I started to write about KILL LIST (2011) and how British cinema's so edgy and America's so lamely safe. But if I think about KILL LIST I start to write about the Illuminati and mind control and then I got to write about the alleged 'entrance fee' of child sacrifice as one the dissociative traumas used in brainwashing. Meanwhile, I've been having a series of mild panic attacks watching ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK Season Three, man. No one escapes the trauma of continual self-realization on that show, and it's too well acted and written, and I can watch too many in a row so that soon I can't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore, which in turn reminds me of KILL LIST again, because that's what indoctrination is all about -- breaking down a person's mind and distancing them from the collective 'concrete' reality so they're receptive to programming in order to activate the inner killer. Ever since being dragged to a dry frat rush as a freshman at SU I've harbored a streak of horror and hatred towards the baser elements of the masculine species. And when a man like me is all hopped up on depositions or depictions of rape and sexualized misogyny, I'm ready to go stomp anyone with Greek letters on his sweatshirt. Amp it up a little more, dissociate me so that I think I'm just vividly imagining a heroic role in a vigilante rape-revenge picture and I'm ready to kill... ready and set and waiting for the starter pistol.
There's no word for this kind of ambient rage but it's potent, a justified TAKEN-esque homicidal fury that heightens the senses. It's instinct. A good male populace patrols itself, and if a pedophile or frat boy violates a woman or child it's the job of 'any man that's around' to fucking bash his brains in rather than hope his lawyers don't get him off on some bullshit technicality like the rape kit's evidence bag has a pin hole in it. This instinct is innate, it is related to the lynching, the fascist rally, and the riot. The biological urge to protect women and children and even animals, is wired right into our deeply buried lynch mob homicidal well with a razor sharp Plainview milkshake straw. It even exists once the perp is in jail, for prisoners have this instinct too, and are usually provided with more up close chances.
Of course if it turns out the victim is lying, or the story is misreported for ratings or something, then we may have murdered an innocent man... but that kind of story isn't nearly as intense or engaging. We slink home, draw the blinds, and wait for dogged Spencer Tracy to show up like in BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK.
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| Bad Day at Black Rock |
Still, it's enough that I need to recuse myself from writing about the Illuminati or Cosby, Polanski, and Allen. It gets me just too damn mad, for I have no target to vent this hostile rage upon, or the wherewithal. Also, killing someone based on what you learned on TV is never a wise idea. That's why it has to be personal --the relatives or boyfriend of the girl afflicted, or the neighbors or coaches (i.e. Joe Paterno) stepping in and castrating, beating the shit out of, and/or setting on fire the guilty party (as long as you know for sure he is guilty). It's tricky, in short. And isn't that why it's there in the first place?
That's why there's KILL LIST, which twists the Plainview milkshake straw to this collective 'good' male inner killer and co-opts it to the logical insidious end. Is that the whole point, perhaps, of all this evil in the first place? To provoke a response that will enable us to kill people on command (via post-hypnotic trigger word activated false accusation)? In movies like TAKEN they use it for a different kind of trigger: knowing we'll instantly be deeply focused on the film, that Plainview milkshake straw twisting like clockwork from our empathic response to our bloodlust until we're as fired up for vengeance as young Hotspur in HENRY V.
Only occasionally, as in MYSTIC RIVER or GONE BABY GONE, is the full futility of that vengeance truly exposed, the ease with which it can blind you to the truth of a given scene. The girl who casually admits she was lying after you've already done the retaliatory assault, the abduction that turns out to be a benevolent rescue from the real source of abuse, it all forces us to confront the ugly truth of that primal response. In GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO on the other hand, we're so on the side of Lisbeth Salander that her liberal reporter friend's law-abiding humanistic hesitance at her full measure of retaliatory violence is seen by us with disgust, emblematic of how following society's rules is like being in a cult for some people, making them blind to their own self-preservation. And the result: we grow upset with mankind as a whole, rabidly against anything capable of creating such true vile sexual evil. Lisbeth is our redeemer, killing the men who need killing. When men are too stuck in passive wuss journalist mode, teaching us what it is to be a man and sickening us at the same time, the same way TOOTSIE did in reverse.Other sources, like SIN CITY, are almost anti-misogynistic porn; women-hating creeps and pedophiles set up like nine pins to be disemboweled in vivid high contrast black and white. It's cathartic, but it also panders. One of the reasons I love old TV like CHARLIE'S ANGELS is that total absence of that sort of thing. If rape or child abus cropped up on TV in anything made before the 70s it did so in 'special episodes' with much forewarning and the violence was abstracted (such as the candle being dropped in THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE). Now just watching LAW AND ORDER SVU is enough to give me an ashen sense of being brutalized by the system as well as men in general, for weeks. In CHARLIE'S ANGELS a girl might be tied up and kidnapped but she's never sexually abused once so (other shows like the later hour-schedule POLICE WOMAN might be different, that show's way too intense for me). HBO programming like GAME OF THRONES and SOPRANOS meanwhile is so rapey I can't watch it at all. A woman is brutally raped in SOPRANOS season three just so the rapist can get off on a technicality and the victim can be presented with the option of telling Tony Soprano about it so he can kill the guy. She decides not to, thinking herself some great hero I'm sure, but of course leaving the rapist free to continue brutalizing women who don't have the mob recourse.
In 70s films on the other hand, this kind of shit happened to your wife and child and the vengeful vigilante as hero was born, the law seen as impotent, unequal to the task of dealing with this new breed of punk --as in the SOPRANOS, the law would rather let them go on a technicality and harangue Dirty Harry for his off-book mauling rather than try to get these scumbags off the streets: DEATH WISH, for example, is a vile yet huge hit that led to a score of imitators, the best of which is Abel Ferrara's MS. 45. On the other hand, that female avenger's sin is then 'absolved' and dissolved through her nun's habit into the raped nun in his BAD LIEUTENANT, where she forgives her two rapist attackers while everyone in the city fantasizes about catching them and beating them to death in front of their parents. Once again, raping a 'good' woman ensures you're not only forgiven and go unpunished, but that she'll consider herself a saint for not getting even. It's a cop out, of course. Or is it? The violent retaliatory response good men have within them to weed out these perps is left with blue balls so to speak, which can then explode in different ways, none of them good.
Part of becoming, as I have, a total recluse in my off hours, is to gradually lose all perspective, my comfort zone narrowing down into a tight strangling shroud. Besieged and eaten away by death, money, and employment all changing and shifting, riding the lifeboat of the televisual.
As Skeet says in SCREAM, "life is a movie, Sid, you don't get to pick your genre." One's life (if you're me) starts out a warm hearted family film becomes a high school persecution saga, a war movie, a tragedy, a college-set sex and drugs concert film, and then a young couple comedy, then a break-up drama again, a comedy, a drama, a romance again and again and finally the narrative shrinks all together into one of pure and unending horror, and one must begin drug and alcohol recovery. In a horror movie "sex equals death." In a sense childbirth is death as well, death of an old paradigm of self, and isn't that all death is anyway? Yeah but talking to God as you understand him (or Her) and getting the lord can lure you right into a nice family movie again. Boring, but safe, you're not stuck as the grumpy uncle or a landlord while young people slowly accrue, ever younger, pushing you right on out of the door of your own house and into a nice pine box or crematorium. You're part of them, and of all life, and all is one big comfortable white cloud with heavenly Tami Briggs harp music, all without having to actually spawn oneself or shun, surlily, children as a class. Surely your unborn children are grateful to be spared the inexorable SOYLENT GREEN future. of playdates, tiger moms, and bulletin boards.
Now, sober and vulnerable, I personally go out of my way to have never seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IRREVERSIBLE, or any of the TAKENs, any white slavery documentaries, THE HUNT WITH JOHN WALSH on CNN, any of the ID programs not about deadly women, and so forth. Even the deadly women who con guys like me into killing for them, with tales of abuse fabricated to vibrate our Plainview straws.
Luckily I live in an age where it's easy to cocoon yourself in a unique patchwork quilt of your own making. The result is, I watch a lot of El Rey channel and TCM, listen to mixes I create that never end and can't tell one ninety-pound chalk-white dude in suspenders and tiny fedora or Children of the Corn hat playing a standup bass or mandolin from the other, nor would I wish to. As a result, unless I get stuck watching THE VOICE, these anemic high-voiced smarmy pishers escape my fury and doubts about the future of masculinity outside Australia.
A guy in my day would have been beaten soundly for being such a wuss, and as a result we became manly... because that's what men do- we patrol ourselves, stomping out the sign of weakness, and preying on women and children is the worst weakness of all. These high-voiced needle legged hipsters are just long keystroke or guitar poke fingers, ears with little white 'ear buds' in them, and clunky glasses reflecting some glowing screen or other. Where is their goddamn crippling anxiety and self-loathing? Not to kill you, to kill your soul... slowly? Why did Courtney Love even bother getting sober?
The goal of demons is beyond just possession, but to create in general a backlash against all spirituality. When priests or beloved childhood figures like Michael Jackson, Cosby, etc. are revealed to be sex offenders, our sense of trust in our fellow man dwindles. The devil takes steps to rob us of the ability to enjoy God's grace. Overpopulation makes even the beauty of childbirth seem selfish. The animals we love to eat are given soulful sad eyes all the better to haunt us with--all various components of the devil's plan to shrink our soul from wispy stratus clouds into contracted dense purpose cumulonimbus so when it rains (i.e. you die) the soul falls, and the water is collected for Hell's steam engines that run the THEY LIVE mind control force field. The agony of collected souls is trapped in its own isolated battery cell, then slowly burned into nonexistence to fuel the steam engine that keeps them in dominion over us.
Human sacrifice involves the idea of throwing another soul under the bus to escape being ground up oneself in the steam engine, being able to hold onto one's evil self, the liquid condensation of the evil ego making all sorts of harmful deals rather than surrendering.
But there is in the end, on the macro level needed to dig where I'm coming from, one soul, so every victory of the demons is another square mile of our precious rainforest lost. That's why we, when our souls are rising and almost up and out of the wheel of woe, so often turn around and go back to help others along. I've done it three times already!
And once I'm back down, buried under the mystery misery I always kind of regret that decision, or rather the ego, which returns, inevitably, convinces 'me' to regret it. The 'Me' who regrets isn't the me who made the choice to stay, it's the difference between a terrified kid on his first day of school and a graduate with a million friends, or the difference between a selfish thug and the benevolent social worker trying to reach him. You can't get to heaven without becoming a selfless love thug. The trouble is that once you're that selfless, you hesitate to go to heaven when so many of your denser soul fellows are still suffering. The rich man can't enter the kingdom of heaven anymore than a camel can go through the needle, etc. Once unburdened by wealth, the needle threader pauses and looks back. Is this wisdom, compassion, or another devil sucker play? Is there a difference?
QUEEN KONG
(1976) Dir. Frank Agrama
**
God bless British women, British Actresses... for they are in inspiration to men the US over in the hopes that their own girlfriends, actresses, wives, and mothers might be assertive, witty and capable without needing to drag a man down to get there, without becoming a bitch (or c-word) in the process, without mistaking the voice of assertive self-resolve for the voice of browbeating and joyless aggrieved harangue. There's very few shrill Annette Bening types in Britain (or at least British actresses - and the Brit women I've met and partied with). They're so cool, in fact, the British birds, that I'd say they don't have to prove it. American women (again, this is all in films, mind you) are either simpering objects or rugged bitches either way their gender is lost when they make the move to GI JANE/Ripley in ALIENS-ism, except as far as motherhood. But in England, with its rich history of S&M (borne perhaps of their brutalizing school system), women are badass -- they smoke and drink, and while our women are counting their carbs and browbeating their husband for having a faint odor of cigarettes on his clothes, Brit women are saying ah fuck-off. Didn't we know all this as kids from getting one look at the toothsome Emma Peele in THE AVENGERS? And now, rather late (De Laurentiis sued to hold it up), is QUEEN KONG.
Now while the women are awesome and numerous, QK has a slight cheeky problem: it's bawdy 'Carry On' brand of cheeky humor doesn't translate as well as some when leaping across pond and decade. QUEEN KONG ain't perfect. It may have the lamest ape suit in the entire history of lame ape suits, looking like it's just a bunch of fake fur throw rugs stapled together. But damn it, how does a woman ape look that's different form a normal ape? And it doesn't start well, and one has to be ready to tolerate great levels of British camp, but movies with reversed genders (where women are strong leaders and men all fey weak objects) are few and far between. And generally these unique products of the 'women's lib' feminists are loathed and buried. There are only a few of us who keep the torch alive for Norman Lear's ALL THAT GLITTERS and the British-West German co-production STAR MAIDENS, and when we stumble onto something like QUEEN KONG, which I've been avoiding for decades after being depressed by GODZILLA VS. KING KONG once as a child, that when we do, it's a blessed relief. Some of that terrible KILL LIST Plainview straw rage melts away. It's a dumb fantasy, but in a way so is TAKEN... so whaddaya gonna do? You just try to get through the day.
One of my ways, is movies with assertive British women and Valerie Leon, so assertive and imperious and sexy in BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, is a favorite. So when I learned she was in QUEEN LONG, I had to see for myself. That said, she's almost unrecognizable - she's lost some weight in the baby fat department and is wearing disco-level make-up and the print on Amazon Prime is royally messed up.
"Why does she want me?"
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| Leon in PREHISTORIC WOMEN |
"She wants you to because you look like Doris Day."
"Who's he?"The leading lady is Luce Habit (Rula Lenska, Britain's answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor or Peggy Hopkins Joyce. At least that's what we figured back in the 70s when she got off a plane like we were supposed to know who she was in an Alberta V0-5 ad. Our not knowing set a chain reaction to the point she was canned by her agent. But all that's in the future. Here we learn she's a grand comedian if nothing else. As Luce Habit she's the Carl Denham of the narrative, offering her loving protection to her shanghaied boy (she drugs him after catching him stealing a KING KONG poster in the Fair, slings him over her shoulder in a sack, and makes for her vessel, a little tugboat party vessel of a thing). She even carries some joints for him. In short, Lenska's Luce Habit is a great camp diva delight as "the biggest producer (of B-films)... with love interest... in the business." In fact, her wry delivery of intentionally terrible lines reminds me a little bit of my own in
Of course they eventually wore out the schtick, at least for me. I liked the JAWS dance but when a lame shark shows up with lipstick and breasts and a big sign around her neck it's a good sign this shitshow's going to collapse long before it's officially over. I confess that I stopped watching after two tiresome battles in the jungle section of old QUEEN. And there was one too many leering Benny Hill ass shots and just too damn much of that damn moth-eaten 'lady' apesuit. But how often do we get a movie that's nearly all female - just a few baggy pants weirdos on the island and the rest either Luce's chorus of leggy bikini models or the all girl Nabonga tribe.... it might be gayer than John Waters and campier than 60s BATMAN but once we're just forced to reckon with this truly wretched ape suit and papier mache monsters; I just couldn't let it go on. I had to stop and take a nap. That's show biz.
And hey, both QUEEN KONG and KILL LIST are British so it all ties together. I wouldn't go so far as to say wonderfully. My brain is always making connections to random unrelated events, and its susceptible as hell to the mad loop of conspiracy theory. Because I finally know that, unless maybe I'm about to charge into battle and need a speech about how the enemy is raping our women and children, I don't need or care to have that Plainview milkshake straw tapped and manipulated. If we kill anyone, let them get up a moment later, take off the dinosaur suit and take a bow. The genius of actors like Arnold is we never really take him seriously. It helps avoid trauma. We can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined, but in keeping everything fake and weird, our narrative immersion dissolves and we're symbolically freed from the drama of our movie lives. When you decide your movie's a comedy, regardless of the tragedy or doom around you, it is. The grim circumstances just dictate how dark, how deadpan, and how surreal it is.
God hears our complaints about war and misery and all the evil and the suffering in the world the the way loving parents hear their kids cry over not getting what they want at the store. If God makes it too Edenic then God is forgotten. 'No atheists in a foxhole' is a truism that explains war's entire existence, a slippery slope straight to God, for whom death and rebirth and life itself is a puppet show, all just a long test of merit and faith. When we take off our masks, like they do in a Godard movie or a movie about moviemaking or something accidentally Brechtian, we're God finally, if only 'til we're sucked back in. Godard would know how to save this movie: the dinosaur takes off its mask to show some girl puppeteer operating it, who absconds with Ray up into the sound stage catwalk while Kong looks up, utterly confused, and lights a Gauloises. Erasing all lines between meta and textual, we're finally free. We are--in the moment of laughing at a lame special effect or line--free from identification's iron fist grip. CUT