Recently discovered hiding deep in the Amazon Prime--an interior so vast and tangled one never knows what serpent jewel is coiled below the most innocent flower thumbnail cover: a 1958 TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS starring Boris Karloff as Kurtz. For fan of both the actor and the tale, it's quite a find: Archetypal, potent, pungent, primitive in every definition of the word (picture quality as savage as the setting), acted in a kind of beatnik cafe dream poetry shorthand, following streams far indeed from Conrad's estuary, it nonetheless sings the masculine psyche electric, turning the journey of Marlow upriver to Kurtz into a kind boy's life anti-colonialist/pro-incest version of Alice in Wonderland performed by the residents of some remote mental institution. Some might consider it unwatchable due to terrible image quality and stagy overacting, but for those of us "in the know," one look into Boris Karloff's wild eyes as he dances around shirtless in a jungle leaf crown while a circle of cannibals thump on drums, shake skull rattles, stab goats, and wiggle long feather or vine skirts that look up close in the unshaded video quality like fire (or radar-jamming window), and we know we're home. Add a shirtless wild-eyed Roddy McDowell as Marlow, demanding the whip and being branded with a hot "K", feeding off Karloff's crazy energy, matching his performance art hysteria note for note, like Page and Plant dueling high notes in "Dazed and Confused" coupled to a family trying to be heard on the tarmac of a busy airport. "I celebrate my cruelty!," they shout. "I celebrate my hatred!" Been there, bro. I hereby claim this HEART as wild and true. "I celebrate my lust!"
I celebrate the generosity of Amazon Prime and this great deal they made with some library of long-neglected (unrestored) garbage called 'Sprockets' which supplied this, along with thousands of junky exploitation films from the 50s-70s, many of them too damaged to even be on a Something Weird compilation. I celebrate genius of mixing the potted plant jungle lurid sadism and miscegenation fantasy of Kongo, White Woman, Rain, Tarzan with O'Neill's folk play existentialism (shades of Emperor Jones), undergraduate avant garde theatricality (ala the old Pratt Institutionalized Theater, here) and a Greek-myth analyst-couch bird-swarm beach-boy rending of Tennessee Williams / Hitchcock. I celebrate its Shavian satire, Kafka-esque existentialism, Maugham 'Victorian morality dissolving in the jungle heat'-ism its bounty of expressionist dream poem segues. This isn't the Congo of Conrad, with its observed landscape and anthropological detail, but an inner Oz for sexually repressed British sailors --no matter how intense things get, the magic coins in Marlow's pocket --like Valerie's earrings, Dorothy's slippers--whisks him home as fast as Thorazine.Growing up watching Shelly Duvall's Fairy Tale Theater with my parents, studying Jung in college, and finding magic doorways on my own later, have all merged within my psyche and left predisposed me to love something as woebegone as this old Heart. It's similar to the way I love The Love Witch or Valerie and her Week of Wonders, or Lemorra: A child's Tale of the Supernatural. If you love any of those three then you might cotton to this which is like the repressed hammy male version of those fairy tale sagas, only it's more a reflection of going off to college and having your first acid trip and orgiastic sex experience in the same night and feeling like you just opened up from a black and white shell to a prismatic butterfly of awakened transdimensional sanity - only here it's all black and white and scuzzy forever, the basement mythic landscape of the 1933 Paramount live action Alice (see: Reeling and Writhing) rather than the Technicolor Disney.
Subtle, pretty color shit wouldn't translate across the primitive broadcasting signal anyway. Dreams are often in black and white, and of poor quality image-wise, as your third eye antenna can't always get a good picture. I can handle poor quality black and white much better than poor quality color, which tends to be washed out and depressing. In this case the rough signal works: there's an amok charcoal and Everclear madness brought out by the ancient tape artifacts (the grayscale has become... unsound). The weird distortions and deep black outlining give it all a ghostly inked-in appearance as if from some spy camera left in a cavern on the moon crossed with a smudgy charcoal courtroom sketch witnessed by a drunk suffering the DTs being wheeled into the psych ward down the hall, seeing the image trail onto the white walls. The result of it all is neither TV as we know it today nor off Broadway theater nor beatnik theater troupe improv, but a mix of all three as if witnessed by another planet from a signal bounced off the moon. Maybe right now, sixty odd light years away, on some remote alien space station, they're picking up this show (it was broadcast as part of the famed Playhouse 90) as the first sign of life outside their own solar system and they'll be in awe. These alien anthropologists will wonder whether this is some ritualistic indigenous ceremony, a filmed inauguration, live, like an Olympics ceremony, re-enacting of ancient rites, on ancient video equipment, as valuable a relic as cave drawings or Sumerian tablets. That initiation rites from boy to man are such a key part of all indigenous tribe mythologies and so absent from our own, surely says something when dealing with our national crisis of arrested male development. We don't televise wild initiations into the terrors of the unconscious self, but we should. After all, like any other televised event, it's all show.As in the Off-Off Broadway dream poetry tradition, scenes are connected by childhood nursery rhymes ("Bobby Shafto's / gone to sea"), further making this all seem like a long LSD trip back in the day when it was legal and done on a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by giant potted African fronds and the sound of children playing outside the shrink's window became like tribal chanting reflecting the ebb and flow of one's inner psychosis, the old neuroses dissolving off like a serpent's old skin. Clinging to religion the way some lightweights cling to the ego's old skin, McDowell's repressed and unhinged character becomes a hurricane eye around which scenes revolve in ever tighter loops; each meeting gets weirder, slowly peeling his 'false Buddhist' monk robe skin off. Starting with a ship's hold wherein he's forced to crush a rat in his bare hands (like salty shipmates always be making faux-Buddhists do), through to his returning home alive and reborn to his lady love/sister Maria (Inga Swenson), McDowell's acting is either terrible or brilliant or both, holding the whole thing together with a kind of magical foot-to-the-gas madness as Marlow, reminding me how deft, charismatic and hilarious he was as Tuesday Weld's manager in Lord Love a Duck (there, as here, never stealing a scene but rather using and reflecting the energy of the actors around him, then mirroring it back and raising it again, forming a slow burn duel of ham mania).
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| Inga Swenson's Nordic alien DNA captured via early TV signal being non-receptive to the alien cover signal (as seen in THEY LIVE) |
The rest of the film is a progression of weird archetypal energies: a 'Before the Law'-esque wife of a disappeared trading company envoy; a blind 'crone' (Cathleen Nesbitt - left) in Queen Victoria /Virgin Mary headdress, signs Marlow up while loudly encouraging him to also join "The Society for the Repression of Savage Custom"; the company doctor (Oscar Homolka - below) measuring his skull against those of previous trading company representatives for comparison (he thinks head size changes after "you go out there to that frenzy, that solitude, that swamp of obscene temptation where there's no policeman, where no voice of a kind neighbor can whisper a public opinion, (ala "don't touch the B in room 237"); pushed through a closet door of the trading post, Marlow winds up in the jungle where a cannibal boy almost bites his finger off, and the weird dark energy begins to really congeal.
Now, in the jungle, things devolve quick: cannibals almost eat him alive before he's saved by the estimable Mr. Robertson (Richard Haydn), the Trading Company 'accountant.' The complete opposite of repressed Marlow, and without a shred of the humanity of the earlier characters, Robertson has embraced the moral twilight and encourages Marlow to do the same: "I don't judge anything, so I don't suffer." Whipping natives to ease his aggravation, he tries to offer Marlow a chance to get out his aggression with a proffered whip, and notes that he'll have to whip the native slaves all the way back inland to Kurtz's compound anyway, that he should give into the madness of the place, but Marlow--his resolve ever weakening--cannot, refusing even a Pim's cup with homegrown cucumber. We can feel the ghost of W.S. Burroughs stir sluggishly like an opium ghost in our bloodstream with the appearance of this Benway-esque character: "No drinking, no violence - you're really quite an example of something or other aren't you?" he says. Assuring Marlow, he has nothing but admiration for Kurtz's methods in dealing with his cannibal slaves ("he sends them off all fat and saucy with a meal of two-legged pig, which I think is a charming way of describing what they eat. [1]"), Robertson is our first example of a man who's kept his British detachment by surrendering fully to the madness of the place. Marlow cannot, he'd rather hang the chain on himself and beg to be whipped like an anguished penitent. He's combusting from the inside out, being devoured by the Congo, while Robertson isn't even bothered by flies.
Eartha Kitt (left) shows up as Kurtz's silken feline queen. Named her Maria, as are all Kurtz's women so named, reflecting his incestuous obsession (the Elektra complex of the 'gentlemen's agreement' relationship between the three of them) she's ordered to get the coins from him, as if a holy grail relic that frees him from Kurtz's trap.Of course in this surrealism-on-the sleeve riffing, it's not necessary to glean whether or not there's actual incest or desire between Kurtz and his daughter --this is pure psychosexual dream theater, laying its surrealistic tells far more bluntly than Conrad, there's no time for subtlety. Writer Stewart Stern clearly uses the source text as diving board rather than a podium, he's interested in reaching certain deep Medea / devouring mothers, hoping for coins tossed in by long ago Phoenician sailors, swallowed by the depths of the Kali-tentacled maternal behemoth. It's Conrad the way Coltrane's "Favorite Things" is Rogers and Hammerstein.
And putting other Kurtz's to shame (Welles' radio show version included, Brando of course being the worst), Karloff seizes the chance to really ham it to the rafters and thank god he did, for anything less would have been lost in the splotchy Bacon/rain/Caan smudginess of the distorted video image. As it is, both his and Roddy's eyes really pop out, like mad scientists in the peak of a DOM trip, that bold 13-hour mouth at the froth from which no traveler returns without a jingling secret pocket Xanax ("welcome to Annexia" silver bullet for the Emperor Jones' William Tell routine.
It's worth comparing this adaptation alongside two other mythopoetically dense Stern screenplays: Rebel without a Cause (for Nicholas Ray) and The Last Movie (for Ray's friend Dennis Hopper) there's the fascination with ceremonial rites (Rebel's Chicken Run with its existential fatalism, the planetarium; the straw cameras of the Andeans in Movie) and the terror female nymphomania evokes in the male psyche (Natalie Wood's dad obsession, the weird mom; Julia Adams in Last). Here it's that even deep in the madness of the Congo, the reach of voracious Maria reaches out to both men, via the coins, the portrait medallion Kurtz wears (like a pagan charm -she becomes the yin in the center of all this frantic performance art yang) - he has the bullets! Kurtz and Marlow both driven to flee home to escape her, only to find representatives with her same name (the queen). The lust celebration a reminder that the repression of savage instincts abroad (as in the Puritans, Rev. Davison in Rain) always devolves into sex tourism: "Behold my surrender! Behold my marriage with abomination!" Marlow snaps the whip and Kurtz leads the chant, as the drums pound and the whip snaps, the flames heating the "K" brand and the wiggling feather/taffeta skirts and headdresses all overlap and become one blurry rain of braided white noise; Marlow shirtless on the dais, suddenly swept up in the evil tide, while the natives clatter their homemade percussion instruments and wave their crude knives ala Suddenly Last Summer - the rendering birds of The Birds rending the baby turtle children to Mrs. Brenner's unconscious bidding just as the beach boys render Sebastian in the ruins of the Dionysian sacrificial altar temple high at Violet 'Medea' Venable's (rather than let him enjoy one summer out from under her wing). Kurtz represents the male equivalent of this devouring mother, he's the primal father writ large- mirroring our modern cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones, preferring to wipe out his flock rather than be taken back to civilization.
I should note that as with the source text, there's a rampant racism at work here: all the African natives as savage childlike cannibals, who respect only brute force (the whip). But we should remember that this jungle is in the mind of a repressed virgin who's never been there and so projected his id onto it. Well, isn't that what racism is, you say? True, I retort, but it's even a theme of the play that only by expressing, owning it can we exorcise it. It's in celebrating his evil and his lust that Marlow frees himself from its toxic grip, at least enough to breathe, and to give himself a hug (above), his dilated pupils looking up towards the finally revealed heaven. The last thing that would suit his character is to get all preachy and self-righteously racial activist. What can white authors know of blackness? To try and Stanley Kramer it up would kill the larger-than-life messiness of myth. Myth needs to be neither believable nor logical, true or safe, (nor -as here - even in focus or frame), what it needs to do is resonate below the line of consciousness, become truer than truth can reach, provide a kind of trap door access to the basement of the mind, something to open up the vents and allow for temperature equilibrium. Just as the African tribe surrounding Kurtz use ceremonial masks to reflect their demons rather than hide them, this primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of evil.
That's why it helps in a way that this is so poor and overwrought --the totemic demon mask need not seem real, but almost something to laugh at, a cathartic confession rather than denial, evil the Medusa reflected in the Perseus shield of satire. So let us celebrate our evil and above all celebrate the ability to cherish weird-ass shit like Playhouse 60's Heart of Darkness, celebrate a humanity that could allow this dark plumming of its darkest depths, the bravery in going--as my friends and I used to say--"for distance" rather than polish, decorum and linear clarity. Now our live TV events are tepid musical remakes of movies, as toothless as an old rheumy lion. We won't see the like of rough unhinged dream theater 'interpretations' like this Heart again, outside perhaps of "Le Bad Theater" on SNL reruns (2) and we will continue to suffer for its absence, just as the lack of male initiation trauma (3) it depicts inevitably outs in everything from school shootings, alt-right trolling, and all the other sad last ditch gasps of boys who never found their hideous dark father's compound and so never saw the sad end game of their own dark hypocrisy, or tasted the ecstasy of being shred to bits by a thousand little beaks.
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| "even the jungle wanted him dead" |
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| It's also on youtube! |
NOTES:
1. "two-legged pig" also known as "long pig" = human flesh.
2. though there was a TV movie version in 1993 with John Malkovich and Tim Roth, I couldn't get too into it, as it was too sunny and realistic, humdrum, literal, even faithful to the text to the point of sterility.
3. Initiation rites do exist in some organizations but outside of, say, the Navy Seals, they lack sufficient trauma for true change - as the agony of child birth makes a mother of a woman, the agony of the initiatian rite 'second' birth makes a boy a man. No pain, no gain is no gym mantra but, sadly, at the core of all human maturity.