Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to see it, worried we'd go crazy if we did. With our blinders up, the coincidence matrix is less a pineal gland-buzzing latticework and more just white noise --the odd splotch of identifiable pattern--a word lining up with a word you're reading or writing or saying at the same second someone on TV is saying it--then back to white noise background before the meaning can be sussed; but dig, when you're 'alight with manic magic' or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic, or a genius -- then you might be able to behold how every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand such linkages, stretching from your mind into the screen and out to America and into biology and macro and micro fractal-ing out and in.Whether or not we can handle it, interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendrils betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment of our perception of course) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind, connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the wind and the DVD is a mere shard of a windmill, a record of our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality are a latticework 'other' if for no other reason than our perception - and then maybe you start howling in pain, because you can't shut it out.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron 'round the pineal car wreck, that is (presuming fluoridation hasn't crusted it over) one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, The Lenny Bruce of Lauded Literariness, the acidhead Brecht. Southern took the ball from randy sordid men like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' shattering the speed of the three martini lunch glass bottom end zone and into the many Hindu deity arms of free love mind game psychedelic put-ons for an unbidden id touchdown. The true anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers, protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove, mixed jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy and trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants and skirt chasing, apocalypse and slapstick, in ways that may or may not seem dated today, but compel us either way to ponder the relative inanity of today's sexual satire and find it woefully anemic and puerile by contrast.  

Southern dispatches from an era before The Rules refettered our once-unfettered naked lunches, before feel-bad skeeve was restored to sex, before the heavy price tag was re-affixed to free love, and when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed but really sweet nerdy boys, who could be considered men only by sods who'd never seen Mad Men or any film made before 1982. This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of animal sex may have seemed to the easily deluded PC snobs like a victory (1), but they were never good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineal glands being so calcified over from pollution of the precious bodily fluids that they're blind to even the idea they can't see. They can't even remember that intellectual satire can be lethal when volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror --while the potty-mouthed prattle of grown infants is never a threat and can indeed be yoked to the patriarchy's repressive practices. So it is WRITTED!

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the rabid hetero Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertrochemical industry, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the Western Medical Association, even the gurus and hippie new agers of the counterculture. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id grounded in literature and art (Sorbonne, Paris Review  et al) full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics and willing to look deep into the horrifically obscene gluttony and madness of human civilization without blinking, or even judging. The kind of adult humor he spearheaded into existence wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices and a level of maturity we no longer see today (think Johnny Carson vs. Jimmy Fallon, or even Animal House vs. The Bunny -- AND WEEP for the tomorrow's America).


If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after the PC putsch, that is who can be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny through the sheer 'trying' of not to be, he is well-hidden, and would never dare write a book that could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their consent, borderline rape, and so forth. Seems being the secret word. Men now feel so bad if we say no to a relationship after saying yes to sex we'd just as soon say no to the whole bloody business, but back then no one was meant to feel bad at all, even for chasing a girl young enough to be one's daughter around the room with tongue hanging out. Well, if you neuter your dog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to lose his guard dog edge, to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, the home invaders who, once ensconced within your walls, shall not leave but proceed to eat your masculine drive down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub, to the point the only sense of power you have comes Cialis for daytime use

You know what I'm trying to say, the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smug behind walls of standards and practice policies while writers are sent scurrying after mundane consensual love affairs, bawdiness relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmentation puerility, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour winds up shamed by the nation. Would men have ever gone along with our PC symbolic collective castration if we knew chicks would still pick the brutish lothario's casual lay over our sensitive pledge? What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid?

The vanishing of Southern's ilk is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore. Comedy writers now must lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Dying in the desert of the modern masculine they turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable, let alone molestable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up its presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People). In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied and balding, and too drunk to even make it to the party plane, but as long as they've produced books or filmed scripts, they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm with no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic.

Southern, centered

This is actually quite a luxury since writers must retreat from the social groove in order to write about the social groove, so in fact may only very lightly tread therein, but the three times he went out drinking with luminaries are well recorded in the historical annals - making it seem like he went out all the time. The truth is, we're all in the head, the noggin, the throat of the soul, so when we seduce it's in an awkward half-paralyzed lurching movement. That's why we tend to do our boondoggling in frenzied bursts, get as many women mad at us as possible, then run off and settle with the one girl willing to do all the heavy lifting, and who won't mind when we jump out of bed to write about the experience.

Southern may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles and worked with Kubrick. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone from birdless to beflocked statue status with a single hit record and the accompanying changes in sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof --'tis easy to be a stud when you're not actually putting out --once the pants come off all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest, especially with uncut coke dust in the wind and groupies are impatiently waiting, their plaster cast drying.

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for the discussion of Candy because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in ways that would be to unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. Southern takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and  the naked body as in itself, as incorruptible. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically glorious postures before becoming slavering beasts when within striking distance of some hottie naif with blonde hair and a pink mini dress saunters by, and the way in the end, it just makes them all the more ridiculous as no amount of hot air can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, or the PC lockstep of the other in today's sexual clime, and the once de rigueurJoy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety and as far as movies are concerned the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out, one false step and you wind up on Lifetime. 


 Though only based on Southern's original novel (written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems, in large part, based on what it has in common with Dr. Strangelove, quintessentially Southern. Both films are savagely honest critiques of America's noisemaker patriotism and paranoia and the sexual puritanism that underwrites it. Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making a grand appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly, brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing in the wind he probably imported, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo" (pause for political righteousness).. after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been banned "in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius to hangdog contrite as he mentions his book is available, signed by the author for three dollars in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey." It's a great performance not least for the wry way Burton satirizes himself, and actors in general - the psychosis that can result when one is carried away too firmly by one's own booming mellifluence.

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy:"Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero:"Well man, that's the story of love."

MacPhisto seduces her or tries to, in the back of the Benz while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and get into sexual adventures together ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," he says as prelim to his attack, "it has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." As they drive he gets loads drunk from a Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz, and winds up crawling around, booming about his 'giant, throbbing need' making a play for Candy but winding up pathetically (truly surreal) lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids while reciting random outbursts and sobbing heroically as Ringo Starr as a Mexican gardener (terrible enough with his half-assed Alfonso "Stinking Badges" Bedoya-by-way-of-Speedy-Gonzalez accent to be a real adult film actor) paws at Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!") and beaming approvingly at the crazy scene. It's the kind of brilliant knavery I hitherto thought was the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Now, alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the the best part of the entire film and even that is marred inn the second part by Ringo's terrible accent and 1/4-assed performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father); the uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches." A drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles like banshee harpy wicked witch Jezebel Humongous' gang debs, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / valkyrie / flying nun effect --another high point though once the whips and brass knuckles come out the film starts to just hang there, leading to another bad casting choice: Walter Matthau, miscast as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jew general?) and since when would a general waste his time in the air in control of only a planeload of shock troops? Though he does know how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, Matthau's cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending him to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Turgidson, it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid!


But Candy's next adventure involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!"), a most definite second peak. His histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend of Southern's, and Coburn has the spirit of the thing in the way, say, David Niven never did in Casino Royale. Like Burton, Coburn modulates Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum. They are the only two of the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in the lines (which Matthau breezed right over) and to let each word ring like freedom (from sanity). Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms to conjure a physician as liberated but completely insane titan-- accusing the audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his curse fingers right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing") saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph, Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!


And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg shows up as the jealous nurse (alas, dubbed as she was in Barbarella) attacks as Krankheit's number one nurse; Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator; John Huston shows up as a prurient administrator who seems to get off and trying to shame Candy in front of the entire party after she's caught being molested by her uncle; Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots in the ass like party favors, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle for their master to wave his hand. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage and power a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. How dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? For another the president of John Hopkins is a friend of the studio!

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg

There's still good things to come, but the next adventure, involving a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy wop filmmaker, is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment at all the preversions (shades of Col. Bat Guano) as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on colorful hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress. As usual, the dialogue is interesting but the targets are too easily lampooned, like yeah we know cops are jerks, man. Why not branch out, have the cops be groovy. Hell they were the best part of Superbad! But it being 1968 I guess these things were still new. Now, though, the police brutality angle is pretty dated and also closest moment the film comes to out and out hostility toward its satirized, and the film is wandering downhill. Candy hides out in Central Park where she hooks up with an agile criminal mastermind hunchback played by Charles Aznavour, who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni-Feldman-style behavior is another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off if you've seen Godfather 2.


Candy finally winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl (Marlon Brando), a role Southern originally hoped would go to Lenny Bruce. Oh well. Brando is funny if not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn. Stuck in a limbo between sounding strangely like modern Johnny Depp, Brando's Indian accent wanders freely into Jewish territory, mining the rhythm of Groucho or his old Guy friend, Nathan Detroit. Brando's way too internalized for Grindl to reach the egotistic grandeur of McPhisto or Krankheit. But for fans of old pre-code comedies, it's a gas linking his accents to the past. When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" he's noshing on a sausage and sounds like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move it's hard to feel anything by a sympathy headache for poor Candy. Once the fake white snow comes down through the open top the guru, now hopelessly spent after a scant six 'levels' of enlightenment is hopelessly congested and his last lines like "you muss fine da sacred boid" are delivered through a seeming mouthful of borscht and Godfather cotton. Shocking and racist as it might be to find an actor of Brando's caliber in Indian garb, trying to be as downtown hip as Lenny Bruce, and hanging in the sixties equivalent of a shag carpet lined party van, but just remember Brando (and Burton) liked working in adult film Europe at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like (the X-rated) Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972) where they could be in the company of vast acres of underdressed starlets, dining with jet set Italian millionaires who knew the good life in ways Hollywood could never duplicate and free to drink and smoke and screw to excess in a country that understood the joy of the finer things vs. America's globe-destructing pressure cooker of Vietnam and post-Puritan repression.


In Candy, everyone from the men to Candy herself talk of being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed but if they didn't try, where would humanity be? But that's the importance of satire, humanity needs it, for the truth is unendurable any other way. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body and its needs and failings, the hairy gorilla reality underneath the expensive's suit and polished air. We need a forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if you denude the beast in the suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all you do is bum out the world, not save it. Instead, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, and that there's nothing bad about the human biological system, from sex to eating to shitting to dying - in Southern's satire human biology, with all its hair and noises and needs, is celebrated, satirized, and forgiven its uncanny otherness, while the moral hypocrisy, the judgment and denial of these bodily inescapabilities, is attacked without mercy.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals." - KR, in deposition

In sum, Southern comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid second hand smoke and arguing in a mawkish voice about using plastic bags at the food co-op meeting. Real hipsters at that co-ope meeting would be hurling the organic produce at their opponents, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented, and raging against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then dying for real, as nature intended! Real hipsters were able to dig on and understand out-there modern jazz, probably because they had great focus, having faced death, or the draft, or angry fuzz and still knew were to get some army-issue amphetamines. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, cigarettes, hashish from the Arab quarter, mushrooms from Mexico, burgundy from California, hepatitis-C from New York and, if they pilgrimaged south, the holy yage. Perhaps in revisiting Candy we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls. Southern's oeuvre shows us that well-read intellectual weight can be riveted to rabid id-driven boosters and thrust like a canon maw right through the zipper of hypocrisy and we sorely need it to.. He was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he arguably invented) to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors with ingeniously deconstructive language. In doing so he helped show America was still strong enough to handle any amount of jabbing and MASH-style shower tent unveiling of its naughty bits, and that facing our monstrous extinction with a joke rather than cloaking it all in rhetoric and duck-and-cover exercises was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap, making a play rather than running screaming from the train, is the very height of bravery. Gentlemen, we cannot allow a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One) are long gone and good riddance