (that while creepy is also overly familiar from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings - at least at first, the nightmare threats of a children's book are usually tempered with some degree of levity - "Good fright, pleasant screams," as the creepy narrator of The Inner Sanctum radio show used to say. When the death threat implied is tempered with 'just kidding' bad puns and levity, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little sugar and lots of suffering. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing. Maybe it's that as children 'remember' Death, remember how she cried as she dropped them off at the nunnery doorstep of existence if you will. They know where death is, and so death can't suddenly surprise them. For very young children the big fear is never death, but of being separated from one's mother (i.e. an unpleasant moment without her is far scarier than entombed eternity with her). But adults have been away from death long enough that they no longer recognize her reflection in the mirror, and so when she shows up out of the blue to pick us up from the nunnery now that she's clean and sober, we freak out. And so Babadook's children's book gimmick would be just cliche if not for its blunt unremitting threat --moving slowly and gingerly from playfully macabre to outright hostile, threatening, malicious, obscene even as it never strays from the psychosexual Lynchian ostrich nasal lampshade imperiled dog Joe Campbell crucible, to become like a 'next stage in a woman's life" sequel to Twilight, Maleficent, Frozen, and Snow White and the Huntsman. In returning to the dark heart of the feminine-centric fairy tale myth, the blueprint for maturity and unification of spirit which is, at its most simple, recognizable and familiar. It's a trilogy through which nightmare animuses become, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, and finally the prince in Sleeping Beauty, before devolving into the Fisher King, with good capon lined, before crumbling back to the freedom of the dust.




Shout's Blu-ray includes Kent's short, Monster, a 16mm black and white, lean little thing, with the Babadook itself more of a Goth kid who likes to run up on people through the old 'cutting out every other frame' trick so beloved of Nine Inch Nails. And of course trailers, interview full of nice tidbits that really stretch out. The Blu-ray brings excellent tactile depth to the powder blues and grays of the walls, a color scheme that I'll confess is not my favorite, but it works to suggest color is draining out of this bizarre family. "I'll make you a bet, the more you deny, the bigger I get!" It's pretty Freudian, especially when the pop-ups begin. And the score emphasizes and distorts Amelia's disintegrating mentality, in one great scene Amelia looks for her son and you hear his calling but muffled and echoed, hard to pinpoint. This Babadook is like their unholy 'third heat', borne perhaps of their collective psychic blocks, the horror of losing the father, Oscar, the build-up that comes from never allowing the gushing destruction of grief and tears to overtake you.  It's never suggested otherwise; while the kid is being terrorized, she's downstairs and the cuts back and forth exhibit a profound grasp of the way the repressed emotions and sexual frustrations of a widowed parent can spontaneously generate autonomous external threats, as in Dr. Morphius' monster "from the Id" in Forbidden Planet or (single mom) Jessica Tandy's Birds.

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From top: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, The Eternal, Tomb, Eternal

Story involves hard-drinking couple staggering around NYC, taking the Cyclone in flashy Christopher Doyle style color wash slow mo set gorgeously to Cat Power's "Rockets." They're going to Ireland to dry out and visit the ancestral homestead, which husband Jared Harris (the late Lane from Mad Men) hasn't seen; she hasn't been back since she left unexpectedly shortly after her mom died and she was... well, I shan't spoil it. Debits for the ginger, their son. But he keeps his ugly haircut to the rear most of the time, which is just another thing Almereyda gets right -- these parents are cool, in the old school tradition, in that they don't freak out and/or treat their kid like some precious egg in a relay race. They're partiers, and they love to horse around with the kid, but the kid doesn't stop them from getting sloshed at the pub. And Harris is no Dustin Hoffman "pacifist" pussy and he does a great Christopher Walken impression. First thing he does to prove his mettle when the Straw Doggie skulking townie ex-boyfriend shows up is punch him, picking a fight by the juke box more or less unprovoked. It's a great scene not least because they've stopped in there 'for a quick one' after swearing off drinking, and soon its hours later - they're tanked - and the son is falling asleep at the bar from stone boredom. Yikes! Call child services except, god bless it, this is Ireland. They just get ejected from the pub and our narrator girl notes "They'd been kicked out of bars all over the world" notes the narrator, with some veiled admiration.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. What counts in the meantime is the groovy scenery and how Walken's residing uncle patriarch has a great homicidal record collection (well not great, they make fun of the Irish Tom Jones, Joe Dolan but dance funkily to "She was a Good-Lookin' Woman") Meanwhile the girl with the disaffected expression who occasionally interjects some plot points "your mother was a witch as well," and has a kind of worldly calm. It's all right there - in the beginning she's a bit like the girl in Don't Look Now and for awhile she's like the girl in Who Saw Her Die (1972).


One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken anger - as still sick and suffering alcoholic Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it. That kind of balderdash makes me want to retch. And I should know. The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some Scotch down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the kid, it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself would feel keenly. How nice that there's whole films and wings of Irish literature just for us! No matter how adept his Walken impression, or grace around the dance floor, Jim's refusing drinks on Nora's behalf stings like a slap, especially when he turns out to be sneaking sips on the side from a flask. Only Eugene O'Neill really ever wrote scenes that captured the way the alcoholic mind hears every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, as a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on our hero or heroine's behalf like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from. And only Hawks and Huston ever understood it well enough to capture it; only Hawks and Huston understood how cigarettes and drinks are the currency of cool loyalty, how they buy the world into focus, and out of it. Of course, Almereyda doesn't have time to stretch out and show Nora's detox, no mariachi band playing the Death Song to steady her nerves like in Rio Bravo; or to be denied a desperately needed drink just for 'singing lousy' in Key Largo. No time; the sub-plot just dries out. Plus, "Why be serious? that's for people in sad countries like Poland or Africa" notes the girl narrator. And anyway, the mummy catches on fire and bursts through the window and gets zapped by electric current just like James Arness in Hawks' original The Thing and add the cigarettes (Harris is constantly lighting them and sticking them in his wife's mouth; the young girl does the same for the old woman, keeping one for herself-- a wee lass smokin'! Save your sermons, o nanny statesmen --this is Ireland!) and drinks (and drink awareness) and that's Hawks enough. We don't need resolution. We need another round.

Other wry references: Jim offhandedly quotes Six Million Dollar Man while building a fire; crazy old bat Lois Smith's hair makes her resemble the crazy old Baroness Graps in Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill (1966), which Eternal resembles for its inter-generational war of the matriarchal sorceresses plot, and the transmigration of souls motif which also ties in with Nadja and its influences like Daughters of Darkness-ness with the dreamy beachside ending.


There's other evidence of Almereyda's artistry and laid back genius with subliminal nodding, as in the way he evokes the idea of a pharaoh's crypt by lighting the cavernous marble foyer with the kind of candle light that evokes a big archeological dig; or how Almereyda uses super 8mm movie footage to nod to home movies for the flashbacks to the ancient druid's romantic tragedy (she let her love for a no-good man weaken her magick power) and the death of Nora's mother, (Sinead Dolan). It could have been a corny touch but Almereyda has been exploring the use of different media within film structures for awhile, as in Hamlet's pretentious conscience-of-the-king-catching video art pieces and overwhelmed Blockbuster trips; the Fisher Price Pixelvision in Nadja, and the old lady (Lois Smith), the dead mom of Nora; the undead mummy shamaness; and the girl narrator provide a multi-generational matriarchal chain around which the little ginger, the local lads, and Jim are the only men and always seem a hare's breath away from being killed in a Barleycorn sacrifice. "It was the Iron Age, you had to a do lot of nasty things to get by," Walken says in reference to Nora's question about whether the bog mummy is good or evil. "She was ferociously herself." Jim meanwhile jokes around when it turns out the mattress is stuffed with dead snakes and potato-shaped stones: "The ancient druids used Mr. Potato Head as part of their rituals" he tells his owl-eyed ginger. But is the ginger really his? Straw Dogs skulking in the windows with their deux ex machina timely shots may have wild scenarios ala 'Her Majesty's Coachmen' in Lady Eve. Then again, do they? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. These shards of Jimmy Dolan albums aren't going to just telekinetically slice into townsfolk's necks themselves! And as for sobriety... Fuck sobriety, no one comes to Ireland to dry out and besides good Scotch funciton as snake bite remedy. This is the dawning of the Iron Age of Aquarius, sweet ladies, goodnight. St. Patrick or no, we always keep serpents handy!

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Goodnight, ladies, goodnight sweet ladies...

My last virtual TCM schedule was such an excess they said add another - and I never say no to a menage-a-trois, I just run home to call my sponsor. Or hide in the movies, and no movie hides you better than the three-plus hour opening film chosen here. Which Criterion should release on DVD, but they don't. They haven't. And it's not nor are the other two on DVD at least in North America, not even DVR, and yet essential! Let us not forget these brothers in the shadows of the shadows. Alongside my 2012 entry, advocating John Huston's FREUD (1962), Howard Hawks' CEILING ZERO (1936), and two films that have since come out on DVR, COBRA WOMAN and DISHONORED.  here she is, my Friday Night Guest Programmer fantasy. May they all come soon, so i can turn over and find a new delusion.



I haven't seen it since it screened at Lincoln Center back in 1999, but even at 31/2 hours and in grainy black and white it stuck in the hearts, minds, and nostrils of a theater full of foul bourgeoisie; it was pretty great, hilarious, touching, and helped break me up with my then-wife by convincing her I wanted a menage a trois with my hot blonde friend from AA, even though I didn't (just wanted to sip the JVS well of masochistic sexual tension) And so denied it, and made her think she was crazy and didn't even hook up with said AA girl after my wife left (the first time). You think I should have gone for it? It's pointless to regret it now! But I will praise this film to high heaven for its effect on my marriage- it delivered me from still waters. And not just because it made me feel all artsy (since I was covering it on my first-ever critic job) before I even knew who the bourgeois were, but because my first long-term post-marital affair was with a beautiful married Frenchwoman who'd come by my place after work for cinq a sept and bring me bonbons and coffees. As for the film itself, it was 13 years ago I saw it but I know I laughed at least once and only had to move three times to different sections of the theater to get away from bourgeois eaters with their clickety dentures, cheeses, and whispering nannies (this was right before the dawn of cell phones, thank god). Luckily the packed Walter Reade was almost empty by the time the film was over. Even cheese-eating bouregoisie have to get up and read their New York Times on the way 3 train in the morning. But not me. I took the 6, to the C, to the G!

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Clik here to view.
Maybe it's so relatively unknown here because Eustache (left) killed himself shortly after completing it, and his only other credits were some slaughterhouse documentaries, so we don't have a pop culture icon face to go with him like we do for Truffaut or Godard, nor a vast oeuvre like we have for Rohmer, but he belongs in their ranks, for this film encompasses in spots all three of their styles: Rohmer's real time naturalistic three-way, Godard's May 68 brick-throwing and 'pop-bang-wiz!' And Truffaut's Jean Pierre Leaud, impossibly young despite Gauloises. And like all three: obsessed with sex, impotence, class-consciousness, and the kind egocentric humanism only the French can make work.

Leaud stars as Alexandre, a Parisian slacker who's still trading on his high profile in the riots of May 68, and keeping an "open" relationship with live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont). A sexy nurse comes along named Veronika (Francois Lebrun),  even more liberated than either of them. The three of them later try to make it as a menage a trois, but mostly they talk, drink, smoke, look good and play endless records on a cheap turntable on the floor, and 215 minutes of running time goes by faster than any five minutes of Last Year at Marienbad. Isabelle Weingarten is Alex's bemused ex, and Jacques Renard Alexandre's his male chum. The English subtitles were the dirtiest things I'd ever seen... up to that time.

As I've written in the past, 1933 was a magical year for movies, and America: it saw the election of FDR, the repeal of prohibition, and 'ahem' the rise of Hitler into power (that last part, not so magical but the war effort did lift us out of the depression). At any rate -- change was afoot, probably akin to our modern years of Obama, legalization of marijuana, and gay marriage. Or worse, or better. And I myself turn to old dark house movies every May or so, because they understand hay fever, the way allergies imitate the first signs of a cold and make the bright sunny day with the calla lillies in bloom again seem a jeweled scorpion, glistening shiny chitinous flowers on the outside and stinging venom within; and by contrast murky AC darkness an opium den refuge of creaking doors, whistling wind and hands coming out from secret panels behind oblivious heiresses. Or maybe it's that May is on the opposite end of the year from Halloween, and as such I can see it clear across the circle. Here's five from 33, with my ratings for both film itself and DVD or TCM broadcast image quality.

This is one of those largely forgotten shipwreck flicks so big in the silent and early sound era (any excuse for nude bathing, apes stealing clothes, reversion to savagery, and ye olde ape suit). As per usual the survivors include rich ladies, scheming crooks, third class social climbers and a drunk.  Mischa Auer as Ben Gunn type castaway comes in half the way through this weird Allied Pictures cheapie, cabin fever crazy, living with a gorilla and a couple of skeletons on a remote island, but he's not a monster... very often. his gorilla buddy spies though and somehow, just because he's a crazed castaway with a thick beard and he's forgotten how to speak he and his ape are artificially blended for the poster!

Oh well. There's a trick ending to the weird plot: lots of daytime outdoor footage (a minus for ODH fans) and two dames: Lila Lee, kind of like the taller, gawkier older sister to Gloria Swanson; Gwen Lee is a Mae West-x-Pat Kelton-ish gold digger who gets all the best double entendre lines. Some guy named Monte Blue is the nominal hero; William P. Davidson the numb nuts copper; perennial lush Arthur Housman a (what else?) boozy playboy who can barely feign interest in how his girl (or is it his sister?) is being wooed by the square-jawed hero --I think! It's hard to hell who's who when all the heads are cut off half the time. If director Ray knew where to point a camera, he could be up there with William Beaudine. He has the right idea anyway: shoot it outside on some beach and the rest on handful of shipboard cutaways. As it is, it's one of the rare 'forgotten horror' films where the script and acting is better than the direction.

There's one great bit the morning after the shipwreck (which occurs right after the murder!) when the lifeboat survivors all wake up and--silently without others noticing--begin to take stock of where they are, remembering what happened, (or coming out of a boozy black-out) and either forging silent eye-alliances, passing notes about some cache of diamonds, or getting scared, quietly. I learned more of the plot in that one silent stretch than in all the malarkey fore and aft. Four bells! 



I like that the girls sleep in the cave on the beach during the night (the men around the fire) and they wake up to find skeletons of past castaways sitting right near them. It might be cheap but it's never dumb or dull. The real killer's madman menace and when he pulls the two girls deeper into the woods at gunpoint, then oh oh baby. It's wild man Mischa's gorilla and his skeleton crew to the rescue. Or at least... Mischa stands off to the side while the good and bad guys slug it, and on his tiny island with his old age and his wisdom, cries "Mary!" (that's his skeleton's name). And I like how Housman--who's been slowly and on the sly morphing from tipsy to hungover to competent and alert--like three different people, but all without being grandstanding about it-- is so thrilled to be back in the presence of booze after they're rescued he brings the whole tray, whiskey, seltzer bottle, ice, and all, to the inquest.  Prohibition, thou art repealed. Hell, it was probably why they were all on that boat to begin with. The old international waters thing (three miles out?) led to lots and lots of party boats... and bootleggers hiding behind old ghost legends to keep snooping kids away from their stills...

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Mischa and Mary (left)

Retromedia's Forgotten Terrors DVD is shit but hey! Hey! It's a genuine effort to pack in some weird old shit you'd never find in a million years on your own, including Tangled Destinies and The 1931 Phantom! They don't look so good but then again, they're at least made available. The fourth title on the single double-sided 4-movie disc is the hardly forgotten Zucco vehicle Dead Men Walk  is avail. elsewhere in better form, hunt down the Roan group disc where its backed with The Monster Maker, which is total shit (so I remember as a bored kid waiting for this damn monster to be made while Luigi sits and listens to about eight fucking operas -or so I remember. I haven't seen it since) but Roan does a swell job, and they're all OOP so snap up!


"Life does continue after death," notes Dr. Carl Houston, the psychologist friend (H.B. Warner) of bereaved heiress Carole Lombard. He wants to experiment on the corpse of soon-to-be-executed murderess/free spirit artist Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne), a kind of prototype for Catherine Trammell or Michelle Pfeiffer in White Oleander. Her dead brother is used as bait by bogus medium Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart), an expert at delivering the old glowing death mask /blackmail/lost loved one's voice giving banking instructions via a long horn floating in the air flimflam. His drunken landlady (Beryl Mercer) knows all his tricks but forgot the age old adage for any would-be blackmailer: never threaten to expose a creep right to his face without an exit strategy! But while the seance at Paul's pad seems to go as planned, Lombard stops at Houston's office for a second opinion, right as he's doing life after death electrical experiments on the body of executed murderess and Carole winds up possessed--in one of those 'small world' turns of coincidence--by the very same murderess who swore revenge on Bavian for turning her in.

If the plot sounds familiar, it's because Boris Karloff played versions of the same scenario about a million times all through the late 30s and 40s, indicating America was obsessed with the electric chair and radio, and soul transference (in that order). Sharp eyed fans will note some of the walls from White Zombie reformatted for Paul's seance parlor, with a great touch: the above ground subway runs right past his apartment window, adding just the right amount of tawdriness. The final third of the movie takes place over one long night as the possessed Lombard seduces Paul, ever fighting to refrain from strangling him (for the nonce) while bringing him out on her yacht (easy body disposal) as boyfriend Randolph Scott put-puts to the rescue. Pre-code points for when Paul cups Lombard's breast while they get down to business on the divan, and the general air of sleazy heat between them when they sneak into Ruth Rogen's studio apartment like Marcello and Anouk in the beginning of La Dolce Vita, to fool around in front of her creepy life-size self portrait. I froze the projector and did two paintings off the moment they embrace (acrylic on canvas -2003), to capture a kind of post-modern ghost refraction -ion-ionn.... And Lombard shows her true chops by morphing from killer Rogen and grieving heiress with sensuous conviction.


Minus points for sight of a big dog perennially chained in the psychic's house; I'd have liked to see him getting a nice walk or some affection. Instead the dog conveniently disappears, never to be seen again. I don't have the Universal Vault DVR yet, because I have a pretty solid burn from an old airing, but it's only a matter of time before it too dissolves, warps... wanes.


With its use of Swan Lake over the opening credits (as in Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue) you'd think this was going to be a real pre-code Universal horror treat: Lionel Atwill stars as the father of Gloria Stuart, celebrating her birthday in a big cozy castle while the whistling wind howls outside in the night, and three of her suitors are the only other guests (kind of like Lucy Westenra's). The creepiest part is that dad Atwill doesn't mind having these three fools fight over her, sleep over, for who knows how long, etc. as his only houseguests. Instead of ordering them out, Atwill says "Give us all a nice birthday kiss." Yeeesh,

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Clik here to view.The one with the best chance at Stuart's hand, the clear winner, is an older foreigner, played by Paul Lukas (in one of his flattest performances); the one with no chance at all is abashed adenoidal pup who grew up with her (Onslow Stevens); the middle guy: William Janney, considers himself a mystery writer. He bunks with Lukas, even though there's like 80 rooms in the castle and no one else lives there but servants. What the hell? These strange details are way more fascinating than the titular mystery, which involves each suitor sleeping in the cursed blue room, one by one, to prove their courage. Stevens goes first, and in the morning...

If Stuart and Atwill weren't so imbued with classic horror moxy this would be the smallest, saddest mystery film ever. Characters seem cobbled together to suit the mystery, each utterly void of character details or anything else to talk about beyond the titular secret. There's no other guests, and no other women aside from a maid. Thank heaven Edward Arnold shows up halfway through as the local detective. The ubiquitous Robert Barrat (Babs' pimp dad in Baby Face the same year, extending the pimp dad motif) is the butler who keeps signaling at the window in a red herring bit borrowed wholesale from Hound of the Baskervilles. A

nd if the stakes seem unduly low, like the entire film had no other life in it beyond just telling this dumb 'mystery'- it will still be catnip to fans like me after they've already run the gamut of the other pre-code Universal horror favorites (Frankenstein, Old Dark House, Black Cat, Raven, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dracula, Invisible Man, etc.) and need more, more more! Seems a bit like Laemmle was scraping the script barrel though, and Neumann's direction is slow and pointless - always quick to cut away from any legitimate horror moment. At one point we literally have like a full minute of just Arnold and his cops in a bedroom looking at their watches. It's a remake of a German film, Geheimnis des blauen Zimmers from the year before, so blame the Germans! Soon enough, they'd deserve it. The Universal vault DVR looks great though. So soak up the beautiful black and white photography on a beautiful transfer, then give it to someone you love as a nice birthday kiss-off.

Every blood moon or so comes a movie I seem to be in the minority of calling great. I'm happy to time and again sacrifice time on the altar of their DVDs. And for them, the ten reasons: 10 Reasons GHOSTS OF MARS ; 10 Reasons TERMINATOR 3 and 10 Reasons THE THING (2011)

1. John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981): JC had scored two big back-to-back hits in HALLOWEEN and THE FOG. He was now a brand name, associated with launching the slasher boom, a sub-genre he had no interest in. So he took his rep and profits and went all out with this gonzo adventure story. His own hero was the maverick iconoclast Howard Hawks, regularly did the same thing, switching genres with impunity. And Carpenter found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in downtown St. Louis, which had been devastated by a terrible fire and was yet to be rebuilt. He basically had the run of the place!

2. George Miller's THE ROAD WARRIOR (1982) 

MAD MAX hadn't made a big dent here in the US, but was a four alarm fireball in the rest of the world (AIP -the American distributor- insisted on dubbing the voices to get rid of the Aussie accents--a real bad idea). So Miller had real money for the sequel and it's all onscreen. And he found a cheap source of post-apocalyptic urban wasteland in the Australian outback. We kids didn't quite understand what the Outback was in relation to the rest of Australia... but we sure do now. The idea of needing speed to survive in the wasteland is now totally clear - that vast flat desert emptiness makes the whole continent like one big drag strip. 

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3. Walter Hill's THE WARRIORS (1979): Hill found a cheap source of graffiti-covered urban wasteland in 70s NYC, which then at its most gang-accursed days since the days of the Dead Rabbits. Crime was so rampant the city cried for a vigilante, and got Bernard Goetz, the Guardian Angels, and (onscreen), Charlie Bronson. In THE WARRIORS, taking the subway line from the far heights of Pelham Bay Park all the way back to Coney Island was (and still is) an Odysseus-style journey, encountering an array of wimps and shoving baseball bats so far up asses the Baseball Furies look like popsicles. Yeah, we all wanted to be Ajax (James Remar) and laughed at the seriousness and narcissism of Swan (Michael Beck). It's still the quintessential New York movie, and those heady days are returning thanks to our mayor Bill "Cyrus" de Blasio.

I've already written of how my own life was changed the Halloween night in the early 80s when my mom rented us both WARRIORS and ESCAPE and had them waiting when we got back from trick-or-treating. We saw them back to back high on our scored candy, the sense of edgy urban danger bringing us higher and higher... and were never the same again. I would never have believed I would ever be crazy enough to want to live in NYC after those two movies, let alone for 20 years. And I've seen all three of the above enough times that this whole blog and my whole life flows with quotes from them - Look at yourself, Max, you're a mess. See what you get, Warriors? See what you get when you mess with the Orphans? You're the Duke! You're A number one. The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla... you always were smart, Harold. And to that outfit that had such a hard time getting home, sorry about that, guess all we can do is play you a song. What a puny plan.

Maggie... he's dead. Come on...
Losers! Losers wait!
I'm gonna shove that bat so far up your ass you'll look like a popsicle...
Keys, map of the bridge, hey! hey! Hey!
We're the Lizzies...
Just walk away... just walk away...

The sexy girl was languidly gyrating atop our seated hero when the drugs began to take hold. Her every slow deep rhythmic breath sending electric thin twisty second chakra waves through my senses, me buried in a seat next to a giant who never took off his leather coat, my own giant winter coat all around me, contraband spilling everywhere, the image of these two drug-addled lovers, bigger than life on the BAM screen, on Doc's couch, coming deeper into 3-D focus with each inhale; each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filament of the deep seething photography like a haunted hazy amnesia-curing brushstroke, framing these lovers against the darkening afternoon of his Godita Beach apartment, her Tropic of Capricorn-style twisted sexual bondage extended single take narrative slowly driving our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. Beginning to end, a single take, single shot, turned me on in ways I forgot were possible for a movie to do; the way being turned on by a pretty girl's breathing can trigger the onset of whatever substance you took a half hour or so after the movie started and then forgot about; the way her whole aura trembles and vibrates; a pure delicious energy works its way into your soul deeper with every inhalation. 

It's a real thing that any sexually frustrated shroomer knows, seen and breathed before only once in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, where just being an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the trip and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. Ya dig?

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GF later tells me I was moaning softly all through the above-described VICE scene. Not the first time I've been told that by girlfriend while we watch an erotic or romantic moment on a theater screen. I never notice it, but who notices anything when they're so transfixed in the dark of a crowded theater? I had my first psychedelic moment at a late night double feature of YELLOW SUBMARINE and HEAD in 1986... not knowing what to expect and excited and a bit scared, there in the dark... and then, as the "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" girl plunged down on her carousel horse and the animation shifted into an Art Nouveau Matisse rotoscope, I plunged down with her, the floor of the student union theater opening up beneath me and my idea of what was possible in the realm of my perception and experience widened. It was like that again, with INHERENT VICE, in that scene, but sexier. Every strand of her hair and flush of desire in her eyes morphing in shimmering thin spiderweb heat lines. the deep mind-blowing breathing second chakra freak-out of this moment. 

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Benicio is a very attentive lawyer (from top: FEAR, VICE)

Everything that came before and after in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas might prove impossible to all savvy in one viewing, but this one scene something like the erotic heart of all things, and a reminder that lurid stories of domination and submission often work more powerfully when told (as in PERSONA) and not seen (which is why 9 1/2 WEEKS is so much hotter when you haven't seen it - and why people are going to be laughing all through 50 SHADES OF GREY). Unlike THE MASTER, though where there wasn't any character worth hanging out with, especially not all those bow-tied pinks, nor Phoenix's mangy scrawny drinky sailor nor Hoffman's bouncy wet-eyed infant, this is, man... mano... We still got Phoenix but his fierceness has more value since it's brought out only when needed... but more important we got a damned good anima--not just for him but the entirety of PTA's emotionally stunted male character psyches--in the great breakout vividness of Katherine Waterston. There's also a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts (this is to him what KILL BILL was David Carradine). And most of all, rather than Monterey or wherever the hell in the dullard post-war 40s-50s, this is1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, Thomas Pynchon.  I want to hang onto everything but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. A stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family, the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink, and that Waterston monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. And the Marx Brothers, weren't they there? Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL CRACKERS arch and talking to Doc like a cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs. I remember that much. Always is in a Pynchon, he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so high-falutin' - kind of the best part of the books, to be honest. He knows his pop culture shit, and blends it and spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug real nice. 

Mystified critics reasoned English major Generation X stoners who remembered the 70s from childhood as some mystic California consciousness raising half-scam half-dawning of the Age of Aquarius high water mark--an orgy they saw but never experienced as the frigid sexual slasher post-Lennon-getting-shot-AIDS 80s clamped the lid down--would probably dig it more than their bourgeois-kowtowing local paper fusty baby boomer selves. Paul Thomas Anderson, as far as they were concerned, hadn't made a decent movie since HARD EIGHT. The Gen X-ed of us knew better, we loved everything, but 2012's THE MASTER had thrown us for a loop. We dutifully saw it twice thinking it would cohere into genius but no, it was still just gorgeously photographed acting of no more lasting effect than a sleepover at grandpa's house and being made to chop wood and liking it. After that, a sense of existential despair set in for we PTA devotees. The only moment of THERE WILL BE BLOOD-level badass Babe and Bunyan truth in the whole film is when Hoffman shouts "Pig Fuck" with a coiled unresolved adolescent fury any frustrated enlightened charlatan knows all too well. The more spiritual drivel you speak, the surlier your squirming toad cortex seethes below. But it was hard to buy Hoffman, for all his towering talent, as a cult leader. Neither he nor Phoenix is the sort, for example, you'd want a bedroom poster of, or to pray to on an altar, the way say we would Cary Grant or Russell Crowe or "Bob" Dobbes.


But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius. The question is just where has the vapor condensed, a hard thing to trace in a 1970 California, where hippie-dom is apparently very near becoming such a dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair still. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.

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Milk

Thus the strange ancient frenemies relationship with Josh Brolin's flat topped cop Bigfoot. And Brolin's character invoking hazy memories of the 'Twinky Defense'-copping assassin Dan White in MILK (2008), connecting with Newsom's debut album being the MILK-eyed Mender).

PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto brother or father relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue. Instead it was like a boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness to craft the dark father of capitalism. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacek in BADLANDS blank slate but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen. Her albums rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated--"and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?"--she and Waterson are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, orbiting men in motion like moons but belonging to no single planet or direction.


Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, his gynecology chair a zone for smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing and the dentist next door permits. Seeing double somehow allows the plot to come into focus for old Doc. Heroin and Manson-esque cults were the dead end of the counterculture: ouija boards, astrology, all-star cast including Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist (along with another, real, doctor) whose mother Minnie Ripperton's song "Les Fleurs" rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:

Ring all the bells /sing and tell 


And a wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner but brilliant detective is so crazy about her. Like Lebowski about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?"

Throw off your fears, let your heart beat freely 
at the sign that a new time is born

RIFF INDEX:1. Jackie Treehorn -(Big Lebowski) Pornographer played by Ben Gazzara (a riff on Eddie Mars in Arthur Gwyn Geiger + Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep) - "I'll Say She Is" - title of the last (unfilmed) Marx Bros. Broadway revue / Jack Horner - Pornographer played by Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights)3. "when the drugs began to hold..." - opening lines from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing... Vegas 4. "Turkey Ranch... that's all I got" - Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1959)5. "Spoilsport Motors,""Where were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith" - Firesign Theater (How Can you be Two Places at Once...) / IV. "Communiss" - Confederacy of Dunces / 7. "Roddy McCorley" - Irish drinking traditional (via Clancy Brothers album we had as a child)6. "like the Andalusion girls used..." -"crimson... almost life fire" -  James Joyce, Ulysses 7. Trucoat - protective coating / sealant - scam extra Lundergaard tries to sell - Fargo (Coen Bro.s)12. Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic - "Again and again the choice for men who put good grooming first" Squaresville, in short. (Sponsor for old radio show "The Adventures of Sam Spade" / Walter - (John Goodman in Big Lebowski; also Dick Miller in Bucket of Blood)9. "Take this Longing..." - Leonard Cohen / "quill from out.... my heart" - Poe, The Raven 42. Tab - common 70s slang for square from a sheet of blotter acid, also one of the earlier Diet colas: the latter of which I am now hopelessly addicted, and for which I blame past use of the former - ya dig?ii. ".... Why the long face?" - lyrics from "Sawdust and Diamonds" by Joanna Newsomiv. Purple Barrel... - play on a common form of mescaline from the 80sxx. "If you care to blast for it" - Ben Hecht - Nothing Sacred (1937)17. Harper Valley - Cockney-ish slang for Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) - re: "Harper Valley PTA"21. Al Shean - AKA Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg (Marx Brothers' uncle, credited for coming up with their names and schtick) 

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Fans of Miami Blues (recently released on a spiffy Blu-ray), are maniacs, or rather fans of maniacs, especially when safely across the screen. We are connoisseurs of true film maniacs, in that they are beyond motivation, desire, and depravity, for these all phony. We seek the semi-benevolent destructive playfulness that can only be found in certain rare 'awakened' megalomaniacs, those who are like us in our most id-unleashing dreams, or as we are sometimes in video games where instead of racking points and advancing levels we just drive over pedestrians and shoot innocent bystanders. Directed by that shaggy dog beachcomber director George Armitage, Miami Blues offers one such maniac. It is a violent Marx Bros writ large in the deadpan Elmore Leonard Miami... allegedly about hangdog cop Hank Moseley (Fred Willard) who decides to hunt down the mysterious guy in the airport who broke a moonie's finger, though god knows why, it's really about masks, and badass madness... just for the hell of it. And we love it because it's a film that goes all the way, covering Alec Baldwin's back as he seems to spur-of-the-moment bring the film down around his ears.

In Blues we glean the subliminal Marx connection only if we're savvy that Junior's initial alias, Herman Gottlieb, is the name of Sig Ruman's Baroni-signing exasperated straight man in MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), a film I saw so many times as a kid that its textures and rhythms cloak me still in a kind of cinephile temple garment. It's just too obscure a reference for even learned critics but it's intentional. It has to be, because that connection holds the secret to the madness of Baldwin's maniacal character. His genius lies in that same crazy Marx-Lugosi "life is but a dream" row-row yer way straight out the Truman Show bubble direction. Forever caught in an old world (pre-WW2) bourgeois slow burn harrumph as Groucho dances verbal circles around him and Harpo sets his shoes on fire (or steals his gun. badge and bridgework), it's only natural that he'd eventually get his wallet lifted and identity stolen by a light-fingered Harpo out of hell, for how can we measure the high crusting curves of madness without a straight line? It doesn't work otherwise.

And sometimes it doesn't work anyway. As we all know, if the unleashed Id is too self-serving or sadistic, the unleashed 'it's all a dream anyway so unleash your primal desires and/or try to fly' aspect leads merely to lurid horror movies (Killer's Moon, Devil's Rejects) and if it's too post-modern leads to a headache-based longing for narrative immersion (Daisies, Weekend); but if it's juuuust right? You got the Marx Brothers, Bela Lugosi, Timothy Carey Jr., and... then.... it gets foggy. Who else is left? Then the answer come back: Alec Baldwin as Junior, aka Freddie Frenger, AKA Herman Gottlieb. He's left and let-a me tell you, boss, now you got something. Left handed moths ate the painting. And now that Blues is on Blu-ray it's not just a chance to remember how goddamned charismatic and hirsute old Alec was then but that true anarchic Harpo Marx madness shall not perish from the screen, even into the 1990s. It will merely get a short haircut, presume a deadpan smile of solemn toughness, and acquire a gun. And sans its streaky pastel blurriness, there shall be breathtaking pink skies and dockside 'arrests.'

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Clik here to view.HERE'S TO DEAR OLD BALDWIN:

Most guys as good looking as Alec are, let's face it, dull as chalk - and many still are just as dull even after age does a Jake LaMotta on their kisser. Occupied with making sure their hair is werewolf perfect and their best angle cameraward for so long they forget to accrue depth. No emotion on their face lest wrinkles appear, they come across often as drugged narcissist automatons drained of all wit and regular guy who-gives-a-fuckitude like they're empty aquariums and filled instead with the kind of self-righteous petulance they're convinced is the height of butch charisma. With his Irish-American twinkle alight in his eyes, though, and whatever the age, Baldwin comes off as real, even when he's acting the part of a charming actor who knows he's fake. We know guys like him, and he's a cipher without being a bore. He's charming without being cocky, crazy without being aggravating. Better actors can't say that, nor worse ones.

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The real Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) center, and top right

A lot of us kids who grew up with the Marx Brothers and the Lugosi collection (and then completed our teenage years as snotty poseur with Repo Man) were left in the cold at the end of the 80s. It's hard to believe now, because so soon on their way was a game changing ballsiness in mainstream cinema: Silence of the Lambs, Goodfellas, Miami Blues, and True Romance paved the way for the Tarantino revolution and film long used to blurry dupes they made off cable or wherever in the early 90s, fans who've long grown used to the blurry pastel streaks of the decor and sky, the fuzzy short hair cuts of both Junior and Susie reduced to a blurry halo. With the new Shout Blu-ray its all sharp and clear, with a nice lovely sparkle to the sea and sky and deep 3-D blacks to every sun-dappled shadow. The 80s pastels are no longer as wearisome and the transfer is so sharp you can smell the salt and suntan oil. Extras include interviews with Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who both admit really enjoying themselves with the project and characters and each other, and it shows.

The film had its detractors at the time --there was yet no Tarantino or Fiorentino. In fact one of my only memories of reading 'The Daily Orange' - Syracuse University's student-run newspaper, was a scathing review of Miami Blues, which declared it emblematic of a rise in nonsensical nihilism. The writer was clearly an pretentious twit and there were many in Syracuse, who seemed to have hardened their mind with dogmatic readings of western dialectical philosophy solely to appease their stern conservative father. There were a lot of such idiots in Syracuse and they all got BMWs as graduation presents, and today they're probably going to see the remake of Far From the Maddening Crowd at some UWS theater with their minky wives.

In other words, a bourgeois white elephant filmgoer will not approve of Miami Blues, which seems like an open invitation to the underclasses to rise up and boot them from their homes like Bane in Dark Knight Rises. Those of us with love for Baldwin's crazy ex-con Junior don't care if they do or not and anyway we still have a grip on the termite megalomania of early childhood but have no urge to burn out the white elephant hoi poloi except via silver screen termite effigy. All that rage we used to excise via the now outgrown release mechanism of temper tantrums building up and up through early adolescence, until a miracle like Bela Lugosi in The Raven or Harpo Marx in Night at the Opera comes along, and out it comes in gushing waves of joy, an air pocket of tyrannical childhood, the good with the bad all buried now rising like an oil gusher, lifting us up off the surface of our becalmed flat consciousness is a most pleasing way. One wild man performance is worth three movies worth of 'importance' or 'meaning.'


We see Junior's kind of kinetic free-form insanity so seldom, especially in today's nanny state clime, that when it comes it's like a precious little match in the Hans Christian Anderson blizzard of safe sanctified sanity: we saw it in Ledger's Joker, Jolie's Lisa, Joe Pesci's Tommy, Burton's Georgie Boy, Barrymore's Oscar Jaffe, Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and Hopkins' Lecter: it is the glint of madness that takes that fluttery match and lights up the sky for just long enough we see the vastness of heaven. And then the match is out, the sky is dark, the house lights come back up, the veil of paralyzing self-consciousness descends once more like a clingy Psycho shower curtain, and not even Fred Willard can be held accountable for what we do to try and get the fire back. We wind up in rehab, or as deranged loners, buried deep in our bomb shelters, watching our Night of the Opera - My Man Godfrey -  tape over and over.

PRINCETON BLUES:

And if you know you're in a dream, and beyond all fear, why wouldn't you go a little nuts - the way Baldwin's crazy cop goes around he's a dead ringer for an old friend from the Princeton Blues Traveler days, Percheur - a crazy Bill Brasky type of larger than life maniac who was a living legend amongst the local mix of debauched upper dregs 80s hippie-music-Princeton Record Exchange / Hoagie Haven / stealing badges to crash the Princeton reunions / pre-fame Blues Traveler / I told (you already) Althea gave me her last double purple barrel - contingent.

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That Percheur he a some boy all right.

I thought they were just making Percheur up until I finally met him at a big outdoor keg party somewhere in the wilds of the Jersey Devil country, he spied some other dude he kind of didn't like from the other end of the throng, and then with a crazy drunk falling motion flung his half full Bud tall boy high into the air. If you've ever thrown a half-full tall boy straight up in the air like a mortar you know it's not easy to get either distance or accuracy and this was an pinwheel over handed wind up swing, upon releasing it he fall backwards and hid behind a car, as the bottle soared up and landed with pinpoint accuracy on the guy's head - he must have been 50 yards away at least.

Percheur (not his real name) didn't do this to impress anyone. He didn't even know anyone was watching (and I was the only one). I pretended not to notice and refrained from looking at him as the guy, huge, started running right toward the car behind which Percheur hid and so he took off into the scrub brush. Percheur spent the rest of the party on the run, coming back to the keg (and Max and I) periodically like a renewable kick the can. To this day it's the single most amazing throw I've ever seen -- he never even aimed or even looked at the guy directly before throwing it. Even when fighting or being chased he never seemed like it was anything but a friendly scrap with a old buddy even though the old buddy clearly felt different.

But that story is nothing, Max shrugged it off as lesser Percheur. Last Max heard of him was 20 years ago when--inspired by Miami Blues--he stole a fireman's badge and was pulling over cars on the road to fuck with them and/or steal their drugs. And they called him from then on Princeton Blues. (Ours was "As the Spliff Burns...")

Soon after of course the neighborhood was smotten by crack - which they could afford. They'd sit around doing rocks and watching pre-code WB gangster movies on TCM, which I respected. I still have the tape they made me of Two Seconds, Picture Snatcher and Beast of the City. And like pre-code WB, Miami Blues man flies free while we.... oops it fell. As we all did. But that's the arc of a gangster. The film ends and its time for teeth to be returned from whence they came, as they always must be.... Walter Brennan in Red River asking for them back 'come grub' with after losing them in a poker game to Chief Yowlachie, now named Two Jaw Quo! Think about it, Gummo. Your teeth will never grind so free again.

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"come chow, you get

The sexy girl was languidly gyrating atop our seated hero when the drugs began to take hold. Her every slow deep rhythmic breath sending electric thin twisty second chakra waves through my senses, me buried in a seat next to a giant who never took off his leather coat, my own giant winter coat all around me, contraband spilling everywhere, the image of these two drug-addled lovers, bigger than life on the BAM screen, on Doc's couch, coming deeper into 3-D focus with each inhale; each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filament of the deep seething photography like a haunted hazy amnesia-curing brushstroke, framing these lovers against the darkening afternoon of his Godita Beach apartment, her Tropic of Capricorn-style twisted sexual bondage extended single take narrative slowly driving our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. Beginning to end, a single take, single shot, turned me on in ways I forgot were possible for a movie to do; the way being turned on by a pretty girl's breathing can trigger the onset of whatever substance you took a half hour or so after the movie started and then forgot about; the way her whole aura trembles and vibrates; a pure delicious energy works its way into your soul deeper with every inhalation. 

It's a real thing that any sexually frustrated shroomer knows, seen and breathed before only once in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, where just being an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the trip and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. Ya dig?

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GF later tells me I was moaning softly all through the above-described VICE scene. Not the first time I've been told that by girlfriend while we watch an erotic or romantic moment on a theater screen. I never notice it, but who notices anything when they're so transfixed in the dark of a crowded theater? I had my first psychedelic moment at a late night double feature of YELLOW SUBMARINE and HEAD in 1986... not knowing what to expect and excited and a bit scared, there in the dark... and then, as the "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" girl plunged down on her carousel horse and the animation shifted into an Art Nouveau Matisse rotoscope, I plunged down with her, the floor of the student union theater opening up beneath me and my idea of what was possible in the realm of my perception and experience widened. It was like that again, with INHERENT VICE, in that scene, but sexier. Every strand of her hair and flush of desire in her eyes morphing in shimmering thin spiderweb heat lines. the deep mind-blowing breathing second chakra freak-out of this moment. 

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Benicio is a very attentive lawyer (from top: FEAR, VICE)

Everything that came before and after in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas might prove impossible to all savvy in one viewing, but this one scene something like the erotic heart of all things, and a reminder that lurid stories of domination and submission often work more powerfully when told (as in PERSONA) and not seen (which is why 9 1/2 WEEKS is so much hotter when you haven't seen it - and why people are going to be laughing all through 50 SHADES OF GREY). Unlike THE MASTER, though where there wasn't any character worth hanging out with, especially not all those bow-tied pinks, nor Phoenix's mangy scrawny drinky sailor nor Hoffman's bouncy wet-eyed infant, this is, man... mano... We still got Phoenix but his fierceness has more value since it's brought out only when needed... but more important we got a damned good anima--not just for him but the entirety of PTA's emotionally stunted male character psyches--in the great breakout vividness of Katherine Waterston. There's also a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts (this is to him what KILL BILL was David Carradine). And most of all, rather than Monterey or wherever the hell in the dullard post-war 40s-50s, this is1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, Thomas Pynchon.  I want to hang onto everything but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. A stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family, the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink, and that Waterston monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. And the Marx Brothers, weren't they there? Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL CRACKERS arch and talking to Doc like a cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs. I remember that much. Always is in a Pynchon, he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so high-falutin' - kind of the best part of the books, to be honest. He knows his pop culture shit, and blends it and spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug real nice. 

Mystified critics reasoned English major Generation X stoners who remembered the 70s from childhood as some mystic California consciousness raising half-scam half-dawning of the Age of Aquarius high water mark--an orgy they saw but never experienced as the frigid sexual slasher post-Lennon-getting-shot-AIDS 80s clamped the lid down--would probably dig it more than their bourgeois-kowtowing local paper fusty baby boomer selves. Paul Thomas Anderson, as far as they were concerned, hadn't made a decent movie since HARD EIGHT. The Gen X-ed of us knew better, we loved everything, but 2012's THE MASTER had thrown us for a loop. We dutifully saw it twice thinking it would cohere into genius but no, it was still just gorgeously photographed acting of no more lasting effect than a sleepover at grandpa's house and being made to chop wood and liking it. After that, a sense of existential despair set in for we PTA devotees. The only moment of THERE WILL BE BLOOD-level badass Babe and Bunyan truth in the whole film is when Hoffman shouts "Pig Fuck" with a coiled unresolved adolescent fury any frustrated enlightened charlatan knows all too well. The more spiritual drivel you speak, the surlier your squirming toad cortex seethes below. But it was hard to buy Hoffman, for all his towering talent, as a cult leader. Neither he nor Phoenix is the sort, for example, you'd want a bedroom poster of, or to pray to on an altar, the way say we would Cary Grant or Russell Crowe or "Bob" Dobbes.


But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius. The question is just where has the vapor condensed, a hard thing to trace in a 1970 California, where hippie-dom is apparently very near becoming such a dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair still. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.

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Milk

Thus the strange ancient frenemies relationship with Josh Brolin's flat topped cop Bigfoot. And Brolin's character invoking hazy memories of the 'Twinky Defense'-copping assassin Dan White in MILK (2008), connecting with Newsom's debut album being the MILK-eyed Mender).

PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto brother or father relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue. Instead it was like a boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness to craft the dark father of capitalism. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacek in BADLANDS blank slate but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen. Her albums rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated--"and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?"--she and Waterson are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, orbiting men in motion like moons but belonging to no single planet or direction.


Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, his gynecology chair a zone for smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing and the dentist next door permits. Seeing double somehow allows the plot to come into focus for old Doc. Heroin and Manson-esque cults were the dead end of the counterculture: ouija boards, astrology, all-star cast including Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist (along with another, real, doctor) whose mother Minnie Ripperton's song "Les Fleurs" rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:

Ring all the bells /sing and tell 


And a wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner but brilliant detective is so crazy about her. Like Lebowski about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?"

Throw off your fears, let your heart beat freely 
at the sign that a new time is born

RIFF INDEX:1. Jackie Treehorn -(Big Lebowski) Pornographer played by Ben Gazzara (a riff on Eddie Mars in Arthur Gwyn Geiger + Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep) - "I'll Say She Is" - title of the last (unfilmed) Marx Bros. Broadway revue / Jack Horner - Pornographer played by Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights)3. "when the drugs began to hold..." - opening lines from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing... Vegas 4. "Turkey Ranch... that's all I got" - Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1959)5. "Spoilsport Motors,""Where were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith" - Firesign Theater (How Can you be Two Places at Once...) / IV. "Communiss" - Confederacy of Dunces / 7. "Roddy McCorley" - Irish drinking traditional (via Clancy Brothers album we had as a child)6. "like the Andalusion girls used..." -"crimson... almost life fire" -  James Joyce, Ulysses 7. Trucoat - protective coating / sealant - scam extra Lundergaard tries to sell - Fargo (Coen Bro.s)12. Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic - "Again and again the choice for men who put good grooming first" Squaresville, in short. (Sponsor for old radio show "The Adventures of Sam Spade" / Walter - (John Goodman in Big Lebowski; also Dick Miller in Bucket of Blood)9. "Take this Longing..." - Leonard Cohen / "quill from out.... my heart" - Poe, The Raven 42. Tab - common 70s slang for square from a sheet of blotter acid, also one of the earlier Diet colas: the latter of which I am now hopelessly addicted, and for which I blame past use of the former - ya dig?ii. ".... Why the long face?" - lyrics from "Sawdust and Diamonds" by Joanna Newsomiv. Purple Barrel... - play on a common form of mescaline from the 80sxx. "If you care to blast for it" - Ben Hecht - Nothing Sacred (1937)17. Harper Valley - Cockney-ish slang for Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) - re: "Harper Valley PTA"21. Al Shean - AKA Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg (Marx Brothers' uncle, credited for coming up with their names and schtick) 

With every passing year, Cronenberg's 1999 mindbender eXistenZ grows in its many-tentacled relevance. 1999, lest we forget, was a year when the internet was still only five or six years old and dot.com bubble hadn't burst - it was to us what 1928 was to capitalism. Virtual reality was just beginning to figure itself out and William Gibson cyberpunk adaptations or offshoot homages were popping off right and left--Donnie Download, Strange Days, New Rose Hotel--they all worried about 2000, when the internet was going to explode and cripple the world. We stocked up on bottled water and duct tape, loved The Matrix, didn't really care about the other cyberpunk stuff because unless you could actually die while in the virtual reality, who cares? We bought Morphius' sketchy "the body can't live without the mind" adage but even that didn't hold true by the dull sequels. I remember seeing the first one, Reloaded, and walking out during the 'big' fight with a thousand cloning agents vs. Neo, as neither side was ever going to win or lose - so why were they bothering?


Now, 16 years later, eXistenZ seems to predict everything The Matrix was too busy slow mo bullet dodging to notice. The dot.com bubble burst long ago; nothing happened when the clocks ticked 1/1/00, or 12/21/12. Even the first The Matrix seems dated and naive now. Making the 'real' extra grungy and depressing (lots of grotty grey dreadlocks, cream of gruel ("everything the body needs" - good lord, who cares?), leaky pipes, cold grates, robot threats, ala the Terminator) so the grungy and depressing artificial reality (corporate skyscrapers, busted down telephone booths) seems believable as artificiality, i.e. the fake real as more real than the 'real' seems the most naive of tricks. But recently, in the past two months or so, the symbolic is trumping the real to the point reality is at best a third class passenger to the symbolic and imaginary realms, with no gruel or dusted dreadlocks needed. The storm of bad press over the all-white 2014 Oscar noms; the storm of pro-and-anti-American Sniper sentiment; the sheer weirdness of North Korea-vs.-A Stoner Comedy case lingering in the mind as The Interview pops up on Netflix; the bloody events of Paris earlier and the "Je suis Charlie" response, we're finally experiencing the collapse of the boundary between the real and imaginary. And it goes much deeper than what the First World sees as a free speech issue, just as it had nothing to do with O.J. Simpson being guilty or innocent at all that caused so many black people to celebrate spontaneously and chill white folks to the bone in the process when the Juice was at last set loose... in 1995, the same year Aol.com began setting the gears in motion for the 1999 Prince party moptop dot.com collapse pinnacle of bidding wars on nothingness.

Today, 16 "years" later, we in America have very little real left, just there is very little symbolic or imaginary dimension left when you live in a war zone, especially when contending with radical Islam, who are--to begin with--so anti-graven image that any kind of representational (non-decorative) art is a signpost straight to Hell. To most westerners, 'thou shalt not kill or steal' are the only commandments worth fussing over. Adultery, lying to your parents, bowing down to graven images, these are negligible sins at best, their potential for evil dispelled most often with a simple apology. Certainly you won't be stoned to death for them. But not everybody is as 'evolved' as we are, we who seem never more than a few votes away from reversing every last humanitarian stride we've made since the Dawn of our Democracy, bringing our country back into a kind oppressive fundamentalist Handmaid's Tale-style WASP dystopia, we know best. Democracy is that best. As long as the majority doesn't vote in the one party against voting. All it takes is one Pat Buchanan or Billy Graham in the right place at the right time...

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Al Jazeera America welcomes you to the Desert of the Real

To unpause now on eXistenZ... Telling the chronicle of an immersive interactive virtual reality game that's interrupted by a terrorist threat on the life of the designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Cronenberg's film is a fine illustration of how western culture's ever-widening hall of virtual mirrors keeps edging out the 'Real' to the point images provoke real life threats just as much as vice versa. The terrorists even call themselves 'Realists'--they seek to destroy the game and specifically game designer Geller, who's just taken it all to a next level mind-fuck, in order to save our collective sanity. In her game, the sense of 'alternate' reality is so vivid that the Realists worry our breadcrumb trail back to sanity will disappear altogether, resulting in a collective psychotic break. '

And they're right. It's all written in the winds of Jungian psychology. The artist-visionary needs to venture outside the pack, it's in their DNA, but they should never go so far out they snap the cord and can't find their way back. if they go outside in the service of the pack, as scouts and foragers, ambush-blockers, spies, counter-intelligence entrappers, stray rounder-uppers, then they are 'good' artists. If they just go out to escape the pack and that cord snaps, they'll wind up floating helplessly through space like Syd Barrett, or Brian Jones, or Don Birnim, or Dr. X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes --worthless and ignored by the social order. If they're in the studio, their channel is turned off in the mix (ala Brian Jones in Godard's Sympathy for the Devil). So if Allegra's game is too real, if it manages the Matrix trick of transcending the real through the performance of realness--"more human than human is our motto," as Tyrell tolds his Roy--the entire world becomes Brian Jones. "Is this still the game?" asks one bystander after all the presumed layers get peeled back. And of course, the worry is that no answer at this point can be correct.

Post-modernists could have saved the terrorists the worry from the get-go, however, noting with wry consternation that reality's been slipping away since 1917. If they wanted to smash something, they should have started with 'R. Mutt's' urinal, they'd say. Taking a pompously pronounced sip of their absinthe, they'd note Duchamp's original point was drowned out in the bidding war over that urinal, and that eventually Duchamp had to hide his readymades so well no collector could find them, which he did with "Trap (Trébuchet)" 1917. an unobtrusive coatrack that went unnoticed at one of his gallery shows. And then Andy Warhol turned lazy silkscreens (made by his assistants, signed by his double) into the height of overpriced post-Duchamp balderdash. And now it's not ask what post-modernism can do for reality, it's what can reality do for post-modernism. Reality bows before the "Fountain" and drinks deep from the milk of the prodigal golden calf, returned from the mountaintop with a dozen teraflops of commandments, each one composed of so many ones and zeros it writes its way right into your subconscious, and just a little tiny speck more of your once vibrant imagination is deleted to make room.

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"Fountain" - Marcel Duchamp / eXistenZ gaming console

"(as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle." - Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

If there's any point to film theory at all (and there isn't), it should be that the Void/Real Thing, as Zizek extrapolates from Lacan above, is approachable only via the fake spectacle, the Perseus Medusa shield, i.e. TV. To confront the thing in itself means total annihilation. The mistake of the 'realist' terrorists is to think that, in killing the fake spectacle, they align themselves with the power of the Void, that its tragic raw horror dimension becomes their ally. But as we learn in Thomas Harris' book Red Dragon, it's a big mistake to identify with your inner demons. On the other hand, identifying purely with the spectacle isn't good either, and we first world zombies have been subsumed into the screen to the point our fake spectacle doesn't mirror the real at all, but vice versa, and the terrorists are seldom more than images to most of us, anyway. We only notice the eruption of the real when passing soldiers on our way to the train, or getting our fingers dusted for... explosives (? - who knows, you don't dare ask either) at the airport. Aside from that, terrorists are just images on CNN.

The formula mirrors the below chart illustrating the future and past of immersive video game tech, only with terrorists struggling to deliver the void of the real onto more than just CNN, to blow our walls and electricity clear away and force us to watch the slaughter of our kin in first person, up close, to essentially provide a feedback loop that erupts from news channel sound byte coherence and explodes our eyes and ear drums, paradoxically opening our senses to 'the Real.'

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Source: WIKI

 The terrorists endeavor to widen the sliver by breakng the input-output loop, just as we narrow it still further by living totally within a comfortable cocoon of cable, letting our reality go all to seed from inattention and considering the terrorists as a direct threat to that cocoon, and with good reason. Perhaps it is because of their rejection of the imaginary realm that fundamentalists mistake satire / humor for genuine attack, and why I become so disinclined to hear about them. I'm worse than anyone as far as not caring to see the suffering. I turn the channel at the first wide-eyed orphan or emaciated dog commercial, no matter how riveting the show. CNN understands. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, shows images like the ones above, of life in Syrian refugee camps, the carnage of bombings of Palestine. Watch Al Jazeera and CNN in alternating segments and maybe you can get a proper idea of our whole fucked world, but who wants that? That's too much real! We need smaller doses of horror, otherwise we're like Scarlett at the makeshift hospital in Gone with the Wind, we just keep walking, the sheer magnitude of the 'real' overwhelming our empathy response past the point of ambivalence.


But the converse is true, not enough 'real' is just as corrosive, creating a 'real dysmorphia.' If you ban harsh images you give them power, just ask any Brit who was denied Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) for 25 years due to Britain's ban on 'video nasties.' Those nasties became any Brit horror fan's obsession. Nothing gives an image power like enforcing its absence. No actual 'nasty' measured up to the dread associated with not seeing it --the sight and sound of a film dispels a lot of it's power. Of all the nasties, though, Texas comes closest to capturing the pure horror of the void. This is partly because it understands pure horror. The extra 'real' smash to the head power it still holds today might have to do with the hell the cast and crew underwent to make it and that's a hard thing to intentionally duplicate. In a way, it rips the screen open to become a whole new thing, a once-in-a-million-tries 'true' horror. Even so, it can't measure up to the potentiality conjured by the image-starved imagination.



Still, want and curiosity are powerful things; images have obscene amounts of power for those denied them, and as the Brit kid squinting to see some bootleg seventh generation dupe of Texas Chainsaw can tell you, the imagination never yet met a blank it couldn't fill in.


By contrast to the mostly unseen Mohammed, Jesus and the Buddha are omnipresent in figurative representations, providing both a comfort at odd moments and an excuse to keep us out of the real (as in we don't have to imagine anymore --every last bank is filled). Mohammed isn't supposed to be depicted for reasons not unlike what motivates the 'Realist' terrorists in Cronenberg's eXistenZ. I forget which of the Ten Commandments says not to bow down to graven images but I know we've been bowing to that shizz for so long we can't stop without someone pulling the plug on the TV. I doubt Moses would be on the terrorist's side if he were here, but to his rheumy eyes every animated billboard on Times Square might be for Golden Calf margarine. You got to be quick and ruthless to maintain a holy order. Cut the advertisements down at the knee. Because if you don't then even the Commandment tablets themselves will inevitably be worshipped as graven images, or at the very least bid on as collector's items or removed from out in front of a Southern courthouse, not that it's the same thing as violating free speech (the atheists didn't try to kill the sculptor) but it shows the same confusion that motivates jihads on cartoonists and hacks on stoner comics also motivates alleged atheists.


'Now' at the time of 1999, newly sober and full of angst--uneducated in the tenets of Baudrillard and Lacan--I loved The Matrix and thought eXistenZ was meandering and too much like a rehash of ideas he worked over already in Videodrome and Naked Lunch. There's the same harvesting monsters for their organs (for making drugs in Naked Lunch, biomorphic gaming consoles in Existenz), the same guns made of organic material (Videodrome); the same bewildered protagonist shuffling along after a savvy, sexy woman who knows her way around (Judy Davis in Lunch, Deborah Harry in Videodrome, Jennifer O'Neill in Scanners, etc.), a maze of spies and counterspies where, as the talking fly's ass says in Lunch, the best agent is one who is unaware he is an agent at all (hence our hero is caught in the middle and never knows the score); the scene in the garage with Dafoe installing the portal in Jude Law's spine a mirror to the Naked Lunch scene where the Moroccan man sticks the broken Martinelli in the forge and pulls it out as a giant Mugwump head. And on and on. And at least neither 'drome nor Lunch involved actual gross eating of weird monster things (the sight of which makes Leigh gag in the film - and leaves a bad feeling in sensitive viewers like myself).


But it's all come true since then. Hasn't it? eXistenZ, I mean? Once we get over the 'using living organic matter for data transmission' stigma and learn how to tap the inner recesses of the pineal gland and bypass the clumsy ear and eye, we'll be exactly there --using the dream energy to craft something our brain can't distinguish from the reality its used to--and we'll be able to restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. It's got to be coming, it's just too controversial to be public. Either way, we've come a long way since The Matrix (1999) or Ralph Fiennes selling other people's bootleg sensory impressions in Strange Days (1995). Virtual reality isn't just for Michael Douglas breaking into a virtual safe in Disclosure (1994) or falling off a roof in The Game (1991), not no more it's not. Cuz this here's real. Unlike Matrix, though, you can't die in reality just because your avatar is killed by a WOW marauder. It's just a damned game after all and maybe that's part of the problem... there's very little at stake. But is it really so little? Really? Reealleeeee??

 The point that works is we can't really tell, we just keep waking up out of one reality into another - is that death, or just finishing a level on the game, and there are millions of levels?

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an understanding will never develop. “Try to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph,” author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance, her book on photography and political violence. Photos like Jarecke’s (above) not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has “an ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.” (The Atlantic "The War Photo No One Would Publish")

I haven't ever been shot or been in a war, or shot someone or been shot, but I was way into cap gun artillery and pre-paintball war games as a kid in the 70s-early 80s. And I've had some profoundly spiritual Lovecraftian transdimensional horror/void plunges since I put guns away and picked up guitars and hookahs. And even after quitting booze I've had some roller coaster reptilian demon devouring soul cleanings that make my worst college acid experiences seem like mild disturbances in the force --mainly because I had them stone cold sober. And they have stripped my soul clean 'til all that was left was a glowing sunlit circle. And to dismiss these experiences as just manic episodes or a hallucinations is the same as presuming there's no subjective-imaginary component to the experience of death, to dismiss the most profound human experience (NDEs) as nothing more than 'mere hallucinations' of an oxygen-deprived malfunctioning brain - which is, to the 'experienced,' like saying getting shot in a war is nothing but a physical 3-D space-time event rather than a terrifying crisis of mind-soul-body, your life flashing before you, things going dark, all in the middle of a confusing smoke-and-shrapnel firefight, i.e. hell on earth.

I don't mean to compare a meditation or drug experience to being in combat but either experience can be pretty damned terrifying and traumatic, life-changing in profound ways, so to dismiss either as 'mere hallucination' or 'mere reality' is to convey, clearly, you've never had either experience yourself. If you did then you'd know that what's going on is a deep drinking in of the pure intersubjective real, soul, mind, and body suddenly fused in ways all three are normally spared. The horror of constant growth and decay that is our organic, physical world is suddenly grasped on a level usually unreachable thanks to our symbolic and imaginary filters. These filters are important. Without them we wind up either penniless spiritual wanderers, or institutionally-committed, as is so often the fate of PTSD veterans. But by the same token, if those filter aren't ever compromised, so overused that the real is all but obscured, we turn into pompous a-holes without, as they say, a clue.


For example: A real sunflower beheld by someone with their imaginary-symbolic blinders on is merely a sunflower - identified against one's inner rolodex of flower names as if to impress one's inner grade school horticulture teacher, its full elaborate mystery screened out since it's neither a source of fear (unless you're allergic) or desire (unless some sexy new lover gave it to you). But for someone without those blinders, like a yogi, Buddha, starving artist, tripper, child, or schizophrenic --that sunflower breathes and radiates light and is alive with the little yellow petals around the big stamen center like yellow flames.

Just as a digital cell phone picture of the sunflower is a mirror image of the sunflower, the sunflower itself is a mirror that lets us look directly into the radiant crown chakra sun. This radiant crown image is not a 'mere hallucination' though a less enlightened friend might dismiss your enthusiasm, saying "dude, it's just a sunflower, chill out." In fact it is that idea --that the real is completely contained within its symbolic component, that it is 'just' its label--that is the hallucination. The symbolic breaker for this less enlightened friend as overstayed its welcome, leaving the friend trapped in a morass of the purely symbolic-imaginary. The only time the friend can feel a glimmer of the 'real' beyond language is when they buy an expensive trinket they've had their eye on, or paint the bedroom a new color--thus forcing them to reset their symbolic GPS. And even then, the joy is fleeting. These folks dismiss near-death white light experiences as just dying brain hallucinations, but the reverse is true. These same people are perhaps also most likely to consider "it's like a painting" the highest compliment they can give an outdoor vista. Or, if they behold some surreal carnage or high strangeness in the real, they note that "it's like something out of a movie" i.e. the more 'real' things get, i.e. outside their language's dismissive pincers, the more things get "like a movie", i.e. imaginary).

And for those trapped on the outside of the purely symbolic-imaginary, the prisoners of the morass of that real, the symbolic-imaginary prison of labels is taken as a real threat, hence the Parisian cartoonist massacre. The average fundamentalist Islam terrorist perhaps considers the hallucination of the atheist consumer a physical threat, and the purity of the real then becomes its own hallucination and they, in effect, go to war 'in the real' over a purely symbolic representation (i.e. a cartoon of Mohammed). For us this would be, in a sense, like arresting Spielberg for depicting war crimes in Schindler's List or being so freaked out by some grotesque cannibal movie they arrest the director and demand to see the actors who were show being killed show up in court, to prove they're not dead. 

So NOW for my post-1999 eyes and ears, the idea that a newbie to the virtual reality game like Jude Law in eXistenZ would act all amateur hour "oh my god I'm tripping too hard" is not surprising or even that upsetting (it really annoyed me back in 1999). These are the types who have some serious resistance to the 'weird' - they hang out with us (the psychedelic surfers) latching onto some girl or guy they like, but fall prey to the first anxiety that comes along. We called them 'wallies' in the day (see: The Bleating of the Wallies) A voice in their head tells them they're drowning, so next thing you know they're clutching at your lapel, begging you to take them to the emergency room when a moment ago you were both fine and chilling out listening to Hendrix, man, and exploring the vast universe between your thumb and cigarette.

And who among us in that same situation hasn't heard that same voice in our head? We just know to ignore it, along with all the other panic triggers being pressed, to let them come and go along with the joy and rapture and spirits whispering in our ears. But if you're not prepared for the rush of contradictory signals--every new impression flooring the gas pedal and both fear and desire at once, to the point you want to make love to a candle flame or end table one second and then destroy them the next--then you're like the surfer hypnotized by the size of an approaching groundswell, who gets near-drowned when all he had to do was duck his head under the water for a few seconds.

As Ted (Jude Law) notes after spending a little time in the game:

"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."

It's silly to think that of course, even if it's true. No one forced him to play the game. He should stop being a little bitch, be more like Bill Burroughs.

There was a stretch of time in 2003 when every day after work I was leaving my physical body and hovering around on the ceiling over my bed, and what sometimes stopped me from merging fully into the next world was the dreaded feeling of suffocation: 'what if I stop breathing while I'm not in my body?' which is kind of dumb, since we don't worry much about that when we go to sleep at night - and in dreams we're just as outside ourselves as I was at the time, and that shit goes on for hours and hours. These excursions of mine only took a ten minutes or so of linear time, though they seemed to go on for hours. It's not like I couldn't snap out of it in a microsecond if my buzzer buzzed. I knew then that the body and mind are built for these excursions. Not all of us are meant to have them, the shamanic near-Brian Jones/Syd Barrett pack separations, but those of us who are, are.

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Real (pre-symbolic)

So I came to realize Cronenberg's Naked Lunch's InterZone has always been true --anywhere the majority of people have taken or are currently on powerful hallucinogens a kind of group mind outside linear time and space takes over, and the usual layers of symbolic and imaginary are peeled away, denuding the lunch as it were. Even if you haven't taken any substances, you too start seeing things 'as they really are' which is the same as seeing things as 'they usually aren't' and the result is a profound existential nausea (Sartre was a big mescaline fan).

In this sense, trying to differentiate truth and illusion is like separating an orange from its peel and asking "which one is the true orange, the peel or the guts?" You might say the 'inside' is the orange and the skin and seeds are just compost, but the outer peel or skin is just as much 'the orange' and will exist far longer than the rest of it, which you will eat and then it will cease to exist. But it's then that it finally becomes real. When it's ground up and cycled through your system before being expelled, then the real is occurring. Wait... wait I know where I'm going with this, it's that Cronenberg has always known this real horror, that biotech is the wave of the future as much as virtual reality. It's already beginning to happen, designers are learning to 'write' DNA. And new steps in virtual reality are always imminent. Imagine vast teraflops of data in a simple eye drop. "Right now we're at the pong stage" notes Reasonblast39, "but within ten years we'll be full circle." What the hell do you mean, Reasonblast? I axed. But he didn't exist anymore - just a glitch in the matrix of our lives. (See also Post-Sensory Pong).


Similarly, David Cronenberg's allegory for the collapse of the symbolic is now revealed as savvy enough to understand that only by denuding the lunch, as it were, can the imaginary transcend the symbolic and become 'more real than reality'. It's also the realization that our human nervous system has long been an elaborate immersive experience for higher beings. These demons and angels use our delicate nervous system as video-audio immersive booths with which to experience all sorts of Hellraiser-esque masochistic pleasures. Jesus wept, but he wept our tears. We'll all soon be marching through the traumatic real of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre bone rooms and wind up impaled on Leatherface's meathooks, all just so some fourth dimensional burnout can feel a Batailles-esque ecstasy via our ruptured nerve endings.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as close to Traumatic Real as horror can get.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake) - the Re-Staging of the Re-Staging of the real becomes unreal through excessive realness i.e. the art direction is so so so 'real'  from the high contrast photography, elaborately stressed wood, and other  art direction it becomes commercial jeans ad banal

But since in eXistenZ we're dealing with agents and counter-agents, spies, saboteurs called 'realists' who are worried--understandably as it turns out--that once games get too 'real' we'll lose our grip on reality, and yet are working within the game itself, it's clear that re-staging of the staged real collapses any exit strategy back to our old symbolic-imaginary repressive mechanisms; in that sense the 'Realists' in Allegra's game aren't too far off from hardcore Islamists who see even an innocent portrait or landscape hanging on a wall as evil - so determined are they to be free of the Platonic cave of illusion confusion that they create their own even smaller cave through a performance of non-caveness. Where do you draw the line between killing someone for drawing a a guy in a big hat with word 'Mohammed' on his chest and firing an NBC comedian for letting an 'F-bomb' slip during a live broadcast, or crucifying a sports team owner because his mistress leaks a private phone conversation where he uses the word 'nappy' or am I thinking of Don Imus, who was also fired 'in real life' for word use deemed unsavory.


I'm not justifying any of it, you understand, just noting that everyone on both sides of the divide feels their strong emotions demand action, only those of us who've seen the limitations of our own judgement, been in therapy for years, or learned in AA that "feelings aren't facts" can step back and not send that angry e-mail. But I am just pointing out that if we free speech champions think we're beyond confusing our umbrage over symbolic representation --either in printed word, speech, or image--with legitimate real life retaliation, then we're blind to our own blindness. Destroying a man's standing in the real world because of what he said in a private conversation to his mistress is just a nonviolent first world cousin to the Charlie massacre, i.e. killing people because of marks on paper and remarks on the phone. Names hurt worse than sticks and stones, so the response is in proportion to the sense of hurt, rather than in proportion to the actual offense. In both cases, if we never heard the phone conversation, played obsessively on CNN, or if the terrorists never saw the offending Charlie cover, would they or we be any the worse for it? No. In these cases we can blame the messenger, to some degree, but it's a messenger we can't live without. We created it, a giant amorphous amoeba blob of all our hopes and fears jammed within the 24-hour news cycle, the journalists like a bunch of snappy piranha orbiting the latest popular kid on the playground and shunning aloud the unpopular, and instigating each's rise and fall.

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The minute / you let it under your skin....

Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.

It's a game everybody's already playing, it's just no one uses the same rules, because even in admitting it's a game they lose half their pieces. So shhhh, pretend you didn't read this. It's too long anyway. My mom died yesterday... very sudden, and far away.... and words are just fingers pointing to illusions and skittering away to the next schizoid dot connection... and this is a time for me when illusions don't work at all, and I'm forced, alas, to exit the Boar's Head Inn, Falstaff's woolen eye coverlets trailing behind me like the last few strands of my latest televisual cocoon.

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It's probably a sign of your mental health whether you find Warhol superstar /debauched debutante extraordinaire Edie Sedgwick's continued toplessness in Ciao! Manhattan (1972) sexy or just tragic. If sexy then you're either a swine or just so enamored of the Edie mythos that you'd follow her off a cliff. And I who have followed three different gorgeous drug-damaged [anorexic] rich New England free spirits off cliffs know what I'm talking about. But if like me, you see her in this film and wonder if her destruction is somehow your fault, a side-effect of your rubbernecking hot mess icon-worship, it's hard to feel anything but the need to pray for the still sick and suffering outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. But she, long dead, cannot hear those prayers. We can only save ourselves... the trouble... of enduring Ciao! Manhattan.

But we can't, can we? So come back with me then... a ways. Know that I too, like Edie, am a descendant of a daughter of the American Revolution, the Puritan stock, though not quite as pure or land-rich as some, we are perhaps just as insane and prone to addiction and depression. I came to the Edie myth via the Velvet Underground, which I came to via Lou Reed, who alone on MTV seemed cool, so I fell under his sway. In college (I only later learned Reed and I had the same birthday and I was going to his same college), I quickly found psychedelics, crazy shiksas with Ritalin prescriptions, alcohol, and anorexic lost girls whose hot mess sadness I swayed before like a hypnotized cobra. I was in with the in-crowd because my Velvet Underground and Nico expertise (and Lou Reed T-shirt) made me 'factory-ready', though in truth I knew nothing about Edie. That picture on the cover of the Plimpton book (below left) intrigued me as a kid, but I thought she was an androgynous kid in military school watching a fireworks display.

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Clik here to view.And these sad girls I followed off cliffs dropped me cold for any boy with cocaine no matter the brutalizing they received in the tail end, when the powder ran out. And every last one of them had a thing for Edie Sedgwick. They had Edie books, that black and white striped shirt (below), the posters. There was yet no internet so any scrap of information had to come through print. And there just wasn't anything except OOP copies of Plimpton's book, which was less a glorification of druggie artsy excess and more a Grey Gardens monument to fallen pilgrim aristocracy. As someone from her old pre-fall circle, Plimpton's book had the same kind of higher ground shock many of us have when watching someone we knew as relatively normal disappear down the druggie rabbit hole... in other words, not the roundhouse kick of advocative justification behind the front door damning found in Burroughs, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.

Alas, only one semi-mainstream movie, a botched mess to run alongside the book with the same name, really holds Edie in motion (as opposed to Warhol's film portraits and glorified home movies). It's a dreary, ennui-soaked mix of old weird footage from some 1967 unfinished black and white film without any synced sound, coupled to a foggy color framing of a dumb long-haired cut hick named Butch (Wesley Hayes) hitch-hiking his way into the frame like he was booted off Haight Street for refusing the come-ons of Bob Weir, all while his voiceover drones on with the most musically-challenged of hick accents and he winds up taking a job as Edie's keeper (at this point she's living in an Arabian tent in the bottom of an empty swimming pool). 

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Butch

You might wish you could do something genuine to help her, but she doesn't even seem to notice whether or not you're in the room. She only notices the camera, and in the past footage--the black and white stuff--only notices drugs, stealing a cocaine stash before getting lost in a speed freak robot-mechanized version of NYC, palling around with one-time Hendrix flame Pat Hartley while trying to find Dr. Robert for one of his patented B-12 shots all while some mysterious David Lynch-ish millionaire named Mr. Verdecchio tries to find her through the long arm of post-modern 'later filmed' foggy drab color stutter stock. It's like we in the audience aren't there at all. Maybe she gets a Strickfadden sparkle-circumscribed glimmer of us, gawking at her from a future vantage point window opening in the space-time continuum during electroshock, but then we're just static.

It would all still be art by virtue of its Warholian association, and all the songs written about her (Dylan's "Just like a Woman,""Like a Rolling Stone," VU's "Femme Fatale" and more later by artists who didn't know her personally) if not for the dumb cut hick narrator "Butch" (Wesley Hayes) whose bad cornfed voiceover and big curly shock of hair, pale skin and slack jaw makes one think he snuck across the broken down Isle of White festival fences, one too many times. Know what I mean, Mr. Verdecchio? And he's got no respect for leather interiors. A fine sophisticated pilgrim stock royalty speed freak burnout ex-model is too good for him. He's clearly a signifier that this film, for all its toplessness, is meant for an older gay male audience, So we amble back to a question: why Butch? The cut rentboy rube from the sticks, as naive and dopey as traffic will allow is a favorite subject for aging gay filmmakers. They like to watch these guys traipse around in their towels or less post-shower after a long day indulging in Fire Island volleyball and windsurfing, or doing odd jobs around the condo. Said filmmaker (or designer) shoots sly glances while hunched over their brunch table Times (see also Gods and Monsters). I hope that's why we're subjected to Wesley Hayes' super pale naked chest and dopey voice as he walks around in tight shorts and a dazed hick expression so charismatically challenged from a straight perspective he makes you wonder why Joe Dellesandro wasn't playing the part. Was he so unreliable by then? Or could he just not, by then, play a rube, having shot too much, in both senses of the word?

As an Edieophile (Edie-ott?) by association, and--no matter how trunkenshtoned I got--relentless in my gallantry when it came to protecting incapacitated hotties from leering gropers, watching Butch take charge of Little Miss Can't Be Right in these color pool scenes makes me feel like I was leaving my brand new Bentley with Jethro Bodine for the summer. No offense against Wesley Hayes, the actor who played Butch - I'm sure he's smarter than his character and that's part of the problem - if he was a lot smarter he could have brought out a crafty Jeeter Lester savvy, a kind of Elmore Leonard-esque criminal aspect, like Butch starts robbing Edie on the side, just as she robbed Paul America in the earlier footage (aiding justice, partner). And if Butch was dumber, then his scenes would feel more natural, like a good actor would play the hick as trying to come off more sophisticated than he is, instead of vice versa. Instead he's right in between... The only long hair with any smarts is the previous Edie-wrangler, who steers him to the job on his way out of town. He's smart enough, perhaps, to get out before a certain someone gives him hep-C, unless she already has.

Butch occasionally manages some sharp shirtless jean short observations as he tries to appease Edie's mom Isabel Jewell (who sharp eyed viewers may remember from Lewton's Seventh Victim); but he does nothing to help his charge who natters on and on down the druggie tangent trail while lurching around topless in her emptied swimming pool terrarium; the only time she gets out is when Butch drives her to the doctor, played by Roger Vadim, like a hottie-in-distress vulture looking to add to his trophy case before giving her some much needed electroshock...

In short she's like the sad ghost of her former self, who by today's standards, knowing what we know about eating disorders (and knowing she was kicked out of two boarding schools for being anorexic) makes it hard to revel in her alien beauty in the Alphaville-esque city wandering scenes, and/or the Warhol factory and YMCA pool party footage. She passed mere weeks after her color footage was shot, and you can feel it. Hers is not the knowing sadness, the glimmer of a gorgeous new type of maturer beauty that we find in Marilyn's footage in the unfinished Something's Got to Give. Edie doesn't even to fathom where she is, and watching her is like watching a psychic interacting with ghosts, half in this world and half in the past, but was there ever even another half? Andy Warhol supplied some of that other half, but he supplied it with a vacuum. And who knows how many times the Andy she interacted with was only Andy's double, and Andy's relationship with Edie itself a double, a bizarro mirror to the gay artist-female muse/proxy/twins bond between Waldo Lydecker and Laura... or Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond.

In the end, maybe, we all get our Joe Gillis, some half-in-the-pool-face-down floater of a narrator who only in death finds his poetic voice, and then only to describe us, our grandeur, our lost pilgrim decadent flower, like a hack Baudrillard drowning in a nepenthes stamen.

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Is that the real Andy though?

With the post-synced sound, especially of the mysterious millionaire in the limo, seemingly recorded on a cheap basement microphone propped up next to the telephone receiver while he reads his lines, and later shows up and gabs with the rentboy about how great the leather interior of his Rolls Royce is. I can never watch the whole thing without wanting to commit suicide, and feeling like somehow watching the movie and Edie's Grey Gardens crackpot repose but isn't that the point? My friend Monika had to watch it every time she came over. I remember her lifting the drink to my lips when my nerves were too jangled, or was that Amy? Either way, both were thrilled to know I'd gotten sober, and left my Edie annihilation fantasia far behind. Nowadays Ciao! Manhattan only shows up to haunt me once in awhile, like a ghost swimming in an empty pool and talking to people who aren't there yet are more interesting, alas, than most of those who are. Perhaps it's no wonder that the only coherent and 'sane' person in the film is Brigitte Polk sharing secrets for skin popping amphetamine. Best to listen. Or of course, to run back to your Hawks and Ford like one of those errant lovers who gets a close look at the empty speed-addled despair awaiting him once he's bedded down with the facile cold blonde Connecticut WASP hottie and goes racing back to the comfortable warm familiarity of his old Putnam County Italian-American girlfriend like bedraggled storm tossed sailor into a dry towel. Comfortable, warm, familiar: three words no one could e'er apply to Ciao! Manhattan. Alas, no matter what the rich NYC pop art history, watching someone else's burnt-out shell stagger around their one room memory lane only reminds me that my own 'lost in the past, in dreams, in cinema' self doesn't radiate well from outside looking in. My isolation, like Dietrich's is warranted, to preserve my self image as perennially young, but the farther we aging hipsters withdraw from life, the smaller it looks as it chugs along without us and the more we need superstars to feign aliveness, to be our onscreen proxy, to fill the gap left by life's absence. We don't need to see them lurch vacantly around the room burnt out Phenobarbital Barbies dreaming of some broken Ken. Only Andy's camera was ever satisfied with less. For the rest of us, there's Liquid Sky.

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This weekend's TV was momentous with AMC's crown jewel ending at the beginning of the glorious Free to Be You and Me 1970s. Don Draper finally hit bottom and was, as always happens, in the right place at the right time to surrender, and find the heart of the American dream....again. After sneering through the consciousness-raising retreat center, ambling after the niece of his fake wife, the only other person who knows his real name, and like the girl he originally moped after out there, a mother like his own, i.e. fleeing their child like its a needy style-cramping vampire. He's along for the ride but it turns out he's the one who's finally able to rise up and hug a shlemiel in a group therapy session as decade began, a good omen that led immediately to what he had been looking for (unbeknownst to him or us), the perfect Coca-Cola commercial, one that would define the decade itself--it's seamless interweaving of the mainstream popular plastic packaging and post-Aquarius encounter group openness commercialization and open collar freedom, but a freedom beyond the boy's club sexo-alcoholic escapism of the sixties, a freedom that understood no one escapes oneself, and the minute you stop trying, joy comes dropping down like a cartoon anvil. Hugging the shlemiel (Evan Wood) is the first truly free thing he's ever done, to release seven seasons worth of accumulated stress, of the Don Draper mask, the alpha male swagger, collapsing like a globally warmed iceberg and just hugging it out with a guy his total polar opposite, a weak-chinned balding charisma void, the kind I used to be always mean to, fearing if I was nice they'd hang around and try to poach foxes, embarrassing themselves, chasing off foxes and cramp my style by association. Learning to recognize myself in them, to love even them unconditionally, was the biggest surrender I ever had to make, and it's a case of genius casting that he's so forgettable even when talking about how forgettable he is. As an actor though, it's truly extraordinary; there's no maudlin sentiment or whining for attention -- it's not a breakdown but a breakthrough, crying and laughing at the same time.


And just when you thought things were getting kind of wholesome, pure, believing the Aquarius line, it comes in fully with "I'd like to teach the world to sing" extended length commercial, played in full. Watching, transfixed, still moved, I could remember hearing that song everywhere in the 70s as a kid and when I was getting sober in 1998, hanging out in AA just to meet girls and drink free coffee (I told myself). Only gradually feeling the cracks along my walls and barriers. When I could literally hear and feel the iceberg in my soul finally melting enough that it just split and cracked open and dissolved, right in the midst of an AA meeting on a late Friday afternoon, triggered by my self-imposed humiliation over walking in late with squeaky shoes, toxins and sweat, laughter and tears and rose-tinted waves of gratitude all pouring forth like the incoming warm ocean.

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The Nordic Aliens bring their universal message

And to the show's credit there were no little montage vignettes woven in during the Coca-Cola commercial, no carousel pics of Betts and Don at the dance, or forward to Roger's third wedding, or Don getting the Clio for the ad. It's not even clear for sure if he came back to McCann and pitched his revelation, or ever went back at all. And that's the genius, for in committing to meditation all that stuff ceases to matter - it's a new day. And to me, of course he did, he pitched the ad, it's his career capstone. Because if he did, then the entire show from beginning to end makes a post-modern socio-historical Guy Debord meets Alcoholics Anonymous kind of sick sense. And it's so glorious to see how the show really understands these kinds of breakthroughs, as of course no actor is worth a damn unless they've already worked through a lot of the same issues - for in the end method acting and this kind deeply emotional 'true' stuff hinges on such unrelenting self-honesty. And that's how fiction ends up being truer than truth.

And most unique to the 70s too, we were all--the entire nation--into that song. We all knew and know all the words, not that there's many. Because irony didn't exist in the popular media; we were too open-hearted and there were too few channels to separate us, no other devices on which to watch things. In the 70s we all had to endure each other's programming and the kids never got first draft choice if my dad was around, but we were always in the same room, seeing the same things. It left us all with a cross-generational water cooler currency woefully missing from today's everybody on their own screen post-nuclear familial structure. That's how that Coke commercial crossed the generations, it bonded the entirety of the nation in its moment.

TV was a shared language in the 70s but it was the EST and therapy groups and encounter sessions that brought us closest. Even if your parents didn't go, some couple they knew did, and the message of openness and being 'perfect in the now' crossed from that couple to your parents and outwards in a loving pink energy ripple effect. Parents knew how to treat us, to not hold on tight or try to align us to their thinking, not to live through us or rathe their worth as humans on what daycare we tested into. They were them and we were us and all were okay. This kind of encounter group wildfire helped prep me for later yoga classes, acid, and eventually AA. Don's encounter group scene's tremendous cathartic power comes from that same wildfire, the time when yoga and meditation were brand new to the west. There was no arguing with the resulting slow burn awakening as the news of inner peace's availability spread (like that 70s Faberge Organics shampoo spot:"tell two friends / and they'll tell two friends / and so on / and so on").

It's the same with Don's mountain retreat moment, as we say in AA, "your own best thinking got you here" - which has about two dozen dual meanings. To be able to commit to a meditation class without smirking, or judging, being able to take instruction from a young hippie kid in the lotus position, to get the message rather than let your ego--like a jealous rival--convince you to hang back and judge the messenger, to sneer at such naked emotional simplicity rather than leave that jealous ego in the dust, to shiver in the naked heat of the sun rather than run back to the iceberg re-freezing warmth of the bar. But looking at the entirety of his seemingly haphazard journey west, we see how every little incident led to this moment, from the invite to the Veteran's fundraiser to giving some snotty thief his car, all step by step, like a careful opponent making sure all his enemy's (i.e. ego's) avenues of escape are blocked before springing the iceberg break coup de grace. If he had his car he would have quit before the miracle (as we say in AA), if the guy speaking had been attractive, or young, or old, or somehow different enough to be either desirable or a threat it wouldn't have worked, if that mopey bitch in that first encounter group hadn't cross-talked about being abandoned by her mom, then his ride wouldn't have bailed, and so forth.

Don was hugging the shlemiel not because he heard, as we say in the rooms, his own story, or recognized the dawning of the commercialization of the Age of Aquarius. But because he saw beyond himself, and knew this person was him, and was Jesus, and the dying Betts, and his children, and whore mother, and brother he drove to suicide, all wrapped into one flag-draped coffin of a rainbow child. But Do is an ad man to his core, and even there in the crucible of surrender, lurks the next gold ring. For him they are inseparable but that's the thing you go into the wilderness of Self but if you don't bring back a present, a souvenir we can use here in the communal house, you just wasted our time telling us about it. We're conditioned to accept that from popular culture, so maybe it doesn't even get our French theory noses in a twist when right after the credits comes a car commercial with Jon Hamm voiceover. The average critic writing about the show doesn't mention that, doesn't see it in the context of the show itself. But any acidhead huckster would note, that's SYNERGY too!


I'd like at this juncture to thank those who got me here. God, my sponsor, my therapist, the makers of Effexor, Wellbutrin, Neurontin, Robert Duvall in The Apostle, and Helen Slater (left), this wizened broad (aptly, her first role was in 1984 as Supergirl!) eyes tired but serene with the gaze of one who's come through the inferno to the light of forgiveness and unconditional love and who brings Don to the point of his. She reminded me of the cool people who kept me coming back to AA in the very very beginning, the ones who barely said a word other than 't'sup?' after the more overt and smiling welcome committees scared me off time and time again. Slater's wizened woman says and does the same things these t'sup people did to keep me coming back and give me the final gentle push through the breakthrough door (see: CinemArchetype 11 - The Wild Wise Woman) rather than trying to drag me through like a stubborn mule.  She comes to him not as a future conquest, or yet another mother on the run from her child (his favorite brand) but as merely a gentle guide who knows, as so many did for me, that anything more than almost nothing was too much. There's a moment before the shlemiel takes the talking chair where she looks and smiles over at Don as if inviting him up but doesn't coax, sensing his inner ice already beginning to break and not wanting to push him. And when he stands up walks over to him she just gives the faintest of smiles, not the 'I made this happen' thing, but the joy of the truly enlightened upon seeing the course of dharma in action and gratitude that they've been blessed with being awake enough to pick up on dharma's plans like it's some kind of subatomic benevolent Dr. Mabuse. That's her gift and as the lighting cues ever so perceptively shift, we realize with her help the episode's stealthily gone from inviting us to sneer along with Don at all the new age claptrap to weeping at being once lost and now found, in the same moving way Clark Gable did in Strange Cargo! Or Billy Bob Thornton in The Apostle!

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Helen Slater, showing she always had a way with reticent buds (Supergirl, 1984)

And that's how it happens, to we who have had the terror of death's visit and the post-ghost Scrooge satori, who've walked in late to an AA meeting with super squeaky shoes, and went--in a final cracked dam buckling we can actually hear in our soul. I felt like my older brother ego finally passed the joystick after banging around the same game level for 30 years, and my inner little brother picked it up and effortlessly opened six new levels, including the exit. Freedom. Ugly or old, fat or anorexic who cares you're a child of God. I love all things scrooge satori merry xmas you old building and loan. I love you all as I used to think I loved myself, but only a sick sadist would treat someone he professed to love so harshly as I treated me. "Self-seeking will slip away" is one of the AA Promises that does come true, it's the 'slipping away' part that intrigued me when I'd read them up on the wall, as if it wasn't something done consciously, it just happened on its own, like baby teeth falling out. When the egoic whipping boy construct of self is gone, the collapse of the persona illusion of difference falls soon after. What remains? Only Love. It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru.

So we mustn't think of these events we've seen in Mad Men as fake, or either cynical (the 'Coke Meditations') or sincere.  Having lost both my parents recently and neither one of them much for protracted death scenes (my mom lied to everyone until right up to the last minute, so we wouldn't worry or try to come visit). I also was moved by January Jones' own melting frostiness. She showed in her one telephone scene that her frosty stiffness over the previous seasons was not just because she was a bad actor (and --especially with her wooden acting in X-Men--we wondered). But it all pays off for this one beautiful scene on the phone, the one final moment of these two emblems of the 60s, each accustomed to the social order elevating them by virtue of charismatic superiority, each clinging to the tenets and terms of their social personae until they finally in this moment break and they can surrender to their real feelings (a mirror to the telephone making intimacy possible too in the conclusion of the Peggy arc). But it doesn't matter at all- it still counts, the phone; these moments of redemption are what makes all the bullshit not just necessary but worth enduring. The longer the climb the better the sledding, and what other reason for reaching the top is there? Behold a snowy pale white horse. And the man that snorted it was Death. But first, Coke added life, and was the real thing. And he rode it.

Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with a B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws of Death (1981) for Ants) they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color where was all greyish brown streaks. When all else fails, we can admire how pink the natural light is beaming through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. For Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa - those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children.

At the same time, Shout preserves the subtle grain of real film stock and doesn't eliminate it in favor of some waxy, 3-D, so these still look like 70s movies, like panelling. We of a certain age and disposition need these movies. They are a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of terror nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger. As a kid I was traumatized by TV commercials for Torso, and Silent Night, Deadly Night. I had pre-pubescent pre-sexual juissance dreams about waxy cultists after the ads for The Devil's Rain. The two downsides of all this sparkle: the HD now makes the contrasting footage of rear projection and overlays and special effects mattes very glaring; the splices and outlines between the humans and the monster and--the Gordon trademark--the transparency of the over or undersize being as he or it or they scurry or strut, they're all now so glaring as to be almost meta. Second, the abuse of any animal--even snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or regular bashed... is abhorrent, because someone else does our killing for us. We just light the charcoal and think it all grows on trees, our brain more than willing to cover the existential horror with the absolving ketchup. But we're sensitive now, because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), the 70s natural horror kick, so we sicken at the sight of suffering far faster than we used ti. Hence I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating. Tell me you still care!



Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain casting the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde capped toothed ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner, as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a silent snap-pass prayer, but there he is, practicing on a frosty field (or is pollution? Freeze frame!) going off for R&R to a remote woodsy island, just the boys, to hunt horse on deerback or deer on horseback with two teammate buddies, one played by the ever-dependable Jon Cypher and the other soon-offed by giant transparent wasps that look first like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps, and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps carefully entwined in the zippers of his backpack. Marjoe will not let that stand; and the film is off and running as old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations, wherefrom he's soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as the farmer's wife and an angry Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat as the rote capitalist pig, here to get a look at the white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food. It works pretty well, but without a rooster the size of a UPS truck there's nothing to keep the rats away and don't forget the wasps, and the caterpillars biting Lupino's hand. Ah, I see her now, gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand around to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own; hear how her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into and into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low key horror... howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its expression, it is only this that the pain was ever for...

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Teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's secretary, there's horror regular Pamela Franklin, disguising her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. She was such a little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to act circles around ole Marjoe and to add what little pizazz might be added to lines of 70s corner-cutting bluntness like "I'd like... for you to make love to me," as the rats close in. The much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, on the other hand, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the rats start closing in faster than a zombie horde or a drunken Cornish lynch mob.


But then, endless shots of rats getting shot with pink paint in the face and body begins to weary the soul. I left the film feeling kind of sickened, the way I used to after feeding Mina (my pet black king snake) a live mouse... every week, another death... the blood on my hands accumulating... I had forgotten all about that existential nausea until this film ended. Mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better; maybe they weren't killed or permanently hurt (though a few sure look that way) but they seem to get a surprised, betrayed look in their eye when shot. It's not pleasant.

 That said, many of the overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, and the giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's game hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam' all make this bad film shine like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. It's that good.

I always thought Frogs rather overrated, but that was on the small screen, colors drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, all its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and he tedious red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party schemata. Now on Blu-ray the confidence director McGowan displays in its Deleuzian hat trick (i.e. we see a person reacting, cut to nature, back to person's reaction, almost like the footage itself is attacking them) is justified as the footage is beautiful, creepy, and in a way laconic. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' kind of champagne cheeriness. Sam Elliott without his mustache is the ostensible star here as a laconic nature photographer out in the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by rich Brick-esque prodigal son (Adam Roarke) and his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark), trying out their new outboard motor during a break between fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations. All seems ripe for a hook-up for ole Sam, but the mansion is also besieged by normal-sized frogs, croaking away at night, driving them all crazy. Old Sam Elliot is invited home to change into dry clothes and the stage is set, in short, for much picking off one by one via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids. Elliot's not as purty as Melanie Daniels, but he does all right.

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Blu-ray image much better

Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual loungey helicoptering. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster (as opposed to, say, Meeker in Gods). Instead, he's almost Ahab-like in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders.  There's even a shade of Col. Rutledge from The Big Sleep in his Marlowe-Sean Regan-resque bond between surly Milland and taciturn Elliott, each recognizing a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken capable hombre like himself in the other. Meanwhile, they go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler bond with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.
Their leaving signifies when the film really comes into its own, sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws--now it's just the white man and the all devouring natural world, at each other's throats with no witnesses, sides, or seconds. Just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, this is the coonskin cap's revenge. There's no raccoons, but a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; and Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line, and the gators close in. And then... well, the rest of the time we can savor the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and misty trees, the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions," dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker, and the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be caught dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko), while we wonder how in hell they're going to pull off death by normal size frogs, and where that dog came from just in time for the very end. Dogs never do get a break in horror, the frogs get the best of everything. Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame marching band music to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but that old devil AIP composer Les Baxter will have his pomp. 



Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, their pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do a slumming Joan Collins--trying not to break a nail as she rooks time share commitments out of a boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders, except that her pheremones don't seem to be working, so she berates and bitches in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' who's hot but thinks she's even hotter. "You are terrific in the sack and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you," to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!" I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the decade's most defining sexual icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her sound convincing. This on-the-nose stridency and jackhammer subtlety just makes her seem like she's in over her head - her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that it has never worked, and that she yells at herself in the mirror because she can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray, even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film stocks, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. I've already seen it twice just this week!

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I'm glad old Bert didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins' queen bitch and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them, one through overacting, the other through pheremones. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections. Ideally this comes too from the nostalgia effect, the dutiful attempt to create a cross section of America, so older stars and younger B-listers can intermingle and get a chance at a scene. There's never enough time to rehearse, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, and are touchy about the realization their agent has really failed to convey the requirements of the job. So it's natural that no one is nice to each other in the beginning, people hit on each other unsuccessfully and without a single entendre. So there's the frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, she hits on the captain; a girl played by the inestimable Brooke Palance wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine) wasn't such as a self-obsessed date-rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to date rape her. And through it all Collins bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than in all of Troll 2. But the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which then has to explode to be saved and then, well the fire keeps the ants away, but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is really and truly served.

With all this gloriousness on display, it's a surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy, it's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes out of him for the extras on Ants and Gods, and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like saying Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane; or talking about going down to Panama to shoot footage of these special kinds of fire ants, but it looks like normal nature show B-roll and anyway every ant in the film is jammed up in ant farm, crawling against the glass (as above). Not that I mind; in fact I like the big fake ant heads here better even than the ones in Them! which never strike me as more than big carnival floats. Gordon's ant heads, with their jet black little eyes and hairy heads and jagged antlers have a real grim dirty menace about them that's far scarier.

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Who'd of thought the second best worst film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness. Like other Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrids (The Car, Killdozer), the title (AKA King Cobra - but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources, even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen. As you can guess, a snake is possessed. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver has descended from a bunch of druid-burners, at a party. Introducing most of the coming cast, the local mystic lady says "considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup" perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration renders divination fruitless. Shhh, the devil is coming, because a snake in a in a cage on a train isn't that scary on its own, so this snake has telekinetic powers. He can even bite people just by striking an 'invisible' terrarium (the director in his infinite wisdom can't be bothered getting a clear glass to separate actor and snake). Satan then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis is currently incarnated in Weaver's sulky form. Unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent and biological clock into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. "You know god, he can be quite a trip too" -this to a nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced then the kid. What good is it being a materialist priest? He's wasting his own time, i.e. glug glug glug.

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Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to action: rattlesnake deaths mount, smaller cobras show up; an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film) and soon he's chased around the local graveyard by the King Cobra in the dead of the afternoon, while all while normal late afternoon California life goes on oblivious, and he's eventually forced to fight the King Cobra from an open grave while it tries to get at him through the gate. Oh hahen doth Weaver seem awake at last, and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross coroner has already burned the body (you know he's vile because he eats chicken in the morgue). A satanic cobra loose in town could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state." A very young Christina Applegate gets the film's only other spooky moment, wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night.

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The Blu-ray of course looks much better than this grainy pic

Then there's great crisp details so ludicrous as to defy all explanation: the supposedly independent doctor lady heroine needs the handsome snake handler guy to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into bed with her (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and then he needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they can sleep together. Bro, if like once you have a loop around its neck and the loop's attached to a pole, and you still have to really fight to keep it from biting anyone--and then, wait... wait... finally blow it's head off, all to wrangle a snake that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then well, some might say you're bad at your job. On the other hand, what bad 70s amok nature horror really needs is more guys like him, for they are the expositors... the catch-all expert who walks around unfamiliar with small-town ways, or vice versa.

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Applegate, Christina

So the dog race track grand opening is the kind that Aaron Spelling might stage: a jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in the stadium, people fleeing and trampling children, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, but all that happens is Christina gets bit in the janitor's closet. I don't even think we see a single dog. Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shoulding "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over with the fierce conviction of a kid who knows his Lacrosse buddies are snickering in the doorway. In other words, aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker terrorizing Corbett there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its namesake/s. And after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, all that's left is the wire that held the snake hood erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far... Jaws of Satan goes all the way.

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Howard Hawks fans like myself expect motif repetitions: if something works in one Hawks film, you can be damn sure he's going to use it again, and why not? His riffs and motifs tap into deep archetypal veins of mythic resonance, especially where men facing death in the service of some grand quest are concerned. Mail over the Andes, blazing the Chisholm Trail or being the first white men in Northern Washington, defending the north pole against a super-carrot, Hawks' men in a group are the men you want to be with. But there can't always be wars, or Dutchmen with open bars, or endangered ladies, or scoundrels in jail with rich brothers trying to get them out, or pilots trying to land in ceiling zero fog or mighty herds driven through a land rife with border gangs. And then, when noble danger-facing dries up, adrenaline junkies like Hawks' heroes have to risk death purely for their own pleasure, which is far less exciting... for us, at any rate. There's no noble existential pursuit to wanting to go super fast around a track, or to capture and cage wild animals for those uniquely 'human' environments known as zoos. To my mind, it's just the opposite, showing the heart of the Hawks' masculine camaraderie may be less honorable than we thought. In the absence of real danger, they have to go create it... for kicks. Hawks flew with Faulkner in WWI, hunted and fished with Hemingway, and raced.

Hawks made very few bad films in his long career, far fewer than John Ford, yet he receives far less lionization at the hands of the popular press, who tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box'), thus BIG SLEEP is a Bogie picture, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS a Grant picture, or even--god help us--a Jean Arthur picture. Part of it might be that his personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes within a single film, and his iconoclasm meant he stayed independent, making each studio less likely to claim him than any other. Still, for a lot of classic film lovers when we make our top all-time favorite film lists Hawks takes up at least half.

By the early 60s, we were a long long way from Hawks' days as a flier during WWI, an experience which left him far more clear-eyed about the courage involved in facing death than most directors of his time or ever. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern his master class iconoclasm. I've already analyzed the comedy MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....

So amulets in the jumbles somewhere, or scoring the animals for zoos 'round the world or whatever, and John Wayne leading a crew of mostly a hearty and hail-full international crew of animal trappers in Kenya, racing after an array of giraffes, rhinos, and wildebeests. There's German actor Hardy Krüger in a pair of little Boer shorts so we can see his bandy little legs and Valentin de Vargas (he played the leather jacketed "Pancho" Grande in Touch of Evil) and in the role usually reserved for Ward Bond or Arthur Kennedy, Bruce "Kong-blockin'" Cabot as "the Indian." There's also a little French newcomer, Gérard Blain, who decides it's easier to share women with the similarly diminutive Krüger rather than compete for girls, which is an interesting resolution to a war their parents started some 20 years earlier.

So right there, with this international cast of rough tough horny dudes, we have a ton of different accents and to add woe to the scene, there are only two girls to go around and neither are very captivating: French actress Michèle Girardon is a bit too mother earthy as the ranch owner Brandy, and Italian model Elsa Martinelli is too lean, literally, with all the tell-tale signs of an eating disorder.
Now, I have nothing against international casts, but it's hard to sound breezy and naturalistic while delivering a mouthful of Leigh Brackett dialogue if English is not your first language. So don't blame them if the camaraderie feels slightly forced, just try to enjoy it, because as with all Hawks, there is plenty of it. During the daytime of course there's the animal wrangling, feeding, and watering; and perks like the memorable Henry Mancini score, and the authenticity of all the hunt and capture sequences. Wayne and company had the guts to do all did their own animal-wrangling; there's no rear screen projection, no stunt doubles, no stock footage whatsoever... and it makes a huge difference (vs. something like MGM's Tarzan series, which relied on all three). These scenes of the chase, racing in a complex hunting strategy of racing jeeps and trucks chasing down an array of Serengeti plains roamers, even influenced Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World. 



Alas, the forced-sounding breezy dialogue and compassion-based unease seeing innocent animals abducted for our amusement aren't even the only problems: I could live with either, but what keeps HATARI out of my DVD collection is something else, something all Hawks' other comedy-laced 'group of men facing danger' adventures didn't have to contend with... a hirsute little ginger attention hog cockblocker named Red Buttons.
Red Buttons, the original red-headed stepchild... I love his convulsive dance marathon heart attack in They Shoot Horses Don't They? But in Hatari! there's no need to ask who we'd like to shoot next.

Sure he's got a kind of hairy Arthur Murray tenement grace to his movements, but his hammy cowardice and shameless cockblocking drag the joi de vivre down like a steel mesh net. Whining, blowing up one of the Serengeti's few scarce acacia trees in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys (but looking away as his rocket-driven net flies over and engulfs the tree) and then getting drunk that night and asking about it over and over, refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he didn't look for his big moment of triumph, he's unbearable, as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.


But that's not the worst of it, the worst is when he steals all the ice at cocktail hour for his poor widow ass (after he gets knocked over on it). And insult to injury: he winds up with Brandy instead of the Frog or the Hitlerjugend who've been dueling for her hand all through the first half of the film).  It's not Hawksian to be so needy, so constantly demanding of praise, so ramped up with that short guy attention grabbing. It's not, perhaps, Buttons fault if he's the pisher left standing after the needle is lifted in Hawksian archetype musical chairs. He's the one 'new' kind of character in the Hawks oeuvre, at least he hasn't been seen since Bringing Up Baby's Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles). I guess that's okay in itself, but back to Brandy: Imagine if old Ruggles' Applegate wound up with Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo? Was you ever bit by a dead bee, indeed.

And if the usual easy breezy chemistry of the men-as-a-group adventure seems forced, the actors can't be faulted so much as the casting director, for the international vibe costs Hawks his usual entrainment of mood, and 'brave and skilled men in a group facing danger' style (vs. say, Hollywood actors as foreigners instead of foreigners as Hollywood actors).








Perhaps we can understand late period Hawks well by contrasting his two tame leopard-in-a-bathroom scenes, the one in BRINGING UP BABY and the one in HATARI! In BABY, Susan Vance pretends she's being attacked by the leopard in order to get David (Cary Grant) to charge over to her apartment and 'save' her (he doesn't know it's a tame leopard) but in HATARI, it's the girl in the bath who doesn't know the leopard is tame, and Red Buttons capitalizes on that to act like a hero, charging in with chair (top). But while Grant's over-acting was--and he knew you knew--a front, a grown man play-acting in a Cavellian comedy of remarriage, here Red overacts and gesticulates as if Mickey Rooney crash landed in the middle of RIO BRAVO and tried to turn the whole thing into a Andy Hardy picture before Hawks came back from the bathroom.
Anyway, the real problem is sex. The way Buttons cockblocks Wayne constantly, interrupting his woo at the worst times, is forgivable first and then downright obnoxious, only Hawks probably thinks it's funny, perhaps because he can no longer get it up himself by this point (then again, who can? Viagara was still decades off) Wayne has to marry her (offscreen) at the end so they can get a hotel room together in town, but then their bed is literally crashed by her three baby elephantss, and Red of course. Haw Haw.

 I've always hated cockblockers. Imagine if Bacall's attempted seductions of Bogart in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) were continually undone by Brennan's drunk character randomly barging into the room without knocking, to ask for change or talk about the dead bees, over and over and over. Wayne has enough problems, smoking casually and getting older,  he seems always at risk of stretching his cowboy actor legs once too often in taming of wild animals, like he could wind up like Clark Gable in real life after he tames that mustang in THE MISFITS (1961). Hawks would be better off back in Hollywood, or on location someplace temperate, near the beach, like with John Ford, presiding over pointless Irish brawls off the coast of Hawaii instead of racing around after rampaging rhinos and wildebeests.

As for the girls in HATARI!, all two of them, well, if pop culture has taught us a bit about eating disorders since 1962. Unless she was suffering from yellow fever while on location, Italian model-turned-actress Elsa Martinelli scans bulimic. When she declines a drink after her first long bumpy, dusty hard safari animal-wrangling jeep ride I knew Hawks had some serious miscasting. Bitch, when you're all sore as hell from being bounced around, you don't refuse a first-rate analgesic like alcohol. It's like saying your head hurts too much to take an offered aspirin! I can abide anything but that kind of idiocy. This is frickin' Hawks country you're in, not frickin' Texas Female Baptist College on a Blake's bus tour! These people are men!

And I wish to god I was with 'em.

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Center: the normal-height human who won Ann Darrow

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Clik here to view.See, the French broad's not even jealous. The French are the best, aside from their inability to give Hawksian dialogue that necessary razzle dazzle, at least they have a healthy grasp of sex --that it's just a thing people do together, not 'to' each other. They're not obsessed with it to the point they rarely have it. Too bad there's no other French people around, just these lumbering blonde mastodons with their infantile obsessions and conviction that somehow driving in circles faster than anyone else makes them deserving of a girl who's not a racing "slut!" When what else are they going to meet?

When the current of loyalty is undercut in a Hawks film, it begins to drift loose. He had the same problem with The Crowd Roars. Of course it's a problem men have, this weird thing where as soon as a girl comes into our lives we try to make her into our mother and then feel suffocated by the security, desperately looking for a way out of a cage we're too numb to realize we've already left, and so we cage ourselves by trying to escape. That's the thing, Howard. We left this cage, long ago... the marshall came and took Joe Burdett, and we moved out of the jail. We don't even need fast cars anymore, because there's no where to go once you're everywhere at once, unmoored, as it were, from that localized spot, that feminine vice clamp flytrap magnet that pulls us ever in, and it's all some men can do not blaze away from its gravity with as much horsepower as they can cram under that mortal hood, going so far so fast they wind up right where they started. As Tom Waits sang-"If you get far enough away / you'll be on your way back home." Racing around in an endless oval, these maniacs avoid that risk, but who was the girl, Steve, who left them with such a high opinion of women? Maybe Hawks has been driving and flying and shooting so long by 1965, that even he forgot. As Dude said, a man forgets. But just because you forget what you're running from doesn't mean you stop. Crash after crash, the race goes on.