Bright Lights After Dark

Antichrist's Cine-Chthonic Relations

2009-11-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

I'm shocked SHOCKED to find the modern masterpiece of 2009, ANTICHRIST, getting such hostile reviews. Why? Call me off the wall but I'm betting a) a lot of critics just don't know much about film history; b) Camille Paglia has fallen from grace in modern academia; c) Many critics never did learn the difference between "exploring" issues of misogyny and actually "being" misogynist, i.e. objectifying (VERTIGO Vs. PORKY'S, for example).

Perhaps Von Trier's films are so polarizing because they rave against cinema and sexuality like an apocalypse of seeing. Compare the much higher reception for Quentin Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, a very similarly pre-de-constructed 2009 film, which together with ANTICHRIST represents the post-modern pinnacle of 2009 box office polarization. But QT's cinematic influences and reference points are written on his sleeve (or soundtrack CD back cover) and Nazis are safer to hate than our own corrupting sexuality. Poor Lars is just lumped in with 'artsy' which we're already presumed to pretend to know. Also, I bet a lot of these critics saw the film at Cannes, and I can't imagine it would seem very good in the context of too little sleep and way too much less-than-worthy artsy tripe, it's all about context.

Below is a small list of films which surely influence Von Trier or at the very least may help one understand ANTICHRIST as more than just "that movie with the scissors." Instead of my own synopses I've attached relevant quotes:

REPULSION (1965)

"Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery -- she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain." - Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun

VERTIGO (1958)

"There is something mysterious about femaleness -- coming from the facts of woman's physical nature, the endless mysteries of the shadowy womb, and the power of procreation that even she doesn't understand." -Camille Paglia (Salon)

BRINGING UP BABY (1938)-

"One question: If adulthood is the price of sexual happiness, is the price fair?...Why are the vaunted pleasures of sexuality so ludicrous and threatening?" -- - Stanley Cavell (Comedies of Remarriage, p. 125)

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE AKA DAY OF THE WOMAN (1978)

"Unlike, say, “Pulp Fiction” or a Wes Craven film, it’s not Dafoe’s character doing the cutting. Instead, Gainsbourg’s character does the honors of the late-term bris, which may be the reason why so many male critics gave it to very limp thumbs down, while singing the praises of Cannes’ other ultraviolent piece of work, Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards.” Women literally ball-busting on screen? That’s something most of America is not ready for, even as we watch heads roll and blond bimbos get chopped to pieces." -- Drew Grant, The Frisky

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (1959)

"He-he was lying naked on the broken stones...and this you won't believe! Nobody, nobody, nobody could believe it! It looked as if-as if they had devoured him!...As if they'd torn or cut parts of him away with their hands, or with knives, or those jagged tin cans they made music with. As if they'd torn bits of him away in strips!"- Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor)

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

"Desire is red and desire is death and desire is woman. There is, inescapably, a fear of, a distance from woman here. And there is a loathing of self, too: the peeping video artist, complete with self-bilocating technical trickery, has (at least initially) the aspect of a cosmeticized and malignant dwarf." - Donald Lyons (Film Comment, 1997)

SEE ALSO:
THE INNOCENTS, THE BLUE ANGEL, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, PERSONA, BETTY BLUE and see my more detailed piece on ANTICHRIST on ACIDEMIC.

The Unknown Paul Wendkos (1925-2009)

2009-11-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

I just learned, via Peter Nellhaus, of the passing of one of America's most obscure-but-talented directors, Paul Wendkos.

Wendkos would be far better known today if his first film, the great low-budget noir, The Burglar (1956), were more readily available. The Burglar, an unabashedly arty film based on the David Goodis novel of the same name, starred Dan Duryea in the title role, and Jayne Mansfield as his ward (a serious acting role that preceded her "bombshell" period). A fatalistic heist film clearly influenced by Orson Welles, particularly The Lady From Shanghai, The Burglar ends at an Atlantic City funhouse where a loudspeaker proclaims, "We, the Dead, Welcome You!"

Wendkos directed several other films of interest, the well-known but atypical Gidget (1959), The Mephisto Waltz (1971), and two more stylish noirs, The Case Against Brooklyn (1958) starring Darren McGavin as an undercover cop, and the fascinating rural noir Angel Baby (1961) which stars Salome Jens as an Aimee Semple McPherson-like revival preacher, and has a terrific supporting cast that includes George Hamilton, Mercedes McCambridge, Henry Jones, Joan Blondell, and Burt Reynolds. Angel Baby's striking black and white cinematography, most of it shot in the Deep South, was by Haskell Wexler.

Eventually, Wendkos found his niche in television. He directed several episodes of the '60s right wing sci-fi series, The Invaders (in which aliens were equated with Communists). Of far more interest were a series of made-for-TV movies he directed (he was a pioneer of the form), including The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970), The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), Cocaine: One Man's Seduction (1983), and the mini-series Celebrity (1984) - all of them distinguished by a paranoid world view communicated through unstable wide-angle compositions, and performances skillfully pushed to the edge of hysteria (Glenn Ford in Brotherhood of the Bell, Dennis Weaver in Cocaine).

If anyone ever published an interview with this *unknown* auteur, I would love to see it.

Brothers in Cynicism

2009-11-16T02:02:00.000-08:00

Every time a new film by the Coen brothers comes out, I dread having to hear from the same old so-and-so's who can't bear to slog through the Coens' peculiar brand of pessimism. The words "bleak" and "cynical" often pepper their reviews rather liberally, along with some gasp of regret that the brothers don't seem to have much sympathy for their characters. Jonathan Rosenbaum called their style "pop nihilism", and not in a positive sense. Before the release of their newest film, A Serious Man, I could practically hear them sharpening their claws.

As a die-hard fan of the Coen brothers, it's not so much the predictability of these reactions that irks me, but the general unapproachability of it as a critical argument. Dismissing the Coens as cynics makes as much sense as dismissing Frank Capra as naive: both are true, of course, but neither one is grounds for belittling the quality of their work.

Much of it boils down whether or not someone "gets" the Coens. Even if you understand where they're coming from and what they're getting at, if you don't have, at some subconscious level, something akin to their dark outlook on life, their films will almost certainly be off-putting, unsatisfactory, and pointless. Joe Morgenstern used the word "repellent" in his review of A Serious Man to describe the characters the Coens had written, but it aptly describes his attitude towards the whole film and the Coens' entire oeuvre.

What's so perplexing is that many of these critics seem to think it's a failing on the Coens' part that they have never gotten over this cynicism. Sometimes people call them "juvenile" and sigh: 'Oh, when will the Coens grow up?' As if this were a dark, teenage phase they never developed past, the filmic equivalent of a high school sophomore's black eye-liner and lip piercings. Maybe the Coens, like myself, have just never witnessed anything that suggests that the world might not be such an awful place after all, that people really are good at heart, that life does have some grand and noble purpose. More optimistic veins of thought are certainly nicer, but it's not as if anybody can help being a cynic.

There's a lot to be said for artists who are comfortable and secure enough with their own philosophical leanings to not feel the need to try and sugar coat any unpleasantness. Even if you accept that the Coens are antisocial juveniles - and there's no real good reason you should - then you at least have to grant that they're honest. It would be nearly impossible for any other filmmaker to fake the cynicism that the Coens pull off with total sincerity. Many of the critics who denounce such pessimistic ways often say that they wish the brothers' technical prowess could be put to better use, but what better use for an artist's skills could there be than to create works that communicate to others the way they see the world?

To watch A Serious Man - their most morally sophisticated work - is to feel what it's like to be Joel or Ethan Coen, to see the world as a pointless series of endless sufferings and inconveniences, surrounded by insufferable buffoons and irrational cretins (a sensation I'm rather familiar with, and, I assume, so are many others). This is not a world of their making. This is the world they live in. If David Denby really did think A Serious Man was "hell to sit through", I can't imagine what he'd think of sitting through an entire lifetime of it.

As a western New York Gentile from the 1980s, I have no overt connection to the 1967 Jewish Minnesota suburb of A Serious Man, but I feel a taut psychological bond to the intellectual frustration, the passive misanthropy, the hopeless irony that permeates its every scene, a bond expressed principally through laughter. Where critics like Denby see a film that dehumanizes life and drains it of meaning, I see a film that structures the horrible train wreck of life into a fine, sharp joke.

Perhaps I'm also an emotionally-stunted creep, but there's something close to genius in anyone who can make humor out of pure unhappiness. Life is miserable, you'll never get the answers you want, death is just around the corner, and isn't that just hysterical?

Carl Dreyer says Drive Safely and Save Lives!

2009-11-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

They Caught the Ferry (1948) is a short highway safety film – much like the ones we used to watch in Drivers Ed. - produced by the Danish Film Commission, and directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the legendary auteur of The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (The Word, 1955), and Gertrud (1964).

It’s a macabre little story about a young couple on a motorcycle frantically racing across the countryside from one ferryboat to another. (When they stop at a rural gas station, fans of Scandinavian cinema might expect to see Max von Sydow manning the pump – as he does in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.) The couple encounter various obstacles along their way, including a railroad crossing, and a road hog whose face – as we see when the couple maneuvers around him – is the face of Death. The only ferry they end up catching is the mythical rowboat that carries souls to the Underworld. Hence, the irony of the film’s title.

You might be reminded of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (especially the great “Breakdown” episode directed by Hitch himself) or certain episodes of The Twilight Zone. I also thought of “The Monkey’s Paw” episode from the Freddie Francis-directed feature version of Tales From the Crypt, in the course of which a driver takes a look in his rear-view mirror and sees this.

They Caught the Ferry is an exercise in pure visual storytelling. Those who associate Dreyer with the slow-moving cameras of Day of Wrath and Ordet, or the near-stasis of Gertrud, might be surprised by the style of this little film (made between Day of Wrath and Ordet) which is all about speed, and uses every trick in the filmmakers’ book – fast cutting, dutch-angled POV shots of the countryside, inserts of the speedometer, and shots of the wind blowing through the couple’s hair – to convey the impression of steadily accelerating motion.

All of this was reflective of Dreyer’s personal and deeply held spiritual beliefs. For him, stasis equaled eternity. Speed killed.

Memo to Michael Bay: GI JOE KICKS YOUR ASS!

2009-11-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

Superheroes with toy franchise tie-ins get a lot of heat... unless critics had a real lively sense of humor they trashed both TRANSFORMERS (as well as WOLVERINE, TERMINATOR SALVATION, etc.) but GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA does everything right. AND it gets a lot less things wrong. One can only hope the Michael Bays, Brett Ratners and McGs pay attention when watching JOE (though its director, Stephen Sommers, certainly has some crap under his belt, such as VAN HELSING). Here's some things they might look for:

1) DEADPAN: The key, as with the best John Carpenter films, is the universal Deadpan: Just compare Channing Tatum, first-rate in his second-rateness as the "Most American" Joe" to, say, the comedic everyspazzisms of (Tatum's real life friend) Shia LaBeouf in TRANSFORMERS, and why is Tatum so good? Because he scraps the winks and wails, and underplays! Ditto the amazing Sienna Miller. When these two are together, sparks fly because they don't! (Bay would show literal sparks, probably coming out of someone's ass)

2) RACE: There's a lot less racial "consciousness" and more of a racial celebration in JOE. For one thing, the main black character--Marlon Wayans in JOE's case--is actually given a personality beyond the carefully compiled compendium of "safe" cliches that make most token black characters so invisible (i.e. they're loyal and don't interrupt when their white friends are talking). Instead he's allowed to have a genuinely ballsy "take charge" persona as well as sensitivity. He knows when to move in and when to back off in his amorous pursuits of this fellow Joe chick who is... white! She ain't blond (her dyed red hair could denote some ghetto roots), but hey, Sen. Strom, baby steps.

3) RELATIONSHIP DYNAMICS: JOE takes a a page from Joss Whedon's BUFFY to see how relationships and events in "normal" life can reverberate to a larger mythic canvas. The Baroness turned evil because Joe couldn't face her at her brother's funeral (he just drove by on his badass motorcycle in the Arlington cemetery rain, etc. etc.) Rather than some drab "You killed my father" "But I AM your father" bit of linear by-the-portable-Jung cliche, we zoom back and forth from the present Bondian crisis to past traumas, most of which develop character AND expend firepower.

4) COMPLEXLY MOTIVATED VILLAINS: They all "fell" from grace at some point, and they mouth their bad dialogue in that rarest of styles: the selfless straightforward, not wincing or mincing when their dialogue clunks to the floor. One is a Halliburton-style industrialist, another a deformed mad scientist type (BRICK's Joseph Gordon Hewitt!) and another a self-centered ninja still harboring a grudge against his little white adopted and better-at-kung fu brother who blew up his spot at kung fu school (Nothing it turns out, is cuter than two little tykes wailing kung fu on each other in a Chinese kitchen flashback - with cleavers!).

5) COMPETENT EDITING: No matter what's going on in JOE, you can follow it. The edits are tight but not whiplash insane or Bay-level insecure, or shredded down to meaninglessness as in the disappointing QUANTUM OF SOLACE. There's a trust in the thrust of the story to override the sugar-addict guitar pick whittling style of so many current action films, which aren't happy unless they're cross cutting by nanosecond between 18 different incomprehensible and overly loud set pieces. More than anything, JOE's ingenious editing strategies remind me of the good early Hong Kong action films like MADAME CITY HUNTER and SUPERCOP 2!

Lastly, JOE manages to involve character arcs and development that for once are NOT cliches, because they connect to the truth...truths of being a tough, rough, heart of gold military type (they remind me of some very cool rangers I know) as opposed to a kid who is a "hero" based on his ability to own a possessed sports car or play a video game. While Michael Bay is spending millions on CGI to make a giant robot dance around like a spazz to bad top 40 rock, JOE is smashing up cars in Paris while flashing back to proposing to his girl (now the hot leather badass villain known as Baroness!) all without the requisite bullshit throwaway gags and punch lines. In short, all while keeping a completely straight face! It ain't been this good since STARSHIP TROOPERS or, another classic JOE reminded me of, the Sam Hodges' 1980 FLASH GORDON!

Like TROOPERS, JOE does the atom-splitting antithetical dichotomy bit, turning the CGI military spectacle into into both an effective critique of the military-industrial complex AND a veritable Sears catalog worth of cool new deadly stuff for sale! If the future is even half this rad, I'm glad I'm still alive to watch it happen... later, when it comes on DVD... and blu-ray! And did I mention Dennis Quaid as the leader of his beloved Joes? Shit son, there ain't even a foul-mouthed robot or annoying anthem rock songs to fuck this up. I'm not saying Channing Tatum is the new Vin Diesel, but if even if he's just the new Scott Walker, the sleeping 15-year old boy in all of us can finally wake up and look unashamed into the draft board future. Ride on, big Joes. Ride on...

Bright Lights issue 66 now online

2009-11-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.

From the editor

Keep watching the lights...

Articles

Roman Polanski: What's on Trial?
By Karin Luisa Badt

Looking at Charlie: Modern Times
An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
"Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!"
By Alan Vanneman

Past Sunset: Noir in the West
"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."
By Imogen Sara Smith

On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren't
By D. J. M. Saunders

Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America
"Tease was out, honesty was in."
By Jack Stevenson

The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
"We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era."
By Jesse Stommel

The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions
By Jay Rothermel

Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
"In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance."
By Rob Faunce

Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
By Suzanne del Gizzo

Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age
A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others
By Barry Wurst II

Actors

Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return
"Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice."
By Dan Callahan

Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust"
"Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever."
By Christopher Sandford

Directors

Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
"I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me."
By Damon Smith

Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."
By Jon Lanthier

Columns

Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
By Gordon Thomas

Letter from New York (c. 1980)
"The problem is other people — crazy people."
By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1
"Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates."
By Vlad Dima

"Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2
"This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them."
By Lee Weston Sabo

Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
"His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.""
By Robert Castle

Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11
"Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp."
By Devan Goldstein

Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies
"Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances."
By Joan McGettigan

"They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain
"Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . ."
By Jay Rothermel

Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up
"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"
By Gary Morris

Festivals

After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival
"An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?"
By Lesley Chow

Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival
This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience"
By Megan Ratner

Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Getting out of the ghetto
By Gary Morris

From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival
"VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all."
By Ben Cho

Books

In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder.
By Joseph McBride

Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot
By Jon Lanthier

America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart
By Matthew Kennedy

Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North
By Deborah Allison

Have a Blaisdell Halloween!

2009-10-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

Paul Blaisdell (July 21, 1927 - July 10, 1983) was a science fiction illustrator (The Ant Men, above), a special effects artisan, and an inspired designer of imaginative costumes and props for a series of low-budget horror, monster, and sci-fi films released by American International Pictures and Allied Artists in the 1950s. He was the King of Rubber-Suit Monster Creators, making and often performing inside such creations as The Beast With a Million Eyes, the three-eyed scaly mutant in Roger Corman's The Day the World Ended, The She-Creature, Voodoo Woman, the little saucermen in Invasion of the Saucer Men (with Blaisdell, left), the cave-dwelling Venusian in Corman's It Conquered the World (below, right), the tree creature in From Hell it Came, the flying umbrella thing and other extraterrestrial organisms of Not of This Earth, the horror masks of How to Make a Monster, and - most memorably - the rampaging alien in the spaceship of Edward L. Cahn's It! the Terror From Beyond Space (above), a film which many claim was the inspiration for Ridley Scott's Alien.

You could always recognize a Blaisdell creation. There was something simultaneously comical and disturbing about Blaisdell's monsters, something weirdly familiar that grabbed the viewer's unconscious and wouldn't let go. Something in that odd latex texture. Something in those alien eyes. Even Blaisdell's props - like the tools used by the little saucermen to repair their spaceship - had a distinctive character.

In the 1960s, Blaisdell was a founder of, and occasional contributor to, Fantastic Monsters of the Films, a magazine which rivaled and sometimes surpassed the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine created by Blaisdell's former agent, Forrest J Ackerman. (Almost all the Fantastic Monsters covers were photos of Blaisdell monsters.)

The magazine failed. Blaisdell died prematurely. Had he lived longer, he would have seen himself lionized at horror and sci-fi conventions as the genuine star that he was. Read more about Blaisdell here.

An Atheist's Guide to "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

2009-10-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. –Stevie Wonder

In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their “package” films – barely-feature length vignette collections made on reduced budgets during World War II for theatrical distribution – though the dyad of animated novellas included are improved little by their seemingly haphazard juxtaposition. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, featuring the shorts “The Wind In the Willows” (which in turn inspired quite possibly the most demented dark ride in theme park history) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” has since been rightfully canonized due to its ubiquity in television programming and perennial presence on home video. I remember lucidly the withered VHS sleeves of my family’s first copies (in the 80’s Disney gave each of the shorts its own separate video cartridge and retail price), particularly of “The Wind in the Willows”: I was never enamored of Kenneth Grahame’s bucolic text, but the sight of anthropomorphic rodents and amphibians gulping down foamy pints of ale (a substance with a menacingly alien allure to this youngster) was the stuff of summer daydreams.

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” however, was something different altogether – a half-feverish, half-jokey ode to common sense and harvest culture inspired by Washington Irving’s profoundly sterile folktale. As was, I can only assume, customary in many other early 90’s middle-American households, my parents would include “Sleepy Hollow” in a Halloween night round-up of child-friendly entertainment also including the Our Gang short “Spooky Hooky” and the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia (among other even more benign snippets). It was always the highlight of the evening for me, much more so than the acquisition of candy (I was born, alas, with a gastric aversion to sugar) or the jack-o-lantern carving (I could never stand to dirty my hands with squash entrails) or the stressful role-playing involved in donning costumes. The invocation of spirits, however (and later, as I was to discover, the imbibement of same) always struck me as the real deal, even if it was depicted playfully – as it is in another of my favorite cartoons, the Disney Silly Symphony “Skeleton Dance,” which rather joyously refracts the grim desolation of sepulcher motifs through the giddily kinesthetic mirror of human anatomy. Even odder still is that this fascination has stuck with me through my conversion to anti-transcendentalism, though the two predilections may go hand in hand: Examining the concept of Hell, for example, is not likely to entertain anyone who genuinely believes that their soul is in continual risk of eternal damnation. Those who lack belief are free to wallow in the sinister details.

There’s a historical piquancy to superstition and the occult as well, particularly when one considers how pervasive such belief systems were fairly recently (and admittedly, still are, in certain parts of the world), even in the United States. Hawthorne, for example, claimed to have been haunted by the ghoulish “heritage” of American ignorance – particularly the crescendo it reached in Salem, Massachusetts. And the diabolically educational elements of “spook” culture form a significant part of the success of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Set in colonial New York – in a landscape awash with vibrant, autumnal hues that adeptly suggest the richening of more subtle, vernal colors – the film is as much a caricature of its milieu as any other cartoon period piece, but it effectively and accurately depicts our childish expectations of Dutch-settled New England in an artfully grotesque manner (think Longfellow, who reads easier as transcribed archetype than as poetry). And delightfully mucking up the pastoral painting feel are big band songs from Bing Crosby, which seem to have stepped in from another era entirely to rape the proceedings with marvelously complex 6th chords, and the vividly exaggerated characters – Ichabod Crane himself, with a beaky nose, lanky stature and voluminous appetite quite befitting an itinerant, small town pedagogue (rendered with an impeccable mix of sympathy and ridicule by animator Ollie Johnston); the beefy, tanned-skinned sexual bully Brom Bones with his Davy Crockett-esque coonskin cap; and the ruddy, complacently plump farm baron Balthus Van Tassel, whose daughter Ichabod woos (to Brom Bones' intense chagrin) with sensitive, epicene gusto for the first half of the running time.

As with most Disney productions, all the sex has been expertly drained from the relationships. Ichabod’s interest in Katrina Van Tassel is predominantly financial and comically gustatory (the teacher trolls around town absent-mindedly for a great deal of the short, evading trouble in a Mr. Magoo-ish fashion while managing to schlep every piece of available food in sight), and despite Katrina’s formidable bust and petticoat-laden coquettishness we can’t even imagine Brom Bones nailing her: She’s more china doll than woman, and probably the film’s least interest aspect. Most of the other females, meanwhile, are inflicted with garish imperfections to accentuate Katrina’s putatively ideal form: Ichabod gives singing lessons to an illustrious trio with a potbelly, bulbous nose and curiously asymmetrical face between them. But while these visual gags are an insincere departure from the source material (and a distracting one, especially when the headless horseman arrives and the animators ameliorate his intimidating features with a buffoonish barrage of slapstick), the asexuality isn’t, necessarily – Irving treats the inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow as colonial entrepreneurs as much as narrative cast-members, and it’s not until after Ichabod visits the Von Tassel mansion in the text that his heart flutters uncontrollably. Disney explicitly depicts the metaphorical fields of gold from the paragraph below in Ichabod’s fantasies:

“[A]s he rolled his great green eyes over the fat meadow-lands, the rich fields of wheat, of rye, of buckwheat, and Indian corn, and the orchards burthened with ruddy fruit, which surrounded the warm tenement of Van Tassel, his heart yearned after the damsel who was to inherit these domains, and his imagination expanded with the idea, how they might be readily turned into cash, and the money invested in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness. Nay, his busy fancy already realized his hopes, and presented to him the blooming Katrina, with a whole family of children…”

It’s intriguing how Ichabod’s mental path swerves directly from real estate to progeny without any intimacy as linkage (and it’s equally funny how in the preceding, unquoted paragraph, his dreams all involve the gourmet cooking of livestock, described with the only language in the entire novella that could be considered sensual). How distant is this, though, from the impotent family values in most Disney films, promoting the nobility of contributing to American industry while saving time for wholesome domesticity? Still, reinforcing the benign ideals of family life are not quite the same as aspiring to predatorily insert one’s self into a handsomely wealthy lineage (near to the American dream as it may be), and it’s seemingly for this reckless desire that Irving “punishes” Ichabod with the Headless Horseman in the original story. It’s implied that Katrina bursts Ichabod’s bubble of grandeur at the harvest shin-dig and, having violated the delicate balance of the Crane-Bones-Van Tassel love triangle with a direct proposal, he’s sent away penniless, only to have his sorrow fed upon by a decapitated rider.

This is the most notable alteration in the animated adaptation – while we view Ichabod’s ignoble intentions with a laugh (it occurs to me that they’re even less respectable than simple lust would be), the connection between his desire for Katrina and his run-in with the horseman is not sturdy enough for us to assume a causal relationship. Instead, Disney intervenes with a characteristic dash of old world Gnosticism that wildly improves both the story and its spiritual significance: Ichabod Crane’s gullibility. It’s ham-handedly introduced – before Brom Bones sings the “Headless Horseman” number Bing Crosby’s narratiahon simply tells us that Ichabod believes in ghosts without any foreshadowing before it whatsoever, and it’s one of those odd, tell-tale seams in classic animation that reveal the handprints of multiple script writers and drafts (not to mention, very likely, the influence of coffee-and-cigarette fueled arguments about proper narrative direction). But in a way we relish being heaved down Disney’s rabbit hole so brusquely, because what follows not only enchants all the preceding content in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” – it also includes eight of the most accomplished minutes in animation history.

The “Headless Horseman” musical number is a dense pocket of Disney brilliance, a collaborative effort aligning the inimitable talents of several men while maintaining an impeccable cohesion: We never lose sight of the fact that we’re listening to Brom Bones – outlined with incandescent yellow from the furnace behind him – attempting to scare Ichabod Crane out of Sleepy Hollow so he can wed and bed Katrina himself. Wolfgang Reitherman lent his sense of spatial fluidity while Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston and Ward Kimball allow a wealth of dissonant emotions to populate Van Tassel’s living room (Katrina’s amusement, Ichabod’s mounting trepidation). Likewise, the diversity of visual and aural influences littered about the screen and soundtrack is staggering: The scene encompasses Dixieland, Boris Karloff, Albrecht Durer, bandstand jazz, Edgar Allen Poe (or, more accurately, wood carved illustrations of his tales), and John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (below), just to name a few. The result is a story within a story (Brom Bones “elucidates” the tale of the Headless Horseman) depicted with horrifically makeshift illustrations (Brom rides a wooden chair towards Ichabod casting ominous shadows, a startled cat shrieks and darts into a hollow pumpkin, a window flies open letting in the grave solemnity of the dimming woods, and so forth). The effect is such that despite the distancing nature of the stylized animation we feel very close to the action – the scene is directed half at Ichabod and half at “the camera,” assuming Ichabod’s isolated, “alien” POV in relation to the remainder of the community who offer vocal accompaniment to Bones’ tune – and it’s though we’re imagining these images while being read to, and Disney’s animators are simply splashing them onto cels as they soar from our brains.

The balladic nature of the song (it actually resembles the corrido form structurally, concentrating on a single character’s history and attributes instead of detailing a coherent narrative), written by Don Rage and Gene De Paul and sung in Bing Crosby’s campily inappropriate, genteel baritone, allows for another important change to the driving motivations of “Sleepy Hollow”. In the original text it’s not entirely clear what the Headless Horseman wants, aside from corporeal revenge for his present state, and in the legend itself the horseman is described as carrying his severed head like talisman wherever he goes. In the cartoon, however, the need for violence is rooted in more practical matters. While he does indeed still “[hold] his noggin’ in his hand,” the Horseman’s fellow ghouls aren’t all that fond of his appearance. Thus, “With a hip-hip and a clippity-clop / He's out looking for a head to swap / So don't try to figure out a plan / You can't reason with a headless man”. Indeed, Brom suggests that the only logical course of action to take should one encounter the Horseman is to cross the bridge out of Sleepy Hollow – on the other side of which the specter has no power (it appears that, as with most tenets of meticulous transcendental hierarchies, even the undead have their limitations).

The final sequences of “Sleepy Hollow” are laced with tenebrous misunderstanding – after leaving the Von Tassel household, Ichabod’s mind is wiped clean of his connubial aspirations as he rides his mule into an oneiric forest where frogs and ferns seem to lugubriously whisper his name. These scenes are quite funny, but there’s a fierce sense of hopelessness behind them: Ichabod’s trust in misleading empirical data, influenced by the fabulism of rivals, is his undoing, rather than his arrogance or opportunistic intentions. The confrontation between Ichabod and the Headless Horseman should be less gag-laden than it is, but the attention to detail – the fuming nostrils of the Plutonian steed, the Horseman’s lacking of even a neck, and the headlong hurling of the flaming pumpkin through the bridge/vortex at the scene’s close – confirms the reality of the Horseman (at least in Ichabod’s mind) in startlingly subtle ways. The narration indulges in omniscient, free-indirect discourse for the majority of the film (the only primary head we don’t crack is Katrina’s), but the “Headless Horseman” musical number represents an unexpected shift, after which we're lost in the confused corridors of Ichabod’s brain. Until the last few seconds of the film, we are Ichabod, and it’s terrifying; not only because of what Ichabod sees and is victimized by but because of what he believes.

The lyric “You can’t reason with a headless man” turns out to be crucial. While the Horseman has been decapitated, his search for a new head is the most practical goal in the entire picture, as well as the one with the most existential urgency: Until he finds a skull and brain the Headless Horseman isn’t even a legitimate entity, he’s a personified objective. Ichabod, on the other hand, is totally lacking in the “reason” that might help him win Katrina more expediently – he’s not only an easy-to-mock woolgatherer but a believer in spiritualist folly that makes his universe impossibly hazardous (indeed, what the superstitious receive in exchange for sensibility is the comforting promise that arbitrary rituals – such as the spilled salt Ichabod tosses over his shoulder – will protect them). Brom Bones chooses an ironically fitting ghost with which to frighten Ichabod, because the teacher’s occultist vulnerabilities prove that he, too, is headless – far more so than his antagonist, whose pragmatism, subdued eroticism and mercantilist economic outlook (there’s a finite number of perfect heads out there, right?) make him the model American citizen. Ichabod is, by comparison, a eunuch – a stork-like man pecking his way through the trials and troubles of life.

While Irving’s Ichabod Crane embodies a firmer moral, one steeped in a classically frontier-American sense of chivalric propriety, Disney’s Ichabod propounds a far more useful (and a far more modern) message – the relevance of which extends far beyond love triangles encircling the lustless courtship of old money. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a cautionary tale of belief, of the dangers of faith that hinders our success, and it’s likely the only one of its kind to be found in the slush of mainstream family animation. But wryly grinning at us from every shattered pumpkin and every bale of hay is also a fascinating study of how aesthetically satisfying the pageantry of superstition can be – which, perversely, is the primary contribution “Sleepy Hollow” has made to film culture. In the Tim Burton remake, the veracity of the Horseman’s existence is never in question, and Ichabod is played more as a nebbish techie than a Yankee Doodle-ish ladies man with a formidable Achilles heel. Most viewers remember, above all else, the odd appearance of the cartooned schoolteacher, and his knee-knocking fear, and yet what enables the ride of the Headless Horseman in the first place is an irrational trust in fiction – in fiction once tendentiously treated as fact. If only the transition from the fact of today to the fiction were tomorrow were smoother, we might not all feel so headless, galloping through dark, snowy woods with miles to go before we sleep.

The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT

2009-10-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

It's massively popular, it's ridiculously mopey, yet it's also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing... in short, it's everything you hate and love about Seattle if you ever tried to move there. TWILIGHT captures the "real" version of the icy self-importance that suffuses the locals, as opposed to the foggy eccentricites of, say, TWIN PEAKS...it celebrates alienation, emotional distance and the ability to suppress darker instincts... and youth oriented product positioning!

I haven't read the TWILIGHT books but that doesn't mean I can't comment on the movie... plus, that Kristen Stewart is a little flannel-wearing hottie with a brain ("Earlier this month, Stewart was made to clarify some comments that she made about fans of the vampire romance, after calling them “f**king psychotic” in an interview.) and I love that her character, Bella, is not humiliated and bullied on her first day of school in a strange new town, or ostracized in the lunchroom, or saddled with a John Hughes-esque geek as her only friend. She's hot in the context of the movie, so every clique in the school is vying for her membership, just as it would be in real life. And I like that she's a legitimately weird, dark character.. boys are important, but sulky poetry and drawings in her notebook are as well.

Then there's the Ed Cullen, I mean Robert Pattinson. Well, who cares? He's a dreamboat who wears white pancake make-up like a pro and can brood well and I dig that Bella keeps her virginity and it's all a big mopey deal. Like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER without Buffy, or Zoe Bell's stuntwork, or laughs, or good writing. But at least the scenery matches the clothes! And Robert Pattinson is better at being ANGEL than David Boreanz. God, I couldn't stand Boreanz, no offense to the man, it was mainly the hair and the poseur quality. Pattinson walks a thin rope over the pit of adolescent pretentious/narcissism (which most of the WB network falls into) and never slips. TWILIGHT works because it pays barely any attention to the tropes expected by the slavering fanboys. It's a chick flick in a very real sense of the word... all it's missing, really, are more horses. Are there horses in it? I can't remember. Hell, our dopey hero only drinks day old animal blood instead of humans, the vampire equivalent of a promise ring.

Also, more than the homey shire or Hogwart's or Sunnydale, TWILIGHT's locale manages to be both fantastical and actually real-- a genuine geographic destination, one soothing in its misty purple mountain majesty - the Pacific Northwest. In this sense TWILIGHT is like the scene when Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak wander through the redwoods in VERTIGO, stretched to three hours and what the hell is wrong with that? Everything of course, if you consider VERTIGO to be a terribly overrated bore. (I don't, but I used to).

So why does TWILIGHT draw the simmering hate from the bad boy blogosphere? Is it a reminder that we're all not Robert Pattinson or 13 year old girls? And why is an old reprobate like me netflixing it and getting drawn into the swoony virgin pining of it? Because I recently noticed that if a young cute innocent girl can learn to enjoy movies clearly meant for boys and men (war, gore, superheroes, Japanese "pink" movies, bimbo-thons, etc.) then we older men should at least try and do the same for teenage chick flick vamp movies. Plus, I follow the Carol Clover model of the "viewer" as beyond the dualities of age and gender and am on speaking terms with my inner 16-year old girl). Why am I even justifying this to you? My GOD! Kristen Stewart is so cute.

TWILIGHT it must be remembered, has nothing to do with "real" high school or "real" horror films - it's a fantasia of maturity deferment; a snapshot of how pregnant with dangerous, giddy possibility the world seems before one gets their first "bite" - it's permanently frozen at the moment of rapture right before the disillusionment of the first sexual experience with a guy who promises you the world, then splits. The idea of an ageless vampire here becomes an excuse for the eternal virgin pre-pubescence; an eternity dwelling at the edge of the cliff that all your friends are now beginning to dive off of (and looking kind of busted when they resurface, if they ever do).

Aren't movies primarily vehicles for escape? In the case of TWILIGHT, what the girl demographic is escaping from is their own wooden stake penetration, the pink dawn of the mighty crowing cock. Who can blame them? I remember my revulsion at seeing hairy 1970s nudist magazines being circulated in elementary school. Could people really be doing these things with their... potty holes? It seemed unsanitary, violent and most of all, painfully humiliating.

What eased the fear (for me) of maturing into such a dirty werewolf? Pamela Sue Martin as TV's NANCY DREW, Kate Jackson in CHARLIE'S ANGELS... TV, in short, the promise of an eternity of hand-holding and chaste confessions of love and adoration, as opposed to a humiliating orifice merger. Perhaps the TWILIGHT haters are undersexed, and if so, why? Self-sabotage? Unrealistic expectations? Could it be that the answer is right there in Kristen Stewart's dazzling pout? It's when you're ultra-hot that virginity carries currency, the electric buzz of tantric orgasm. For the rest of us, not gettin' any becomes a great excuse to never face the dread of our own desires. When you actually do finally get some, all sorts of bad shit happens: STDs, pregnancy, evil Angel, and worst of all... disappointment.

But haters needn't worry. The immense popularity of the series all but automatically ensures it wont last. The bigger the rise the faster the plummet once the demographic grows up and into college. But the lovers needn't worry either; if we survive past 2030, there's bound to be a wave of nostalgia--TWILIGHT-mania--with a few thousand stalwart troupers still rolling out for the semi-annual convention. Comics, souvenir programmes, and probably Pattinson--toothless and hungover--in a booth with a stack of glossies and a magic marker, endless ways for now mature fans to turn their ordinary money into autumnal reverie.

Disney Imagery in Citizen Kane

2009-10-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) released by the same studio, RKO, only four years later: the gothic castle at night with its one glowing window ...

... the outstretched hand dropping the apple (or, in Kane's case, a snow globe) to show the passage from life to death (or, in Snow White's case, a death-like state from which she will eventually be awakened).

The purpose of this gothic faerie tale imagery in the prologue of Citizen Kane is to establish Kane as a figure of myth and legend, like an ogre or an archetypal fairie tale king. What's most remarkable is not Welles' usage of this fairie tale imagery, but the sudden transition from the *mythic* imagery of the prologue to the hard documentary *reality* (almost cinema verite in some shots) of "News on the March." This abrupt and dissonant clash in styles was virtually unprecedented in film at the time Kane was made (Had Welles been reading Joyce's Ulysses?) and serves to warn the viewer that henceforth the character of Kane will be viewed simultaneously through two lenses, the lens of myth and the lens of reality. In fact, as the film progresses, we will see Kane through several other clashing points of view. Style in Kane equals content, the style of the film telling us that no man or event can be understood through only one way of seeing.

The Surreal World of Slavko Vorkapich

2009-10-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian–born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly about editing – the right and wrong ways to cut two shots together, the “kinesthetic” (physical) effects that could be produced in the viewer through montage.

As a filmmaker, Vorkapich co-directed with Robert Florey the experimental short film The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928, above), and he was the leading creator of montage sequences for studios like RKO and MGM during Hollywood’s “Classic Era.” He was Chairman of the USC Department of Cinema from 1949 through 1951, a mentor to future Gumby-animator, Art Clokey. He continued to lecture on film until his death in the mid-‘70s.

But beneath the respectable veneer of an Apollonian film theorist lurked the soul of a Dionysian surrealist.

Consider the evidence:

Crime Without Passion (Ben Hecht, 1934)

Vorkapich’s opening montage is by far the most striking part of Hecht’s adultery melodrama. Notwithstanding the various editing tricks employed (and there are some good ones), the most memorable aspect of Vorkapich’s montage is its crazed surrealist imagery, the screeching Harpy animas emerging from drops of blood to enflame the passions of The City.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victor Fleming, 1941)

Who but Vorkapich could have conceived this montage that accompanies the chemically-induced transformation of kindly Dr. Jekyll into murderous Mr. Hyde? Spencer Tracy as Dr. Jekyll cracks a phallic whip over a chariot driven by two galloping horses, one dark, one light. The horses turn into his leading ladies, brunette Ingrid Bergman and blonde Lana Turner (previously seen as water lilies). MADNESS! MADNESS!!

The Mask (Julian Roffman, 1961)

Where, previously, Vorkapich’s montage sequences had been icing on someone else’s narrative cake, in The Mask (Canada's first horror film), Vorkapich’s anaglyphic 3-D hallucination sequences ARE the cake, the reason why people pay to see this film in the first place. The film’s narrative sequences are strictly set-up. A psychologist played by Paul Stevens acquires an ancient Aztec mask. He hears a commanding voice, “Put the mask on now!” (which also cues the audience to put their 3-D glasses on), he obeys the command, and then the real fun (Vorkapich’s hallucination sequences) begins. Removing the mask, the psychologist finds a dead body in the room, someone he must have murdered during his fugue state. Like a drug addict, he vows never to repeat the experience, but of course his vow is soon broken …

The thing to notice here is that Vorkapich has abandoned editing tricks almost entirely in favor of pure archetypal dream imagery. The psychologist’s dream-double gropes his way - like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - through a world of cobwebs and mist and trees with organs that breathe. Stalactites hang like giant insect legs. A blonde mask-wearing anima beckons, but hooded figures with clawed, flame-shooting hands intervene and carry the helpless girl to an altar of sacrifice.

The Mask, including 3-D glasses, can be obtained through the usual on-line sources. Wondering how to celebrate Halloween? PUT THE MASK ON NOW!!

Let the wild rumpus start! Ghidorah Lives!

2009-10-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

In the most recent edition of BLFJ (65), I wrote about the (inter)relationship that's developed between novels, films, and their screenplay binding agent. As such, I was rather interested to read about Dave Eggers' The Wild Things: a novelization of a movie adapted from a book.

Typical of such things, there's even an overlooked screenplay-shadow lurking behind this hodgepodge narrative mass ... somewhere, the filmscript always a literary and narrative Other.

Beyond reinforcing my thesis that the great narrative genre of the twenty-first century is three-headed, the Sendak-Jonze-Eggers Ghidorah further illustrates that we're living in a new aesthetic age fueled by the adaptation imperative, wherein almost every genre finds itself involved in an on-going, partner-swapping, swing-dance session that shows no signs of abating.

If anything, it's intensifying.

Thank God Linda Hutcheon gave us a roadmap!

Eggers discusses his novel and the experience of working with Spike Jonze on the 15 October edition of NPR's "All Things Considered."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK ARNOLD (October 14, 1916 – March 17, 1992)

2009-10-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

If director Jack Arnold were alive today, he would be 93. A former stage actor and also a writer who occasionally co-authored his screenplays, Arnold was an underrated master of genre (science fiction, horror, westerns, film noir) and of film form, the only filmmaker to have directed four features in the 3-D format. His best-remembered movies include It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957 - his masterpiece), High School Confidential (1958), The Space Children (1958), and The Mouse That Roared (1959). To celebrate his birthday, and in the spirit of Catherine Grant’s great Film Studies for Free website, Bright Lights After Dark offers the following collection of links relating to director Arnold and his work.

Allan Gray – Thoughts on ‘No Name on the Bullet’

Arbogast - Unusual Histories (Tarantula)

C. Jerry Kutner – Welcome to the Modern World: Program Notes for a Michelangelo Antonioni-Jack Arnold Film Festival

C. Jerry Kutner – 3-D Noir: Thank You, Mickey Spillane!

David Cairns – “All the Same I Feel Sorry for the Creature” (Creature From the Black Lagoon)

David Cairns – ET Go Home (It Came From Outer Space)

David Cairns – Lost in Space (The Glass Web)

Ed Howard - Jack Arnold Double Feature: Tarantula/Monster on the Campus

Ed Howard – The Monolith Monsters

Gary Tooze – The Incredible Shrinking Man DVD Review

Gary Tooze – Tarantula! DVD Review

John Brosnan - Jack Arnold: A History of Horror

Mark McGee & Susan Frank – Interview: Classic Sci-Fi Film Director Jack Arnold

SPECIAL BONUS for readers lucky enough to possess their own anaglyphic (red/green) 3-D glasses - a clip from It Came From Outer Space (1953) that shows Arnold's feeling for the otherness of landscape and why I consider him the first American master of three-dimensional mise-en-scène. (Via David Cairns.)

The Marienbad Music Video

2009-10-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

So many music videos and television commercials have ripped off the imagery of Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad since its 1961 release that it makes perfect sense for someone to have created a music video consisting entirely of shots from the original film. The Asian singing voice reminds us of the affinities between Resnais's work and the work of Chinese director, Wong Kar-Wai (2046).

Set my Polack free!

2009-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

An apt cinematic analogy of the Polanski brouhaha can be found in Charles Laughton's NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, namely the hyper-reactive old salt of the general store, Mrs. Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden). First she practically forces Robert Mitchum's homicidal preacher on poor Shelley Winters, taking his collar and phony rap at face value, endangering and traumatizing Shelley and her children. Then when she finds she's been hoodwinked she immediately starts screaming for a vigilante hanging, further traumatizing the children. Thus our friend Icey is a great representation of the American Justice & Media system and its power to fuck up nearly everything it touches by over-reacting, fear-mongering and four day-old fish peddling. If the media is Icey than it's Icey when she's not only on her high horse, but drunk as a skunk as well, fighting and apologizing with puppy dog tears and repetitive, maudlin blubbering. Just go to bed! we yell at it. But it's not leaving until the bottle is empty, all our money's gone, and all the houselights are broken... and maybe some of our bones.

Few of the pro-Polanski critics have been drawing the Mrs. Spoons in the country quite like Huffington Post journalist Kim Morgan, who received a barrage of seething hate mail for posting an older piece of hers on REPULSION, titled "Polanski Knows Women. Therein she posits something the rabble never like to hear, that women, and that means girls too, are complex and just as screwed-up sexually as men:

Deneuve makes one feel the confusion of a corrupted child: She is an arrested adolescent who, like an anorexic, cannot face her womanliness without visions of perverse opulence and violence. Carol is the personification of sexual mystery -- she is what lurks beneath the orgasms of pleasure and pain. What Polanski finds intriguing and revolting is perceptively female, making Repulsion a woman's picture more than women may want to know, or care to face.

She responded to the ensuing barrage on her own Sunset Gun by reprinting the article and some of the comments with her responses:

Well if I get a prize, I'll hand a gold statue to The Post News blogger who wrote a bizarre, creepy take on my piece: "Kim Morgan claims she’s setting aside her arguments for the right to rape children, and instead does some film criticism of Repulsion in an effort to suggest that Polanski can’t be a rapist, because he understands women , and their dark desires -- hint, hint, his 13-year-old victim was asking for it when she cried and said no and begged to go home. Polanski knows women better than they know themselves, she says. He knows, apparently, that 13-year-olds are dying to be raped, even if they continue to say no after the fact by pressing charges... Morgan’s insinuation that rape is some secret desire of women everywhere, and especially of junior high school girls."

I'm not sure how to respond to this this Andrea Dworkin-style foaming of the mouth, other than, I'm happy that she actually dug into my piece this deeply and at least saw some of the dual desires of women. Or, rather, what she views what I see. Even if she erroneously believes I'm saying Polanski can't be a rapist, because he understands women. And even if she thinks I'm a sick fuck.

The hostility towards Morgan's admittedly provocative piece becomes even more telling when when one takes into account that it originally came out a long time ago. Why wasn't anyone lashing out and accusing her of championing rape then? Polanski was still a rapist; is it one's proximity to the top story headline that increases guilt? Now that the Times mentions it, why yes, thank you, I would like a pitchfork and a torch.

All you have to do is go over to the Huffington Post link and see her L.A. cute blonde picture alongside the words "Film and culture writer" and you've already got a lot of different people angry, unless she's writing sob sister "I'm just a girl" recycled PR-puffery, which she certainly isn't and god bless her. This country is all about opposing fundamentalist Muslim-style restrictions on women, but if you're blond and young and attractive, don't you dare be smarter, gutsier and better informed than the patriarchal learning curve allows. Marilyn Monroe had to practically hide the fact she knew how to read.

I've written many times over the years now in defense of Kim Morgan's right to be hot blond right to be radical (picture at left), mainly because I 100% agree with her and am inspired by how she has more balls than most male writers put together, not to mention she looks a bit like Catherine Deneuve in REPULSION and if that character had a blog, maybe she wouldn't have hallucinated hands coming out of the walls. Morgan makes no excuses for her insane edge-of-the-cliff-peering-over fascination with sexual pain and feminine risk-taking and danger, the black widow mirror of the dark unconscious ocean where sex and death dissolve into one salty morass, the cthonic!

Originally championed in the feminist scene by Camille Paglia, the cthonic could have and should have been the shit if academia wasn't so anemic and afraid of genuinely progressive change. This sort of change can only occur on the personal level--through fearless self-examination, mortality-facing and maybe therapy, rather than through staid academic lip service by a bunch of people so desperate to cling to their titles and meager shred of power that they break into a sweat when a truly dangerous female arrives on the scene. Perhaps the clinging of the old guard has made it automatic to judge with suspicion anyone who doesn't have black hair, wear glasses, smoke a pipe and/or wear tweed. The conspicuous "fun" of the blond is intimidating mainly because we feel so much pressure to be un-intimidated by it.

Kim's crimes against the phallus are less forgivable to the public order, for example, than those of someone more androgynous, like Camille Paglia or older and off the hotness grid like, say, Jane Campion or Agnes Varda. Kim's "crimes" of youth and beauty daring to overstep its proscribed bounds, are similar to those of Asia Argento, who's recently won a kind of begrudging respect, but who originally got trashed by critics and the public for brave and crazy SCARLET DIVA and THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS. Nothing brings up a feeling of powerless faster than sexual desire which is kind of what all these media-initiated lynchings are all about -- the repressed southern MANDINGO fantasy leading to lynchings in the south, the repressed infantile sexuality of America leading to our current round of Disney-packaged-princess-run-amok ACE IN THE HOLE cave-in survivors, like Lindsay Lohan or the Olsen Twins, slowly starving and dying in the public eye while we pruriently slaver over the latest indiscretions.

Polanski and his victim have moved on, but America can't let go; we're greedy. We can't let go of anything, let alone a lurid sex scandal involving a minor... we're stuck at the anal stage and have been for 100 years and the French are laughing at us. In America, you still can't be a great artist or writer and a freak at the same time, at least not if you get caught. Luckily, like Frankie Pentangeles in GODFATHER 2, there is an honorable out: die and all is forgiven; those who were about to burn down Neverland turn around and start buying up collector's plates and genuine imitation silver gloves dabbed in your blood. Now they can worship you without worry.

Best of all the ironies in this story: Polanski's beautiful wife Sharon was murdered by members of the Manson family as we know, back in 1969, and if he's sentenced and convicted, Polanski and Manson will maybe be cellmates! Maybe Polanski will tattoo a Star of David on his forehead and then have a showdown with the swastika-tattooed Manson in the prison cafeteria... can you see the awesome tracking shot, with the tray-eye view of Polanski heading toward's Manson's table? Maybe Polanksi will cut off Manson's nose, CHINATOWN-style, with a shiv, thus closing at least three metatextual narrative circles in one fell slash... Now that would be some overdue justice!

I can imagine poor Polanski's trial out in old Los Angeles, news vans setting up shop for the long haul outside the courtroom, spreading into years; the OJ souvenir peddlers back with new T-shirt. In the end, the accuser in the Polanski crime doesn't want to have to go through this all, so the trial is already sleazy and Ken Starrish: it aint about what some little girl now grown into a woman wants, and never was. She's still gonna get it, over and over and over again, til she starts getting into it, until she signs a book deal, or until she herself flees the country just to get away from the drooling, throbbing American Tool of Justice. And of all the haters and screamer-outers, on either side of the divide, or even those, like me, who judge the judgers and (hopefully) realize we're just as guilty but can't stop the music, maybe someday we'll all learn forgiveness, to tend our own gardens, and pray for absolution and stronger connection to the universal force of love, to see beyond the "ooh you're gonna get punished" attitude of so much petty morality, to endeavor to be more like Lillian Gish's stalwart mother to her stray "little ones" (above) in the final third of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, or Bill Murray on his last day of Buddhist hell in GROUNDHOG DAY, and maybe once we do that then we wont be tortured at night by unclean thoughts of what someone somewhere is doing... to a child. It won't work the other way around. You got to forgive and love everyone, Jesus-style, otherwise you're just pissing in the wind, Mrs. Icey Spoon America! Forgive me or you'll be one hysterically reactionary motherfucker, and I should know! UNCLEAN! WE ARE ALL UNCLEAN!!

The Vertigo-Narcissus Connection

2009-09-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

In celebration of the birthday of director Michael Powell (1905-1990) today, I’d like to share with you this clip from Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 color masterpiece, Black Narcissus, a story of spirituality, sexuality, and madness set in the exotic Himalayas. Note in particular the many similarities to the climax of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo made almost a dozen years later - the moving camera P.O.V. shots, the nuns, the chapel, the vertiginous wooden staircase, the church bell that dominates the composition of the last few frames, and the suspense created when we realize that one or more of the characters (Powell discoveries Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Byron, below, both playing nuns) is about to fall from a very great height. Earlier in the film, the screen turns red to communicate the Byron character’s encroaching insanity, an effect that foreshadows Marnie.

Hitchcock and Powell were buddies. Powell had been a still photographer working on Hitchcock’s sets in the 1920s. Both were English directors with a taste for Germanic expressionism. In the mid-40s, when Powell was about to make A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), Powell asked Hitchcock if he could recommend an American actress to play the female lead, and Hitchcock suggested Kim Hunter, whom Powell cast.

Folks who complain when other directors, e.g., Brian De Palma, borrow from Hitchcock seem to forget that Hitchcock was one of the biggest borrowers in film history – always, of course, adding his own personal stamp to what he borrowed. Hitchcock borrowed from Welles, Lang, Powell, and many others. They, in turn, borrowed from Hitchcock. As additional evidence of the admiration/envy that Hitch seems to have felt toward Black Narcissus, note that at the end of the ‘40s, when Hitchcock was about to shoot his most ambitious color project to date, Under Capricorn (another melodrama set in an exotic land), he hired Powell’s Black Narcissus cinematographer, Jack Cardiff.

Méliès Magnifique

2009-09-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

The general line on Georges Méliès (1861-1938) is that his films were rooted in the theatrical. He had been a stage magician before he was a filmmaker, so many commentators have viewed his films as mere extensions of his magic act. The Infernal Cauldron made in 1903 (above) helps to dispel this notion. With its lovely color tints carefully applied frame by frame, it owes as much to painting and illustration as it does to stage performance. It not only entertains (like a theater piece) and evokes the viewer’s sense of wonder (like a magic act); it evokes the aesthetic pleasures of the most beautiful illustrations one might stumble across in a 19th Century childrens’ book.

[Tip o' the chapeau to Ross Freedman.]

Thoughts on Antichrist

2009-09-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

I screened Lars Von Trier's new film Antichrist a few nights ago in bed, on my iPod touch (insert slightly guilty shrug), while my wife slept beside me. Throughout most of the running time, but particularly during the first 20 minutes or so, I felt her angrily kicking me in the hip to halt my distracting giggles. For all that has been written about this film so far, and Von Trier's characteristically self-destructing demeanor at Cannes, I feel compelled to point out one thing: Antichrist is undoubtedly a comedy, and one of the funniest I've seen in a long, long while. Much, much funnier than Von Trier's misfire The Boss of it All. If this film was indeed intended as a solution to crippling depression, I can't imagine a better project.

But labels can be problematic. What attributes qualify a film as a "comedy"? I suppose I'm using the term at its loosest, to simply identify a work of narrative art that is intended to provoke laughter. There's the need, however, to also state that this isn't an overt satire -- aside from the masterly opening sequence, a illuminated pointillist gag on jewelery commercials (complete with operatic score) where the two main characters graphically fuck while the product of prior fucking plummets to his icy grave. The film isn't precisely a parody, either (though some have pointed to the mystic gore of Dario Argento as a target), nor is it that most oxymoronic of subgenres, self-aware camp. Antichrist is an experiment in gnostic extremism, both a ravenous comment on and a grimacing departure from earlier Von Trier works (most notably Breaking the Waves, a similarly grim tale of disheveled distaff sacrifice), as well as something of a portrait of endurance. Dreamy, brutal scenarios float by, softly bumping into one another without much thematic connection -- there's a story about a couple coping with the freakish death of their son, but the methods of "making peace" depicted herein are like a snarling "fuck off" to Kübler-Ross. The man, played by Willem Dafoe, attempts to force his vaguely scholar wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg, to confront her self-implicating psychosis, but she slowly begins to embody her fears rather than dismissing, or even succumbing, to them. Dafoe also gets his testicles crushed, his leg drilled, and member stroked to a thick, frothy, crimson orgasm. Get the joke? Maybe you have to have been there...

What makes the film *powerfully* funny, however, is the way that Von Trier cultivates a nebulously creepy tone between the laughter. There's a reverential fear of the natural world pulsing from the film's core (an appropriate topic for a decidedly technological artform) that seems a daring continuation of Von Trier's ob-gyn nightmares from the brilliant miniseries The Kingdom -- stillborn foals, talking foxes and impossibly resilient ravens worm subcutaneous anxieties into us without ever seeming bombastically evil (as with most of the film's milieu there's something a few ticks from normal about them that's off-putting). Von Trier even fashions these dainty natural curiosities as Grimm-like entities. Under Gainsbourg's fever they assume the tripartite "Satanic" avatar of "The Three Beggars": which sounds a bit like unnervingly grotesque characters from a Medieval woodcut print. The guffaws here are more like nervous subterfuge, but rather than using such faint elements of damnation as mere foreshadowing, Von Trier has no qualms about revealing our greatest fears for harmless wildlife; it's our loved ones, under the influence of confusion, that pose the most intense threat, and the impartial horror of ecology moves at its own pace, on a parallel timeline.

Antichrist isn't too likely to win Von Trier new fans -- those who already find him needlessly sadistic and misogynist will find much for their antipathetic dissertations here. But for those of us who have often wondered how a Danish film director could inexplicably have access to our most curiously severe imaginative content, Antichrist is, as with the best of Von Trier's oeuvre, the therapeutic movie of the year. But don't get too excited about playing analysand to Von Trier's bespectacled doctor; he challenges perversions with merciless barbs, and -- in Antichrist especially -- they aren't all for the patient's benefit.

Henry Gibson 1935-2009

2009-09-17T14:24:00.000-07:00

Henry Gibson was not only a gifted comedian (Laugh-In), but a remarkable character actor with at least three great performances to his credit: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and Nashville and, more recently, as big tipper "Thurston Howell" in Magnolia (above) by Altman disciple, P.T. Anderson.

Born as James Bateman, he adopted the name Henry Gibson (according to the L.A. Times obituary) as a tribute to Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. He made his screen debut as a student named "Gibson" in Jerry Lewis's The Nutty Professor.

[Image via Bill Ryan]

Alan Turing, 1912-1954, 2009

2009-09-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

Since we're commemorating dire events today, here's one from queer history worth noting. From today's Guardian website:

Gordon Brown issued an unequivocal apology last night on behalf of the government to Alan Turing, the second world war codebreaker who took his own life 55 years ago after being sentenced to chemical castration for being gay.

Describing Turing's treatment as "horrifying" and "utterly unfair", Brown said the country owed the brilliant mathematician a huge debt. He was proud, he said, to offer an official apology. "We're sorry, you deserved so much better," Brown writes in a statement posted on the No 10 website.

Turing is most famous for his work in helping create the "bombe" that cracked messages enciphered with the German Enigma machines. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 after admitting a sexual relationship with a man.

Below is a review I wrote of Breaking the Code, the 1997 BBC film of Turing's life starring Derek Jacobi. Previously released only on VHS, maybe renewed interest in Turing will get us a DVD.

* * *

Alan Turing was one of those gifted homosexuals all too common in queer history — a brilliant mathematician who did pioneering work on early computers and helped make England safe for heterosexuals by cracking the German "Enigma" code during World War II. In return, this unapologetic "nancy boy," as his shocked mother calls him, was harassed, robbed, arrested, hospitalized, and forced to take estrogen as a condition of being probated rather than jailed. The surprisingly athletic Turing (he held records in marathon running) developed breasts from this bizarre treatment and eventually fell into a depression. His death in 1954 at age 42 is believed to be a suicide, from a strychnine-laced apple, though some think it may have been an experiment gone wrong.

The 1997 film Breaking the Code, the Masterpiece Theatre version of Turing's life, gives equal time to Turing's passionate intellectual curiosity and his pursuit of homosexual pleasure. The film, adapted by Hugh Whitemore from his play (which was based on Andrew Hodges' biography), structures the story around flashbacks and flash-forwards, an apt metaphor for the kind of psychic dissonance Turing must have suffered in trying to be as free in his personal life as in his scientific pursuits at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain.

An early scene (1929) brings together Turing's dueling obsessions in the person of Christopher (Blake Ritson), a handsome, equally science-minded schoolmate who visits his friend for the weekend. Christopher's wide-eyed description of seeing one of Jupiter's moons through his telescope amounts to a verbal caress, which Turing longs to return. "I wish we could live here together, just you and I . . . wouldn't that be wonderful?" The soundtrack here takes an acceptable liberty, superimposing the endearingly kitschy "Someday My Prince Will Come" from Snow White (actually released eight years later). The poison apple that killed Turing more ominously echoes Snow White.

The film shifts quickly from here to 1952, when an adult Turing (Derek Jacobi) picks up a decidedly less innocent version of his "prince" — an unemployed piece of trade named Ron Miller (Julian Kerridge). Their relationship, clearly economic on Miller's part, triggers Turing's downfall when the prince becomes a thief and an angry Turing turns him into the police, who instead arrest the older man for sodomy.

Between Turing's early schoolboy romance and his downfall at the hands of the British authorities, the film shows fascinating glimpses of his work life. He's inducted into Bletchley Park's coterie of code-breakers, among them Patricia Green (Amanda Root) and head cryptanalyst Knox (Richard Johnson). Green is aware of Turing's homosexuality but falls in love with him anyway. The pragmatic Knox tells Turing he doesn't care personally "if you go to bed with choir boys or cocker spaniels," but urges restraint for the sake of the project — breaking the Germans' heavily coded transmissions.

Turing's dislike of protocol extends to his work. Frustrated by the lack of funding, he appeals directly to Winston Churchill, who orders that Bletchley be supplied with every resource it needs. Turing's success helped end the war, but typically that wasn't enough to save him from Britain's antiquated sodomy laws, which arguably destroyed him.

While Breaking the Code has some of the uncomfortable insularity of its origins as a stage play, it's redeemed by consistently strong performances. True to Masterpiece Theater standards, the film treats Turing's actual love life with "tasteful" discretion – mirroring contemporary views of the homosexual body as something that must be hidden and arguably feeding the same kind of homophobia that was Turing's undoing. Nonetheless, Derek Jacobi makes the character's passions come alive in spite of the absence of who he really was, sexually speaking.

Quotation of the Day - La Belle Captive

2009-09-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

La Belle Captive (1983) is an erotic noir mystery by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad. It is also quite tongue-in-cheek. The following three images which appear in succession in the film capture something of the movie’s fetishistic flavor.

If the last shot reminds you of the orgy sequence in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, that’s appropriate because, like Eyes Wide Shut, Marienbad, and several of the films of David Lynch (Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire), La Belle Captive is a dream film. Don’t look too hard for significance. As in the best dream films, the story and images seem to flow directly and unmediated from the filmmaker’s subconscious to you.

The film was photographed by Henri Alekan, a master of dream cinema, who also shot Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, and who would later shoot Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. The film’s soundtrack alternates Wagner with accordion tangos - just like Buñuel and Dalí's Un Chien Andalou.

THE STORY - Walter (Daniel Mesguich) is a secret agent of some kind who takes his orders from a black-leather-clad brunette who rides through the film on a motorcycle like the Princess of Death in Cocteau’s Orpheus. One night in a disco, Walter meets a beautiful long-legged blonde (Philadelphia-born Gabrielle Lazure, above) who refuses to give him her name or telephone number. Driving home from the disco, he encounters the same blonde, lying bloodied and handcuffed in the middle of a country road, apparently the victim of an accident. He takes her to the nearest house, a mansion of course, where the Eyes Wide Shut-type guests appear to be expecting her. After a wild night of surreal, quasi-vampiric love-making, Walter wakes up alone in a ruin. Was the girl a ghost or some other type of supernatural anima? As in Vertigo, Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, Jess Franco’s Venus in Furs, and so many other films of this kind, the protagonist spends the rest of the film searching for her. Meanwhile, the police suspect him of murder.

STRUCTURE - At one point, the film cuts to a shot of Walter unconscious in a laboratory, hooked up to various recording devices while observed by two "scientists" who had previously appeared in the film in other roles. "Aha," we say, "this confirms everything we have seen up to now as the protagonist’s dream." And then he wakes up in another location, and we realize the shot of the scientists was a dream-within-the-dream.

THE QUOTATION - Walter visits an expert on the supernatural. He asks the expert if it was possible the girl he met might have been - you know - dead? "Oh certainly," says the expert - who also happens to be the girl’s father, "Most of the people you see in the street are dead. That’s why it’s so crowded everywhere."

The original inglorious bastard

2009-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

In the midst of this blogospheric firestorm revolving around Inglourious Basterds, one relatively mild concession we can all make is that, for one reason or another, the movie (like all of Tarantino's work) certainly inspires people to watch other movies. One old favorite I found myself attracted to after seeing it was The Dirty Dozen, which, despite the confident comparisons made by dozens of reviewers I've read, barely resembles Inglourious Basterds at all. Perhaps the difference can best be summed up as the difference between Lee Marvin and Brad Pitt, the two films' biggest American stars.

By pure coincidence, the day I re-watched The Dirty Dozen was the 22nd anniversary of Marvin's death. To me, Marvin has always been one of the most utterly masculine movie stars to ever grace the screen. He had the face of a Great Dane who's been kicked around by an abusive owner, with a rusty, dragging voice. When he smiled - which wasn't often - he invariably looked devious. Even when he was young, he looked old, and even when he was clean-shaven, he seemed to have the aura of a beard about his face, commanding attention and respect. Yet he was charming, powerful, and - yes - sexy.

Pretty boys like Pitt simply disappear into the scenery when they share the screen with such a dynamo (the exception being the magnificent Burt Lancaster, who was, to use a horrible cliche, far more than just a pretty face). Marvin supposedly couldn't stand the scene in The Dirty Dozen where he purposely provokes Clint Walker's character, Posey, into attacking him with a bayonet, only to wrest it out of his hands and knock Walker flat on his ass. It was too phoney, Marvin said, and, had it been another man in the scene with Walker instead of him, he would have been right. Walker was quite possibly the manliest-looking actor in Hollywood, then or now, but Marvin makes him look like a school yard pansy.

It's something of a small miracle that someone like Lee Marvin was allowed to become a fully fledged movie star in an industry that rarely allows people with his ugly mug, bad attitude, and general sourness from ever rising above the level of "that guy" character actor. The only other movie star I can think of in the same vein is Humphrey Bogart, but he at least had the benefit of playing, for the most part, romantic leads. Marvin was too tough for romance, too cool, and too tough for Hollywood - which is, no doubt, why America loved him so much.

Now, the near-masterpiece of a crime thriller Point Blank has been remade into a limp Mel Gibson vehicle, and Spielberg's pseudo-epic Saving Private Ryan has far eclipsed any exposure that The Big Red One ever had. Film students, having taken their prescribed dosage of John Ford with The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Grapes of Wrath, move on with their curricula without every looking at The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Hell in the Pacific is all but forgotten. Worse yet, in a sad twist of irony, many young people of my generation were first exposed to Lee Marvin through a line of dialogue in Reservoir Dogs.

What is it about this sign that disturbs you, Marnie?

2009-08-29T20:54:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing to me that some fellow Jews who were so indignant about Sophie’s Choice (by which I mean the Styron novel — arguably his best — and not the hollow Pakula movie) can give Tarantino a free ride on this one, presumably under the theory that this boy should be allowed to enjoy every last drop of his all-American fun, even at the expense of real-life Holocaust victims. As far as I’m concerned, whatever Tarantino’s actual or imagined politics might be, he’s become the cinematic equivalent of Sarah Palin, death-panel fantasies and all" -- J. Rosenbaum

Few writers these days bother to think things through when they get fired up on the web, which is why it's always better to wait to post until one's had time to cool down. For example, I deleted the first five paragraphs of this post after being up half the night ranting away. Certain things make me see red, and one of them is phrases like "even at the expense of real-life Holocaust victims." Just how, Mr. Rosenbaum, is a movie like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS at the "expense" of holocaust victims, unless of course you mean the Weinsteins? And what the hell is a death-panel fantasy? I probably have one myself, somewhere...Freud says I do anyway, and he's Jewish so musk know. And what does Rosenbaum mean by "giving Tarantino a free ride"? Is it up to Jewish critical consensus to set the fare? And does that mean one must be Jewish to write a Jewish character? Does it really, as Woody Guthrie once sang, take a worried man to sing a worried song? I'm worried now, but I wont be worried long.

I bring up the film MARNIE in relation to this big brouhaha and the above poster, because I know certain signifiers bring up painful memories in people, regardless of connection or conceptional intent. In Hitchcock's film, Marnie (Tippi Hedren) freaks out over the color red, which Connery then uses to try and get to the root of her hysteria via all his crotch pocket Freud. I'd vote that this is the movie to compare BASTERDS too, not SCHINDLER'S LIST, because in the latter film, Spielberg uses red only once, to show a single girl's coat (left)as she's led to her death, a powerful statement in the Stanley Kramer tradition. QT on the other hand, uses red like Connery in MARNIE, like a finger in a wound, poking, poking! Hithcock's obsessions were understood by him and all synchronized to his cinema, while Spielberg is unconscious of his own desires and how they manifest in icky ways. I can imagine Freud looming over Spielberg on the couch, the way Mark looms over Marnie: "So...What's your fetishistic obsession with burying children in outhouses and crushed cars, getting them drunk and touching them with glowing fingers? Do you understand, Mr. Spielberg, that somewhere a child is being beaten AT ZIS VERY MOMENT?!"

Being aware of things that predispose unconscious bias is the mark of a good writer Imagine Marnie as a NY Times film critic, being assigned a film like DEEP RED, for example, or hating any movie she sees in a red velvet theater like the Ziegfeld. But if Marnie realizes that Sean Connery is deliberately using red for the sole purpose of getting to the root of her hysteria, then what was once automated toreador commie flag waving for the American bull becomes therapeutic, or at the very least, modernist.

Let's not forget that the USA is hardly a "clean" country when it comes to genocide. What makes us able to adopt moral postures is that when we were shipping Native Americans in packed cattle cars down to camps in the southern swamps to die en masse of starvation and fever, there were no AP news photographers, no UN observers and no CNN. No pictures = no guilt. No REAL guilt as in, let's give Manhattan back to the Native Americans with our apologies and all move out into a well-lit refugee camp to do penance. Basically, the USA is one of the few empires that "did genocide right," as in all the way through to the end, with no horrific documentary footage of the slaughter to be played at trials, and the victim race being a people who do not breed well in captivity.

I think of WAG THE DOG here in the idea of "one picture of one bomb dropping through an air-shaft, America bought that war." America will buy anything if it has a good image or key phrase that triggers our "this time it's personal" response. Ultimately this is what Quentin is addressing in his film: the way wars are fought and won by images, propaganda, troop gossip, the hearts and minds of those at home watching newsreels. What was it that got so many usually well-spoken Jewish Americans ready to nuke Palestine on 9/11? Just a picture of Arab kids on a street corner cheering. One picture and America bought that war.

The worry that we will somehow "forget" about the holocaust if we dare even compare it for a moment to a media event stems from a misunderstanding of how powerful film is in our unconscious. The footage shot in the liberated camps during the fall of the Reich is what ensures the Holocaust happened and will continue to have happened. Failing to understand this will also make INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS wearing on the nerves, and will make Spielberg's artificial sweeteners feel like a nice cozy escape womb.

But it is just those nerves which need to be worn so ruthlessly. The mission of the artist is not to flatter bourgeoisie "intelligence" but to find the spot they don't want to be poked and then poke there until they scream and threaten to take your grant away. This is what art should be, a ripping open of a wound festering from repression, a wound created by NOT talking about the elephant in the room, a denial of the need to talk racist or act sexist, or issue threats, or humiliations, or commit the heinous act of smoking in the office, which is why MAD MEN is such a breath of fresh air, so to speak. Though I am sure there is a Rosenbaum somewhere, who is worried that kids are going to watch that show and start harassing their secretaries again like it's all good fun.

Rather than as a war film, BASTERDS should be met as a meditation on artifice, cinema and power. The main scenes people don't like in the film generally revolve around women: the protracted tavern scene with the movie star fending off drunken Germans playing a drinking game, the projectionist dealing with the amorous German movie star; these are the uncomfortable, long scenes and the point is that real life under occupation involves ALWAYS living this way, there is no cathartic respite, no "now we're safe" moment. It's so easy to reduce years of trauma to a few signifyin' sound bytes in a cushioned place like NYC, where terrorist bombs aren't a BIG problem anymore. When our big buildings fall, it's the catastrophe of the century and we demand answers and that heads roll and that all the nations gather around and mourn with us at how unfair the world is. When we explode buildings in your country, on the other hand, it's just "collateral damage" and you have no right to get snooty.

We weren't prepared for Quentin's sensitivity to the constant annoyances endured by attractive women saddled with unwanted male attention, being forced into positions where you can't say no by uniformed conquerors. We'd have been prepared for this film if it said it was by Neil La Bute or David Mamet, because BASTERDS is just as much about sexism as it is about antisemitism; to paraphrase an old Nirvana song, it's Francis Farmer having her revenge on Seattle. It is a movie that makes you uncomfortable and frustrated on purpose and, like the Coen's best work, the mise en scene indicates the absence of a "perfect" narrator and becomes a kind of self-reflexive surrealist poetry. Tarantino even includes a small clip from Hitchcock's SABOTAGE (left) to let you know he's intentionally trashing proper catharsis, intentionally doing what Hitchcock regretted more than any other directorial decision in his career, blowing up the boy on the bus.

How Tarantino earns his stripes is via the upsetting the enthroned patriarchal "liberal"-- how dare some film geek expose our lack of familiarity with the origins and meanings of the medium which we profess to be experts on!?!?! The only competition Tarantino has in his use of silent movie psychology, pre-pre-code old testament vengeance and amniotic incestuousness, is Guy Maddin and Lars Von Trier, so it's interesting the ANTICHRIST is so linked with BASTERDS as far as knee-jerk hatred in the current press zeitgeist. The old guard critics are too busy manning the canon to realize their complicity in the banality of cinema as it exists today, how they are responsible for the the way "art" films bend and kowtow to the limited range of the bourgeoisie, banning all mentions of emperors and new clothes. Knowing as they do almost nothing about early cinema (silent movies are BORING, yo!) the average critic of today seems to have forgotten that the social mores they take as a given were fobbed onto them by a raving anti-semite named Joe Breen. When Tarantino or Von Trier come at them with ideas from the old testament of cinema, the bourgeoisie get indignant. Ultimately BASTERDS is the best film about Old Testament vengeance since DOGVILLE. If you don't like to see Jews with guns, don't go to the movies, or Israel for that matter, where hot chicks in fatigues and machine guns aboundeth!

Akin to patriotism, indignant moral outrage is the last refuge of a scoundrel, someone desperate to hide their true scared, shattered, splintered self behind a false persona of "completeness." For example, IRREVERSIBLE. If you saw the film and now have traumatic associations with seeing Monica Belucci from behind in a red stairwell (above), then your opinion on all future movies with red stairwells and Monica Belluci together in them is suspect, unless, of course you are aware of this traumatic association and account for it in your writing. If you've ever been to therapy you know that if the therapist makes you mad, whatever they said is probably the truth, therefore, by extension, if a film causes riots and outrage, it's probably telling the truth. Freud, for example, got really mad when Jung tried to expand on the unconscious' role beyond Freud's view of it as a kind basement storage for repressed memories and desires. So the man who once braved a booing, jeering audience to deliver the controversial theory of infantile sexuality, boos and jeers the next guy's theory. Similarly, Rosenbaum once a champion of free expression, gets really mad when Tarantino dares tamper with the boilerplate saga of "his" people. There's no "except" in freedom of speech, man, even if you talk about Jews in WW2. When we say, "we humans" as writers, are we supposed to exclude Jews (if we're not Jewish)? Velcome to zee slipperiest slope of zem all!

Anima & Animus - Revenge of the Giant Face

2009-08-28T18:18:00.001-07:00

The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino has created is some kind of movie.

Unless you have been living in the proverbial cave - and I don't mean Plato's - you should know by now that Basterds is not, nor was it ever meant to be, an accurate historical representation of World War II. (Much less, the Holocaust!) It is a mythologization of history. Nothing new about that. Entire movie genres have been based on the mythologization of history - notably, the Western. Wars have been mythologized since the days of Homer. (See Troy, loosely based on Homer's The Iliad, and co-starring two of Inglorious Basterd's leading performers, Diane Kruger - as the mythic Helen of Troy - and Brad Pitt. And yes, they are both remarkably better in Tarantino's film.) The title of Inglourious Basterds' Chapter 1, "Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France," tells the audience exactly what kind of film they are going to see.

I wanted to talk about what is probably the film's most memorable image, the ghostly black and white close-up of Mélanie Laurent as the French-Jewish heroine, Shosanna, projected amidst the smoke and flames of the film's climactic chapter, "Revenge of the Giant Face."

It invokes - consciously, no doubt - two of the most memorable anima and animus images in cinema: Brigitte Helm as the robotic "False Maria" (top) at the moment she is finally engulfed by flames in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), and Frank Morgan as "The Great and Powerful Oz" (bottom) terrifying Dorothy and her friends in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Oz's giant face is also, as it happens, a projected image, a creation of smoke and mirrors.

An anima or animus is another kind of projection. Whether god, goddess, vampire, witch, mermaid, faery, beast, devil, golem, or other paranormal entity, our animi give form to aspects of the human psyche that are larger than life, transcendent, the stuff of legend.

Or the stuff of story. Shosanna does not enter Inglourious Basterds' story as an anima. She doesn't become a true anima until the story's final chapter, either at the moment she puts on the makeup and red dress of an avenging angel (scored to Bowie & Moroder's "Putting Out the Fire With Gasoline" from Paul Schrader's Cat People, another story about animi), or later, when she is "reborn" as the Oz-like Giant Face.

The moment is comparable to those moments in Greek myth when a hero or heroine dies and is reborn as a constellation, something eternal. In Kill Bill, Tarantino aimed at the mythic level (invoking it, for example, in the "Superman speech"). In Inglorious Basterds, even more than Kill Bill, I think he achieves it.

Since everyone else seems to be talking about it...

2009-08-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

...and I mean *everybody*...

Jonathan Rosenbaum posted a rather damning blog entry on his website regarding QT's "IB" that was subsequently picked up and scoffed at by a smattering of online critics. Rosenbaum responded to the hubbub over his equating "IB" with Holocaust denial in a postscript, reprinted here:

Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I’ll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. (He was speaking about Pasolini’s "Salo," but I think one can also say that anything that makes Nazism unreal is wrong.) For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp as a historical reality. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention — by which I mean a reality derived only from other movies — it loses its historical reality.

First, let me address another issue, namely that Rosenbaum has also challenged the blogosphere to cogently argue in Tarantino's defense -- what, precisely, is this film contributing to our culture? Does the director have mature assertions to make regarding WWII, or Jewish identity, or the "Final Solution"? Does it even have much to say about film?

My sense is that the answers to all three questions respectively are "nothing," "no," and "no". The first two should be obvious enough, with Tarantino's trash-fixation; for all the intellectualizing about "wish" or "fantasy" fulfillment the movie can hardly be viewed as historical scholarship in any sense of the phrase (not that it aspires to, and not that this should be considered a shortcoming). The last rejection is likely to incite debate, but too often Tarantino seems to be alluding and emulating without care or purpose; his enthusiasm for arcane genre is inspiring, but what of this leaks into his directorial voice feels like the irritating echolalia of a kid who just saw "La Jetée" or "Duck, You Sucker" for the first time and won't shut up about it (the opening credit sequence to "Jackie Brown" with its eye-rollingly smug "Graduate" visual quote comes to mind). If only the retro-Universal logo at the start of "IB" signified something beyond a callow desire to mimic such arbitrary and facile ornamentation (he doesn't just want to make a film *inspired* by Spaghetti Westerns or Kung Fu...he wants to force his audience into a masturbatory time machine so he can participate in these modes quite literally, even as he mashes up disparate genres with filmic ADD).

But, that's not what we're here to discuss. Can the film be justly called "Holocaust denial"? Insofar as Rosenbaum qualifies the term to describe an object that wedges a distance of understanding between the viewer and the event, I would have to admit that yes, it can and does. The question that remains, however, is whether or not this precludes the film's candidacy for success or excellency or aesthetic merit, as Rosenbaum suggests.

The notion of filmic -- or perhaps better put, narrative -- morality is a difficult one to discuss, even more so today where it seems as though the most widely praised filmmakers are cynics, inventing microcosms that suggest more hope for the nefarious (or at least ethically ambiguous) than for the innocent or steadfastly compassionate, which have come to be depicted as sharply naive. We've gone beyond simply cheering the bad guy in his tainted struggle, knowing that he'd either get his or be redeemed in the end. The casting of the chief antagonist of "Chinatown" turned out to be remarkably prescient, as it's now the director/writer who's often the "villain," being cheered on for his/her sadism without -- and this is a key departure -- any notable repercussions in the text of the film (how can there be?). This has also been followed by, to my thinking, a shift in film criticism, away from discussion of characters and themes and more to aesthetic subtexts and subtle relationships between form and content; it's not that we're no longer talking about what films seem to be saying, it's simply that they seem to be speaking to us in tongues half the time.

The point being, can a film be "wrong," to use Barthes' terminology -- morally unjustifiable -- and still be a good movie? My elementary argument in this late hour would be something along the lines of "why not?". And I'm not referring to the easy divide between a film's visceral detail and its "story" (ie, the way that a depicted killing can be ethically dubious but rendered beautifully through mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc), but rather to the difference between the nature of expression (cinematic eloquence, perhaps?) and the nature of what is being expressed. This is a much more complex dichotomy to read into "IB," particularly because even if read as Holocaust revisionism it seems to be cutting corners in all sorts of places -- it only achieves truly mind-bending bowdlerization in the fiery finale, content instead to use the threat of Holocaust throughout as a tension-increasing agent (and it is used, I must say, remarkably -- Tarantino had my attention, at least, for the entire duration of his flick).

Those who are dismissing and/or embracing this as a propaganda film akin to Riefenstahl's are on the right track. The ending is a grand set-piece of wish-fulfillment, to be sure, but not for Jews -- for young cinephiles who not only wish that actual wars could resolve themselves climactically like the conflicts in pictures, but films about actual wars as well. When I exited the theater after seeing "IB," my first reaction was directed squarely at the denouement: Hadn't Tarantino just re-organized WWII the way that the Revolutionary War and the 100 Years War have been in the past, inventing a kind of tall tale? Is gunning down Hitler in a burning theater any more a sin than conjuring a fraudulent romance between Pocahontas and John Smith (I'm looking at you, Terence Malick!)? The answer depends, of course, on whether or not we have a social commitment to uphold the veracity of certain events above others (we do), and whether or not that responsibility implicates artists (I'm not so sure that it does, though clichés like "dramatic license" are sticking in my throat).

Tarantino's meta-stance may occlude a few less-perspicacious detractors, because he can always claim he's revising Holocaust literature rather than the real thing, and the film itself illustrates this protectively (it's a grand, day-old stew of tropes and simulacrums). But ultimately the tenor of the movie's reception is reliant on an audience's thirst for disengagement -- which is why some critics and bloggers are claiming that older viewers just "aren't getting it". You've got to be hip to not only what Tarantino does but also ne'er-do-well's like Lars Von Trier (he also gets a thrashing on Rosenbaum's blog, by the way), whose films are often so unnecessarily menacing and discomfiting they seem like endurance tests. I've written about the so-called "point" of "Dogville" before -- it has something to say about primitive psychology and the need for feudal protection, I think -- but even if my interpretation were deemed valid and somewhat authoritative I'm not sure I'd agree with it as functional commentary. And yet the film is disturbingly poetic, and probably one of only a few masterpieces from the 00s. Why?

Because, like "IB" (not a masterpiece, but still very good), it epitomizes what (at least some) people who are in-tune to the culture of today expect to reap from it; not the seeds of change any more, or any comforting observations about cosmic equilibrium, but masochistic mirror-manifestations of the self-referential and tangential nightmares we've become (to be slightly alarmist). One gets the distinct impression that Von Trier (certainly) and Tarantino (maybe) are mocking us from the projection booth ("Young Americans"?), making the on-screen explorations of their barbed idolatry even more potent. We don't even write books or make films about events or socio-political concepts anymore; in spite of their protean content, they're mostly about other, older books and films (or in the case of "Dogville," experimental Teutonic dramas). What's even more disturbing is that books about books and films about films -- even as they tackle their true subjects ever-so-superficially -- are often intensely satisfying and emotionally resonant.

I often doubt my generation's ability to properly fathom crises like the Holocaust -- but Tarantino seems to be saying that we don't really have to. Wasn't the Holocaust just a movie, anyway? An excruciatingly palpable, mass-murdering movie?