Sever me Member, Scarlet Cinder! EX MACHINA (2015) and THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

Is western scientific dogma really just man's elaborate defense mechanism against the arcane force of his own feminine unconscious? Has keeping a sweet young innocent locked away from the world ever preserved her innocence, or protected her keeper... for long? Is there a correlation between these two questions? The eventual mauling the imprisoning male authority figure gets when his captive is finally freed is always relative to the length and virulence of her oppression, even if he created her. In myth, fiction, science, and what happens when all three roll together: Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis, the intractable if unspoken dictum is that the married royal Cinderella, the 'cinder from the flames' as it were, beheads her stepmother and throws her wicked stepsisters into the dungeon. Vengeance is sweet, sayeth the wronged. Drown them in fire, o faire Frances!

The male of the species is, after all, ultimately an appendage. Woman's ovaries are the wellspring, connected directly to the divine; man's member is there like merely a postman at the gates of dawn, dropping of a package and then racing back into irrelevance, needing to high five and pass out cigars to prove he's essential to the process. Perhaps it's only through fiction he can enter those gates and allow his whole soul to be devoured by the voracious chthonic tide of Woman, to wear her skin without needing to lower lotions in baskets he must unlock the door to the foreboding attic, and let Mrs. Rochester prowl the halls at night.

This applies equally well to film history and to ancient alien 'star seed' theory, whether in science fiction revamps of the Pygmalion myth about the creation (and then restriction) of artificial intelligence (which indicates through fractal-mirrors, our own creation, and the God who hides us from His friends in shame while tinkering with the next edition), or the pulpy-but-true horrors of shock therapy, iron maidens, aerodynamic brassieres and other repressive devices (projection of patriarchy's demons onto the 'weaker' sex). Fiction allows us to acknowledge our prehistoric-alien-insemination roots in ways we can't if arguing them as truth with closed-minded positivists. It's only through Jung, via Freud, that we can grasp that some fiction is truer than fact, and that no amount of Jekyll tea totaling denial can suppress the Hyde alcoholic for long. Either let him out (in fiction, art, AA) or wind up in the lunatic asylum, buried alive in a sterile post-modern tomb of celluloid.

actual photo (w/child)

Seeing this for the first time, the same week as a fifth revisit to Horror Express (1972) has me wondering if perhaps the zeitgeist of ancient alien theory--which had just broke big a couple of years earlier with Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods-- had an effect on either of them, or every horror film from those years. Consider: both have an ancient alien brought back to life by heedless archeologists in Victorian times, when science was much more open to the possibility of all sorts of tosh (like phrenology!). In fact, mainstream archeology of the late 1800s resembles the fringe archeology of the early 1970s (as per: Scarfolk) in its openness to the validity of right brain thinking (ESP, seances, sea monsters, etc.). Both Express and Flesh star Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as semi-friendly rival scientists competing over a prehistoric humanoid fossil that just needs some jostling to come back to life and start dominating people through telepathy, telekinesis, and various precambrian maneuverings. In Horror Express, we learn the alien is a free-floating soul that was just possessing the frozen caveman (a kind of ancient yeti) who can drink earth creature's memories through their eyes and gain their knowledge, as well as hop to different bodies. In Creeping Flesh the word nephilim or 'titan' is never bandied, but it's clearly what it is, with its goalie mask skull and gigantic skeleton merely needing water to regrow its flesh, its blood ripe with undiluted evil, the kind gods might make floods (and Ice Ages) to erase from their chalkboard earth. Both beings have ancient alien written all over them and perhaps because of the Jules Verne-style liberation of the era, safely poised between the air balloon and the passenger plane, between the ages of religious dogma and scientific dogma, are utterly freed of all the usual dismissive hamperings; no close-minded PM or colonel (such as in Five Million Years to Earth) or witch-burning Christians hamper these Cushing and Lee on their journey into the ancient future. Yet in Flesh, there are those whom Lee and Cushing would sandbag mighty low, and they are Cushing's nympho-schizophrenic wife and lovely daughter, and his lab monkey.

Cushing w/ Red Angel wife Emily (Catherine Finn)

Flesh starts with Cushing  returning to his lovely mansion with a gigantic prehistoric humanoid skeleton in tow and a big grant on his mind. His virginal, locked-away daughter Penelope (Lorna Helibron) is excited to see him but of course Cushing's more excited to play with his big skeleton, and he forbids her from looking in his laboratory or upstairs in mummy's room. The wife recently died, in half-brother Christopher Lee's asylum, but Cushing told Penelope she died in childbirth, so as to not touch off her madness, as if a whiff of scandal would awaken the madness, ala Irina Dubrovna or Madeline Usher.

In his tearful flashback her descent into the nympho/schizo maelstrom is brilliantly rendered by director Freddie Francis as a splotch of Vaseline blurring a stack of teddy bears in the background, seeming to grow larger as the camera slowly zooms in on her, and there's grim echoes of Argento's Deep Red in her madness and color scheme. Finally working up the nerve to invade mom's scarlet boudoir she's soon wandering the streets in her mom's red dress, eyes alight and jaw clenched like she's on her first big coke high or really good acid. Her drug? Ancient Alien blood, like quinoa, or the vamp blood powder mixed and drunk by the debauched libertine in Taste the Blood of Dracula.

Penelope (Lorna Helibron) gets her first coke high

Speak of which, I'd just caught Deep Red (1975) on El Rey earlier that evening, and was reeling from the idea that Argento's film was made just two years after Francis' film, as one is like the post-Freud psychosexual shattered mirror reflection of the other's pre-hysteric lobotomy-and-hysterectomy-happy misogynist medical community of 19th century Britain. Each involves a paranoid schizophrenic mother's sins outing in the singing knife of the progeny, and the ultimate trauma of seeing your father killed on your birthday (in a truly bizarre flashback where the son is deliberately made to seem like an automaton of the sort one sees coming out of cuckoo clocks or Macy's Xmas windows). The realization from this being a kind of profound 'we are the gods' own robots" subject to short-circuiting when presented with unfathomable horror.

Cushing's desire to protect his daughter from mom's madness isn't 'merely' his own projection-cum-symbolic repression of his own shadowed feminine or a scientific awareness of her genuine latent paranoid schizophrenia, it refuses to name one or the other, the way in Polanski's films of the same period people are paranoid and everyone really is out to get them. If Weimar Germany was as repressed as Victorian UK, and Emil Jannings ran an insane asylum, the ending of Angel might have been very, very different.
Cushing's inability to accept any guilt results in his jumping the gun like old Janice Starlin of Starlin Enterprise with her wasp serum but man is it worth it: as with the chaste wives and maidens of Hammer, once she's 'turned', Penelope lets her hair down, tarts up her frock, and turns drop dead gorgeous. Seeing her all crazy-eyes in mom's scarlet dress, chased down the street after gashing a sailor with a broken bottle, the red dress tearing around dim magic hour dawn old London street corners is one of the highlights of my cinematic year!

Science and sex marches on, and both have the eternal aim of preventing the scythe-time-swiping maenads from slicing a their members off at the root. Avast ye, mark the way the fleshy finger of the Creeping nephilim giant Cushing's holding in the second from top photo atop; allowed to look like a cut-off dick it is, which is where I got me title. Clever alliteration, aye mate? Have at thee!


Fussy, sterile, hipster, and inert this story of a prototype AI named (what else?) Eva has been told better elsewhere, and I mean recently, even calling the AI the same damn name. There's the West-German Eva; and Ava in The Machine from 2013 (which also has an earlier Asian prototype with a punk cut whispered to in order to instigate the uprising) - the same year as the "Be Right Back" episode of Black Mirror which features the same actor--Domhnall Gleeson. And those are just the ones I've seen. I mean, I get that it's a futuristic riff on Eve, but Jeeze Alex, if you want to be intertextual, call her Pris.... or Ash... ley... and have her say "I want more life... fucker."



Awkward nerd Caleb (Gleeson)--an employee of a future version of a Google-style search engine-- is packed off for a week to do some top secret research with his burly bald bearded billionaire boss Nathan (the wearingly ubiquitous Oscar Isaac) living in a big post-modern sterile movie-less locked-down research mansion in the middle of the Norwegian fjords with his exercise equipment, fully-stocked bar, and cadre of pleasure models and experimental tech, a bit like Dr. Coppelius from Tales of Hoffman crossed with Omni-publisher Bob Guccione (Caligula) if he hid out on an Island of Lost Souls like he was Dr. Moreau shopping for a Mr. Parker to try out his Lola the Panther Woman and picking dopey, can't-relax super awkward squaresville programmer Caleb, who could handle the situation a dozen better ways than his dorky mixture of smarm and insecurity to hopelessy entangled in today's tech-noir cubicle/coffee shop tables. As Ava, Swedish model-actress Alicia Vikander is beautiful and properly inexpressive, but maybe I'm showing my decadent age as that whole granny dress crew cut Williamsburg hipster thing she rocks leaves me cold, though it could be I dated a few girls with that same androgynous Holly Hobby look 'for real' in the pre-Friendster chatroom era. Cue Silent Bob's post-Selma sexual shudder!

But Nathan is actually worse, seizing on his superiority to passive-aggressively bully Caleb, to basically treat him like a rat in a maze given the challenge of testing the next dog down in the subservient pecking order, 'the woman,' in an even smaller maze. Nathan thinks he's invented a genuine real alien intelligence, one that thinks for itself and its own self-interest rather than merely follows its imitation snob algorithims; and if the film made more of the idea that he considers himself just the means by which evolution supplants itself it would be a good film, but it's hung up on all that artsy bourgeois surface. Filmed in a beautiful but depressing Nordic scenery hotel where every room is either off limits or openable with a pass card (which can change in an instant to trap you wherever your are), with no TV or stereo (but who cares since Caleb has his little iPod?) it's paradise if you've tailored it all to your own needs, but in Caleb's situation it's like that overpriced spa where they freak out if your toenail scratches their perfectly-stressed industrial concrete floor, all while urging you to relax and let it all hang out. I loathe those sort of places. I feel like I'm sleeping in the middle of an overpriced boutique hotel, adding up my every breath of oxygenated air via remote micro-scale sensors. How can I relax in a room where I'm thirsty and hungry and sleeping next to an array of candies and drinks that I can't touch unless I want to feel guilty and humiliated paying $40 for a goddamned Diet Coke mini, even if it's someone else's money? I mention all this in case you wonder why I'm so unhappy with this film, to illuminate my prejudice. Naturally, your mileage may vary.

It's a future where, as I feared, it seems there is no longer a difference between the store and the home, and the sound of rich people snickering at your every non-gauche thought is audible within the rustle of the leaves. AI testing is apparently common, to the point that testing AIs is a whole craft unto itself (we've come a long way since the Voight-Kampff, baby), and Caleb's got a load of tiresome textbook questions, and won't even try to drink like a normal person (at first), or ask to borrow a pleasure model (at first), so we hate Caleb for being so out of the moment, and hate Nathan for rubbing his face in it. The only good wrinkle with Caleb is a moment where he can't even tell who's real and who's not anymore, which recalls a great, hilarious bit in Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (not in Blade Runner), but the best we can say about Nathan is he likes to get hammered, but if you're drinking with robots, ain't that drinking alone? And I say this as someone who considers W.C. Fields a person while I'm drinking in the morning alone watching International House over and over. But Fields, preserved in 1933 amber liquid and film stock, is more alive in my stoner 1995 living room than the characters of Ex Machina within the context of their little boutique 'chamber piece' future. Is that a metaphor maybe for a closed-off ever-shrinking sense of the public space, of the non-digital, or just writing by someone who, like Terence Malick or Kubrick, got called a genius once too often and so stopped listening to the heartbeat of the world instead of expecting the world to just listen to his, never getting a straight answer from the acre of awed doters as to whether it's already been been done or worse, dumb.



Watching Garland put his well-trod story through its paces I was a little reminded of the first time I saw Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket-that is, the second half, thinking I was in for some real genius of the sock-blowing order, but coming out thinking Kubrick's glacial slowness had resulted in him being about five years behind the curve - because a Vietnam pop culture inhumanity satire choked up with jingoistic jargon, ridiculous pop songs ("The bird is the word") and doublespeak (M.O.U.S.E) had been done and re-done, the only thing left being the kind of self-aware misogyny of more than one man trying to size up and conquer/understand/destroy/mate with - an alien/unknown wild woman (the VC sniper, a robot, a madwoman), which is pure myth, rather than a style, so will never age even as it's older than time. In fact it's all that's fresh in Ex Machina. When it presumes it's breaking new ground and asking tough questions about the future of artificial intelligence and what constitutes 'free thinking' it's like Hardcore Zen "master" Brad Warner smugly bitching out a barista over his latte's temperature. Films like Android, Creation of the Humanoids, the Machine, Demon Seed, Terminator: Salvation, and The Matrix--might be kind of gonzo-nuts, but they go all the way around the track nuts--like a crazy hopped-up hare before crashing into the wall and bursting into flames--and that's a Zen master I'll give my steel pot to any day; Garland's film plods inexorably forward like a jewel covered Huysmans tortoise, pretty in the ambient light but only going 1/10 as far, like that's some kind of crazy first instead of a sane twentieth. Only in the female-male dichotomy--the Pygmalion-Trilby hybrid--does this Machina work, and even there... it works anemic. Give it the nephilim blood and let all the bitches loose into the Freddie Francis dawn rather than just a ribbon trenchant faceless street corner reflection B-roll. And if those dentatas should castrate you for damages already endured, well, at least you did something to deserve it. And at least she had to touch it first, right buddy? If you did it yourself, well, you might go blind and have missed all those views....