You may have forgotten February was Women in Horror Month, but not me. Even if I barely get in on it at the last minute, or even halfway thru March. Or even here in May? Wait, June now? Whatever, I've ben alternating between two Hells - Pollen and bad AC, the kind of AC just cool enough to not do anything about (as in buy a new one, pay for a repairman) but not good enough to keep me fully cool. I could tell you allergy season has hit me more than passing strange this year, but you and your little violins mock me pre-emptively so while I suffer in my crippling lack of delirium,. get ready for the 12-part series of horror women badass double features heading to this blog this summer and most of all get ready for runaway tangents that double back like the sun's snake rim, devouring itself... hey, the rim sun eclipse shizz reminds me..
Happy graduation and congratulations, Samara!
She turned 22, graduated Pratt and will be starting her Pittsburgh job (with V-Drome) as global content creator in Sept. Samara, honey. I never said this before, but we're all so proud. Sure, you're a fictional character, but honey, so was Damien Hirst. And I just know that somewhere, in some groovy alternate reality conjured by our conjoined imagination, you are there with me, filling my head with bizarre and disturbing imagery no ordinary movie's gentle reverie can allay. Not even Audition. Nothing can equal what I see from you. Wishing you well... well... stay (in the) well...
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| Samara's first scream-lit TV sitcom |
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MUMMY'S CURSE, THE
(1944) -**1/2
This time first see Christine's Ananka it's as if she's coming out of a mould, face almost like a half-formed clay sculpture come to life (ala Harryhausen) climbing out the newly drained Louisiana swamp, caked in dirt but clearly loving feel the touch of the sun like a flower rising from the soil. Occurring right in the middle of the day apparently (though supposedly 'quitting time', there's a bit of a dazed walk-of-shame vibe to this resurrection, the sun high in the sky beaming down at her via Ra-like sun rays. We've all been there, right? Pulling ourselves off the floor after what seems like a 25 year black-out, weaving home warmed by the sun, still in our gown or suit from the night before, walking through the working men commuters like a phantom. And wait, weren't we in the New England bog last night? How did we wake up down in Louisiana, 25 years later? And why are the workmen saying it's time to quit for the day and go home when the blazing sun is still high in the noonday sky?
Then begins her odyssey of somnambulistic drifting. Cajun Joe, who just left his bulldozer back where she came out of the mud, now spots her while walking home (he must have got lost - again it makes no sense as he should be home by now, considering how clean she is), and takes her to Tante Berthe, and no sooner as Berthe put the amnesiac hottie (with the very modern Bettie Page bangs) to bed and showed her some kindness, then the mummy bursts in and kills her, like some jealous stalker slow mo one-armed strangler ex-husband. Ananka runs off into the swamps again, and the killing and stalking goes on. Each time the mummy gets near she goes into a trance and repeats his name but when he tries to grab her she screams and runs away. Women, am I right?
On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much thought put into Curse at all, yet it manages to use its limitations and stupidity to craft uncanny dream-logic, not great by any means, but in the same twilight realm of logic at times as, say, Carnival of Souls, or Dementia. It's unusual to see people basically killed for being good samaritans, something that makes us feel the murders more than usual for these sorts of films (ala Lewton's Leopard Man from the previous year). The first female victim, Berthe is loved by everyone in her corner of the bayou, so when she's killed for trying to protect Ananka, that really kicks in a sense of tragedy to this saga, with the Egyptian conspirators giving off an air of domestic terrorism. Why command Kharis to kill indiscriminately if not for some ancient cult zealotry and impersonal hatred against first world capitalism and Christian decency?
What gives the film it its real alchemical magic though, are the weirdly modern bangs, posh accent, confidence and cat woman litheness of Virginia Christine. She's got a very weird role to play, needing to patch a whole wealth of inconsistencies. A local in the bayou notes "it's been-a 25 years since a mummy drag a girl in the swamp" but what girl? The last film was only made the year before where she was just a reincarnation a girl named Amina and played by a different actress. This time we're compelled to gaze deep onto those modern bangs and wonder: is Amina/Ananka the reincarnated mummy expert or a mummy herself? What made her aging problem reverse this time?
There is no real answer so we're better off trusting that it 'feels right' and anyway, Christine is great at splitting the difference ("its like I was two different people, two different worlds.") While trying to decide if she's Princess Ananka or the contemporary Amina (preserved for 25 years via the New England-Louisiana bog stream), she says Bearing out the split subject aspect is the similarly hair-colored and style of Kay Linnaker as the drainage project foreman's understanding assistant. 100% 20th century, she's the 'lucky' girl who winds up with Moore. While Ananka reverts to bandaged death as soon as her head hits the sarcophagus pillow. Why she changes rapidly ages back into mummy bandages at the end is never explained, but by then, like a psychoanalyst session, the hour is up.That concept of doubling fits Christine's fashion-forward bangs and use of a night dress as swamp wear. I don't generally like those Betty Page bangs -- you have to be damn hot, willowy and with the right mix of bad girl, demure kitten, and assertive intellect to pull them off --not to mention the right dress, and just as her character is neither here nor there as far as soul-body-mind-incarnation-century cohesion, her dress is neither nightgown nor formal evening dress, but a sublime hybrid; she could either be lost on her way home after an all-night party or sleepwalking. Christine pulls both options off at once, and looks damned great being carried around by Lon. I love her... in this incarnation.. Naturally the more I see this film the more I have to forget, amnesia being the B-movie lovers' friend. Is that why 'forgettable' and 'dreamlike' go so hand in hand,
2. Patricia Arquette - Renee / Alice
LOST HIGHWAY
(1997)- ***
The story involves the film noir machinations of Alice, a gangster moll who uses her ample wiles to hook a mechanic named Pete (Balthazar Getty) into killing, not her gangster kingpin boyfriend (or is he?) Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) but robbing Andy (Michael Massee) some extraneous pornographer in the Hills, involved in Mr. Eddy's operation. The killing of Andy (via noir's signature 'freak accident the cops will never believe') is perhaps fueled by the site of Alice being 'taken' from behind on a stag reel while Rammstein blares on the soundtrack (evoking the 'cult programming' showing on the wall (while she's upstairs with Andy, distracting Andy). "You killed him," she says to Pete, coming downstairs. She points a gun at him, forcing one to think of all the films that end on this very same note (i.e. woman as manipulator/femme fatale - i.e. Lang) then changes her mind and gives it to him, "put it inside your pants." forcing one to think of all the other films that go that way instead (i.e. lovers on the run). We realize we still don't have a bead on which of the genre roads this film is speeding down, it all hinging on which male character she's betraying vs. which ensnaring in an elaborate game to supply her and her real love with a made-to-order patsy. Driving down the titular highway in her car, the mechanic starts to change to match her fluctuating mood and shifting loyalty; he'll be the disillusioned suspicious Fred if that's how she wants to play it. They fool around outside the fence's cabin while deliriously sad music plays on the radio.
There are two signifying split moments here, and please bear in mind I'm synopsizing backwards, like an armchair, each of the main masculine psyche splits hinge on sexual performance anxiety issues, the impossibility of true sexual union, of returning to the undifferentiated womb, thrown back in our face. Even if we're Lulu and Sailor-level hot or Pete-Alice level delirious, ghostly, we wind up back in the zone of the primal scream of abandonment. Even with This Mortal Coil's siren song hanging motionless in mid-air like the mosquitoes in the amber headlights, Pete still "wants her" - the wanting gets him worse than nowhere. "You can never have me," she whispers, which to a virgin would make no sense. He just had her or is having her. This line is devastating for a man to hear, and she knows it; her conciliatory pat of Fred's (Bill Pullman) shoulder in the earlier section's joyless black death silk sheets could come right after she says it here in this other zone, may as well, as each version of man is crushed back to earth by those words, by the inevitable folding down collapsed tent erection, the clattering shut of cell bards all over again: thinking of the key, as Eliot wrote, confirms a prison. And when the bitch be sayin' mean shit like that, honey, you may as well be Jimmy Stewart forced onto Midge's stepladder to get over your vertigo, as ready for the big time ledge.
The fire goes in reverse, Pete reverse engineers his wanting towards loathing, this disillusionment turns him into Fred, or vice versa, for even if he can go back in time, she can't or won't or better yet was never in one time or the other to begin with.
In literally splitting his subject into different characters and actors, Lynch splits conception of self wide open; unless you're not ready or on the defensive about it. You could just say its a Moebius strip noir, a never-ending story of shifting identity and you'd be right. But it's not necessarily the fall guy/male's identity (Fred/Pete) that splits (from Pullman to Getty and back again), but Renee/Alice's. A picture Pete stumbles onto at another man's house reveals Alice and Renee are twin sisters, perhaps involved in alibi forming or 'hot twin action' stag loops. If you haven't seen it I'm sure this sounds confusing. That's my goal!
These are common themes of Lynch's, elliptical ouroboros narriaves and girls playing double roles, differentiated by hair color: Twin Peaks' Laura Palmer has a brunette cousin is played by the same actress, for example.
And like our Ananka in the last film, Renee's evasive somnambulism could be read as concealing a double life, for real in place of. In a sense she's the 'reincarnation' of the split/subject Ananka - both the resurrected ancient femme fatale, leading princes and jazzbos to their doom (and everyone else who's fool enough to help her), and the modern girl form she fell into the New England bog in the first place in (though was changing to mummy as she sank). Which is which is a qui fits the idea of performance and persona and concealment so central to the post-Peaks 90s Lynch of the 90s.
This can be borne out by a very telling line early on: Fred tells the detectives he doesn't like video cameras because he "likes to remember things subjectively, I want them to be how I remember them not the real way they were" -a line which piques the interest of the only two guys that seem to be real for sure, the homicide detectives with their Kafka-esque inscrutability and 'real person' shapes and ages - they alone seem to exist outside the Lynch psyche, like abstract keepers at institution, gents of some social construct; it's they who Fred and Renee ultimately perform their roles as Fred and Renee for. Similarly, they bear witness to Pete's tomcatting, which is part of the reason it is performed in the first place. Physical closeness and genital gratification is one reward of sexual experience, but it's fleeting, the admiration of 'the guys' at your skill with "the ladies" is forever.
Arquette plays this anima unchanging SISTERS-style part to a T, always a little distant and cognizant of her aphrodesiac body and beauty to an extent that would turn lesser actresses narcissistic and neutered. She's always oscillating like an ocean between dominated sex slave, willing self-debaser, torn lover hoping for an escape, taunting unknowable trickster, succubus, men user, i.e. the gamut from used to user - but all at once, not even separated by breaths or hair style. We want desperately to believe she wants us. There's this agonizing "magic moment" when she's calling a cab at the garage is one of the more perfect fractal vignettes of film noir I've ever seen. She's slowly but relentlessly preparing to call the cab while he stands there, paralyzed with conflicting dread (he's seen Mr. Eddy demolish a guy just for tailgating) and desire; she's so hot, a little busted around the ages, like she really put on the dog to come get him but while a little drunk; there's just no way he can avoid it, he's gonna die from a Mr. Eddy pistol-whipping, but first -- holy shit. We're all but cheering him on, it's inevitable, true noir distilled and drowned its own eternal white light- "like falling in love with a buzzsaw" - as Jean Arthur puts it in Only Angels Have Wings. So when she whispers "you'll never have me" it's the same self-shattering dis as the consolatory 'pat' of Pullman in bed the night before the bloody videotape arrives. Each triggers a rupture in the classic Lacanian 'impossibility of the subject' - i..e. if you lay Rocky 1, II, III, VI, DVD cases in a row, while matching them below with just the same Irving Klaw Bettie Page loops Vol. 1, over and over and over, the same four times. No narrative, no progression, just the bangs and the body in motion. But within those ten Bettie Page cases, only one actual disc exists. Like a shell game, the other Rockys in a sense got gypped, and so fume with jealousy and rage, failing to recognize the "you'll never have me" construct is part of the arrangement, because the Rocky edition that DOES have the Pages loops enjoys her presence even less than the others enjoy her absence.
The Story of the Serpent and the Bartender:
So one day 20 foot long serpent slithers its way into a bar, asks the bartender 'have you seen Mr. Big in here tonight? I'm gonna kill him' and he slithers out the back door and continues up the street. The serpent takes awhile for its length to travel through the barroom, though the serpent--the head part--thinks he's left long ago, he's still 'passin' through.' Finally the tail comes in and orders a drink. It starts talking shit about the serpent who was just in there, not realizing they're the same creature. The bartender realizes the tail is the one who's been calling itself Mr. Big. They're apparently in love with the same girl, played by Partricia Arquette but since they never meet they don't know it. The bartender (Robert Blake) has been dealing with this issue over and over again between the two of them. Each threatens the other but can never seem to be in the same room at the same time. Similarly, if the girl's with the tail, the head's jealous, and vice versa. Both ends are jealous, in fact, of her attention to the other.
Now let's say one night the Serpent pays the bartender to kill Mr. Big when he comes in, so the bartender decides hey, money is money, and shoots the last five feet of the snake off the rest. Death in the form of gangrene and blood loss then starts killing the snake inch by inch, up along up the spine towards the head of the Serpent who then dies before he can pay the bartender.
Enraged, the bartender goes over to the Serpent's nest to see if he can confiscate any valuables as compensation. Once there he realizes that the Mr. Big/<---->Serpent is bigger than 20 feet. It's really 40 ' long. In fact the top half is still in the nest, warming itself by the sulfur springs under the mansion; it hasn't been seen because it shed its skin and is waiting for its new skin to harden. The dead skin shed is only as far down as the halfway point, so Serpent didn't recognize its top half at all. The name of this other 20' is The Reptile. ---->
So the Serpent is really the Reptile the way Mr. Big is the Serpent, in other words, the Reptile disavows the immaturity of its lower half. <-----serpent eptile="" nbsp="" p="">The bartender mentions the deal for killing Mr. Big and asks for money. 'I'd like to believe you, it sounds like something Serpent would order,' says The Reptile, "but I've been locked away down here until my new scales come in so haven't heard anything. Do you have any hard evidence?" -----serpent>
Now let's say one night the Serpent pays the bartender to kill Mr. Big when he comes in, so the bartender decides hey, money is money, and shoots the last five feet of the snake off the rest. Death in the form of gangrene and blood loss then starts killing the snake inch by inch, up along up the spine towards the head of the Serpent who then dies before he can pay the bartender.
Enraged, the bartender goes over to the Serpent's nest to see if he can confiscate any valuables as compensation. Once there he realizes that the Mr. Big/<---->Serpent is bigger than 20 feet. It's really 40 ' long. In fact the top half is still in the nest, warming itself by the sulfur springs under the mansion; it hasn't been seen because it shed its skin and is waiting for its new skin to harden. The dead skin shed is only as far down as the halfway point, so Serpent didn't recognize its top half at all. The name of this other 20' is The Reptile. ---->
So the Serpent is really the Reptile the way Mr. Big is the Serpent, in other words, the Reptile disavows the immaturity of its lower half. <-----serpent eptile="" nbsp="" p="">The bartender mentions the deal for killing Mr. Big and asks for money. 'I'd like to believe you, it sounds like something Serpent would order,' says The Reptile, "but I've been locked away down here until my new scales come in so haven't heard anything. Do you have any hard evidence?" -----serpent>
But that's the big existential issue: If Reptile doesn't die from the gangrene, then it proves the bartender didn't kill Mr. Big so shouldn't get paid; if Reptile does die then the bartender still can't collect $$. Don't worry says The Reptile. I can't really die down here, only shed my skin. We'll look at the shed skin together and that should tell the tale, like an arctic core sample - if you know how to read it, and I do.
Reading its length as if a timeline or celluloid strip, Reptile studies his old skin and is agog with wonder. 'I can't believe Mr. Big and Serpent didn't know they were the same being!' He says, "and neither knew the truth beyond that: both were not them or each other, but me! Deeep, man."
The bartender stops trying to get paid at this point, and then of course it dawns on him: the snake is actually 60 feet long, and he himself is the next link after The Reptile.
THE END
BUT But even then.... what, more?
With great humility, The Bartender casts his eye skyward. "Well?" he asks the sky, "I guess I should pay you, then?" God shoots him in the face for being late on the payment, and then goes back in time and leaves a cryptic remark on Mr. Big's answering machine: "the Reptile is dead." Mr. Big has no idea what it means, but thinks it must be that old Serpent shitheel fucking with him again.
So he slithers into a bar, looking for him.
No THE END, story repeats until head of God explodes
If we are to 'get' anything out of these two serpent segments of cinema called Mummy's Curse and Lost Highway, we have to let go of the idea we're ever going to get paid anywhere up the snake, so to speak, which can then let us better enjoy reading the scales on the shed skin highway, without having to worry about whether or not Patricia Arquette really loves us. Because her character representing the unconscious, is not a serpent at all, but a fixed illusory point, a single scale repeating itself; the anima doesn't 'grow' alongside you, it already IS and you have to become; her silent derision is an impetus, like a fire under a sluggish kettle. Don't hate the novel you're reading because the letter "R" keeps staring at you, like it's trying to start a fight. It's just you're crazy, is all.
Once we stop expecting the next segment up the chain to essentially pay for the mistakes of its lowest 'self' segment, we recognize we were only nagging our own blood turnip for a perceived lack. The timeline of each incarnation is like a serpent: segmented by sleep, years - events. Ask yourself, which "me" is the one who winds up in heaven? What, really, do YOU as in right now have in common with the guy you were ten years ago? If you saw him on the street would you be nice to him, or think he was a little pisher who needs his ass kicked. What if you learned the 'you' who goes to heaven is some punk older self is in younger self's body, cuz in the future you figured out soul time travel like Wolverine does in X-Men Days of Future Past, or Jack Death does in Trancers-- and you're stuck down here, the dick in the middle, shaking your first at yourself "Why you I outta!" like the Three Stooges rolled up into one self-lacerating stumbler? Or if, like Catherine Keener, in love with Cameron Diaz only when she's inside Malkovich?
Another analogy is found in film itself. When you're watching the first reels of Lost Highway, the Bill Pullman and brunette wife stuff, you're not watching the later stuff, and vice versa. You can't ever see it 'all at once.' If you could go beyond time and space you might see the movie differently, or project it backwards and forwards with two projectors on the same screen at the same time like someone does The Shining in Room 237, then you see the male protagonist as a winding serpent of stacking images, the way an old school animator might look at his stack of drawings of mylar overlays, so that every phase of Bugs or Mickey's arm movements are visible at once, like Hindu gods and goddesses with their many arms, instead of disappearing the same time as the next one appears (a film on a screen being always 50% death after all, via the shutter speed). Do this and the variety of male characters we see would look crazy - two or three faces flickering into competing focus, projected onto one head, while the woman would just look the same except for hair color - even the bangs would be the same. Perhaps it is this 'form' - the overlaid self blur that gets to heaven, so only the higher self, who can perceive all these interconnected selves of past and present at the same time, recognizes "hey, that blur of Moebius strip selves is ME, I guess I made it to heaven after all." At that point, they all merge together, and disappear.
But our blonde/brunette split objet desire, the Amina / Ananka and Renee/Alice in Mummy's Curse and Lost Highway. They cannot be in two places at once the way we, the fall guy viewers, are as their trajectories are not connected - not Frankenstein moment chains, spot-welded like ours are (the weird mystery light that Balthazaar vanishes into before coming around in Fred's cell; the way the Mystery Man can be at the party and at Fred and Renne's house simultaneously). Rennee/Alice cannot exist consecutively. They are just two doors, in a sense, to an unknowable dimension. If the bartender is the Mystery Man, then Alice/Renee are the bar -she is the place Fred and Pete cannot be in at the same time, nor either there, really, ever. She's just a memory, a consolation vision, the way Fred 'wants to remember it' - rather than the truth, which is 'you will never have me' unknowability of the camera and the anima.
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It's the ultimate in crushing realizations when the truth of this dawns on one. Deny it as you please, Fred, but if you get the idea Renee's visiting a different self along your same timeline - i.e. if she's with your 20 year old self, she's cheating on the 40 year old self, but of course you can't kill 20 year old self out of jealousy. I mean, which self is the one you can say is OK for her to be with? You can try and claim her for your section, but will only wind up in the wormhole of self our poor Pullman is in, created by the need of Blake's 'Mystery Man' bartender ("Your money's no good here, Mr. Torrance") video camera operating demon figure to get 'paid' i.e. claim his soul (the way souls are captured by photography)- the deal being for vengeance against... whom? Oneself?
It's tricky, which is why we're stuck in the wormhole of self, quicksand dragging us down, back into the timeless sleep of aeons, with SHE in our arms, now liberated from the darkness of immortality and already drying up to dust like our mummified ancient reflection, glug glug - here we go again, folks, if you dare press 'Rec.'
But our blonde/brunette split objet desire, the Amina / Ananka and Renee/Alice in Mummy's Curse and Lost Highway. They cannot be in two places at once the way we, the fall guy viewers, are as their trajectories are not connected - not Frankenstein moment chains, spot-welded like ours are (the weird mystery light that Balthazaar vanishes into before coming around in Fred's cell; the way the Mystery Man can be at the party and at Fred and Renne's house simultaneously). Rennee/Alice cannot exist consecutively. They are just two doors, in a sense, to an unknowable dimension. If the bartender is the Mystery Man, then Alice/Renee are the bar -she is the place Fred and Pete cannot be in at the same time, nor either there, really, ever. She's just a memory, a consolation vision, the way Fred 'wants to remember it' - rather than the truth, which is 'you will never have me' unknowability of the camera and the anima.
It's the ultimate in crushing realizations when the truth of this dawns on one. Deny it as you please, Fred, but if you get the idea Renee's visiting a different self along your same timeline - i.e. if she's with your 20 year old self, she's cheating on the 40 year old self, but of course you can't kill 20 year old self out of jealousy. I mean, which self is the one you can say is OK for her to be with? You can try and claim her for your section, but will only wind up in the wormhole of self our poor Pullman is in, created by the need of Blake's 'Mystery Man' bartender ("Your money's no good here, Mr. Torrance") video camera operating demon figure to get 'paid' i.e. claim his soul (the way souls are captured by photography)- the deal being for vengeance against... whom? Oneself? It's tricky, which is why we're stuck in the wormhole of self, quicksand dragging us down, back into the timeless sleep of aeons, with SHE in our arms, now liberated from the darkness of immortality and already drying up to dust like our mummified ancient reflection, glug glug - here we go again, folks, if you dare press 'Rec.'