Just Whoa Stories: Guy Maddin, Canadian Amnesiac: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

If you'd wondered casually where Guy Maddin's been all these weeks, months, years, the answer is that he has been everywhere yet never more than two or three feet in any direction, the same scope as a dream, with sets that always seem to be breathing on the backs of his actors' necks, the walls about to flap up like window shades, the world passing by the train window suddenly skipping its sprockets and running upside down. Shorts, man, is what I mean. Many many such shorts filmed around the world in in 80 years but in reverse, give or take 10-20, twirling madly across the corrosions of copper nitrate film stock used as brass rubbings, past the vast Cinemascope parting of the red chariot races, past Al Joson and past his meshugginah rabbi father, past the booster shots and icy stethoscopes of doctors Mabuse and Caligari and past even this swirling Geoffrey O'Brien-style sentence, down to tawdry pock-marked classroom instructional videos on writing the number five, or crossing the street and looking both ways, shoelace tying; past your eternal bathtub scene and the horrified rubes peeping through the sideshow curtains at you naked scrubbed body, your sudden realization you're a film character and doomed to die in an abyss of black tail leader. But you could do worse, baby. Future generations will see the same film in the same class but now the colors will have all turned to rust, and it will take much imagination at that age to discern the hauntological textures at work. But that's okay. We have nothing but time, and if you're in a Guy Maddin movie, two or three feet of space, just enough for your nightmare third-eye fevered brain to think you really are somewhere, and not asleep, so you will keep sleeping.

The Forbidden Room hath to the screens small in my apartment come via Netflix streaming. Seventeen or so of the aforementioned films, 17 or so of which are ingeniously woven together in a grand fusion of Brakhage-Decasia film decomposition and Freudian psychological disintegration, the stories enlarge and swallow each other so that one leads to the other and each new character in the last story has their own story they must tell, on and on and inward and inward until, like the crosscut D.W. Griffith climaxes of Intolerance hurled madly into the Russian doll vortex of Jerzy has Wojciech's The Sargossa Manuscript, everything congeals and fuses itself back into an old man's bathtub submarine race... and the forest, the woodsman forced to watch his Red Riding Hood luxuriating amidst the wolf pack, all weird old men in fur pelts, like a random tribe in a Weismuller Jungle Jim bill-filler.



And like his best work and that of only a handful of other filmmakers--Lynch, Bunuel, Antonioni, Martel--Maddin's style defies easy description or analysis, and so falls into the collective amnesia of the 20th century, coming at us the closest thing yet to the baroque yet strangely cheap look of our own dreams. The only one who can tell us what it all meant is a Freudian analyst, smoking in his train compartment (Forbidden Room includes a 'train psychiatrist' - like a ship's doctor, on the Berlin-Columbia Express) while trying to seduce a young zombified girl through hypnosis. Sense of no, Die Verboten Zimmer just came onto Netflix streaming and, for me anyway, went down easier in half hour installments in between various stages of house cleaning, ideally after a good strong inhalation of Pine-Solvent.

And honey, if you don't know what the hell is going on either, just do my old trick and pretend everyone has amnesia. Amnesia: key to understanding not just this film but film Itself. Maddin isn't searching for small meanings here, or even big ones, but medium size ones. If film itself--the physical, ever-decaying reels of it, most of which are deteriorating in dark hidden chambers deep under long closed cinemas and Nazi bombing rubble--was to go into analysis, under the care of an licensed emulsion scratch that grew and shrank (fee-wise) according to the size of the epiphanies realized, then this film would be that breakthrough session. Film has a message for us! The shrank shrink says film is sorry for misleading us, we film lovers who choose the cinema in favor of some full dumb life playing sports or pursuing a 3-D space-time dream like fame, money, power, even the drive to make a difference in your community. We may do those things, but our hearts and souls belong to the movies, and through Maddin's rust, decay and splotches, film its trying to speak to us, to console and cajole and cosign our trust.

But to get back to the cultural and socio-political amnesia. Interestingly enough and quite by accident, I also started watching some Canadian sci fi show on Netflix called Dark Matter with a crew who wakes up from frozen sleep on a space ship and don't know who they are or what they're supposed to be doing. But amnesia is not just Canada's identity crisis, it is a film thing in itself. We come to each new character in any narrative as an amnesiac, picking together details from the surroundings - i.e. a sketchy unshaven dude in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets walking down the street in the middle of the night while ominous music plays, tells you loads about him, none of which may be true, as the US is still reluctantly learning the way we're still trying to learn a language other than English. Artists like Maddin see right through it by making it opaque.

Playing around with speed and reversals, decomposing blobs around a lighted figure in a dark room seem to be breathing in and out of dissolving bubbling lava-like abstraction and almost like free association BOOM there's a volcano. And while each of the interlocked stories and subroutines feels familiar, there's no time or inclination to really identify or understand: a woodsman comes into the forbidden cave to rescue his lady love from a wolf pack in an inverted Red Riding Hood myth, he thinks, but they're all dead and she's shaking as if possessed, and then, what? Then rather than speak on the crime of squid theft, the volcano lectures the gathered tribe on the impossibility of gaseous emissions speaking coherently.

I'm going to rear back and take a non-educated guess that the Canadian gift for portraying amnesia stems from an identity crisis as the middle child between spoiled brat America and dignifed stodgy older brother England. With socialized higher education making a larger swath of their middle class literate in realms of philosophy and art, there's a higher level of dialogue that American college students aren't really read for, at least the red half. The end result is America as you see it today no longer has a fixed identity. But at least we have two, color-coded no less. Canada it seems does not have any, and it bothers them. That is, perhaps, their identity itself, an amnesiac piecing together an identity from scraps, the way a sibling copies those older and despite themselves, younger. So Canada relies on our perceptions of it - a mountie, a moose, a woodsman with a French accent, an Eskimo, and an ice fisherman drinking Molson and saying "take off, eh?"? We imagine it a bit like Alaska, cold and underpopulated, mostly forest, a kind of giant air pocket full of magical if a bit staid snowy sky. Though it's huge as hell we think of it as small. Like my friend Don once said about Vermont: "I hate that town." I'm sure it's not quite that way. But we're not talking about any kind of reality here, just foggy imagination, dream and film, and where they collide, and when it comes to that collision, Maddin is really at the head of his class. But are you supposed to be in that class? Let's see your registration papers. My friend there's no need whatever to take that tone! You should be in a more remedial class down the hall, that's the one your parents insisted you take, the one where you get to learn the sun revolves around the earth and that everything is always what it seems.... to you... at first... thinking twice is unAmerican!


Of course I'm kidding, you can stay even if you are an American. But it helps, or it's helped me to at least have seen one Guy Maddin film with someone from Europe (and Buenos Aires counts), and hence more liberally and better educated. The last film of Maddin's I saw was with Branded on the Brain, with live orchestral accompaniment (with Cripsin Glover narrating in person) and it was okay, the girl I was with was 'meh' about it. I enjoyed more the Saddest Music in the World in the company of my Swiss French mistress who was suitably impressed. Before that I saw Tales of the Gimli Hospital at a midnight screening in Seattle circa 1990 with my girl from Carmel, NY. This was back before anyone knew anything about him. A Canadian Eraserhead was all they could offer by context. I liked the framing device with the radiator but had a roaring headache and my girl was all pissed because I brought a flask and reeked of booze, yet still felt horribly sober. But Careful was a masterpiece of psychosexual Freudian nonsense I saw with my Argentine ex-wife, and we swooned as one. This blog wouldn't even exist without her schooling me in international filmmakers. Come to think of it, every Maddin film I saw I saw with a different girlfriend, loving or hating it according to her response. he Americans were, like me, ticked pink by Maddin's high strangeness at first, then bored for there's nothing to grab onto narrative wise, and we're not used to having to work for our reward, not used to having our desires toyed with, our craving for some kind of narrative thread, some kind of familiar trope, to orient ourselves by eventually driving us half-mad and into boredom. It speaks not so much maybe to our attention span as much as our addiction to images and sound, our constant need to have the TV on, or the radio. Silence and emptiness too tomb-like to endure for us, the existential lonesome nipping at our heels, we latch onto any promise of escape. Up north they don't seem to need that. Maybe the lonesome was too far away, couldn't find them in all that forest (for that's what we imagine all Canada is) or had overtaken them, and they'd stopped running, riding instead the tidal flood current.

Maddin works in the realm of dreams and 'Kino,' but whose dreams? The most obscure and bizarre the more familiar. He picks some unconscious realm where Eisenstein and Oscar Micheaux crank out Klopstockian anti-war propaganda, a place connected directly to the zone where narrative identity shifts and bends and follows no clear linear path, or logical sense, but everything seems familiar... little signifiers that add up to less than Jackie Treehorn's penis drawing in Big Lebowski, by which I mean, it's phallically hip, but sans address. So if you get hung up somewhere in this maze, then your stuck for the duration, beating your head against a wall until that room of the game is 'passed.'

If Maddin's going deep into the psychosexual, that's when it works best, for me, as in the mother-son/ father-daughter incest bonds amidst the isolated Reifenstahl-ish Alpine hamlet of Careful, the sullen dream a finally-weened five year-old making his offer; but Gimli Hospital with its Kafka esque tale of escape and imprisonment was just too ugly - too much fat guys eating and so forth (as I recall, from 25 odd years ago) because when narrative expectations are thwarted there needs to be someone or some place pretty to look at, something that won't demoralize our senses. For example, in Red Desert there is the beauty of Monica Vitti. Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or Anna Karina in My Life to Live.  In Maddin's best work there is always a good center to hold, ala Saddest Music in the World's Isabella Rossellini and her beer stein glass legs launching the switch to color, and there was the sad music competition, a familiar narrative we can become involved to the point we can rest our European 'art' eyes and flip over to our American 'entertainment' eyes. If we have to be weened we can at least see our mom, as she was then, gorgeous and more than five times our height, towering above us like an Easter Island moai crossed with a fairy princess, a time of no good or evil, naughty or nice, just the presence of God, of Mom, and the absence, the darkness coming up and leaving you terrified, alone, and helpless, pissing ourselves and having to wait for dawn or a tired irritated parent giving us a change.

Now we've learned to hold it in, like good little boys and girls who paid attention during that instructional film on potty training. And the figure we so venerated in our cribs those raw unmediated nights, she was gone by the time we were twelve, getting smaller every year as we grew, like Alice on a slow-slow-slowly kicking in mushroom.


That said, it all zipped by way too fast in parts, Acidemic favorite Kim Morgan has only a split second appearance with a wolf skin (that I saw). I imagine it would be quite worthwhile to get this Blu-ray if it includes all the other short films from which this be culled and more. Because my favorite is still Maddin's short Heart of the World, which my BA girl and I saw on the big screen at Angelika before.... what the hell was the main feature? My Buenos Aires girl and I were so thrilled I don't think we even paid attention. I wish I could remember what it was...  but I can't even remember who I am. Except I know I'm an American. Because even now I'm hearing the siren call of TCM behind me... Joan Crawford bitching about losing some part, some romantic leading man cringing on his side of the Cinemascope screen...even that... even that terrifying Woman's Face of hers... hair coiled around her head tight and butch, like a face hugger alien reaching out to applause in curler-shaped single curls, flat dark pink lipstick and trowel grey foundation, that gargoyle moai that turns my blood colder than my Coke Zero herbal tea highballs. Even this, I pick rather than a book. Unless it's about you, of course, my beloved Kino... But it's not. Meanwhile Netflix sent me Spectre and Crimson Peak! (You have to picture me wafting around my pad reading this missive to a can of decomposing film in the sad desperate way Helen Hayes does in Night Flight, or Bela Lugosi in The Invisible Ghost).  Maddin's amnesiac masterpiece mess of a honey of a cockeyed caravan, The Forbidden Room proves I'm doomed by this addiction, as inescapable as a benzo habit, and twice as dangerous. Because when the moment is right and the film is great, there's no better high, for me. No other place to feel free, unseen yet seeing all, participating in the group mind, all this work and time and artistry just to absorb us, distract us, or other.

Because suddenly the film can SPEAKS! And we learn, film is Udo Kier as a ghost dad who keeps making final farewells to his son, leaving him a mustache with which to fool his blind wife that husband is still around. And then coming back again, with beer and a friend he met in the afterlife, and giving the son his first carouse. Dad, thirty feet high, passing us a can of mustaches to call our own, with Udo's soulful eyes to swim in. Are we not men? Grrrarewenogmemgrr.