Crazy gorgeous, crazy for real, unstable, reckless, spontaneous, today they'd be called bi-polar, there's a lot going on with modernist European art cinema's women. We love them and they love us back, or are scared of us (by us I mean camera / viewer / audience) since they can't really see us. It's like they wake up to how trapped they are inside of a four-sided screen and we're the unseen child spirit trying whisper words of comfort across time and media platforms into their forlorn ossicles. Sometimes you'd swear as you gaze into their dilated pupils they can see you there, across time in the dark, hopefully enraptured or at least sympathetic to their cause, and not just leering down their dress.
Women like the one played by Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita (1960, below - right), or Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 - above, below-left) are forever reaching for a 'real' connection with the men inside their film environments, and considering how bad Mad Men makes America look at the same approx time frame as far as pawing and male gazing and sexually harassing, I can only imagine how bad it was in Italia! These poor harassed, molested, grabbed-in-the-street, objectified and leered-at ladies need more than just assurances from some dimwit trying to get them into bed; in that nervous time after a man first sleeps with her but before he can turn her either into a whore or his mother, a woman need to find his inner kernel of truth and pluck it out.
Sensitive intellectual Antonioni may show the woman settling down or splitting apart but we're all really hoping along with him that she can transcend the confines of the Mussolini-period architecture and minimalist gallery space and escape out the open corner of the screen, into his / our arms, someone mature, not like those other boys with their kickball and their obscene gestures. Alas, there is only one Marcello Mastroianni, and he spreads himself thin.In the past Vitti's madwoman characters could find solace and escape from modern life via breathtaking mountain views (as in L'Aventura), in vacant lots (ala La Notte), or even the friendly solitude of the sky (L'Eclisse), but Red Desert these avenues are condemned, or soon will be. Yellow poisons are in the sky, the waters of the river are choked a dull coal black --almost Star Trek alien worldly. And even the interiors, no matter how pop art splendid, are post-modern enough to seem like just different wings of the same factory. This time Vitti needs a different avenue, this time she's got to go all the way through the looking glass, into post-modernism metatextual refraction, baby, until her persona finally shatters like a funhouse mirror in Lady from Shanghai.
Twelve years ago Dr. Paul Narkunas (the skeptical professor in The Lacan Hour if you're keeping score) lent me his copy of The Red Desert, painting it in my mind as a lurid desert odyssey that went dark places he knew I'd been to, neurochemically, and he said it was funny, too, if you got the signifier resonance.
But twelve years ago I was a different person--I didn't know spit from Shiteuxlle, a name I just made up in order to imply I've read such difficult philosophers that even you, learned reader, don't know their names. And the DVD was a far-off cry in the fog from the gorgeous Criterion blu-ray I have seen thricefold since -- weeping with joylessness as my throat pouch widens to encompass more and more hot, psychotropic gas each time. My TV was smaller too, too far away for letterboxing; even my socialist art filmmaker wife at the time was bored. The film's vagueness and incoherence and ugliness combined to gave me a headache and then I fell into a half-asleep, and coasted through to the end, unwilling to turn it off lest I have to admit defeat, and that I was not man enough or intellectual enough to 'get it.'
My problem was not uncommon for an American of my posture, sloth and limited education, an inability to realize that my initial response was intellectual. My torpor and indifference was the height of educated modernist ennui. French intellectuals labor for years to reach such complete disinterest! And how can a film that bores you stiff the first time get better with repeat viewings? That makes no sense, and again, no sense is very European. But Criterion's blu-ray is gorgeous and now my TV is larger and flat with deep blacks; the fog is 3-D now, pulsazione como veleno deliziosa, purple and dark blue flecks that taste like cotton candy. My outer life has gotten worse, conversely, to accommodate it. Now I live in a widescreen (non-anamorphic) fog; my glasses are dirty, my mind shrunken and polluted with rivers of pharmacological run-off. But the screen breathes and grows, ever sharper, deeper, vaster.
Speaking of... now let us vault into the future for the new post-modern comic mini-series, Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of Babylon, a recently de-vaultified 70s miniseries deconstruction from Funny or Die! on IFC. Here, at last, is high camp trash deconstructed, the paths between art and crap, high and low, intentionally inept and genuinely bad, between aspiration and result. Real et Surreal. When Guiliana (Vitti), the crushingly alone and confused wife in Red Desert realizes she can use her modern alienation as a vaulting off point into the delirious realm of the post-modern. But Babylon is already there, refracting in on itself in deadpan absurdity spirals of mismatched indifference. In each the acting and writing are intentionally 'off' with no grounding in anything approaching reality, reaching a heightened abstraction that makes even Sirk's Written on the Wind seem like realism (see here on Splitsider for a shot-by-shot comparison). While Red Desert achieves post-modern affect through mixed signals and ambiguity (in short, art), Spoils achieves it through the through specific recognizable soap signals delocated to the point of abstraction.
Spoils' story is a sprawling epic of oil baron millions and a forbidden love between a foundling adventurer Devon Morehouse (Tobey MacGuire) and his capitalist amok sister Cynthia (Kristin Wiig). Starting in the Depression, rising up Rink-like and soaping its way up through the war, beatnik junkiedom, and hipster underwater observatories, the six-part series' deadpan humor comes less from jokes and more from inept direction, dialogue, framing, mismatched rear projection and adorable miniatures. Carey Mulligan's voice, like Scarlet Johannson's in Her, shows up for an episode or two, linked to a mannequin brought home by Devon as a British wife when he the war from home comes a-marchin' - and that's the order they would use those words in France, and maybe under the sloshy pen of trash novelist Eric Jonrosh, played with half-hearted Paul Masson-era Welles-ishness by Will Ferrell. The idea of a mannequin as one of the characters is both oddly foreboding - a Stepford wife moment - and funny, depicting the dehumanized interchangeability of all characters other than Devon and Cynthia. Stripped to the bones of meaning, the iconography of the mini-series becomes like a tattered yard sale, or the way a red velvet smoking jacket might sell for $100,000. if it was owned by Errol Flynn, or tossed into a rummage pile for .50 cents if owned by Errol Flynn's stand-in, and yet be the exact same jacket - and in fact, the two could easily be mistaken. Where was I? Oh yeah, half-way to a full-on William Wilson.
The idea of stand-ins and arbitrary notions of place and ownership course through Antonioni's work constantly in both micro- and macrocosms, and in Spoils there is an arbitrary dividing line set up, a story as elusive in its ultimate unimportance as the disappearance in L'Aventura. The forbidden love of Cynthia and Devon is made so only in the sense of social propriety --they are not related by blood -- but soap opera cannot function without such refusals, such sacrifices of love in the name of propriety; this sense of sacrifice helped found the Italian film industry, stemming in part from floridly romantic opera and verse and the realities of the post-war post-class economy and censorship which also factors in Red Desert --man's willful exile from an Eden that exists only in the memory. One simply can't be an impassioned sensualist and a 9-5 captain of industry, especially with censors hanging around. Operatic soapy romantic signifiers are cinema's way of mourning the loss of sensuality and the rise of provincial conservative censorship, with grand actress gestures, and it's these gestures that Antonioni subverts, just as the Cinq au sept movies. Codes and the symbolic structure of language point towards specifics after all - did they or did they not have sex? Sexually frustrated moral ethics guardians insist on knowing! Whole presidencies have been endangered over these nagging questions but the code skirts the censors by symbolic references that are frustrating in their ambiguity - forcing the prurient and the narrow-minded literalists into a tizzy. On purpose. And creating modernism, on accident. Or is it vice? verso? Versace!
In Spoils, Cynthia mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy they nurture, the objet petit a that sacrificing love on the alter of propriety entails: Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, that even thinking some new man understands her is false, borne of presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs. But the signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up, they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using soap cliches instead of eyeballs. Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have is the only thing worth having. The signifiers don't add up in Spoils either, less out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style incompetent hack.
I think being American is a distinct disadvantage to getting the modernist alienation affect. Europeans and South Americans all sneer at us for not being into subtitles, or for learning languages other than our own and yet they admire our innocence, knowing it is born out of a single language system. But if we imagine seeing a German film in German class (hence without subtitles) and not being able to understand most of what we hear because we haven't paid attention ever in class, then we too can get the modern alienation effect so coveted by the Cahiers du Cinema set. And it, after 20 minutes or so, bored and restless, we start to notice how silly and strange the people onscreen seem when language isn't there to contextualize their behavior. Until Antonioni helps us we're bound up in signifiers: if we see a woman at a child's bedside in what looks like a hospital bed against a white wall, and the kid has what looks like a thermometer in his mouth, we would totally believe that the kid is sick and the mom is concerned. But then the thermometer is revealed to be a candy cigarette and it's not a hospital room but the kid's bedroom in a post-modern apartment. So who is the woman? Suddenly an orderly comes in to take her away and you think she's insane and this is a mental hospital, but how did we know it was an orderly? Did he have a white lab coat on, and by his gobbledigook speech seemed bored yet nurturing in a coldly robotic way? That was no orderly!
The censors already demand a certain kind of code of conduct and a secret code to imply sex has occurred if your adult enough to read it. From there it's a small step to leading that crazy Jack Torrance dirty-minded censor around through the Overlook maze of contradictory signifiers while you laugh and laugh. To take Americans outside the prison walls of language takes a great deal of this laughing; it's important to realize that Antonioni arrives at his 'plain as the nose on a plane goes twirl' effect through serious artistry, while the three layers of intentional accidental post-modern intention in Spoils of Babylon is through lack thereof. It's the difference between acting the role of a guy leaving a half-eaten doughnut on a park bunch and realizing there is no audience, or camera, and you forgot the script, and so were really just a dude eating a doughnut after all. Did anyone in the park see it? If no one saw you leave it, how do you know it was even yours?
An example of a dry refracted modernism in Spoils of Babylon is right there in the name of one of the characters: Seymour Lutz. It is, of course, a variation of course on the name 'Seymour Butz,' an old Bart Simpson prank phone call favorite ("Is there a Butz here? I wanna Seymour Butz!") This joke in its unaltered form would be far too crass for Jonrosh--a great Falstaffian bargain of a man--so in Babylon the name is abstracted, mispronounced by Cynthia constantly, leaving him to finally shout "it's pronounced Lutz! LUTZ!"
Now of course any comedy lover reading this set up will presume Wiig's calling him Seymour Butz instead of Seymour Lutz, which is where the joke would be if it was only once refracted. But Cynthia keeps calling him "Seymour Lund." Quintessential Jonrosh. Also, in saying "Lutz! Lutz!" he's invoking the tone and delivery of W.C. Fields in 1933's International House saying "Nuts! Nuts!" while fixing a loosened nut on his autogyro.
One similar favorite moment late in Red Desert made me finally understand why Paul recommended it: Feeling guilty about the affair brewing when she's alone with Corrado (Richard Harris) in his swanky bachelor quarters, Giuliana looks up from the bed, sees the door is open, worried neighbors or husband or the porter might barge in any minute and so she closes the door, but it's to the cabinet by his bedside! At an earlier point she runs off after him towards a ship that's been quarantined, as if she is the one who has to stop him from risking his life helping, but then she tuns around, separated from the group in the fog, with Corrado at her side; the others look at her as if she's been caught red handed in an affair - but are they really feeling that, or is just another passing mood? It's forgotten by the next distraction. Everyone seems always about to start an orgy or come onto her, but are they? Is this what being a hot mess in sex-crazed Italy is like? License to paw nonstop? Or are they just ghost Repulsion wall arms? The answer is she's not crazy, we are, Antonioni is revealing our tendency to seek romantic sparks and soapy betrayal everywhere.
Then there's a cart selling apples all painted silver or grayish-white. Now this is odd in and of itself.When Giuliana sits down by the side of it she momentarily becomes the apple seller - Antonioni locks into some old revered neorealist mama. But who would buy gray apples? Are they some kind of decoration? Are the apples poison? Then why the gray paint bucket? Is this art or pollution? We can't deduce what's up with this cart anymore than we can deduce if an orgy happens later, or after that a cheap affair or a tortured love affair, or neither, and if we don't fight the surreal de-signification domino effect then not knowing is like waking up from a dream within the dream, the hidden filmmaking hand is clumsily pulled onstage and the mind's tendency to lose itself in green smoke and booming voices finds itself challenged because the wizard is curtainless from the get-go. Once we no longer fall for the myth or the storyteller we have to face our own death and she speaks to us, as always, through a collage of remembered movie lines, song lyrics, and poetry, in Scarlett Johansen's voice, and Veronica Lake's hair and forgiving eyes, that way she looks at Alan Ladd or Sullivan like she's just rescued him from a bad orphanage.