Soiled Sinema

Manhunter

2021-03-15T02:24:00.002-07:00

I would be lying if I did not confess that, despite my lifelong interest in true crime and dark subjects in general, I oftentimes get an instantaneous sense of guttural disgust every time I hear about films that—whether intentionally or unintentionally—superficially depict and/or glorify serial killers like David Fincher’s SE7EN (1995) and most of the Hannibal Lecter franchise flicks, so it comes as somewhat of a slightly dark irony that Manhunter (1986) directed by Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, Heat) is, at least in some ways, one of my favorite films of all-time, but, then again, I love it more because of its style and mise-en-scène than its savage subject matter. Indeed, while I also have some nostalgic affection for Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—the second and certainly most popular cinematic adaptation of Thomas Harris’ ‘Hannibal the Cannibal’ novels—Mann’s inordinately corpse cold yet cool and visually mystifying movie is certainly the one I find myself coming back to most often as a serial killer flick that manages to be more stylistically slick than it is thematically sick as if directed by a super sophisticated extraterrestrial with a detached perspective of Lustmord and human emotions and behavior in general. Once described favorably by a reviewer from the Financial Times as, “If Dostoevsky had been hired to script an episode of MIAMI VICE,” the film was actually (but, somehow, unsurprisingly) a commercial bomb that achieved more successful in Europe than the United States and would not achieve the cult status it has today until years of cable TV syndication and various home video releases and of course the great commercial and critical success of The Silence of the Lambs.

Originally filmed under the same name as Harris’ source novel Red Dragon (1981), Manhunter was, to the chagrin of auteur Mann, rechristened at the behest of Dino De Laurentiis as the (in)famous Italian producer did not want the film to be confused with Michael Cimino’s shockingly underrated and rather racially based box office bomb Year of the Dragon (1985). Needless to say, the title of the film is not the only thing that De Laurentiis defiled as the same producer, who previously reedited both John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian (1982) and David Lynch’s Dune (1984), also had Mann's movie cut for time yet luckily the standard cut is arguably more immaculate than the director’s cut (which is less than ten minutes longer) as it flows better and has a more otherworldly alien vibe due to missing various exposition scenes. Apparently heavily visually influenced by the ‘high style’ of great production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who was behind such great works as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) and Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), around the time he started Miami Vice (1984-1990), Mann had certainly yet to develop his signature aesthetic when he directed his first (made-for-TV) movie The Jericho Mile (1979), but his first two theatrical releases Thief (1981) and The Keep (1983) unequivocally demonstrate a singular visual worthy of an old master that feels like a sort of Kubrick-meets-Friedkin neo-expressionist chic (incidentally, according to Friedkin biographer Nat Segaloff, Mann originally wanted the fellow Chicago Jewish filmmaker to play Hannibal).

While the novels of source writer Thomas Harris are clearly based on real-life serial killers to the point of gross cliché, Manhunter is completely contra John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) when it comes to aesthetic refinement. Indeed, as Mann once stated himself in regard to his special school of serial killer filmmaking, “I get bored if I treat the events realistically. I’d rather try to conceptualize them. The torments of the human mind included. I think that I express the fantasies in an expressionist way, which always brings me to the fantastic.” For example, instead of depicting the serial killer’s more aberrant ritualistic/fetishistic behavior like ejaculating at the site of his less than festive family slaughters and placing glass in women’s vaginas like in Harris’ source novel, Mann's morosely mad Francis Dollarhyde has a super chic new wave bachelor pad where he blasts Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” while attempting to blow bullets into the boys-in-blue during the film’s semi-surreal climax. Additionally, whereas The Silence of the Lambs—a film that is, somewhat ironically, undoubtedly Demme’s most critically and commercially success work yet arguably intentionally least overtly ‘Demme-esque’—is a coldly clinical yet surprisingly ‘light’ serial killer flick that feels like it could have been directed by its serial killer ‘antihero’ Hannibal (after all, he is the true hero of the film), Mann’s movie is marvelously Mann-esque in the best sense as a singularly stylish cinematic work where, unlike the auteur’s previous unfortunately uneven gothic-horror-holocaust hybrid The Keep (1983), the auteur seamlessly assimilates his style to its source novel (though Harris apparently does not feel the same and apparently only had positive things to say about Scottish actor Brian Cox's performance as Hannibal). While it might be fair to describe Manhunter as virtual audiovisual porn for hopelessly 1980s nostalgic aesthetes, it is also one highly memorable movie that, arguably quite unlike the arguably contrived, cold, and calculated The Silence of the Lambs, rewards the viewer on subsequent viewings. In short, Manhunter is, contrary to bien pensant film dorks and lamestream film critics alike, the most idiosyncratic and masterful of the ‘Hannibal Lecter’ (or, in this case, Hannibal Lecktor) films and it is also, somewhat ironically, the least faithful to its source novel (not surprisingly, Hannibal Rising (2007) is the only film that Harris penned the screenplay for and it is indubitably the worst film in the uniquely uneven franchise), not to mention the fact that it does not even feature Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins (who seemed to want to blot out fellow Brit Brian Cox’s Hannibal from cinema history when he cynically opted to appear in zio-hack Brett Ratner’s patently pointless 2002 ‘remake’ Red Dragon).

I have to confess that is was probably Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and its inclusion of songs like “Alone” by Colin Newman and “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus (which was later covered in a Buffalo Bill-esque fashion by the Tollund Men) that sparked my initial interest in goth, deathrock, and darkwave music. and thus I see it as a sort of early formative film in my life as a cinephiliac aesthete but I also simply cannot deny that Manhunter—a film with its own similarly crucial and potent (yet sometimes admittedly goofy) soundtrack—is, for me, the stronger, more immaculate, and idiosyncratically aesthetically satisfying film in almost every single way. Also, Mann’s movie does not have the unintentionally campy cartoon antics of Anthony Hopkins to throw one out of the film. Indeed, while he might not be much more than a creepy cipher, I have to confess that I am more of a Buffalo Bill bro than a Lecter lover (Of course, the same could be more or less said for Cox’s Lecktor and Francis ‘The Tooth Fairy’ Dollarhyde, though Cox never becomes cartoonish). Whereas Demme’s film is a slick adaptation of Harris’ novel that features just enough artistic flourishes and ‘pop pathos’ to make it memorable and satisfying enough to be a highly re-watchable classic, Manhunter is a film that is, not unlike like Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining (1980), an exemplary example of an auteur totally transcending the source material and creating something great in spite of its obscenely overrated source writer. In short, Manhunter feels like a stand-alone film and certainly not the forgotten first film of an increasingly sociopathic and sleazy film-cum-TV franchise that, at least in thematic and aesthetic terms, seems rather ironically committed to spiritual cannibalism. Still fresh after forty years (whereas Rat(ner)’s remake is hopelessly and painfully typical of the 2000s in every single way, including its absurd casting of perennially hokey human dildo Ed Norton as Will Graham), Mann’s movie might as well be the creation of an extraterrestrial entity as it has a look and feel the screams uncanny utopia despite technically diving deep into dark hearts and demented delirium. Indeed, somehow Manhunter manages to put scenic oceanic sunsets on the same aesthetic, and in turn, emotional, plane as serial killer bachelor pads without seeming too schlocky or silly and this is exactly one of the reasons the film is so great.

While certainly a rare film where the style almost creates the substance, Manhunter still has an interesting storyline that touches on some aberrantly compelling themes. Indeed, the story of an (ex)FBI profiler named Will Graham (William Petersen) who reluctantly gets back in the game to catch a super sick family-slaughtering serial killer simply known as the ‘The Tooth Fairy’ (Tom Noonan) and, even more reluctantly, seeks the professional criminal profiling advice of another serial killer by the name of Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) who was responsible for causing him to abscond to a heavenly Florida beach from his prestigious G-man position due to a mental breakdown caused by a near deadly altercation while apprehending said homicidal Herr Döktor, the film largely successfully manages to juggle both the internal struggles of the protagonist and the killer he is trying to catch whilst wowing the viewer with an aesthetic package that is no less meticulous than a Kubrick flick. As the film's title, which undoubtedly has a dual meaning referencing both protagonist Graham and the Tooth Fairy, certainly indicates, Manhunter is also a film about the soul-draining psychological struggle of the hunt, albeit in a somewhat less obvious way than say the 1932 pre-Code classic The Most Dangerous Game (notably surprisingly, David Fincher would make reference to the film in his uneven Zodiac (2007)). Notably, the film also confirms Georges Bataille's words, “Sacrifice though, while like war a suspension of the commandment not to kill, is the religious act above all others,” albeit it a somewhat sick ironical way where the serial killer's preternatural self-stylized religious views result in pretty much the opposite of his intent. While featuring content that is less sexually subversive (for example, the Tooth Fairy is a virtual necrophile in the book and a “secretor” that, among other things, wedges a piece of glass in a female victim's labia) and an ending that is certainly happier than its source novel, Mann's movie is only superficially normie-friendly, hence its somewhat fitting relegation to the cult realm.

Due to SE7EN and various numerous The Silence of the Lambs-inspired virtual crappy carbon-copy clones and cons like Hebraic hack Jon Amiel’s feministic filmic feces Copycat (1995) and Dominic Sena's conspicously anti-Southern/anti-white trash-masquerading-as-art Kalifornia (1993), the serial killer (sub)genre has largely becomes an all-around artistically bankrupt trend and the singular stylistic majesty of a film like Manhunter in comparison to such frivolous filth really underscores that (a great example of the nadir of the (sub)genre is the Gary Busey vehicle Rough Draft (1998) aka Diary of a Serial Killer). Indeed, I recently watched The Golden Glove (2019) aka Der Goldene Handschuh—a film based on the excremental escapades of Hamburg-based dipsomaniacal serial-whore-killer Fritz Honka—and it is not simply because of its tiresome Turkmite auteur Fatih Akin’s glaringly grotesque anti-kraut angle that the film is so painfully insufferable (after all, Iranian auteur Sohrab Shaheed Salles’ epic morbid whorehouse (anti)melodrama Utopia (1983) is hardly Teutonophile-friendly yet it is a virtual unsung masterpiece of sorts). While The Golden Glove is surely a sick and repulsive film that does not inspire one’s faith in humanity, it is also a rather redundant piece of cinematic rehash that owes absolutely everything to German Lustmord cinema history of the past ranging from Fritz Lang’s M (1931) to Robert Siodmak’s The Devil Strikes at Night (1957) aka Nachts wenn der Teufel kam to Ulli Lommel’s The Tenderness of Wolves (1973) aka Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe to Jörg Buttgereit’s Schramm (1993). Likewise, Austrian one-time auteur Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983)—a film that, among other things, heavily informed Argentinean-French auteur Gaspar Noé’s entire style and practically single-handedly reinvented the serial killer (sub)genre (though few people noticed aside from Noé and Buttgereit)—makes The Golden Glove seem like primitive child’s play by comparison in terms of its seemingly immaculate combination of enterprising technique and viscerally grotesque subject matter, but I digress. Of course, the serial killer subject matter of Manhunter almost feels secondary, if not irrelevant, as the film is an exercise in pure unmitigated style, which becomes apparent when one watches director Mann's previous different genre works like Thief and The Keep.

While The Silence of the Lambs is noted for being a crucial influence on The X-Files (1993–2018), especially before the show turned into a bad (and oftentimes unintentional) joke (incidentally, Tom ‘The Tooth Fairy’ Noonan would also appear as a serial killer in the great fourth season The X-Files episode ‘Paper Hearts,’ albeit of the all the more putrid pederastic sort), few seem to recognize the imperative aesthetic and thematic influence that Manhunter had on the show’s creator Chris Carter’s following series MillenniuM (1996–1999). Described by some as a sort of ‘The Thinking Man’s The X-Files,’ the show is decidedly darker and more esoteric than Carter’s hit extraterrestrial-centered excursion and, not unlike Manhunter, centers on a moody and broody (ex)FBI agent that has a special talent for entering the oftentimes highly hermetic minds of serial killers, though it comes at the hefty metaphysically-draining price of destroying both his mental health and family life (indeed, as Harris describes the character of Will Graham in his novel, “He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers.”). Of course, both Manhunter and William Friedkin’s similarly aesthetically potent and idiosyncratic To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) would lead actor William Petersen to a lifelong career as a fictional cop, most notably (but unfortunately) the almost lethally lame CBS drama series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015). While it is a damn shame that Petersen later opted for such light and lame roles in shit shows that are made to further pacify braindead boomers, he apparently had his reasons, or as he once claimed in regard to symbolically committing character hara-kiri, “After MANHUNTER, I had to actually kill off the character. I cut off most of my hair and dyed it blond. I changed my whole look just to get rid of him.” Aside from television, Manhunter apparently had some influence in the English neofolk scene as Tony Wakeford's main musical outfit Sol Invictius (in collaboration with Evil Twin) sampled dialogue from Brian Cox's Hannibal Lecktor for the epic 15-minute song “A Palace Of Worms.”

Not unlike his fellow working-classic kosher Chicagoan William Friedkin, Mann stands out among the stereotypical Hebraic Hollywood filmmaker in terms of his complete and utter lack of bullshit, sharp yet fair cynicism, and unwavering commitment to certain streetwise truths. For example, Mann’s underrated NBC series Crime Story (1986-1988)—a dark and gritty show that depicts a virtual anti-romance between an destructively obsessive wop cop and his guido gangster ‘other-half’—depicts, among other things, Judaic leftist lawyers, Hebraic hoods and gangsters (notably, Ted ‘Buffalo Bill’ Levine even portrays a proudly koserh thug that literally moonlights as a lounge singer) and the auteur-cum-producer even had the gall to allow Abel Ferrara to direct the show’s feature-length pilot episode. In Manhunter, Mann also cleverly cast Stephen Lang as degenerate tabloid journalist ‘Freddy Lounds’ in a pitch perfect performance worthy of Der Stürmer that totally blows away Philip Seymour Hoffman’s lazy lame duck performance as the same character in rat-boy Ratner’s patently pointless ‘remake’ Red Dragon. Needless to say, it is no small surprise as to why Manhunter received its greatest initial success in Europa where hubristic phoniness is more frowned upon and where the film was described by some as a masterpiece and favorably compared to Dostoevsky at a time when mindless and/or childish big budget blockbusters were vogue and escapism was the norm.

Speaking of Miami Vice, the hit NBC show touched on the theme of the thin line between art and criminality with its excellent fourth season episode ‘Death and the Lady’ where a pretentious art-porn auteur named Milton Glantz virtually anticipates Teutonic artsploitation auteur Marian Dora by making an artsy fartsy pornographic snuff film. Of course, Manhunter’s Francis ‘The Tooth Fairy’ Dollarhyde is an aberrant avant-garde artist of sorts that, as inspired by his warped quasi-spiritual metapolitical influence from William Blake—a genius that Camille Paglia once somewhat rightly described, especially in the context of the film, as, “...the British Sade, as Emily Dickinson is the American Sade”—leaves behind ambitious artistic creations in the form of his grisly crime scenes (notably, Scottish auteur Donald Cammell touched on similar themes in a more overt way with his underrated third and ultimately penultimate film White of the Eye (1987)). Undoubtedly, what makes Manhunter different from all the other Hannibal Lec(k)tor films is that it makes art out of the socially aberrant phenomenon of Lustmord while recognizing the (failed) transcendental potential of Lustmord. Indeed, while the Tooth Fairy believes that, as Hannibal explains, “if one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is,” he is left dead in the end lying on his back with worthless ‘wings’ of blood instead of achieving the beauteously brutal Blakeian Red Dragon of his deep dark dreams. As Mann himself explained himself in regard to the sort of person that degenerates into a serial killer, “…when people are not human anymore, they become bits… of matter.” Had the Tooth Fairy not degenerated into a virtual black void of a man that finds it hard to even maintain a successful romantic relationship with an overly eager blind chick that is completely willing to overlook his social retardation, he might he became an artist worthy of making something in the vein of a great cinematic work like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960)—a film that features a filmmaker ‘antihero’ of sorts that, not unlike Dollarhyde, enjoys shooting footage of his victims—instead of wasting his life on senselessly wasting other people. In fact, I would not be surprised if Mann's films—most of which feature some sorts of criminal antihero—were the direct result of some pathological therapeutic need to express some criminal tendency. Also, I am pretty sure that there are tons of morons out there that consider films like Thief, Manhunter, L.A. Takedown (1989), Heat (1995), Collateral (2004), and Public Enemies (2009) to be more obscene than actual criminal acts.

As has been more than obviously alluded to throughout this review, the serial killer film has become a mostly banal ghetto genre that provides the mindless masses with an appeal to their more base instincts while simultaneously conveniently offering them an alibi for their darkest desires via disgustingly disingenuous pseudo-moralistic sermonizing, hence the importance of a film like Kargl’s Angst where, quite unlike Fincher’s SE7EN—a film that depicts its ‘John Doe’ character portrayed by Kevin Spacey as having virtual godlike powers in terms of keen intelligent and ascetic devotion—the killer is revealed to be not much more sophisticated than a drooling retard in terms of his thoughts and social skills. Undoubtedly, the genius of Manhunter is its equal distribution of aesthetic refinement, entertainment value, and moral integrity as a rather revolutionary serial killer flick that transcends the genre ghetto while somehow simultaneously paying tribute to it. In that sense, Mann’s movie anticipates the first season of True Detective (2014), though it provides you with a completely different aesthetic experience as a film that, despite its dark and dejecting true crime-inspired subject matter, is an absolute narcotizing joy in terms of sheer audiovisual prowess. Indeed, in that sense, Francis Dollarhyde might as well be Mann speaking to the filmgoer in regard to Manhunter when he defiantly declares: “It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: Tremble.”

Indeed, while that might sound like it is plagued with puffery, I dare anyone else to name another film where the filmmaker somehow gets away with depicting a superlatively sexually dysfunctional and atypically autistic creep as the sort of Beau Brummell of serial killers. Additionally, Mann's movie certainly passes Paglia's test in terms of genre as demonstrated by her words, “Gothic horror must be moderated by Apollonian discipline, or it turns into gross buffoonery. The run-of-the-mill horror film is anti-aesthetic and anti-idealizing. Its theme is sparagmos, the form-pulverizing energies of Dionysus. Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity—evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship.” Of course, Manhunter is both an expression and cautionary tale about such expressions of atavistic pagan worship where a damaged serial killer dudes self-destructive under the weight of his own increasing Dionysian drunkenness. Admittedly, Mann's movie is similar to most serial killer films (aside from, say, Zodiac) in the sense that it demonstrates that is only a matter of time before a serial killer fucks up. Unfortunately, the same can also be said of Mann's post-Heat career. After all, Manhunter may seem like a rather bleak film for the 1980s as an era that personified feel-good escapism and pie-in-the-sky utopias, but it seems rather uplifting compared to something like his Miami Vice (2006) movie reboot and his dreary Dillinger Gang flick Public Enemies. Undoubtedly, Mann's serial killer film is pure 1980s in the best sort of way as the auteur arguably exemplified the zeitgeist more than any other American filmmaker, so it almost seems like an artistic sin that he would work past the 1990s, let alone well into the 2010s, hence the steady drastic decline of his work.

-Ty E

I Walked with a Zombie

2020-12-03T05:04:00.000-08:00

As the largely pathetically plastic and aesthetically and artistically prosaic history of Hollywood—a virtual dream factory designed for dullards and dictated over by demons and devils—surely demonstrates, the producer-as-auteur is a most putrid prospect that, not surprisingly, reached its peak long ago during the first year of the Second World War with such preposterously plush proto-blockbusters as Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). Needless to say, it is somewhat shocking yet somehow strangely fitting that during WWII a deracinated Judaic producer would be responsible for creating some of the greatest and most pleasantly poetic horror films of all-time. Influencing everything from Curtis Harrington’s delightful debut feature Night Tide (1961) to Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle (1960-1964) to Mike Nichols’ sole unexpected horror effort Wolf (1994), Val Lewton—the introverted nephew of femme fatale Alla Nazimova who was behind the surprisingly artsy fartsy Oscar Wilde adaptation Salomé (1923)—never directed a single feature but to deny him the status of ‘auteur’ would be insulting to a man that produced films that were certainly weirder and more poetical than anything ever directed by James Whale. Indeed, as a producer at RKO Pictures during the 1940s, Lewton actually managed to rival the Teutonic masters of German Expressionism with a cycle of boldly beauteous and hypnotically haunting horror movies that, despite technically being low-budget quickies, brought artistic credibility to a genre that very few took/take seriously. While most of Lewton’s horror films have something to offer, I can state without even the slightest degree of hesitation that I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is easily my favorite of these flavorsome fright flicks. Directed by Jacques Tourneur who helmed the greatest (and earliest) of the Lewton films, including Cat People (1942) and The Leopard Man (1943), and who would also direct the great British horror flick Night of the Demon (1957), Lewton’s pre-Romero zombie flick is probably the single greatest artistic contribution to the flesheater genre and it does not even feature a single instance of flesh-eating. In short, I Walked with a Zombie makes for a great case that George A. Romero may have had a disastrous influence on zombie cinema, but of course that would be missing the point as the film is a piece of cinematic poetry that simply transcends any sort of genre ghetto and is imbued with a sort of warm melancholy and the uniquely uncanny that, not unlike the undead negroes in the film, leaves one in a trance.

While it might just be a mere coincidence, it seems that the most poetic works of horror cinema do not extend much past the 60-minute mark as demonstrated by Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), and Jörg Buttgereit’s Schramm (1993), among various other examples. Of course, I Walked with a Zombie, not unlike Lewton’s other RKO horror films, is no different as a 69-minute feature with a seemingly immaculate flow and pace that begs for frequent re-watchings. In fact, the first time I watched the film, I decided to immediately re-watch it and I felt no less effortlessly enraptured during this second viewing, which is not something I can say about many films, including many of my favorite ones. Clearly made before the zombie film became a ghettoized gallery of the unimaginatively gory and grotesque, the film—unquestionably the greatest collaboration between dual auteurs Lewton and Tourneur—demonstrates that sometimes taking narrative influence from a classic Charlotte Brontë Bildungsroman like Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) can do a horror film good as a hallucinatory cinematic work that takes an almost somnambulistic approach to the art of storytelling. Indeed, a quite literally titled flick less-than-loosely based on the story of the same name featured in American Weekly magazine by roving journalist Inez Wallace, it begins in a flashback form and even disseminates narrative bits in the form of a goofy negro calypso singer who seems almost literally possessed with a need to spread the anti-gospel of a romantically accursed white plantation family. A film that is somewhat in the racially-charged tradition of H.P. Lovecraft in terms of depicting the forsaken status of white European colonial types that made the mistake of colonizing exotic lands and mixing with non-Europeans, the film also wallows in the hopelessly hoodooed status of Faustian man and his sorry state in the postcolonial world. Needless to say, I Walked with a Zombie makes Wes Craven’s particularly plodding The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) seem like an artless exercise in zany xenophilia by comparison. Additionally, even the watchable second season The X-Files episode “Fresh Bones”—a racially confused tribute to the dubious horrors of Haitian Vodou—seems like a feckless fantasy compared to the pure preternatural poetry of Lewton’s classic flick. Admittedly, the film also imbues the viewer with a sense that it makes no sense to fiddle with the old dark things of old dark peoples lest one suffer an indelible sort of spiritual miscegenation.

Although himself a mischling with tiresomely turgid prose, film scholar Chris Fujiwara makes a great point about the film in his text The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur (1998) when he argues that, “To try to synopsize I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is a peculiarly ridiculous task, since the film, more systematically than any other Tourneur film, abolishes narrative verisimilitude,” yet Fujiwara then curiously proceeds to provide a synopsis, but I digress. While Fujiwara tends to puke-out prosaic puffery as is especially apparent in his obscenely banal Otto Preminger biography The World and Its Double (2008), he completely nails it when he states, “One of Tourneur’s most beautiful films, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is a sustained exercise in uncompromising ambiguity. Perfecting the formula that Lewton and Tourneur had developed in CAT PEOPLE, the film carries its predecessor’s elliptical, oblique narrative procedures to astonishing extremes. The dialogue is almost nothing but a commentary on past events, obsessively revisiting itself, finally giving up the struggle to explain and surrendering to a mute acceptance of the inexplicable. We watch the slow, atmospheric, lovingly detailed scenes with delight and fascination, realizing at the end that we have seen nothing but the traces of a conflict decided in advance.”

I have to confess that virtually every single nurse that I have ever personally known was a cold cunt and it comes as no surprise to me that an inordinately large number of female serial killers were members of the profession, but it would be a lie to say that I Walked with a Zombie lead Betsy Connell (Frances Dee)—a white Canadian chick that immediately lets the viewer know via voiceover that she once “walked with a zombie”—is unlikable, though one certainly sometimes questions her borderline cuckquean-like behavior. Although a Canadian nurse, Betsy somehow finds herself relocating to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian where she is hired by the severely cynical Paul Holland (Tom Conway)—a cultivated man that seems to hate everyone and everything, especially in regard to his seemingly accursed family and their dubious legacy—to take care of his wife Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon) who may or may not be a zombie. While Jessica’s status as a member of the living dead is somewhat questionable, her past life as a wanton whore is unquestionable as she was responsible for bringing misery to Paul’s family by starting a lurid extramarital love affair with his hunky half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) who clearly has stronger feelings for the tragic voodoo floozy. Needless to say, Nurse Betsy, who eventually develops curious romantic feelings for Paul, finds herself getting stuck in the middle of the fucked family affair and even gets so desperate in her quest to cure Jessica that she takes her to a voodoo temple called a ‘Houmfort’ with the help of a titular undead colored gentleman named Carrefour (Darby Jones) with big bulging eyes that puts maestro Mantan Moreland to shame in terms of the unnervingly grotesque and racially caricaturely unfortunate. Naturally, Betsy is somewhat shocked when she discovers that Paul and Wesley’s mother Mrs. Rand (who is strangely portrayed by Vincent Price’s wife Edith Barrett in old fart makeup) is not only involved in the voodoo scene, but she also takes credit for turning Jessica into a zombie. Of course, it is hard to hate Mrs. Rand as Jessica is the hot twat harpy that ripped her family apart. While Mrs. Rand only makes her curious confession after a local commissioner opts to launch an official investigation into the living dead dame’s (ostensible?) illness, her son Wesley decisively puts an end to all the madness by killing Jessica—with or without the help of less than divine intervention—and then drowning himself in a darkly dreamy scenario that rather conveniently takes place at very same time a voodoo ritual involving an effigy of Jessica is being carried out by the local voudon negroes. While I Walked with a Zombie does not end on a happy note as potential lovebirds Betsy and Paul do not even start a romance (though such a scenario was rightly excised from the original script), it could not have ended any other way as a film that wallows in the racially apocalyptic legacy of colonialism and, in turn, (proto)multiculturalism. In short, Lovecraft wept.

Undoubtedly Lewton’s greatest director, Tourneur apparently also shared his collaborator’s ‘progressive’ outlook when it came to race as is so delicately depicted not only in I Walked with a Zombie, but also his later films. Indeed, as Tourneur once stated in an interview with Positif in regard to his then-atypical affection for Afro-Americans, “I’ve always refused to caricature blacks. I’ve never or almost never showed them as domestics. I’ve always tried to give them a profession, to have them speak normally without drawing any comic effect. Watch in OUT OF THE PAST the scene in the nightclub where there are only black people, look at the way they’re dressed and filmed, the elegance of the young woman in responding to Mitchum. Several times I’ve been accused of being a ‘n*gger lover’ and for long months I was out of the studios for that reason. It was a sort of gray list.” Undoubtedly, many of the colored characters in Lewton’s/Tourneur’s zombie flick have a sort of rare ‘tragic nobility’ that is thankfully not betrayed by the sort of rabid self-righteous ressentiment and racial hubris that is typical of ostensibly progressive modern-day Hollywood films, especially the sort of black bourgeois pseudo-art horror of Jordan Peele (who has rightly been described as the great Afro-American film critic Armond White as a “race hustler” and “charlatan”). Additionally, whether intentional or not, I Walked with a Zombie manages to make a mockery of spiritually castrated white progressive types, namely in a scene where the character Paul—the wealthy yet accursed descendant of slave traders—declares when describing a statue of Saint Sebastian named Ti-Misery that, “it was once the figurehead of a slave-ship. That’s where our people came from.” Indeed, like the stereotype of the sort of nihilistic self-destructive aristocrat described in Vilfredo Pareto’s classic text The Rise and Fall of Elites: Application of Theoretical Sociology, degenerate rich boy Paul absurdly identifies with people of a completely different race and class over his own kin, but such is the forsaken fate of a fucked fellow from a unfortunate family that made the rather shortsighted mistake of getting rich off of slavery. Needless to say, Paul’s curse is also now that of the entire modern Occidental world.

Notably, in his worthwhile text Val Lewton: the Reality of Terror (1972), Joel E. Siegel, who regards I Walked with a Zombie as the first of Lewton’s two true masterpieces (the other being the delightfully deathly dark The Seventh Victim (1943) directed by Mark Robson) and a work somewhat rightly compared to Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) in terms of its technique and mosaic-like structure, soundly argues, “Lewton’s strongest abilities are, as [James] Agee observed, poetic and cinematic and not literary or romantic. A very free adaptation of JANE EYRE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE is particularly poetic in its equivocal, often inexplicable, interrelationships between characters […] At no time in the film, even at its conclusion, do we have any idea of strong, single motivations determining the action and characters. Lewton cleverly sets up a series of perplexing relationships; the mystery of his complexly driven human characters leads us outward, gradually to accept the film’s supernatural elements without disbelief. The film’s central image, an emblematic crystallization of all this ambiguity, is the figurehead of St Sebastian which came to the island on a slave ship and now stands in the Holland garden. St Sebastian, who exists at the meeting point of paganism and Christianity, is a fit deity for the film, a mixture of the elemental and the tamed, the fleshly and the divine. The figurehead, which at times serves as a quick transition between scenes, is an emblem of the blending of love and hatred, beauty and terror, reason and superstition, at the heart of this complex, remarkable film.” Indeed, aside from being a rare example of a film that does not utilize Saint Sebastian in a hokey homoerotic way à la Paul Schrader’s dreadful Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (2005), I Walked with a Zombie is a rare horror films that manages to be just as effortlessly enigmatic as it is archetypically perennial.

Apparently, Val Lewton’s own loving wife said in regard to the film that is quite arguably her husband’s magnum opus, “I would never go to see a movie called I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE unless somebody dragged me there.” Rather fittingly, the film even opens with the heroine Betsy Connell mocking the title in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, but unfortunately the title at least temporarily acted as a curse of sorts on the ill-fated-filled film, or as Siegel explained, “It is perhaps characteristic of Lewton’s career that this film, one of the rare pieces of pure visual poetry ever to come out of Hollywood, was seen by hardly anybody but the bloodthirsty chiller fans who frequented theaters like the Rialto in New York. Later, through the efforts of critics like James Agee and Manny Farber, readers of magazines like THE NATION and THE NEW REPUBLIC were altered to the very special quality of Lewton’s productions.” Personally, I am still pissed off at myself for not watching the film over a decade ago as I already regard it as easily in my own personal ‘top ten films of all-time’ despite only first seeing it this year. Indeed, while I now generally regard most of the zombie (sub)genre as being about as appetizing as undead excreta, I Walked with a Zombie is a potent reminder as to why I love cinema and spend so much time devouring cinema despite being routinely disappointed by a good portion of it. While I will always have a softspot for fine flesh-eating filmic feces like Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979) aka Zombie, Lewton’s masterpiece is the only zombie film that I can think of that manages to be a virtual perfect poetic meditation on Eros and Thanatos, among other things. Needless to say, the film will probably not exactly excite the sort of genre sociopath that finds themselves effortlessly enraptured by the sight of brutal deaths and cheap sleazy sex. Likewise, the film fails to fulfill any sort of philistine fantasy about frolicsome flesheaters as the (un)dead seem truly (un)dead and hardly the compatriots of rancid Romero retards.

Rather admittedly, I used to feel that filmic voodoo zombies were the height of banality when I was much younger due to my childish reverence for Romero and sustained boredom while watching such would-be-classic as White Zombie and Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, but I Walked with a Zombie has single-handedly shown me the error of my ways. In fact, as far as I am concerned, it is the only zombie film I really need, though I do not plan to completely abandon the horror (sub)genre despite the appearance of such lifeless flicks as Jim Jarmusch’s prosaically pretentious pomo zombie-comedy The Dead Don't Die (2019) where the near-elderly hipster auteur demonstrates with a dumbfounding degree of detachment his lackluster love of Romero flicks and basic bitch genre trivia. Not surprisingly, I Walked with a Zombie has been remade at least twice and, even less surprisingly, neither of these films are quite as good as the original. The first, Casa de Lava (1994) aka Down to Earth directed by Portuguese Pedro Costa, is a virtual postcolonial Tondichtung sans supernatural horror where the zombies are replaced by a comatose Cape Verdean ‘migrant worker’ who is brought back to his decaying and racially (post)apocalyptic volcanic homeland by an attractive young white nurse that tries in vain to live like the natives (and gets fucked by them in process). Unfortunately, the second sequel Tales from the Crypt Presents: Ritual (2002)—a gleefully degenerate and equally dumb exercise in schlocky CGI special effects and shockingly stupid lowbrow racial fetishism directed by some Israeli hack and co-produced by genre directors Richard Donner and Walter Hill that is surely not worthy of the name of the hit HBO horror anthology television series that was quite cynically tacked onto it—is a total insult to the legacy of Lewton’s masterpiece. While it is surely no surprise that a stupid and sleazy remake was made with kosher cash as it is a virtual tradition of the horror genre, the fact that a perplexing European arthouse auteur like Pedro Costa would seek to rework I Walked with a Zombie is certainly strong evidence of the film's perennial artistic potency and integrity.

Although I Walked with a Zombie is unequivocally the best voodoo zombie flick ever made, it was actually not the first. Indeed, aside from the languid yet watchable Lugosi vehicle White Zombie—a pre-Code independent film based on a story by writer, occultist, and purported cannibal William Seabrook—having the distinction of being the first feature-length zombie film, it was followed up by various rather racially-insensitive low-budget voodoo horror flicks, including the zombie-free Fay Wray vehicle Black Moon (1934) directed by Roy William Neill and Ouanga (1936) aka Love Wanga aka Drums of the Jungle directed by George Terwilliger (who also penned the somewhat similarly themed ‘race film’ The Devil's Daughter (1939) directed by Arthur H. Leonard). While naturally also zombie-free due to being a documentary, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954/1993) directed by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren makes for a nice double feature with I Walked with a Zombie. Although not altogether flattering in its depiction of Haitian vodou, accursed auteur Richard Stanley’s doc The White Darkness (2002) does a good job of demystifying both the literal and figurative darkness of the sort of folk culture/religion that is depicted in I Walked with a Zombie. Of course, a love of Lewton’s film does not require an interest in voodoo, zombies, or even horror films. Indeed, just as Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) does not require one to sympathize with petty criminals, Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) does not require one to even be familiar with t8th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, and Lucifer Rising (1971) does not require selling one’s soul to charming charlatan Aleister Crowley, I Walked with a Zombie does not demand one even appreciate horror or zombie films as a work of singular cinematic art that totally transcends its subject matter to provide the viewer with a virtual aesthetic high that maintains its potency on subsequent viewings. In short, the greatest film with a stupid name ever made and a cinematic work that even rivals Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) in terms of the greatest film ever produced by RKO Pictures. In fact, sorry Orson, but I have seen I Walked with a Zombie more times in one month than I have watched Welles’ masterpiece in my entire life and I do not feel the least bit ashamed of that fact. Undoubtedly, unless Gaspar Noé gets the great gall to direct a film inspired by Lothrop Stoddard's classic text The French Revolution in San Domingo (1914), I doubt we will ever see a Caribbean-themed horror that is even vaguely as immaculately idiosyncratic as Lewton's doubly dark masterpiece. Likewise, I doubt we will ever see a new Hollywood filmmaker that even approaches Lewton in terms of artistic integrity and great sensitivity. A rare enigma of a film producer that cared more about his art than money and made b-movies that were inspired by artists ranging from William Hogarth to Arnold Böcklin, Lewton also broke racial stereotypes and revealed a certain deep eternal darkness in Faustian man that is so elegantly expressed in I Walked with a Zombie. Needless to say, Faustian is more or less a member of the undead nowadays.

-Ty E

The Cremator

2020-07-27T04:04:00.002-07:00

Mainly due to its curious inclusion of Austrian actor Paulus Manker portraying the great Viennese Jewish philosopher Otto Weininger—a character he would play on stage and ultimately immortalize by directing and starring in the rarely-seen masterpiece Weiningers Nacht (1990) aka Weininger's Last Night—I recently made the mistake of watching the fiercely flaccid pseudo-metaphysical feminist flick My 20th Century (1989) aka Az én XX. Századom directed by Ildikó Enyedi and felt the need to cleanse my soul with another black-and-white art film from one of the other strangely dejecting (mostly) Slavic areas that used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the last thing I want to see is another holocaust film, I actually decided on the rather grim Czechoslovak New Wave classic The Cremator (1969) aka Spalovač mrtvol directed by Slovak semite Juraj Herz (Morgiana, Habermann) as it is a rare piece of singular tragicomedic shoah cinema that actually manages to be both humorous and aesthetically pleasing in a strangely aberrant-garde sort of fashion. In fact, despite technically being a holocaust film as directed by an authentic Hebraic holocaust survivor, the film is so innately idiosyncratic, abrasively absurd, and surreally schizophrenic that I never felt that I was watching a film that would be endorsed by the ADL or the sort of especially naive idiot that sincerely believes that Schindler’s List (1993) is a serious film about the perils of prejudice and heights of human suffering (or whatever).

Clearly owing a hefty spiritual and aesthetic debt to German Expressionism and some of the more grotesque Teutonic Dada artists like Otto Dix, the film notably stars the popular Czech star Rudolf Hrušínský—an actor that, quite humorously but not surprisingly, was previously best known for lovable comedic roles—who resembles a sort of all-the-more-bulging-eyed (but hardly Hebraic) Peter Lorre. Since Lorre became a symbol for Judaic criminality and depravity due to his iconic performance in mischling master Fritz Lang’s serial killer masterpiece M (1931), which was infamously referenced in Nazi mischling filmmaker's agitprop flick Der Ewige Jude (1940) aka The Eternal Jew, it is certainly strangely fitting that the actor’s Czech doppelganger portrays a naughty Nazi cremator of sorts who murders his part-Jewish family members as it—whether intentional or not—surely symbolizes both the triumph of Judea and the death of the Occident, for such a film would have been completely unthinkable only 25 years before during the Third Reich era. Of course, the film is, quite thankfully, just as anti-commie as it is anti-nazi as the setting is at least partly symbolic of the sort of artistically stifling and all-oppressive Soviet totalitarianism that would dominate shortly after the cinematic work was created as a result of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia (aka ‘Operation Danube’) that effectively destroyed the Czechoslovak New Wave. In fact, despite being selected as the Czechoslovakian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 42nd Academy Awards, the film was banned soon after it was released and would be completely hidden from the world until the collapse of the communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989. And, indeed, The Cremator certainly feels like the sort of singularly subversive film that had been imprisoned in a vault for decades as it manages to be merrily macabre and misanthropic in the sort of audacious alienating fashion that would offend individuals of all political stripes, especially completely humorless authoritarian bureaucrat types that somehow get a hard-on from soulless schlock like socialist realism.

While I would be a liar if I tried to pass myself off as a Czechoslovak New Wave expert of sorts, I think I am familiar enough with the movement to say that, during its all-too-brief existence, it unequivocally produced some of the most preternaturally dark, perturbing, and artistically enterprising films in all of cinema history. Indeed, while kosher Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman is unfortunately the best known filmmaker associated with the movement since he would later go on to direct hit Hollywood films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984), his classic Czech New Wave flicks like Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball (1967) are pretty softcore and less than aesthetically ambitious when compared to the anti-kraut celluloid pagan blood orgy that is František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) or the kaleidoscopic coming-of-age vampirism of Jaromil Jireš’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970). Fans of degenerate ‘food play’ bullshit like wet and messy fetishism, feederism, and nyotaimori can also rejoice in Czech auteuress Věra Chytilová’s classic psychedelic psychodrama Daisies (1966) where a debauched dumb dame duo gets all down and dirty with dick-shaped devourables and cutesy cunt chaos, among other things. With her all-the-more-avant-garde Adam and Eve reworking Fruit of Paradise (1970), Chytilová once again demonstrated a singular talent for finding the most organically beauteous color schemes in the darkness of men’s souls. Of course, considering the strange Teutophobia of Vláčil’s films like Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees (1967), the filmmakers of the Czech New Wave were naturally also interested in the historical subject of the Big H.

Long before the holocaust became a jadedly Judeocentric cinema subject of the cliché-ridden and unwittingly cynical sort, Czech enfant terrible Jan Němec bombarded the world with his exceedingly esoteric and exquisitely elliptical debut feature Diamonds of the Night (1964), which makes Schindler’s List seem like a retarded Richard Donner action movie by comparison in terms of artistic and emotional complexity. And, to go back to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, it is like a vampire flick as directed by the lovechild Sergei Parajanov and a Völkisch auteur à la Ewiger Wald (1936), albeit shamelessly surreally Slavonic. As for The Cremator—undoubtedly Juraj Herz’s greatest film and a cinematic work that the director himself has described as having total artistic control of—it is arguably the greatest, most idiosyncratically immaculate, and unforgettable film associated with the Czech New Wave and somehow it rather abstractly, aberrantly, and, arguably, aloofly, meditates on the shoah. Thankfully, the film also has a masterful musical score by Czech maestro Zdeněk Liška who of course created music for great films by great directors like Jan Švankmajer, František Vláčil, and Věra Chytilová, among countless others.

The Cremator was not the first hit Czech holocaust film of its era as director Juraj Herz, who was self-taught, actually worked as a second-unit director on two shoah cinematic showcases, including Zbyněk Brynych’s Transport from Paradise (1962) and Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ Academy Award-winning The Shop on Main Street (1965)—a film that seems pretty tame and banal by today's sensational shoah standards—before going solo with the non-shoah short The Junk Shop (1965). Like Kadár and quite unlike Spielberg, Herz was also actually a holocaust survivor that spent his childhood in Ravensbrück concentration camp and, according to film programmer Irena Kovarova, he apparently developed certain perverse interests in regard to sex and death as a result of what he personally witnessed there (or as she so calmly states in a featurette included with The Criterion Collection blu-ray release of The Cremator, “he came from the camps knowing way too much about sex and way too much about death”), which is quite apparent in his film as it is a stylishly sleazy cinematic work that seems to say more about its curious creator than the nasty Nazi numbskulls it so devilishly depicts. Of course, belated NYC cineaste Amos Vogel—a Vienna-born Jew with certain obvious ethnic/political biases—tries to spin it a different way in his classic text Film as a Subversive Art (1974) where he argues that is, “A provocative attempt to penetrate the origins of sado-sexual Nazi mentality is made in this oppressive, strongly expressionist film about an inhibited petty bourgeois family-man whose work with corpses at the local crematorium – to free them for the after-life – gains unexpected proportions during the Nazi occupation […] Editing and camerawork is strongly influenced by the new cinema in the West. Equally surprising for the puritanical East is its clear, yet entirely ‘hidden’ portrayal of fellatio, with the girl under a table and the man sitting behind it: at the end, she merges, wiping her mouth.” Indeed, probably not realizing Herz is a fellow chosenite, Vogel highlights supposed Nazi perversity while unwittingly exposing his own perversion and spiritual contempt for Slavic folk. When it comes down to it, The Cremator is really the freewheeling artistic expression of a damaged and debauched holocaust survivor who, as a Eastern European Jew, is a quite worthy heir of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz (who of course influenced the Brothers Quay who were also heavily influenced by Herz’s friend and collaborator Jan Švankmajer).

If any film manages to reconcile the grotesque expressionist poetry of Gottfried Benn with the disturbingly degenerate caricatures of the poet’s ideological nemesis George Grosz, it is indubitably The Cremator which, rather fittingly, oftentimes feels like a tribute to virtually all forms of pre-Nazi Entartete Kunst. If Italian-Jewish criminologist was right when he argued in his text Man of Genius (1889) that artistic genius was oftentimes a form of hereditary insanity, Herz’s films certainly support that thesis as they are clearly not the product of a sound mind but a debauched dude whose potent aesthetic vision is only rivaled by his clear affection for the fantastically rancid and risqué and it is next to impossible to separate the two in a frolicsomely fucked film like The Cremator where social conformity becomes a symbol of moral corrosion despite the film itself being a gleeful expression of moral corrosion where morbidity is made merry yet the everyday and bourgeois is somehow supposed to be the sickest thing of all. In its horror-ish depiction of the mental decline of an enterprising bourgeois family man, the film can certainly be compared to works ranging from Arturo Ripstein’s The Castle of Purity (1973) aka El castillo de la pureza to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), but Herz’s magnum opus is ultimately a singular flick that really has no contemporaries. While it is easy to describe it as an anti-nazi/anti-bourgeois critique straight from the blackened heart of a renegade holocaust survivor, I think it is also a film that resonates with fellow Jew Gustav Mahler’s words, “In my works can be found my whole existence, my whole view of life. . . .There too will be found my angst—my anxiety, my fear.” In terms of its unwaveringly subversive spirit, gorgeous yet grotesque neo-gothic aesthetic, and rather brazen approach to depicting the ultimate taboo of familicide, I think the film comes closest to Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio's truly iconoclastic debut feature Fists in the Pocket (1965).

Auter Herz wants you to immediately known right from the get-go of The Cremator that the titular protagonist is a banal bourgeois guy with a banal bourgeois family, but he also wants you to know that there is something serious off and unnerving weird about this somewhat cartoonish protagonist who acts if he is the autistic star of an insanely idealized dream than a real person with a real life. Indeed, as Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský) states to his wife at the very beginning of the film in a spasmodically edited scene while hanging out with his nuclear family at the local zoo, “My sweet…This is the blessed spot where we met 17 years ago. Only the leopard is new. Kind nature long ago relieved the other of his shackles. You see, dear, I keep talking of nature’s benevolence, of merciful fate, of the kindness of God. We judge and criticize others, rebuke them. But what about we ourselves? I always have the feeling that I do so little for you […] Thanks to your dowry…to your blessed mother’s support and the support of your aunt. Perhaps I furnished our apartment, but that’s about all. Dear, I must take care of you. Zina is 16, Mili 14. Come now, children… Cages are for mute creatures.” Undoubtedly, Herr Kopfrkingl is big on freedom as he sees his job as cremator as a form of liberation where he is selflessly liberates souls as inspired by his curious influence from Bardo Thodol aka The Tibetan Book of the Dead. As a mensch that respects his Judaic physician Dr. Bettleheim (Eduard Kohout), new employee Strauss (Jiří Lír), and half-Hebrew wife Lakmé (Vlasta Chramostová who also portrays the protagonist’s favorite prostitute), Kopfrkingl seems totally devoid of racial prejudice, but it does not take much for him to be convinced of the virtues of completely betraying all the Jews in his life when his brutal kraut Nazi comrade Walter Reinke (Ilja Prachař) tells him of the new Aryan agenda that includes many personal perks, including an all-blonde brothel and a nice new job as an all-power cremator that dedicates his life to “liberating” souls. No longer content with just burning bodies, Kopfrkingl graduates on to coldblooded murder so that he speed-up the process of liberating souls. While initially thinking of himself as nothing more than a proud cultivated Czech that even enjoys the “Jewish way” of “jellied carp” during Christimas, Kopfrkingl begins stating things like, “even the old Teutons, dear friends, burned their dead, entrusted them to flames,” after his rather culturally confused Nazi conversion and it is ultimately his beloved mischling family the pays the most pernicious price in a film where ideology and insanity are virtually depicted as one and the same.

Indeed, aside from betraying his Jewish friends after receiving the distinguished honor of being invited by his boy Bettleheim to a Chevra Suda dinner and providing phony talk of a Jewish conspiracy to his Nazi friends, Kopfrkingl goes completely crazy and kills his Jewish wife and son (although he also tries to kill his beloved daughter, the Nazis promise to do the job for him) so that they can be properly cremated with Aryan corpses and obtain a patently preposterous posthumous purity of sorts. Despite being clearly unhinged, Kopfrkingl is provided with top secret knowledge by a Nazi bigwig about a souped-up crematorium and gas chambers, which he naturally fully approves of. Not surprisingly, Herr Kopfrkingl’s mental decline parallels his rise to power and he increasingly comes into contact with his rather dedicated Dalai Lama doppelganger who confirms to him the crucial spiritual necessity of his work. In fact, at the very end of the film in an ominously otherworldly scene where Nazi bigwigs drive him away in a fancy car in the rain as a virtual young witchy Angel of Death sees him off, Kopfrkingl declares with a strange degree of deranged gleeful dedication, “No one will suffer. I’ll save them all” as he schizophrenically imagines himself being driven to Dalai Lama's Potala Palace where he assumedly believes he will be taking over (notably, the film takes place in the aftermath of the death of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, in 1933, which was also the same year as the rise of Hitler and National Socialist takeover of Germany). Of course, as Cioran once so rightly and elegantly wrote, “Nietzsche’s great luck—to have ended as he did: in euphoria!” Indeed, Kopfrkingl might have brutally murdered his family members and betrayed virtually every friend he has ever had, but he is nothing if not exceedingly enraptured as if he has literally died and gone to heaven.

With its captivating combination of severely spasmodic schizo editing, sometimes nauseating and even necrotic yet simultaneously faux-merry melodrama, gorgeously grotesque gothic aesthetics and tone, charmingly creepy caricature-like characters, heterodox horror ingredients and somehow paradoxically antiquated yet avant-garde essence, The Cremator—a film that manages to both define and transcend the movement is belongs to—is surely the cream of the Czech cinematic crop and a rare merry celluloid testament to the metaphysics of morbidity and misanthropy. In its depiction of an almost transcendental transformation of a bourgeois bore and striking experimental dreamlike cinematography, the film sometimes almost feels John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) as produced by the ghost of Val Lewton had he died brutally and morbidly in a concentration camp (as opposed to rather impotently croaking from a low-key heart attack like he did in real-life). Of course, despite the film’s preternatural persuasion, auteur Juraj Herz wears his many eclectic aesthetic influences on his sleeve, most notably during a scene in the film where the film’s protagonist stands in front of great Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch’s masterpiece ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights,’ hence Kopfrkingl's classic lines from the film like, “The only certainty in life is death…and the implementation of a propitious new order. The Fuehrer’s new, fortunate Europe and death are the only certainties that we humans have.” While executed in an innately ironical fashion, Herz's film is nothing if not a truly hypnotic celebration of Spanish homeboy José Millán Astray's classic motto: “Long Live Death.” Instead of hysterically harping on the holocaust, Herz seamlessly interweaves classic pieces of art (including of the archaic Judaic sort) and even vintage Aryan pornography to tell something profoundly (disturbing) about the (in)human condition, thereupon confirming the perennial nature of truly great art in a cinematic work that, despite its decidedly degenerate essence, should be celebrated as a truly great piece of cinematic art. Of course, it should be no surprise that the film also pays tribute to the grotesque grandiosity of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol as it is a key aesthetic influence in a cinematic work that audaciously borrows from the highbrow and lowbrow without ever once attempting to discriminate between the two, hence the aberrant artistic brilliance of the film. Indeed, The Cremator might contain the aesthetic integrity and overall meticulousness of mise-en-scène of an early Tarkvosky flick, but it also has the unhinged spirit and intense amorality of an Andy Milligan flick à la Seeds (1968). In that sense, it is no surprise that Herz later went into more genre-driven artsploitation oriented territory with a film like Ferat Vampire (1982) aka Upír z Feratu which is notable for being a bloodsucker flick with a blood-fueled automobile.

By sheer happenstance, I was recently reading Emil Cioran’s classic text The Trouble With Being Born (1973) around the same time I re-watched The Cremator and soon discovered the Romanian philosopher gave what would be a nice thematic description of the film when he wrote, “Annihilating affords a sense of power, flatters something obscure, something original in us. It is not by erecting but by pulverizing that we may divine the secret satisfactions of a god. Whence the lure of destruction and the illusions it provokes among the frenzied of any era.” In fact, the book contains a number of aphorisms that would make for suitable descriptions of the film. For Example, the deranged protagonist is strangely likeable because, as Cioran noted, “We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.” In terms of the film’s depiction of paternal filicide, one might be tempted to awkwardly laugh at Cioran’s remark, “My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.” As for the film’s shamelessly merry misanthropy and overall decided worship of death, one cannot help but wallow in Cioran’s words, “Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.”

As for the film’s director Herz, who I have mixed feelings about but regard his shoah flick as a masterpiece, The Cremator is a good example of what Cioran was hinting at when he wrote, “A writer has left his mark on us not because we have read him a great deal but because we have thought of him more than is warranted. I have not frequented Baudelaire or Pascal particularly, but I have not stopped thinking of their miseries, which have accompanied me everywhere as faithfully as my own.” Indeed, as someone that could certainly do without ever see another holocaust flick again, I have to argue that Herz is, to some extent, a rare artist with virtual alchemical abilities as morbid mensch that can clearly take the shittiest and most play-out subjects and molds them into something akin to artistic gold. After all, there is more genuine horror in a single slice of dark humor in The Cremator than there is in the entirety of Schindler's List but I guess that should be expected from a film that basks in the banality of big budget bathos. Of course, it would probably be fairer to compare Herz's flick to The Pianist (2002) as it was also directed by a holocaust survivor of sorts but ultimately The Cremator has more in common with Roman Polanski's early Polish avant-garde features like The Lamp (1959) aka Lampa—a film that certainly can be seen as a sort of allegory for the holocaust and the apocalyptic nightmare nature of the Second World War in general, especially in Eastern Europe—than the director's hit Palme d'Or and Academy Award-winning Hollywood holocaust flick.

To shamelessly borrow another quote from Cioran, I think that auteur Herz would approve of his words in relation to a major theme of The Cremator when he wrote, “When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.” Of course, one of the most brilliant aspects of the film is that it seems like a Hebrew-helmed aesthetic hodgepodge of numerous pre-Nazi European artistic movements over the last two centuries that concludes with German Expressionism, thereupon associating, not unlike Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s magnum opus Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), the Third Reich with the dubious legacy of the destruction of European art and culture as a result of the Hitlerite taint. In short, the capitulation of Nazi Germany also resulted in an absurd aesthetic holocaust sorts, hence Frankfurt school Führer Theodor Adorno’s despicable dictum that, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Of course, The Cremator is pleasantly putrid cinematic poetry as directed by a holocaust survivor and it certainly says more about than shoah than, say, Claude Lanzmann’s badly bloated 566-minute anti-polack doc Shoah (1985). Indeed, Herz's film is the closest thing the world will ever have to a film as directed by Otto Dix, albeit from a savagely sardonic post-shoah Jewish perspective instead of a savagely sardonic post-WWI kraut one.

Notably, in her insightful text Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (1995), German-language folklore and literature scholar Maria Tatar noted that in Nazi Germany, “Jews came to be linked not only with the perpetrators of sexual murder, but with the victims as well. Like the prostitute, the Jew is seen to represent a serious threat to the moral, fiscal, and sexual economy of the social body. As Sander Gilman has pointed out, both prostitutes and Jews have been linked by what is seen to be a sexualized relation to capital—they have ‘but one interest, the conversion of sex into money or money into sex.’ Unable to find value in transcendent spiritual matters, their interests remain fixed on the material and financial. More important, prostitutes and Jews, because of their spiritual corruption, are considered carriers of sexually transmitted diseases, a view clearly articulated in Hitler's MEIN KAMPF.” Of course, one of the most intriguing and perversely trollish aspects of The Cremator is that auteur Herz completely subverts these stereotypes and depicts the Nazi characters in the fashion Tatar describes as the Nazis have their own special all-blonde bordello where they debased Aryan dames as a reward for their role in the destruction of Eastern European Jewry. Additionally, lead character Karel Kopfrkingl is a particularly perverted hypocrite with a strange fear-cum-fetish of STDs to the point where he regularly sees his Jewish physician friend Dr. Bettleheim, who he eventually betrays to secure his place as a patron of Aryan prostitution, to see if he has contracted a sexually-transmitted disease (in fact, Kopfrkingl seems especially enamored while admiring a grotesque Bellmer-esque STD display at a local carnival in a scene that really underscores the character's innate association of sex and death).

As Tatar also noted in her book, the “Jewish vampire” was another common trope of (proto)Nazi culture as arguably most brutally described in Artur Dinter's popular Weimar era novel Die Sünde wider das Blut (1917) aka The Sin Against the Blood but also largely apolitical cinematic works like F.W. Murnau's masterpiece Nosferatu (1922). While The Cremator does not feature any literal bloodsuckers, it does feature its fair share of blood and Kopfrkingl can certainly be seen as an unconventional ‘psychic vampire’ of sorts. Needless to say, it is no surprise that director Herz would later work in the vampire genre. In that sense, one can see Hebrew Herz as an artist that is so gleefully transgressive in both the aesthetic and (meta)political sense that he has fully embraced the negative Nazi racial stereotypes to the point of nihilistic fury as if his main goal with his art was to destroy the very meaning of early twentieth-century race, art, and culture. After all, one simply cannot finish The Cremator without being ‘touched,’ if not being downright tormented. Indeed, the film almost makes me want to agree with Cioran, who I will quote one more time, when he wrote, “The number of fanatics, extremists, and degenerates I have been able to admire! A relief bordering on orgasm at the notion that one will never again embrace a cause, any cause . . .” Naturally, things get a big complicated when one finds themselves being able to respect both Herz and Dinter. In terms of attempting to reconcile a film like The Cremator and NS thinkers like Dinter, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hans F. K. Günther, the alpha-neofolk outfit Death In June is your best bet, especially their somewhat obscure album Free Tibet (2006) where The Tibetan Book of the Dead receives a tribute of sorts.

-Ty E

Bamboozled

2020-07-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

While I do not typically tend to following the behavior of old independent filmmakers as all my favorites long ago croaked, I could not help but smirk upon passively coming across an attack against Spike Lee by old school auteur Jon Jost (All the Vermeers in New York, The Bed You Sleep In) on facebook on June 13, 2020. As an elderly lefty draft-dodger that seems to think he is still living in a different era, Jost is not exactly someone I find myself tending to agree with on even the most fundamental level yet he has proved with underrated films like Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977)—a rather intimate and aesthetically idiosyncratic depiction of a small-time sociopathic criminal—that he is a singular and uncompromising artist and his recent rant against little Lee is fairly respectable and surprising considering the current state of the decidedly degenerated (dis)United States. Indeed, as Jost wrote, “I was never a Spike Lee fan. I met him once, long ago when I was running, for no money, a collective stand for American independent filmmakers at the Berlin Film Festival - 1979-80, I think I did it for 3 years. I tried to get Spike to join with his first short film, WE CUT HEADS. He was too busy hustling for himself to be bothered, and brushed it off. It had I think less to do with race than class – he comes from upper middle class Brooklyn and it shows. He is releasing a new film, DA FIVE BLOODS. Along with it, for Covid times, he put out a short, NEW YORK NEW YORK, which lasts as long as the Sinatra song. Shots of an emptied New York, taken from archival footage. The song, shots with dissolves and cuts. Real lazy-ass filmmaking totally leaning on the song. Bad filmmaking. Of course it has been praised as blah blah blah. Nostalgia is cheap. Sinatra is good. Spike is a ho, doing his best to prove he is a down black bro. It is an act and always has been, the well-off now very wealthy (40 mil) guy proving he's one of the gang. Spike, like Mr Zimmerman, is now a very rich man. And like Dylan he's made his wealth commenting on, describing, using the misery of America as his subject and topic. This is one of the magical aspects of America, in which it is always the wealthy who are allowed to speak for the poor.”

Admittedly, I found Jost’s sentiments, which I mostly share, humorous enough to inspire me to finally get around to re-watching Lee’s savage satire Bamboozled (2000), which was recently released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection for the first time on March 17, 2020. While I was not as impressed with the film as I was when I first saw it well over a decade ago at a more impressionable time in my life when I had less refined taste and now see it as somewhat of a mess of a movie that oftentimes plods and succumbs to unintentional absurdity at its somewhat pointless 135-minute running time like so many other unpleasantly grotesquely garish Spike Lee Joints, I can still safely say that it is unequivocally the proudly angry Afro-American filmmaker’s most ambitious and subversive cinematic to date and in stark contrast to his recent curiously kosher conformist crap like BlacKkKlansman (2018) where he seemed to be atoning for the virtual career-long accusation of ‘antisemitism’ that began with the ADL and various Hebraic film critics attacking the director for his unflattering but historically accurate depiction of Judaic nightclub owners in Mo' Better Blues (1990). To his credit, Lee refused to apologize for these comically sound kosher caricatures and instead opted to up the ante in terms of ostensible anti-Semitic content with his most shameless and subversive film to date, Bamboozled, thereupon predictably resulting in tons of negative reviews and accusations of antisemitism despite his propensity to get away with virtually all other forms of racial antagonism. Following his most Scorsese-esque film to date, Summer of Sam (1999)—a film that is, rather ironically, also Lee's most anti-guido film to date—the film represents the director at the height of his most gleefully bombastic and hyperbolic race-hate powers as a film that does for both mainstream television and Hollywood in general what John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975) for Golden Age Hollywood, albeit to a more racially ravenous degree.

Undoubtedly, the selective outrage against Lee by film critics of a mostly similar persuasion becomes quite clear when one considers the predictable silence in regard to filmmaker’s fetish for goombah-bashing as is glaringly clear in films like Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), and Summer of Sam despite the filmmaker borrowing his entire style from his supposed Sicilian-American friend Martin Scorsese. Of course, if Lee’s films—or at least his best ones—were not ridden with raw race-hate and demented Der Stürmer-tier racial caricatures of virtually all races (including his own), they would hardly be worth watching and simply cheap expressions of glittery bloated budget kitsch (in fact, Lee’s fairly unknown sometimes-filmmaker brother Cinqué Lee demonstrated a greater dedication to serious art fagdom with his film Window on Your Present (2010)). While oftentimes genuinely funny (albeit sometimes unintentionally so), Bamboozled is indubitably a fiercely fucked flick that is fueled by tastefully toxic racial venom and full of a very calculated yet primitive contempt where Lee demonstrates his nauseating sense of unselfconscious narcissism by repeatedly referencing to himself and his various enemies (e.g. Quentin Tarantino), but of course such superlatively senselessly shallow self-aggrandizement is one of the things that makes Lee’s films so interesting, even if it does not exactly endear one to the filmmaker’s character (or lack thereof). An unintentional racial exploitation film supposedly satirizing Hollywood’s history of racial exploitation, Bamboozled is, in many ways, a virtual cinematic train wreck polluted with mostly corrosive racial cultural debris of both the long ago past and present and it is simply impossible to look away. Simultaneously critiquing the Anglo blackface action of early WASP maestro D.W. Griffith and Hebraic Hollywood while exploiting the most idiotic cultural trends among the modern-day black ghetto subproletariat, Lee’s never-sweetly-sardonic satire is ultimately a surreal expression of racial neurosis and nihilism where the somewhat deranged director characteristically incessantly critiques yet never offers any serious answers aside from condemning the actions of ‘uncle tom’ types like the film's unconventionally pathetic (anti)hero . In short, Lee’s pleasantly perniciously playful neo-minstrel movie reveals that the filmmaker suffers from a sort of racial psychosis which, as the film vividly demonstrates, is only natural for an innately inorganic ‘multicultural’ nation where the minority is forced to live at the behest at the majority; or so the fucked filmmaker wants you to think.

Undoubtedly, Lee’s racial psychosis becomes clear simply when one realizes that Bamboozled—a film that might have single-handedly destroyed the dubious legacy of Hebraic blackface icon Al Jolson had it been more popular—was dedicated to Jewish-American screenwriter Budd Schulberg (On the Waterfront, The Harder They Fall). While it does make sense that Lee would dedicate the film to Schulberg when one considers that the film was clearly heavily influenced by Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957)—an inordinately cruel satiric dramedy about the propensity for TV networks to create and celebrate loathsome grifters that the screenwriter is celebrated for penning—it does seem rather absurd when one considers that a major theme of the film is how Judaic writers, directors, producers, and actors have historically exploited blacks and negative black racial stereotypes. In fact, speaking of Hebraic writers, there is even a scene in the film where the (anti)hero played by Damon Wayans expresses his disdain for lack of black writers on his neo-minstrel TV show by contemptuously proclaiming to a Hebraic underling, “If I had my druthers, they’d be at least one negro writer in this room, and that afro does not qualify you, my Jewish friend.” Needless to say, the counter-kosher references do not stop there as one of the most despicable characters in the film is a seeming sociopathic Jewess named Myrna Goldfarb (Dina Pearlman) who postures as a good little racial freedom fighter by bragging in an obnoxiously condescending manner to the black protagonist in regard to her ancestral civil rights cred, “my parents marched in Selma, Alabama, with Dr. King” while simultaneously suggesting means to exploit exceedingly grotesque (anti)black racial stereotypes on television. In fact, the character of Myrna Goldfarb is more loathsome than anything you might find in Veit Harlan infamous NS classic Jud Süß (1940) as the villain of that film at least has his positive traits, so it should be no surprise that Lee was routinely accused of antisemitism by various film critics. Notably, Lee actually based Goldfarb on a real person, or as the filmmaker explained in Spike Lee: Interviews (2002), “There was an article in their VANITY FAIR or NEW YORK magazine about these young Jewish women publicists for the Wu-Tang Clan, and she was sort of patterned after them. That's another thing, getting back to what we were talking about before, I'm supposed to be anti-Semitic. Because BAMBOOZLED has a publicist named Myrna Goldfarb, that's another example of my anti-Semitism! That's what Amy Taubin said in the VILLAGE VOICE.”

Aside from possibly Goldfarb, the character of Thomas Dunwitty (portrayed by obnoxious Hebraic philistine Michael Rapaport)—a gleefully racist wigger TV executive that has happens to be the boss of the film’s ‘uncle tom’ protagonist Pierre Delacroix/Peerless Dothan (Damon Wayans)—is probably the most decidedly despicable as a rude and raunchy race-fetishizing fiend that literally gets off to routinely shouting “nigger” at blacks in between strategically bragging about the fact that he has a black wife and mulatto kids. Playing it safer with Dunwitty—or ‘dumb whity’ as the name less than subtly suggests—the character is more covertly kosher as demonstrated by his use of stereotypical Yiddish phrases like “Mazel tov” and unforgettably unflattering portrayal by low IQ Hebraic hothead Rapaport who is just as notorious in both acting roles and real-life for shamelessly ‘acting black’ as is probably exemplified in the singularly horrendous film Zebrahead (1992). Dunwitty hates “white-bread” shows about black people and considers the idea that a healthy black middleclass even exists as being patently absurd and beneath contempt as the character takes an almost a demonic delight in lowbrow black dysfunction. Fed up with the fact that Dunwitty rejects and cancels any show that he writes about intelligent bourgeois black types, Pierre Delacroix—a racially conflicted type that was born ‘Peerless Dothan’ but decided to change his name to sound more ‘white’ (it seems Lee has never heard of famous black American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux or French colonialism)—conspires to create a modern-day minstrel show that is so ruthlessly racially repugnant that he can escape his contract by being fired while, at the same time, somehow exposing the racism of the TV network.

Of course, in the tradition of Melvyn Kaminsky’s The Producers (1967), Pierre’s preposterous scheme does not exactly work out as planned and instead he unleashes a sort of culturally terrifying televised negro nightmare that ultimately destroys his entire life and confirms that many (white) Americans (still?) believe that blackface is beautiful (or something). While obviously a satire, Lee, who was partly inspired to create the film as a result of being disturbed upon seeing such cinematic classics as D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind (1939) in film school, clearly wants the viewer to see the film as, at least in part, a horror film of the aberrant agitprop sort where whity has his face rubbed in the cultural disgrace of the blackface of his ancestors (which is made quite clear in a vintage blackface montage at the very end of the film). When lead Pierre declares to his bitch boss Dunwitty, “And as Mark Twain so fully understood, satire is the way if we are ever to live side by side in peace and harmony. So my show that I’m pitching is about promoting racial healing,” he is clearly expressing the opposite of Lee’s sentiment and intent as Bamboozled is unequivocally a ‘race hate’ film that can only inspire racial hatred, nihilism, and gaslighting. Still, I would argue that it is Lee’s unequivocal pièce de résistance and a tastefully trying testament to the racially apocalyptic essence of the decidedly (dis)United States of American. A satire-within-a-satire (as well as a satire of satires), the film ironically (attempts to) underscore how racial satires can have the opposite effect of their artistic intent, or so the uniquely unhip and hapless protagonist Pierre learns upon exploiting the great American culture of taboo blackface with the noble objective of ruthlessly squashing negative black stereotypes and ultimately discovering to his great chagrin that America loves said stereotypes, hence the popularity of hip hop and household name status of such dubious buffoons as Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne who certainly represent a sort of neo-minstrel phenomenon of sorts.

Notably, in his insightful yet oftentimes historically dishonest text Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996), Judaic far-left political scientist Michael Rogin—the progeny of union and pinko activist types—attempts to downplay the severity of the Yiddish role in blackface and Al Jolson’s (in)famous performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) (which of course is routinely referenced in Bamboozled). Indeed, in regard to the ‘musical miscegenation’ of Jolson and company, Rogin argues, “Like the Jewish struggle for racial justice, the black-inspired music of urban Jews was a declaration of war against the racial and ethnic hierarchy of Protestant, genteel culture.” In other words, the proto-wigger minstrel routine of Jolson, warped ‘white negro’ hipsterdom of Norman Mailer, and hokey hip hop hijinx of the Beastie Boys, among countless other examples, can be seen as at least partly informed by Hebraic hatred for mainstream white America. In Bamboozled, Hollywood executive types like Dunwitty and Myrna Goldfarb reflect the chutzpah and arrogance of this bizarre form of cultural appropriation that is expressed with a sort of gleeful contempt for the very same race of people that they are pretending to be in solidarity with. Driven by a sort of ‘psychological blackface’ sociopathy where they do not seem the least bit concerned about hurting or disrespecting the very same race of people they are ostensibly paying tribute to, these characters humorously manage to make a mockery out of both their own race and the one they are poorly attempting to pantomime. Blinded by an almost hypnotic level of hubris, they cannot even see black people as actual people with actual feelings as if ‘being black’ is simply an identity the one can purchase at the local mall when one feels ashamed at the banality of their own race. Needless to say, with Bamboozled, Lee exposes this cruel culture-distorting phenomenon while, at the same time, fighting fire with filmic fire. In fact, this was not Lee’s first attempt at fighting back, or as Rogin complained, “No African American put on Jewface in a Hollywood film, to my knowledge, until Eddie Murphy’s Jewish barber in COMING TO AMERICA […] When Spike Lee turned the Jewish blackface tables in MO’ BETTER BLUES (1990), with barbed, comic ethnic stereotypes of two brothers in the entertainment business, Josh and Joe Flatbush, the outcry about anti-Semitism sounded in a historical vacuum.”

As one would expect from any of Lee’s better films, Bamboozled does to some extent encourage personal responsibility among colored folks by ruthlessly critiquing its more self-destructive and otherwise deleterious elements. Indeed, aside from constantly attacking lead Pierre Delacroix for being an uncle tom that sold his soul to the very same pernicious people that profit from the exploitation of his race, the film also attacks the antihero’s antithesis in the form of a militant rap collective named the Mau Maus—a group named in tribute to the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960) when black Kenyans successfully revolted against whites and the British Empire—that promote a moronic mix of pseudo-marxist revolution and primitive ghetto culture that promotes drug addiction, illiteracy, and all-around stupidity. Notably, the group is lead by a charming chap named Julius ‘Big Blak Afrika’ Hopkins (Mos Def) who happens to be the brother of lead Pierre’s self-described “little lamb” personal assistant/ex-lover Sloan Hopkins (Jada Pinkett Smith) in what ultimately a symbolic representation of black interfamilial conflict and the two self-destructive extremes of contemporary black identity. For example, when Julius dares to describe his sister Sloan as a “house-nigger” after she tells him he “sounds retarded” and is “embarrassing” due to his vulgar black nationalist rhetoric, she tells him to get his “field-nigger-ass” out of her home.

While ostensibly on different sides of the spectrum of black society, both characters have virtually sold their souls as Sloan is a borderline sellout that works for a TV network that denigrates her people while Julius represents a lowbrow lunatic fringe that marinates in malt liquor, senseless black-on-black murder, and pseudo-Marxist moronacy. Needless to say, it is fitting that all of these characters meet tragic ends, though Sloan arguably ‘redeems’ herself by ‘unintentionally’ killing her boss Pierre who of course must pay for being the mastermind of the popular Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show where black actors in blackface make a great mockery of their race for mostly adoring white American audiences. Hiring two haplessly desperate street performers named Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson)—largely ignorant and pathetic characters that are desperate to get the latest ‘Timmi Hillnigger’ jeans—that he proudly rechristens ‘Mantan’ and ‘Sleep 'n Eat’ respectively, protagonist Pierre Delacroix boldly exploits and debases everyone with his new minstrel show as if he is on some sort of holy mission. Needless to say, Pierre also thoroughly debases himself and in the end pays the ultimate price. Indeed, in what is arguably a symbolic depiction of Mother Africa getting revenge against race traitors, Pierre is gunned down by his beloved Sloan who, as an unintended consequence of the protagonist's neo-minstrel show (which she reluctantly worked on), loses both her lover Manray and brother Julius. In short, Bamboozled does not have a happy ending because Lee (probably rightly) believes that there is probably no happy ending to America's racial disharmony as virtually all of past human history has confirmed, hence the cathartic need for comedy of this inordinately cruel and conflicted sort. Undoubtedly, the successful but short-lived sketch comedy show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace (2016)—a so-called ‘post-irony’ TV series that was also ruthlessly attacked (and ultimately blacklisted) under the dubious charge of antisemitism—achieved something similar to Lee's film, albeit for a largely young white racially-conscious audience. When Pierre declares at the very ending of the film, “always keep ‘em laughing,” one cannot help but think it is the only way to endure this American racial Armageddon.

While Bamboozled certainly mocks minstrel-esque rappers that profit from making a mockery out of their race by being grotesque racial caricatures of the drug-addled, crime-prone, and sub-literate sort, director Lee certainly could not foresee the rise of mainstream rappers like Tekashi 6ix9ine and Nicki Minaj as they are indubitably infinitely more exploitative and spiritually bankrupt than any of the acts featured in the Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, which at least advertises itself as a comedy. Indeed, say what you will about the blackface buffonerry depicted in a D.W. Griffith flick or a jazzy Jolson vehicle, but they seem fairly milktoast compared to the phenomenon of ‘twerking’ and gang murders that plague the sick and retarded anti-human joke that is modern hip hop (pseudo)culture. Of course, while Lee would probably attempt to argue otherwise, this killer kitsch (pseudo)culture is just as toxic to whites and other races as is to blacks (after all, the troll-like being known as Tekashi 6ix9ine is actually Latino). Notably, one of the arguments among proponents for desegregation was that it would help to uplift blacks, but as the popularity of rap music certainly demonstrates, it had the complete opposite result as demonstrated by the countless working-class, middleclass, and even wealthy whites that have adopted the culture of the poorest blacks in which is ultimately of vicious circle of spiritual blackface debasement where everyone loses. After all, one can only guess how many lives were ruined as a result of naive white kids embracing Eminem—a rather milk-toast moron nowadays who parrots mainstream media talks and routinely cries about Donald Trump and his shame at being melanin-deprived—during the late-1990s and mindlessly adopting the rather retarded (non)life that he so grotesquely glorified. Arguably, the deleterious and all-around nihilistic nature of this strange distinctly American (yet constantly exported) form of cultural miscegenation is best epitomized by the short and tragic life of SoundCloud rap/Emo rap figure XXXTentacion—a rather popular figure among melancholic and effete Xanax-addled white boys from broken middelclass homes—who ostensibly promoted anti-racism in a video where he hangs a white child and who brutally beat women and robbed people before he was gunned down at the age of 20 in 2018. While it is easy to write-off somebody like XXXTentacion as a wayward wastrel that got what he deserved, his popularity is the real concern as it means that audiences are just as unwittingly doomed as the dumb asses that make the minstrel show a big hit in Bamboozled.

A ruthlessly renegade musical of rancid racial razzmatazz where virtually every single (black) characters meets a miserable end, Bamboozled is not a product of the merry Martin Luther King Jr. School of Filmmaking where a deluded manufactured dream is dispensed like a condom from a machine in some shady truckstop but closer to the ‘anti-communist communist’ film collages of Dušan Makavejev like W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974) in terms of pleasantly preposterously pessimistic perspective. Of course, Lee’s film is about dreams, albeit of the doubly dark deranging sort where the intrinsic impossibility of (inter)racial harmony is sardonically exposed in the way characters of all races (but especially the black race) react to the most mindless sort of race-denigrating mainstream entertainment as they eat broadcasted shit with sadistic glee without even properly digesting it, therein finding themselves in a particularly precarious situation when it is far too late. Somewhat curiously, Warren Beatty of all people pulled a similar savagely satiric stunt with his somewhat slightly underrated flick Bulworth (1998)—a rare Hollywood film that also dares to point out Hebraic Hollywood hypocrisy—but little Lee goes all the way with a film that is the cinematic equivalent of a pitch black nuke as detonated by the crack-and-acid-addled son of Huey P. Newton. While the film might contain all the rage of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, it is channeled through the lunatic lens of MAD magazine marinated in malt liquor meets the peculiar plastic pathos and socio-politically revolutionary aesthetic artifice of Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst (1988).

Shot on atrocious Mini DV digital video (with faux TV commercials curiously shot on 35mm), the film is, in many ways, absurdly aesthetically atrocious, which is fitting for an aggro Afro-American anti-cinematic work that basks in the nadir of kitschy cultural debris. In that sense, the film is like a cruel culturally apocalyptic cinematic counterpoint to James Whale’s Show Boat (1936)—an inordinately romantic musical with exquisite expressionistic cinematography based on the novel of the same name by leftist Jewess Edna Ferber and penned by mischling maestro Oscar Hammerstein II that deals with themes of miscegenation (as personified by a tragic mulatta) and features famous black actors Paul Robeson and Hattie McDaniel—as a film that uncompromisingly shatters the liberal dream of ‘equality’ and does so in the manner of absurdist anti-art agitprop. Speaking of Whale—a cinematic maestro that was himself the victim of the historical curse of a marginalized identity via Bill Condon's defamatory yet somehow worthwhile fictionalized biopic Gods and Monsters (1998)—Bamboozled also tells a simple tale about the perils of creation and that there is always the danger that what you create might turn monstrous and escape your grasp as Pierre Delacroix learned the hard way.

As the various harshly negative reviews of the film and artistic stagnation of his career demonstrates, Bamboozled is the closest thing to a filmic Frankenstein monster that the Afro-auteur Lee has ever made as none of his later films would even come close to the venomous iconoclasm and subversion of his morbidly merry neo-minstrel movie. In regard to attacks from various Jewish critics, Lee once stated in an interview, “The easiest way to discredit the work of a filmmaker whose subject matter is race is to call him a racist. Simple. There is an unwritten code, especially if you're not Jewish, that if you have a Jewish character who is not positive, you're automatically considered anti-Semitic. But I'm not going to be handcuffed like that or be forced to falsify a situation. You mean to tell me that in the history of the music industry there have never been any white managers who deliberately exploited black artists? That in BAMBOOZLED, while I can have rappers going around smoking herb, drinking malt liquor, and killing people, I can't have a Jewish publicist whose character might be a little shaky?” Of course, as a good percentage of contemporary movie and TV trash ranging from White Chicks (2004)—a rare example of ‘whiteface’ of the transracial/transsexual sort—to Dear White People (2017-present) to the singularly wretched Simon Kinberg/Jordan Peele The Twilight Zone (2019-present) reboot unequivocally confirm, anti-white racism is not only perfectly acceptable but totally vogue in the totally culturally, artistically, intellectually, and spiritually bankrupt cesspool that is modern-day Hollywood, but Lee is totally right about counter-kosher sentiment, which probably explains why he opted to direct the surprisingly philo-semitic BlacKkKlansman by kosher mini-mogul Jason Blum’s innately anti-white Blumhouse Productions. In short, Lee seems to have learned some hard lesson as a result of Bamboozled about who he can and cannot attack and now he has ironically become a sort of Pierre Delacroix, albeit one that still postures as a subversive. Needless to say, to describe the film as ‘woke’ would be an insult to its artistic and intellectual integrity as such a film would never ever be made today as it at least partly contradicts the corporate-backed sapphic sista blm narrative.

For a director that has borrowed most of what he knows from great mainstream Italian-American filmmakers like Vincente Minnelli, Frank Capra, and Martin Scorsese—members of the group Spike has had a career-long obsession with treating in a minstrel-esque fashion (including this film, which includes an obnoxious Sicilian-American character in blackface boasting about the dark skin of his fellow Sicilians)—Bamboozled seems especially bizarre as a flick that feels like Federico Fellini meets Dogme 95 as directed by an angry black kid that just read the Nation of Islam (NOI) classic The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (1991). In short, that such a film even exists is nothing short of a movie miracle and indicative of how once cherished things like ‘free of speech’ and ‘artistic integrity’ have become somewhat of an anachronism in the past two decades or so. While I have very respect for Lee as a man and only slightly more for him as a filmmaker, Bamboozled at least reveals that he might have become a serious artist if frivolous and superficial things like posturing and guidosploitation tactics were not his main motivations. When I compare the film to his more recent celebrated antifa-approved conformist turd BlacKkKlansman, I cannot help but reminded of Pierre Delacroix's final words as he dies after taking a bullet to the gut, “As I bled to death, as my very life oozed out of me, all I could think of was something the great Negro James Baldwin had written: ‘People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.’” Indeed, one cannot deny that Jon Jost was at least partly right when he declares, “Spike is a ho, doing his best to prove he is a down black bro. It is an act and always has been, the well-off now very weathy (40 mil) guy proving he's one of the gang.”

While he also committed the liberal sin of ‘cultural appropriation’ by borrowing virtually everything he knew from Europeans while ironically making films against European colonialism, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène—the undisputed ‘father of African film’ and director of such notable works as La noire de… (1966) aka Black Girl and Xala (1975)—at least was the real deal in terms of organic black revolutionary cinematic art. In terms of somewhat overlooked black American directors that do not need to exploit black racial stereotypes to make authentic black cinema that culturally empowers, Lee simply cannot compare to Charles Burnett and his classic films like Killer of Sheep (1978) and especially the mystifying folk comedy To Sleep with Anger (1990). Additionally, Carl Franklin has proved a special talent for using Hollywood genre conventions to explore black (and sometimes white) racial issues with classics like One False Move (1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Even when it comes to goofy black filmmakers like half-kraut mulatto Michael Schultz, his films like Cooley High (1975), Car Wash (1976), The Last Dragon (1985), and Krush Groove (1985) have more ‘soul’ than most of Lee's films and do not seem like the conflicted expressions of someone suffering from a terminal case of racial ressentiment, but I digress. Undoubtedly, in terms of exploiting the worst aspects of black prole kultur, Lee probably most closely follows in the footsteps of Melvin Van Peebles of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) infamy. In fact, Lee even more or less copied Van Peebles’ debut feature The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1968) aka La permission with his uneven miscegenation movie Jungle Fever (1991). To Lee’s credit, he is still a much better filmmaker than Van Peebles, who seems to have never learned the basics of cinematic technique and has thoroughly debased himself with such retarded pseudo-erotic neo-minstrel shit as Vrooom Vroom Vrooom (1995).

When it comes down to it, Lee is just doing the black mainstream equivalent of Scorsese and Robert Zemeckis (who Lee has curiously routinely criticized) and cannot be seen as any sort of innovator as even the low-budget films of a forgotten ‘race film’ director like Spencer Williams, including The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down, Death! (1945), are considerably more idiosyncratic when looked at through the context of cinema history. Still, it takes a special sort of brutal bastard to direct a film like Bamboozled that was clearly meant to be an assault on the greater part of humanity and for that—and pretty much that alone—Lee deserves more artistic cred than 99.9% of Hollywood whore filmmakers, even if BlacKkKlansman is the ultimate expression of black-blackface shabbos goy whoredom and a disgraceful insult to the legacy of trash auteur Ted V. Mikels' exploitation excrement The Black Klansman (1966). Indeed, probably the only way Lee could redeem himself at this point is by remaking the West German exploitation classic Born Black (1969) aka Der verlogene Akt—a film that, incidentally was directed by a part-Hebraic exploitation hack by the name of Rolf von Sydow who, despite his partial kosher pedigree, fought in Uncle Adolf's army—as both the film and its director represent the sort of hyperbolic racial nihilism that America's #1 most famous black filmmaker does best. While Bamboozled is indubitably Spike Lee's most intellectually rewarding and layered film to date, somehow I think most viewers would find the cinematic experience more rewarding if they took heed of gentleman junky queer William S. Burroughs' words, “Exterminate all rational thought,” for such is the only way to accept the innately irredeemable culturally miscegenated clusterfuck that is American (pseudo)culture lest you go insane with abject disgust and disillusionment, among other things. After all, whether Lee wants to admit it or not, Hollywood and the mainstream media has bamboozled everyone, especially America's infuriatingly voiceless and disenfranchised silent majority, hence the very real nightmare that has replaced the American Dream that exists today.

-Ty E

The Birds

2020-06-12T02:01:00.001-07:00

While I have never particularly cared for monster movies one way or another (and I find most killer animals films to be rather retarded), I think it is safe to say that Alfred Hitchcock was taking a big quasi-artistic risk when he decided to make a horror flick about birds as they are, at least to my mind, the most benignly beautiful of god’s creatures and hardly beings that inspire feelings of fear and terror. After all, unless you are someone that suffers from the acute aesthetic aliment of liking Troma trash like Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), there is not another single decent killer bird flick aside from Hitch’s The Birds (1963), but of course the film has much more to offer than the seemingly goofy thrill of uniquely unlucky humans suffering the less than dignified fate of being liquidated by fierce feathered flocks as the film’s title—a clear reference to British slang for women—surely hints. Indeed, the film seems like what might happen if anti-feminist Jewess Esther Vilar’s classic anti-vag quasi-manifesto The Manipulated Man (1971) aka Der Dressierte Mann was used as the philosophical inspiration for the anti-monster film par excellence as a curiously quirky yet strangely sexually cruel cinematic work where the viewer roots for the killer birds, especially when they attack obnoxious human birds and the dumb easily manipulated men that love them. In fact, the real ‘monster’ of the film is women and femininity as an oftentimes cleverly cryptic cinematic work that reveals womankind without its figurative makeup, not unlike Norman Bates’ mummified mommy's face in Hitch’s arguable magnum opus Psycho (1960). Speaking of Psycho, the film also certainly does not leave the less fairer sex off the hook as the dubious dating habits of a nearly-middle-aged momma’s boy ultimately leads to the doom of no less than two hot dames in the film. In short, The Birds is a masterwork in mainstream movie misanthropy where the real monster is humanity to the point where one does not really question why the birds want to wipe humans out despite it being an obviously absurdly silly premise, hence the understatedly eccentric brilliance of the film; or so I learned during a recent re-watching of the film for the first time since I was a young kid.

One of the things that I find particularly annoying about Hitchcock’s films in general is that, aside from their glaring artificiality, I rarely ever find myself identifying with any aspect of them, but on my recent re-watching of the famously bloated British auteur’s feathery flick I was bombarded with seagulls, which I am certainly familiar with. Indeed, as someone that has the luxury of living at the beach, I have also had the luxury of regularly encountering gulls—a seabird that is so unsavory that is known to engage in kleptoparasitism—and can certainly say they are the ideal bird type when it comes to apocalyptic feathered dinosaur flicks. Aside from seagulls crashing into my car windshield at least a couple times, I have personally witnessed these parasitic winged creatures eat cigarette butts, shit on small children at the local boardwalk, and steal french-fries right out of the hands of unsuspecting vacationers. In short, gulls—or ‘mews’ as they were once called—are a bird of an oftentimes stunning natural beauty that is betrayed by their grotesquely aggressive behavior, which Hitch’s flick really underscores. Of course, the main characters of the film make these killer birds—whether they be seagull or otherwise—seem like totally angelic beasts by comparison as it is a stylishly savage cinematic work where much of the frivolousness that defines civilization is both literally and figuratively ripped to shreds by seemingly god-ordained creatures that force said main characters to confront nature in all its unsentimental brutality for what is probably the first time in their entire exceedingly sheltered lives. While it is well known that character development is not exactly key when it comes to creature features, The Birds largely works because Hitchcock goes to great pains to teach the viewer to hate the main characters in all their agonizingly all-too-human glory. Seemingly at least partly fueled by hatred and resentment for the sort of hot blonde bitch that Hitch—a sexually dubious dude that infamously obsessed over his leading ladies and personal secretaries in rather creepy ways—could never get despite his great fame and fortune, the film is also a great example as to why Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto went so far as in tome The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock (1983) to describe his cinematic works as, “astonishingly personal documents.”

In fact, Spoto makes it very clear at the beginning of his extensive biography that Hitchcock was a highly secretive chap that, despite his fame and intelligence, left very little behind in the way of journals and letters, as if he was deathly paranoid that someone might glean some special insight in regard to his psyche and/or personal life, among other things. In that sense, Hitchcock’s films can be somewhat fun to analyze in an auteurist sense as they are indubitably the works of a pervert, misogynist, misanthrope, and sadist, albeit one that seemingly lacked the gall and balls to truly practice such tendencies in real-life to any serious degree (for example, as Spoto also notes, Hitch's wife more or less wore the pants in the marriage). Notably, as Spoto mentions in his bio, Hitch actually dared to offer some rare thematic insight in regard to The Birds when he stated, “The girl represents complacency. The mother panics because she stars off being so strong, but she is not strong, it is a facade: she has been substituting her son for her husband. She is the weak character in the story. But the girl shows that people can be strong when they face up to the situations. . . . But as a group they were the victims of Judgment Day. . . . I felt that after PSYCHO people would expect something to top it.”

In the film, the almost insufferably sassy socialite heroine Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren)—a rich bitch that loves playing practical jokes who becomes the unwitting butt of the joke in the end—travels about an hour-away over the weekend to see and ultimately attempt to ensnare a vaguely hunky lawyer named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) that she barely knows, only to discover he is the son of an obscenely overprotective widowed bitch named Lydia (Jessica Tandy) who seems intent on forever carrying her grownup baby boy’s balls in her purse (of course, as Norman Bates insightfully states in Psycho, “A son is a poor substitute for a lover.”). Luckily, Hitchcock uses the killer birds to ruthlessly murder the romantic melodrama and, in the process, puts these pretty yet putrid people in their place in an almost therapeutically apocalyptic scenario where the petty problems and plotlines of pretty prosaic people are deemed irrelevant as a peroxide blonde cutie goes from being insufferably comfortably smug and confidant to catatonic in a single scenic weekend. In that sense, Hitch exposes himself as a sort of spiritual (proto)incel, though his observations in regard to the so-called fairer sex seem very close to that of a bitchy gay man à la Rainer Werner Fassbinder or even Andy Milligan (who, of course, also utilized horror genre conventions to express misanthropic and misogynistic sentiments) than some virginal heterosexual gamer. Needless to say, I do not think it would be a stretch to describe Hitchcock as the real monster of The Birds, but he is such a marvelous monster that he thankfully trades in tired genre tropes for sexual terror. Also proving that he did not need Bernard Herrmann or a traditional musical score in general to make a great cinematic work, the film is also notable for its exquisitely eerie electronic proto-synthesizer Trautonium anti-soundtrack as composed by kooky krauts Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann. In that sense, the film goes back to Hitch's early cinematic roots as a student of German Expressionism which is fitting since it was a movement that imbued the horror genre with artistic merit.

While Hitchcock certainly took a frisky, if not downright fierce (albeit somewhat covert), approach when depicting those of the feminine persuasion, The Birds is arguably his most ruthlessly ‘gyno-ambivalent’ flick in both the covert and overt sense. For example, as Camille Paglia argued in her magnum opus Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), “The Harpies are servants of the Furies. They are ‘the Snatchers’ (from harpazo, ‘snatch’), airborne pirates, befouling men with their droppings. They represent the aspect of femaleness that clutches and kills in order to feed itself. The archetypal power of Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS, comes from its reactivation of the Harpy myth, shown as both bird and woman.” While Paglia might be committing puffery and giving too much credit to an oftentimes goofy horror flick (indeed, compare Hitch's flick to Belgian auteur Raoul Servais' delectably disturbing animated short Harpya (1979)), her BFI Film Classics book The Birds (1998) provide a number of positively penetrating insights about the monstrous tendencies of the so-called fairer sex. Indeed, while I have to agree with Woody Allen of all people when he stated in a Sight and Sound Hitchcock tribute, “I delighted in about five of Hitchcock’s movies and enjoyed a few others pretty much, but there are many I have no interest in, including some revered ones. They are all very light entertainment, fun like airport books or, as he referred to them, ‘slices of cake,’” it is ironically The Birds—a film with a premise that is so patently absurd and seemingly silly that is screams excremental exploitation trash—of all films where Hitch arguably reveals the most about his own personal Weltanschauung in terms of both elegantly and intricately expressing his great contempt for humanity and especially the opposite sex.

A monster movie for people that do not necessarily give a shit about monster movies, the film is mostly worthy of Paglia’s praise of the film as “a perverse ode to woman’s sexual glamour, which Hitchcock shows in all its seductive phases, from brittle artifice to melting vulnerability.” Of course, Paglia is a fiery guidette carpet-muncher and while I agree with her that Tippi Hedren is indubitably the greatest and most beauteous of the haute Hitch hoes, I think it would be more accurate to describe the film as a delightfully devastating deconstruction of the intricate perennial lie that is woman’s sexual glamour, which Hitchcock soaks in blood and bird shit in what is ultimately a rather ruthless film where a hot twat ‘peroxide blonde’ faces struggle for the first time in her putridly privileged San Francisco socialite life and naturally completely mentally deteriorates in the process, thereupon exposing both the innate frivolity and fragility of femininity. In short, The Birds demonstrates that it is a man’s world and the veneer of civilization, which is completely demolished in Hitch’s film, is the only thing keeping people from remembering that simple fact, hence the lack of so-called feminism among primitive peoples. After all, it is only the hocus pocus of feminine glamour, which is clearly and cleverly depicted in the film, that causes man to yield his power as most women would have very little if it was not handed to them by a dumb horny men that have foolishly fallen under their spell.

While it is impossible to completely hate her, blonde bombshell bon vivant Melanie Daniels—a vapid San Francisco vamp that lives a life of luxury due to her father owning a successful newspaper—immediately announces her sickening sense of self-absorption at the beginning of the film when a little boy whistles at her and she responds by proudly smiling, as if she thrives completely on male attention, including even that of a cheeky kid that is clearly old enough to be her son. While she never verbally expresses it, Melanie is clearly husband-shopping as she is getting pretty old for a debutante and she even immediately begins attempting to capture her prey upon meeting a young bachelor named Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) while shopping for Indian mynah birds at a local pet store. Despite (or, probably more accurately, because of) the fact that Mitch makes a total moron of her by pretending to think she is a store employee and letting her perform an entire bullshit seduction routine, Melanie is immediately enamored with the young hunk who, as a lawyer, recognized her from court in regard to a case he describes to her as, “one of your practical jokes that resulted in the smashing of a plate-glass window.” When Mitch states things like, “Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels” and “The judge should have put you behind bars,” you can practically imagine the heroine getting her panties soaked at the sense of stern male authority and her subsequent actions certainly hint at such a reaction as she utilizes her father’s newspaper power to find out who the hunk is simply by writing down his license plate. Determined to entangle Mitch in her virtual bourgeois femme fatale web, Melanie symbolically buys him lovebirds, but she only learns later from a neighbor that, despite being a hardly-young professional, the young bachelor curiously spends his weekends at his mother’s house in Bodega Bay. Despite being about 60 miles away from SF and Mitch expressing no serious desire to be with her, Melanie absurdly decides to head to Bodega Bay with the lovebirds in what ultimately proves to be the worst mistake of her entire life. While she does seem to achieve her objective of ensnaring Mitch the oedipally curious bitch, she will never be the same woman again as a poor little rich girl that now has bird-induced PTSD.

Although heroine Melanie Daniels is, to a certain degree, vaguely likeable, Hitch makes it quite clear that she is a half-crazed spoiled cunt that, among other things, engages in stalking, emotional blackmail, lying and deception, and various forms of deleterious tomfoolery. Of course, such is to be expected of a pretty peroxide blonde and as Paglia noted in regard to the character in the context of Hitchcockian cinema, “As a bottle blonde herself, she seems to gain strength from the peroxide, which operates on her like a transfusion of plasma. They dye theme appears in Hitchcock as early as THE LODGER […] Hitchcock treats blonde as a beautiful, false color, symbolizing women’s lack of fidelity and trustworthiness.” Despite being riddled with a good percentage of negative female stereotypes, Melanie also expresses absurd pretenses towards (proto)feminist folly, or as Paglia noted, “Miffed at Lydia’s frostiness, Melanie digs in her heels and refuses to let Mitch pick her up for dinner: ‘I can find my own way,’ she says, in what could stand as a manifesto of feminist independence.” Needless to say, Melanie is not the only insufferable chick in the flick, as Mitch’s widowed mother Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy)—a woman that, not coincidentally, bears a striking resemblance to the heroine, albeit a couple decades older—is every young debutante’s worst nightmare as a stuck-up old bitch that treats her son as if he were her hubby. Despite the fact she looks borderline elderly, Lydia has a banally conformist adolescent daughter named Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) who Melanie strategically buys lovebirds for as a birthday gift even though said birds are really clearly a symbolic gift to Mitch who she plans to capture via her feminine wiles.

Out of all the main female characters in the film, a young single schoolteacher named Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette)—a buxom brunette of the subtly bitchy yet rather sexy sort—is probably the most tolerable yet ultimately most tragic. An old flame of Mitch’s who actually relocated to Bodega Bay because of him, Annie was no match for the momma boy Mitch’s momma Lydia yet she still cannot get over him, hence why she has stayed in the area. Luckily for Melanie, the titular feathered terrors take care of the competition as the heroine and Mitch eventually suffering the shock of finding the ravaged remains of still-beauteous Annie's bloody bird-brutalized body. Arguably more ravishing and certainly strangely sexier than Melanie, Annie is assuredly one of the most interesting of the Hitchcock chicks and as Paglia noted in regard to the character, “Suzanne Pleshette, with her savvy Jewish Freudianism, puts all the right shadings into her marvelous depiction of the articulate, hyperconscious, but slightly depressive Annie.” In fact, Annie goes as far as arguably hinting that her ex-lover is gay when she states, “Maybe there’s never been anything between Mitch and any girl.” Needless to say, when Annie states in regard to San Francisco—the virtual cocksucker capital of the world—“I guess that’s where everyone meets Mitch,” one cannot help but feel that is once again hinting at his dubious sexuality (notably, in her new foreword to the 2nd edition of her BFI Film Classics book The Birds, Paglia would even describe a neighbor of Mitch’s portrayed by Richard Deacon as “a waspish, fashion-savvy gay connoisseur who recognizes the supreme sexual power of a woman as cult object without yielding to it”).

While The Birds undoubtedly portrays leading lady Melanie Daniels as an inordinately manipulative and exceedingly entitled bitch that is used to getting what she wants whenever she because she realizes that she has a pricey pussy and is more intrinsically important—both in terms of class and genetics—than most of humanity, her female inferiors, which includes women of all ages (but certainly not coincidentally, especially older women), actually prove to be the greater monsters to the point where they irrationally accuse her of causing the virtual bird apocalypse after all hell breaks loose. Indeed, one hyper hysterical mother portrayed by Doreen Lang even dares to scream in Melanie’s face at a diner, “Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil! EVIL!” Of course, in stereotypical negative female fashion, this sensually sapless bitch just seems to be utilizing the situation to unload her (potentially subconscious) sexual jealously onto a feisty Fräulein that is both much younger and more beautiful than she is, yet Hitchcock makes sure it is almost impossible not to feel a certain schadenfreude at Melanie’s expense as it is about time that the preternaturally pretty heroine be smacked in the face with reality and learn what it means to truly suffer. Additionally, Melanie has something metaphysically (fe)malefic about her and as Paglia noted in regard to the diner scene with Doreen Lang, “The shrill mother, like a witch-baiter in THE CRUCIBLE, advances on Melanie, whose point of view is taken by the camera and therefore us […] Melanie, having had quite enough of impossible mothers, smacks her solidly in the face—which breaks the spell, but there is still no movement to Melanie’s side. While the woman’s charges are too irrational and sensational to accept in naturalistic terms, they have a mythic power that cannot be shaken off: on some level, Melanie really is a kind of vampire attuned to nature’s occult messages.”

Undoubtedly, until she is brutalized by the birds, Melanie wears a perennial smile of self-satisfaction as if there is no doubt in her mind that the world is her oyster, which is in stark contrast to Mitch’s constantly moody and broody bitch mom Lydia who immediately expresses a guarded glacial demeanor to the heroine that only begins to dissipate as the feathered apocalypse begins to get fierce. In that sense, Paglia makes an interesting argument when she mentions, “Crisscross (the theme of STRANGERS ON A TRAIN): literally from the moment Melanie crosses her legs, the bird attack begins. Has Lydia’s witchy malice evoked it? […] Lydia ‘panics,’ Hitchcock told Bogdanovich, because ‘she is not strong, it is a façade’: so architecturally, she is crumbling.” In short, female strength comes with a sunny smile as opposed to a fierce frown as exemplified by the stark contrast between the young and fertile Melanie and old and postmenopausal widow Lydia (who is so desperate for a man that she has succumbed to covert incest and has irrationally attempted to shield her son from a female mate so that she can perversely keep him for herself). Indeed, one can sense that Lydia innately understands (but, due to very personal reasons, does not want to accept) that her son has found a most apt sexual mate when she states to Melanie, “I feel as if I don’t understand you at all, and I want so much to understand. Because my son seems to be very fond of you, and I don’t quite know how I feel about it. I don’t even know if I like you or not […] Mitch is important to me. I want to like whatever girl he chooses.” Needless to say, were it not for the beaked holocaust and Melanie's behavior during said beaked holocaust, it is dubious as to whether or not Lydia would have ever embraced the heroine as the almost quasi-biblical experience seems to force the fiercely frigid old hag to finally come out of her shell.

Notably, the film concludes with Lydia caressing a catatonic Melanie as the lead characters escape Bodega Bay in a car driven by Mitch and one can only assume that the older woman’s display of compassion is somewhat deceptive as it can be rightly assumed that the widow no longer feels threatened that her much beloved substitute husband—her own son—will be taken away from her, at least not completely. For example, as Paglia argued, “At the end of THE BIRDS, who wields the claw? I agree with Margret M. Horwitz’s view that Lydia certainly appears ‘victorious’ and that she and the birds have ‘achieved dominance.’ Melanie is now damaged goods, which Madonna Lydia prefers for her pieta,” but, of course, part of the brilliance of the film is Hitchcock’s quite intentional ambiguity. After all, the film would have probably not been such a big hit, especially among chicks, if it was made completely unequivocal that woman are obscenely opportunistic, cold, calculating, callous and craven creatures that only get all the more so with age. Of course, the great irony of the filmmaker’s understated misogynistic brilliance is that his film is as coldly covert and cryptic as the monstrous women it portrays and in that sense, Hitch is the real monster of The Birds.

Whether intentional or not (I certainly believe the former), it is certainly fitting that, not unlike Jacques Tourneur/Val Letwon with Cat People (1942) and Paul Schrader with his 1982 remake, The Birds connects horror with the primordial horror of femininity, which makes perfect sense when considers the closer link that the fairer sex has with nature. Indeed, as Otto Weininger—a virtually blacklisted philosopher that, not unlike with Oswald Spengler, Paglia certainly borrowed a thing or two from—argued in his magnum opus Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles (1903), “Women are closer to nature in their unconscious than man. The flowers are their sisters, and they are less far removed from animals than Man, as is proved by the fact that they are surely more strongly inclined to bestiality than he is (remember the myths of Leda and Pasiphae; and women’s relationship with their lapdog is also much more sensual than is general believed).” And, of course, what better symbol of femininity than the angelic parasite known as the seagull and its flying sisters?! While The Birds heroine is constantly conspiring and plotting her next move, her main goal is clearly completely instinctual and that is to find a man and procreate, which she literally dedicates all her efforts to in her absurd pursuit of momma’s boy Mitch. After all, as Weininger once wrote (and Hitchcock would surely agree with), “Woman seeks her fulfillment as an object. She is the chattel, either of the man or of the child, and all she wants to be taken for is a chattel, despite all her attempts to hide this. There is no surer way to misunderstand what Woman really wants than by being interested in what goes on inside her and sympathizing with her emotions and her hopes, her experiences and her inner nature. Woman does not want to be treated as a subject. All she ever wants—and that is what makes her Woman—is to remain passive and to feel a will directed toward her. She does not want to be treated either timidly or gently. Nor does she want to be respected. Rather, she needs to be desired merely as a body and to be the sole possession of another. Just as a mere sensation only assumes reality when it becomes a concept—that is, an object—so Woman only acquires her existence, and a sense of her existence, when she is elevated by a man or a child—a subject—to his object, and thus has an existence bestowed on her.” Of course, this is explains why Melanie is totally turned on by Mitch’s initial rather arrogant insults (and why women in general are totally disgusted by ostensible ‘nice guy’ types) to the point where she fabricates an entire journey to be with him (despite knowing next to nil about him). Indeed, as far as nature is concerned, Melanie’s only real mistake is being attracted to a momma’s boy, which is probably the deleterious subconscious result of having a troubled relationship with her own estranged mother who abandoned her. Ironically, in the end, Melanie does acquire a surrogate mother of sorts but it is dubious at best that she, Mitch, and mommy Lydia will live ‘happy ever after’ in the end, especially since she has already made the unforgivable mistake of exposing weakness to the old lady. After all, as Hitch knew, trust no birds/bitches.

Just the other day, I saw a redneck truck plow down two seagulls on the main road in my hometown and there was a certain ironical poetry to these bright white bird bodies as these dead winged parasites still demonstrated more beauty than all the humans around them despite dying such undignified deaths. Indeed, while I am not particularly fond of gulls, they are undoubtedly less obnoxious and purer than the mostly putrid people that have turned their habitat—a resort town—into a hedonistic wasteland where (sub)humans come to bask in booze at the beach and other senseless shit that has less intrinsic value than bird shit. In short, the people I regularly encounter in real-life are certainly more worthy of a bird apocalypse than the characters in The Birds, which says a lot since I feel hardly sympathetic towards the characters of Hitch’s flick. Needless to say, a sequel exists but the made-for-TV turd The Birds II: Land's End (1994) directed by Hebraic Halloween sequel hack Rick Rosenthal is even worse than one might presume despite also featuring Tippi Hedren (who, rather curiously, does not reprise her Melanie Daniels character). Indeed, as much as I like seaside horror cinema, The Birds II provides less entertainment than staring at seagull roadkill for 90 minutes or so. Instead, Jean Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach (1947), Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide (1961), Ken Wiederhorn’s Shock Waves (1977), Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 (1979), John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980), and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), among a couple other examples, make for a nice companion to Hitchcock’s classic if you enjoy fun horror in the sun this summer. In that sense, The Birds might be, for me, Hitch’s most enjoyable film. As for Robert Eggers' latest The Lighthouse (2019)—a film that feels like what the mongrelized mutant offspring of H.P. Lovecraft and F.W. Murnau might make if attempting to take a grotesquely gynophobic approach to Harrington’s Night Tide and The Birds—it is probably the greatest killer seagull flick since Hitch's classic, which of course does not say all that much but I can certainly recommend it.

Notably, during his pre-The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) years, British auteur Peter Greenaway paid tribute to both Hitchcock and The Birds in various experimental collage-like films. In fact, Greenaway's absurdly ambitious first feature The Falls (1980)—an eccentrically and oftentimes esoterically epic 195-minute avant-garde docucomedy of sorts—can be seen, in part, as a sort of absurdist (anti)sequel to The Birds that, aside from being set in a post-apocalyptic realm where characters have bird-like mutations and are obsessed with birds and flights, makes numerous references to the classic Hitch flick. For example, a film character named Obsian Fallicutt—a fanatical film editor that, not unlike Greenaway, becomes obsessed with films with ornithological themes—is described as believing that Hitch faked the mysterious apocalyptic scenario that is central to the film. Indeed, as the film's narrator states, “Obsian Fallicutt had a theory that the V.U.E. [Violent Unknown Event] was an expensive, elaborate hoax perpetrated by A.J. Hitchcock to give some credibility to the unsettling and unsatisfactory ending of his film THE BIRDS.” Needless to say, The Falls is mandatory-viewing for anyone with an acute autistic obsession with birds and/or The Birds.

Undoubtedly, one of the things that makes The Birds so inordinately enjoyable and artistically singular, especially in the context of Hitch’s overall oeuvre, is its strangely foreboding ambiguity. Indeed, as Robin Wood notes in his classic text Hitchcock's Films Revisited (1989) in regard to the conclusion of the film, “A bleak enough message; and in the last sequence of the film—the departure by car through the massed, waiting birds—the effect of bleakness is intensified by the uncertainties. For uncertainty is the keynote of the film: Hitchcock allows himself and us no easy comfort. Under this sense of judgment, of intense scrutiny, every action becomes ambiguous. The carrying of the lovebirds out to the ca: is it a touching gesture (through the child) of continuing faith, despite all, in the goodness of nature and the possibility of order, or an absurd clinging to a sentimental view of life, a refusal still to face reality? The mother’s cradling of Melanie in her arms and the shot of their interlocking hands: is it a gesture of acceptance (hence creative and fertile) or a new manifestation of maternal possessiveness? Melanie’s broken condition: does it represent the possibility of development into true womanhood, or a final relapse into infantile dependence? All these questions are left open: if we demand a resolution of them we have missed the whole tone and temper of the film. We can say, at best, that there is a suggestion of a new depth, a new fertility in the relationships—Lydia has become the mother Melanie never had. The point about the ending is that the degree of optimism or pessimism it is felt to contain must depend on ourselves: what Hitchcock gives us is the questions.” Of course, as a proud (cultural) pessimist, I can only interpret the film’s conclusion as being nothing more than a sort of figurative ‘calm before the storm’ where the main characters receive a temporary reprieve before the misery commences. As to whether it is the birds or their own self-destructive behavior and/or dysfunctional relationships that destroys them, it remains to be seen. In that sense, one must at least give credit to Rick Rosenthal for not reprising the original characters in his steaming celluloid seagull shit The Birds II as it would have surely contributed to the destruction of the mystique of the original film, hence the true unmitigated horror of most horror sequels.

Probably the greatest compliment I can pay to The Birds is that its greatest scenes resemble a sort of goofy warped take on a landscape painting by great Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin who Weininger once described as “one feels that mountains are dead and is mightily attracted only to the sea with its eternal motion.” Of course, as from its eternal motion, the sea represents a sort of escape from humanity as an unconquerable realm that virtually separates worlds, hence the genius of using birds as an apocalyptic catalyst as not even water can offer a chance of escape. Naturally, it is also extremely fitting that it was also directed by the man behind the idiosyncratic anti-nazi propaganda piece Lifeboat (1944) where the sea become a sort of perennial psychodramatic prison where man's sanity and civilization are put to the ultimate test. Surely, The Birds—a film that has aged somewhat gracefully over nearly 60 years—can be seen as a sort of allegorical cinematic ‘canary in a coal mine’ in regard to a sort of sexual apocalypse that has afflicted the Occident for sometime but certainly went into overdrive during the dreaded 1960s.

Indeed, as Weininger—a Viennese Jew whose somewhat predictable suicide Spengler once poetically described as death, “in a spiritual struggle of essentially Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever presented by a Late religiousness”—foresaw over a century ago, “Our age is not only the most Jewish, but also the most effeminate of all ages; an age in which art only provides a sudarium for its moods and which has derived the artistic urge in humans from the games played by animals; an age of the most credulous anarchism, an age without any appreciation of the state and law, an age of species ethic, an age of the shallowest of all imaginable interpretations of history (historical materialism), an age of capitalism and Marxism, an age for which history, life, science, everything, has become nothing but economics and technology: an age that has declared genius to be a form of madness, but which no longer has one great artist or one great philosopher, an age that is most devoid of originality, but which chases most frantically after originality; an age that has replaced the idea of virginity with the cult of the demivierge. This age also has the distinction of being the first to have not only affirmed and worshiped sexual intercourse, but to have practically made it a duty, not as a way of achieving oblivion, as the Romans or Greeks did in their bacchanals, but in order to find itself and to give its own dreariness a meaning.” Despite Hitchcock's Roman Catholic background and formative Jesuit education that he once described to mischling Peter Bogdanovich as being so highly influential in the sense that, “The Jesuits taught me organization, control and, to some degree, analysis,” there is no question of the Freudian factor of his oeuvre and his various crucial collaborations with Hebrews that include Ealing Studios head Michael Balcon, composer Bernard Herrmann, businessman Sidney Bernstein, screenwriters Arthur Laurents and Ben Hecht, and graphic designer Saul Bass, among countless others, reveals that the filmmaker is—for better or worse—a glaring product/symptom of Judaic modernity.

Undoubtedly, to various degrees, Hitch’s films absolutely epitomize this spiritually necrotic disease, but at least The Birds arguably recognizes it on a sort of ambiguous subtextual level as a flick where a scheming debutante, momma’s boy lawyer, and covertly incestuous mother seem to get their just deserts; or at least they are forced to pull their heads out of the asses for the first time in their entire pathetic lives due to the curious circumstance of a wonderfully nonsensical Neornithes nightmare. Of course, in the end, flocks of fatally fierce feathered friends attacking people seems less patently absurd than the petty and patently prosaic concerns of the pretty plastic people of The Birds who are forced by a sort of goofy Armageddon to, at least temporarily, end their innate inertia. As guido gore maestro Lucio Fulci's The Exorcist rip-off Manhattan Baby (1982)—a film that manages to pay tribute to both Hitch’s Psycho and The Birds in a single scene in its depiction of stuffed birds coming alive and killing their master—surely demonstrates, killer winged beasts are not interesting enough to make a film worthwhile but they make a nice backdrop to a film marinated in misanthropy and ostensible misogyny where one cannot help but root for the birds, including seagulls.

While I hardly would describe most of Hitch's film as art and find very little to admire about the life and work of Pablo Picasso, I think the Spanish artist could have certainly been talking about The Birds when he once stated, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” as it is a film that gives a soul to the soulless and takes a pleasantly preposterous approach to giving a sort of human vulnerability to the only superficially human. Indeed, the film might make Hitchcock seem rather unflattering in that it seems like his savagely sadistic reaction to a lifetime of being rejected by premium grade pussy, but he does somewhat paradoxically demonstrate that pretty peroxide blondes also have feelings (or whatever), which the filmmaker took to even further extremes with lead Tippi Hedren in his underrated subsequent film Marnie (1964). After all, Hitchcock—a lifelong sadistic practical joker—seemed to most enjoy cinematically abusing female birds and he apparently even acted like a monster to Hedren in real-life, so it is only natural that a high-point in his career would involve literal birds brutalizing people in what is arguably the most playfully pernicious cinematic pun in cinema history. Of course, in a seemingly apocalyptic age that is increasingly decadent and feminine where relationships between the sexes have reached an all-time high in terms of dysfunction to the point where the birth rate is dropping rapidly in the West and divorce is the norm and marriage is considered a joke, The Birds—a film where it takes a literal bird apocalypse for the heroine to become more passive and her male love interest to take real action and act like a man—is certainly more relevant today than when it was first released and thus more pleasantly punishing than Psycho. After all, we need a world with more pretty birds and less men in dresses.

-Ty E

Psycho (1960)

2020-05-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

Generally, I have two modes of film viewing: serious and unserious. While I tend to reserve arthouse films and ‘heavy stuff’ for my more serious film experiences, I also like to binge-watch old horror and sci-fi series like The Twilight Zone (1959–1964) and Tales from the Darkside (1983–1988) when I am feeling less serious and am simply looking for something nice and cozy to play in the background when I am working on other things, eating, or whatever. While many film nerds and film academics swear that he is unequivocally the greatest cinematic auteur that has ever lived and a virtual god among mere mortals, Hitchcock—a man that would arguably ultimately become better known as a brand than a simple filmmaker—is not exactly an all-time-favorite filmmaker of mine, which I recently further confirmed after having a long Hitch marathon of his mostly late-era top-shelf stuff during a number of my ‘unserious’ viewing sessions over the course of two weeks. Although there is no denying that Hitchcock was some sort of master craftsmen in a way probably comparable to Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher was in his field in terms of playing with things like symmetry and perspective and mastering découpage to an almost mathematical degree, it is hard for me to take him serious the way I do highly idiosyncratic auteur filmmakers like Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Werner Schroeter as his films are simply too glaringly contrived, cold, artificial, superficial, unbecomingly garish and just plain too old-fashioned for my tastes, hence why it does not surprise me that the man was a virtual brand and that he was the progenitor of a hit TV series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents (later known as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) that lasted ten seasons as he mastered a sort of gimmicky form of entertainment which, to his credit, he did better than anyone else. In fact, I would argue that even a classic The Outer Limits episode like ‘The Man Who Was Never Born’ displays more a ‘soul’ than the average Hitch flick, but I digress. Somehow I can imagine that even during sex (which he apparently had very little of during his life), Hitch would have to at least spend 20 minutes getting ready and putting on the right specially selected bondage gear just to get down and dirty as normal sensual things like passion and spontaneity probably totally escaped him.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding like a pretentious prick and/or contrarian cunt, I found it nearly impossible to take most of Hitchcock’s films any more serious than any other seriously reasonably entertaining horror and thriller flicks as they lack a certain heaviness, rely too much on pop psychology and bastardized true crime tales, and just do not hit me the way a great Bresson and Fassbinder flick does (indeed, compare Fassbinder’s Cornell Woolrich adaptation Martha (1974) to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and it becomes quite crystal clear who is the more painfully serious and completely uncompromising artist). Similarly, Rebecca (1940) is undoubtedly one of Hitch's greatest and most elegant films, but fellow English filmmaker Nicolas Roeg went much further with his Daphne du Maurier adaptation Don't Look Now (1973) and seamlessly assembled a singular combination of pathos, tenderness, eroticism, and virtual avant-garde horror that would simply confound the Notorious (1946) director as he seemed to lack a sense of artistic vigor, hence his self-admitted boredom while actually directing films. Still, if you are looking for the cinematic equivalent of a fun amusement park ride that takes your mind off the greater miseries of life, Hitchcock’s films indubitably provide and his countless imitators of various stripes prove this. In fact, like it or not, there is no denying that Psycho (1960)—a film that arguably represents the auteur at his most subversive, daring, and uncompromising—is simply one of the most influential films of all-time, though the overall value of said influence is somewhat dubious (after all, is there a more decidedly disposable and artistically bankrupt (sub)genre than the slasher film?!).

After my recent half-ass Hitch marathon, I think I tend to agree with the popular consensus that Psycho—along with Vertigo (1958) and The Birds (1963)—is one of Hitchcock’s greatest, if not greatest, masterpiece and a film that has aged relatively gracefully despite the large virtual garbage dump of senseless cinematic trash that it has influenced, which is somewhat ironic since it is certainly the one film that has completely escaped its creator’s grasp and developed a life of its own as demonstrated by the various Hitch-unapproved sequels and TV series that have haunted it, not unlike Norman Bates being perversely haunted by the memory of his dead mommy. Of course, more importantly, Psycho has had a totally unquantifiable influence on the art of cinema as a film that, aside from the obvious example of guido giallos and its American bastard offspring—the wretched slasher film—has been paid tribute (and anti-tribute) to in films ranging from William Wyler's The Collector (1965) to George Kuchar’s high-camp avant-fart short Pagan Rhapsody (1970) to Fassbinder’s debut feature Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) to the Amero brothers’ psychedelic hardcore horror flick Bacchanale (1970) to Maurice Pialat’s anti-romance We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) to Robert Altman’s Images (1972) to Paul Bartel's Private Parts (1972) to Jonathan Demme’s underrated Last Embrace (1979) to Brian De Palma's Hitch homage Dressed to Kill (1980) to Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984) featuring Anthony Perkins in a virtual meta-commentary role of his Bates character, among countless other examples. In short, Hitchcock’s arguable magnum opus is a film that has influenced an eclectic range of filmmakers, though there is no denying that its sexual perversion angle is indubitably one of its greatest sources of influence as a work of great indelible penetration where Hitchcock does not fuck around when it comes to depicting a freaky fuck that, probably not unlike the filmmaker, suffered the fate of living too much inside of his own head where he imagined many beauteous blonde babes dead.

Needless to say, Psycho was not the first film where Hitchcock dealt with the perils and problems of the seriously sexually sick, though he was certainly more covert, if not sometimes downright esoteric, when dealing with such material in the past. Indeed, even with his third feature and first worthwhile flick The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)—an Expressionistic silent feature where the auteur revealed his crucial Teutonic influence (for example, Hitch once spent weeks on the set of The Last Laugh (1924) watching F.W. Murnau direct)—Hitchcock had the rather androgynous and openly gay Ivor Novello play the titular lead. While I am totally opposed to the modern-day mainstream academic trend of attempting to prove that great dead artists were secretly gay, Hitchcock’s films just give too many damn clues that he was a closest queen and gay film critic Robin Wood makes a pretty good case in his classic text Hitchcock's Films Revisited (1989) that these signs are apparent starting with The Lodger and his second lesser known Novello collaboration Downhill (1927). In Woods’ obviously biased blow-boy mind, Hitchcock got really fat and married Alma Reville at the same time he worked with Novello as a means to repress his sexual desire for the flaming Welsh actor, or as the film critic argues, “Why, in fact, did Hitchcock put on so much weight? No clear medical evidence has been produced, as far as I know. There seems to be abundant testimony that Hitchcock, throughout his life, longed to be attractive to women an experienced agonies of frustration over his fatness. The Psychoanalytical evidence seems to point in the opposite direction, to a hysterical resistance to being physically attractive to anyone.” Indeed, it is also hard to imagine a straight man stating things like, “The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough” and taking so much sadistic glee in the brutalization and/or death/murder of beauteous blondes in films like Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo which are, not coincidentally, the filmmaker’s greatest (and, for the most part, most personal) works.

Of course, with his great experiment in (non)editing Rope (1948)—a film penned by kosher cocksucker Arthur Laurents—Hitchcock paid (anti)tribute to infamous Hebraic homo childkillers Leopold and Loeb and their failed attempt at a mundanely murderous pseudo-Nietzschean Übermensch lifestyle. Even more incriminating, after his commercial critical flops with Marnie (1964) and Torn Curtain (1966), Hitchcock planned to direct a covertly gay necrophiliac serial killer film entitled Kaleidoscope (aka Frenzy)—a film project that apparently even disturbed #1 Hitchcock fan-boy Truffaut—but apparently Universal Studios bigwig Lew Wasserman felt a film involving an unhinged killer with an unhealthy addiction to beefcake bodybuilding magazines who gets caught masturbating by his own mother was not commercial enough so the filmmaker was unfortunately persuaded to direct the all-too-cold Cold War thriller Topaz (1969), which is indubitably one of his worst and most forgettable films, instead. Of course, Hitchcock’s oeuvre is, relatively speaking, a clever cocksucking cinephile's wet dream as it features much hermetic homoisms. For example, Hitch's first feature The Pleasure Garden (1925) features an exceedingly effete costume designer, Murder! (1930) is notable for a half-breed transvestite killer, The Lady Vanishes (1938) has a curious cricket (and seemingly cock) obsessed male couple, Strangers on a Train (1951) features a titular bromance that borders on the homoromantic, and Martin Landau plays a murderously jealous queen of sorts in North by Northwest (1959), among various other examples. Needless to say, in terms of implied homosexuality and gay coding, there’s a lot of creepy covert cocksuckers when it comes to the cinema of Hitchcock and, as Psycho certainly demonstrates, this one of the most interesting and entertaining aspects of the filmmaker’s oeuvre.

Undoubtedly, the casting of actor Anthony Perkins—a painfully shy and weirdly wiry fellow that, not surprisingly, was involved in strictly same-sex relationships until his late-30s—was a stroke of genius and one can only assume that old Hitchcock had a great gaydar as it is simply impossible to imagine, say, Paul Newman (who later appeared in Hitchcock’s uneven Torn Curtain (1966)) or any another top leading man portraying the unconventionally iconic role of Norman Bates who is indubitably one of the great unforgettable characters of cinema history. Rather revealingly, Bates suffers from the stereotypically homosexual psychological problem of mommy issues and, as Jewish feminist Paula Marantz Cohen complains in her book Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism (1995), the film is arguably at least partially the auteur’s response to ‘Momism’—a term coined by psychologist Erik Erikson (who had his own special lifelong mommy issues as the bastard broad of a Jewess and Danish Aryan father)—and the deleterious nature of an obscenely overly-controlling maternal influence. Of course, not unlike many of Hitchcock’s greatest films, most of the female characters in Psycho are unlikable, if not downright loathsome, including an insufferable secretary played by the director’s own daughter Pat Hitchcock (apparently, the filmmaker was not too happy when his daughter got married in 1952 and their relationship permanently suffered as a result). While most of the male characters are not much better, one gets the sense that Hitchcock is somewhat rooting for Bates Motel master Bates and that he is nothing if not the demented victim of gynocentrism in its most natural and unfortunately unchecked form. While some perennially dry and soulless fecund-free feminist types might go as far as describing the film as misogynistic, I think it would be more accurate to describe Psycho as a fairly successful experiment in merrily macabre misanthropy where a relatively tasteful tongue-in-cheek approach is taken to the idiosyncrasies of the rather retarded enigma that is (in)humanity. Undoubtedly one of the most artfully executed cinematic trolls in Hollywood history, Psycho is a proto-tranny-tinged anti-tribute to the tediously terrible turd pile that is (most of) humanity. In short, the film is where Hitchcock revealed what sort of beast he really is and he curiously utilized a knife-wielding dude in a dress to do it.

In modern post-internet speak, Psycho is the tragic tale of a young erratic incel of the obviously autistic sort (hence his bird fetish) that confronts his virtual female sexual marketplace opposite—a desperate unmarried and childless dame of the seemingly highly sexually experienced sort that is about to ‘hit the wall,’ hence her desperate motivation behind impulsively stealing $40,000 from a crude capitalist cowboy—in a confrontation between the sexes that would have been rather unlikely were it not for the absurdity of fate. Indeed, real-estate secretary Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) has good reason to be so deleteriously desperate as her biological clock is ticking and her divorced boy toy Sam Loomis (John Gavin)—a somewhat dumb yet likeable hunk that makes most Hitchcock heroes seem like effete pussies by comparison—is in serious debt on top of having to pay alimony to his ex-wife, thus it seems unlikely that she will have the means to start a family anytime soon. In that sense, Marion’s brutal murder at the hands of Normans Bates (Anthony Perkins) almost seems like an unintentional act of compassion as the quasi-heroine, who seems to have very little prospects in life aside from great lunchtime sex in sleazy hotel rooms, is put out of her misery and it is only fitting that the culling process is carried out by a miserable man-boy that is unlikely to reproduce himself due to being psychologically castrated by his mother who he, rather fittingly, killed. Notably, after Marion dies, her sister Lila Crane (Vera Miles) hooks up with boyfriend Sam to search for her and it is quite clear the two have great chemistry and will probably make for a great couple in the future. Notably, when Marion and her beau Sam are depicted at the very beginning of the film during a brief post-coital exchange, it almost seems like the end of a transaction between a whore and her john, but one would never sense such a sleazy display between sister Lila and Sam. In that sense, Psycho is not unlike Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) of all films in terms of its ironical depiction of a healthier couple being formed as direct a result of the death of the protagonist. In short, sometimes tragic murders have positive consequences and sometimes lethally lonely lunatics can make positive contributions to society; or such are some of the more delectable absurdities of some of Hitchcock’s greatest films. After all, in The Birds, the most benign of creatures—feathered warm-blooded vertebrates that remind one of nature’s harmony, purity, and beauty—provide the viewer with the delight of going on a bloody rampage and collectively attacking obnoxious spoiled people in what might be best described as the anti-monster movie par excellence. Undoubtedly, films like Psycho and The Birds demonstrate that Hitch derived his greatest sense of humanity in his inhumanity, misanthropy, and misogyny, as there would be very little emotionally left in his films were in not for these audaciously asocial attributes cloaked in dark sardonic humor.

Aside from taking the pink pill and attempting to reveal what sort of queen the knighted English auteur really is after coming out of the closet himself, gay Hitchcock scholar Robin Wood has done a pretty interesting job dissecting the filmmaker's psychological motivations and compulsions in general, especially as it relates to his most famous flick Psycho. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, Wood takes a pathetically politically correct and absurdly academic approach and even attempts to link the film to the holocaust and the abandoned British government-produced agitprop doc German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945) that Hitchcock worked as a supposed ‘treatment advisor’ on. Indeed, as Wood curiously argues at the very end of his chapter on the film in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, “PSYCHO is one of the key works of our age. Its themes are of course not new—obvious forerunners include MACBETH and Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS—but the intensity and horror of their treatment and the fact that they are here grounded in sex belong to the age that has witnessed one the one hand the discoveries of Freudian psychology and on the other the Nazi concentration camps. I do not think I am being callous in citing the camps in relation to a work of popular entertainment. Hitchcock himself in fact accepted a commission to make a compilation film of captured Nazi material about the camps […] But one cannot contemplate the camps without confronting two aspects of this horror: the utter helplessness and innocence of the victims, and the fact that human beings, whose potentialities all of us in some measure share, were their tormentors and butchers […] PSYCHO is founded on, precisely, these twin horrors. For Hitchcock it was a ‘fun’ picture, and a streak of macabre humor (‘Mother . . . what is the phrase? . . . isn’t quite herself today’) certainly runs through it. Is it, then, some monstrous perversion? Many have found it so, and their reaction seems to be more defensible than that of those (must we include Hitchcock himself?) who are merely amused by it […] No film conveys—to those not afraid to expose themselves fully to it—a greater sense of desolation, yet it does so from an exceptionally mature and secure emotional viewpoint. And an essential part of this viewpoint is the detached sardonic humor. It enables the film to contemplate the ultimate horrors without hysteria, with a poised, almost serene detachment. This is probably not what Hitchcock meant when he said that one cannot appreciate PSYCHO without a sense of humor, but it is what he should have meant […] For the maker of PSYCHO to regard it as a ‘fun’ picture can be taken as his means of preserving his sanity; for the critic to do so—and to give it his approval on these grounds—is quite unpardonable. Hitchcock (again, if his interviews are to be trusted) is a much greater artist than he knows.” Somehow, I doubt shoah saints like Claude Lanzmann would approve of Wood's attempts to connect Hitch's masterpiece to the Big H, but I have to respect the film critic's preternatural passion for Psycho.

While I can appreciate Wood’s hardcore (Hitch)cockphilia as a fellow cinephile and argue that Hitch mastered a sort of majestic detachment like no other, I cannot help but feel that, as hinted at in the biopic Hitchcock (2012), the filmmaker derived a great sense of sadistic glee from Psycho and that the film is largely an expression of the all-too-deceptively-effete filmmaker’s great contempt for his audience and humanity in general to the degree where a killer momma’s boy in a dress is arguably more sympathetic than his victims. Indeed, while I do not typically find much to agree on with feminist Hebrewesses, I cannot help but mostly concur with Paula Marantz Cohen when she argued in regard to the savagely yet stylishly sadistic essence of Hitchcock's classic cinematic work, “The gaze that the film directs back at the audience in PSYCHO is, in [William] Rothman’s phrase, ‘murderous’ precisely because it envisions the gaze of the spectator to be, like Norman Bates’s mother, not capable of the right response—imaginatively, if not literally, dead. This being so, the film can only engage in acts of vengeance against the spectator, acts that is also attributes to the spectator as if seeking to animate it (Norman’s strategy with his mother’s corpse). Thus PSYCHO seeks both to animate us into an identification with the murderous Norman and to prove through doing so that we are morally empty in our ability to shift our investment from Marion to Norman and, finally, to accept meekly the posturing paternal verdict of the psychiatrist. The film works to ventriloquize our response, to animate it in order to kill it again. The ‘construction of a mental process’ that Hitchcock had linked to the look in REAR WINDOW has been placed by its opposite, the dismantling or murder of the look. One critic has made a relevant observation with regard to the look in PSYCHO: ‘What is remarkable . . . is that most of the characters who stare at the public are dead when they do so.’ Even the sophisticated montage technique in the PSYCHO shower scene is a model of its deconstructive method […] If montage in its traditional usage conditioned us to see an integrated reality, montage in PSYCHO conditions us to see an unintegrated one—to expect the inexplicable and gratuitous.”

While Jimmy Stewart is an obvious stand-in for Hitchcock in films like Rear Window and Vertigo, I have always felt he was living somewhat vicariously through the John Dall character in Rope as if getting away with (a homoerotic) murder is one of his greatest fantasies, hence the sense of contrived insincerity of the ending where the lead denounces his previous (pseudo)Nietzschean philosophy after discovering that his (ex)students have actually dared to put his Übermensch philosophy into practice. Either way, Psycho, not unlike much of Hitchcock’s films, reeks of fetishism and psychosexual sickness; it is just a question of what the filmmaker’s true repressed impulses really were. After all, as a relatively cultivated Victorian gentleman, Hitchcock was a bit more intelligent and civilized than Ed Gein—the real-life momma’s boy quasi-necrophile influence for Norman Bates—and one can only assume that he would not act on such impulses, which arguably acted as the source of his arguable genius as a master of cinematically depicting mentally defective criminality of the sort that might have been inspired by the various case studies featured in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). In fact, I do not think it would be much of a stretch to describe Hitchcock as a sort of covert modern Uranian artist, but there is no way in hell that the filmmaker would have ever accepted such a label, even if he had been unequivocally exposed as being engaged in tearoom action or buying bussy from young twink hustlers.

Notably, in an essay entitled ‘Must We Believe in Hitchcock?,’ celebrated French film critic André Bazin—a great cineaste intellect that, quite unlike his Cahiers du cinéma comrades like Claude Chabrol and Truffaut, had somewhat mixed feelings about the Psycho director—made a great point about the filmmaker that underscores what I both love and loathe about him, arguing with great no bullshit penetrating insight, “We know that Hitchcock has one idiosyncrasy: he appears in all his films for a brief moment. In LIFEBOAT, he is seen in a magazine photograph that is stained with oil and floating among the wreckage of the ship. In STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, we see him as a musician glimpsed boarding the train with an enormous bass fiddle. We have to take this as more than a superstition or a director’s trademark. A point of irony touching his entire oeuvre is the reminder of a certain between-the-lines reading of the scenario by those who can see beyond the most obvious effects. Nonetheless, at times this marvelously oiled mechanism grates strangely on one’s ears. Through the rhetorical, conventional, and, in a word, reassuring sadism of American films, Hitchcock sometimes makes you hear, over the victim’s terrified screams, the true cry of joy that does not deceive you—his own.” Indeed, Hitchcock’s greatest films almost mockingly hint at the perversions of the man that created them, as if he is so arrogantly rewarding those special individuals that are not total dumb asses and can see the camp and dysfunction hidden underneath—like Norman Bates’ erotic member under his mother’s dress as he penetrates with dumb bimbo with a knife—with a window into his true perverted personality. In fact, this aspect of Hitchcock’s films—and not the brilliant Psycho shower scene montage or oneiric essence of Vertigo—is the one thing that keeps me interested in his films and has kept me from the strong temptation to write him off as an obscenely overrated (yet undeniably technically talented) artisan that has had more of a negative than positive influence on the art of cinema (from the senseless schlock of the slasher genre to the The Bourne Identity, Hitch has inspired a lot of completely soulless/tasteless cinematic shit).

While critics have oftentimes argued that Hitchcock’s intent with Psycho and many of his other films was to, somewhat hypocritically, implicate the voyeurism of his audience (whereas his wop spiritual son Brian De Palma would simply use cinema to wallow in his own self-admitted fetish for voyeurism), the real intrigue of a Hitch flick is what cannot be seen: the debauched director’s deep dark desires. In Psycho and Hitchcock’s penultimate Frenzy (1972)—a virtual exercise in perversely playful self-parody where the auteur finally got to expose real unclad female flesh—the filmmaker probably comes the closest to revealing the real rampaging gynophobic queen hidden beneath the makeup. In that sense, that is why the psychiatrist scene at the end of Psycho is especially annoying and obnoxious as it not only insults the viewer’s intelligence, but also seems like a form of obfuscation upon the auteur’s part as if he wanted to clearly separate himself from the sexually psychotic nature of his film. It is also no coincidence that Hitchcock directed his most personal films while working in Hollywood as he would have surely faced a similar hysterical backlash to the sort that was heaped on Peeping Tom (1960)—a film that, for various obvious reasons, is oftentimes compared to Psycho (in fact, the film's heroine Anna Massey would later rather fittingly star in Hitch's Frenzy)—in the UK that more or less ruined its once-well-respected auteur Michael Powell's career had he dared to direct his gender-bending proto-slasher flick in his native land. In short, had Hitchcock grew up in a different era, he might have done for the thriller and horror genres what Fred Halsted did for homo hardcore as the man was just too innately Victorian and a product of his time to completely break out of his shell. Undoubtedly, Norman Bates might as well be speaking for Hitchcock when he so passionately proclaims, “You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.” While Hitch would actually dare to ‘budge an inch’ (or two or three) with Psycho, one can only assume the sort of unhinged cinematic assault he might have assembled had he been more comfortable with embracing his inner pervert. Personally, while it might sound insane, I actually find it is easier to fully embrace a no-budget Andy Milligan genre movie than a Hitchcock one as I feel like I am not being lied to or bullshitted as the gay gutter auteur might have had a somewhat ‘spastic’ directing style but he could not help but be himself. Indeed, Milligan may have been a monster of the absurdly technically inept sort but, quite unlike Hitchcock, at least he fully embraced it with great gusto.

While, in my opinion, Hitchcock never directed a cinematic work quite as artfully unnerving or perfectly pitch black as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques (1955)—a film that would heavily influence Psycho, especially the filmmaker’s decision to shoot it in black-and-white—I think it is safe to say that he transcended his French influence in terms of being a morbid master of manipulation (though Clouzot was clearly the more delectably misanthropic of the two filmmakers). Indeed, as Robert P. Kolker argued in his text The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016) in regard to Hitchcock’s arguable magnum opus, “PSYCHO is, like all Hitchcock, highly manipulative; it takes us exactly where it wants us to go but on subsequent viewing allows us in on the joke at PSYCHO’s heart. In the parlor scene, where Norman and Marion meet and she first hears Mother’s voice yelling at her son, the conformation exposes who Norman is and pretty much what is going to happen to Marion. The sequence is worth looking at in detail.” But of course, being a master of manipulation and ‘campy’ dark humor (which itself was oftentimes a result of said manipulation) just further confirms my suspicion that Hitchcock was a homo or, at the very least, a sort of ‘spiritual sod’ of sorts, but of course the same can be said of many of Hitchcock's film heroes. After all, while various film critics and scholars (including filmmaker William Friedkin in his DVD audio commentary for the film) have speculated that Vertigo is largely inspired by the sense that Hitch felt haunted by the unattainability of beauteous platinum blonde babes due his trademark portly physique, one could just as easily argue that said unattainability was the result of his sexuality and that he was more jealous of said beauties than desirous of them. After all, Hitch's gleeful brutality of Tippi Hedren in The Birds makes a lot more sense if one sees it from the perspective of a jealous gay man that is using cinema as a cunty covert means to attack stupid dames that he sees as rivals (additionally, due to his curious mommy issues, strange attitude, and dubious dress sense, Rod Taylor's character also seems fairly queer).

While indubitably ‘Hitchcockian’ in the best sort of way, there is a certain irony in Psycho being the director’s arguable magnum opus as it owes so much to so many other talented artists and, not unlike Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976)—a film that, incidentally, Bernard Herrmann also scored—has more than one auteur (indeed, screenwriter Paul Schrader was the real ‘brain’ behind the film). Indeed, aside from the iconic title designs by Saul Bass (who, rather revealingly, also storyboarded the shower scene), uniquely unforgettable musical score by Herrmann, and source novel by Robert Bloch (as penned for the screen by The Outer Limits writer-producer Joseph Stefano), the film is impossible to imagine without lead actor Anthony Perkins who, as far as I am concerned, IS Norman Bates as the character is nothing without the actor’s perturbingly preternatural essence. After all, as Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962), Pretty Poison (1968), WUSA (1970), Curtis Harrington’s How Awful About Allan (1970), and Crimes of Passion (1984) surely demonstrate, Perkins excelled like no one when it came to portraying unnervingly awkward introverts of the oftentimes morbidly mentally unsound sort. In fact, even in Jules Dassin’s Phaedra (1962) were Perkins plays an atypical hunk that cuckolds his own powerful bigwig shipping tycoon father, the actor bleeds a sort of highly visceral vulnerability that screams crazed cracked queer. While they might be obvious examples of cinematic sacrilege, I even find the three Psycho sequels tolerable simply because of Perkins’ presence (notably, Perkins also directed Psycho III (1986), thereupon further cementing his claim to Psycho auteur status). While I have admittedly fantasized about other leading men aside from Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant being in Hitchcock’s other great films, Psycho would be simply unimaginable without Perkins who proved that sometimes being a waywardly wimpy weirdo has its advantages. Additionally, Gus Van Sant's soulless virtual shot-for-shot Psycho (1998) remake is worth seeing just to see how appallingly horrendous Vince Vaughn is as Norman Bates compared to Anthony Perkins. Indeed, Vaughn, who Van Sant clearly wanted to fuck (among other things, the camera pointlessly focuses on the actor's ass as he walks up a set of stairs), seems like he is doing his best impression of what he thinks stereotypical gay men are like (in S. Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)), the actor would prove he is not bad at acting so long as he is playing a masculine character)..

Somewhat recently, not long after re-watching Psycho for probably the fifth or sixth time in my entire life, I happened to rewatch Joseph Losey’s beauteously bizarre failure Secret Ceremony (1968) for the first time and I could not help but notice the similarities and dissimilarities in how they deal with the theme of monstrous mothers as both films feature tragic young characters who grew up to be unhinged due to their mothers’ dubious relationships with sexually domineering men that dominated their lives at the expense of their children. While Psycho is clearly the superior and more immaculate film, I could not help but feel more impressed with the artistic integrity of Secret Ceremony—a meditative, somewhat ambiguous, sometimes dreamlike, and oftentimes quite beautiful film—despite it being a glaring artistic failure that sometimes borders on unintentional camp. Additionally, Nicolas Roeg's uneven yet underrated Track 29 (1988) acts as a nice thematic counterpoint to Psycho as a film where a sexually repressed wife is both literally (?) and figuratively haunted by the long lost son she gave up for adoption 15 years before. Needless to say, Roeg's film is both more thematically and artistically ambitious in depiction of the psychosexually unsound, especially as it relates to the morbidly maternal.

In short, I find it somewhat hard to like Hitchcock as both an artist and as a man as his films are oftentimes as cold and calculating as his carefully contrived cool-as-a-corpse character. In fact, I cannot help but agree with David Thomson—a lifelong Hitchcock fan that even devoted an entire worthwhile book to Psycho—when he wrote at the conclusion of his entry on the director in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975), “His great films are only partly his; they also belong to the minds that interpret them. There is an artistic timidity in Hitchcock that, having put the audience through it, must allow them to come to terms with the experience. But his own personality is withdrawn, cold, insecure, and uncharitable. The method, despite its brilliance, is equally privative and restrictive. To plan so much that the shooting becomes a chore is an abuse not just of actors and crew, but of cinema’s predilection for the momentary. It is, in fact, the style of an immense, premeditative artist—a Bach, a Proust, or a Rembrandt. And beside those masters, Hitchcock seems an impoverished inventor of thumbscrews who shows us the human capacity for inflicting pain, but not more. Such precision can only avoid seeming overbearing and misanthropic if it is accompanied by creative untidiness. In the last resort, his realized blueprints affirm film’s yearning for doubt and open endings.” In short, Hitch had the virtual emotional depth of a tick, the artistic passion of a mathematician, and the humanity of an over-educated executioner, but of course these are some of the things that also make him interesting and distinct as a filmmaker.

Despite the contrived nature of his films, Hitchcock actually demonstrated in a 1960 article entitled ‘Why I Am Afraid of the Dark’ a somewhat surprising appreciation for the proto-Surrealist literature of Comte de Lautréamont and surreal cinema of Luis Buñuel, René Clair, Jean Epstein, and Jean Cocteau, thereupon making his seeming incapacity to take serious artistic risks all the more perturbing but such seems to be typical and quite expected of his carefully contrived character. Indeed, somehow I think I would like Hitchcock more if it was revealed that he was not totally unlike the Norman Bates preposterously portrayed by Vince Vaughn in Van Sant’s Psycho remake and prone to masturbating while playing peeping tom as it at least would reveal a certain vulnerability and, in turn, humanity. Of course, somehow I suspect the real Hitchcock was a mix of motel master Bates and ‘Scottie’ in Vertigo as a man that rather see an inordinately beauteous blonde dead than lying naked in his bed. While Hitch might have been a fag, he was surely no serious art fag and I will continue to enjoy Psycho like my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits while trying to forget that certain film scholars and even great filmmakers somehow regard him as one of the great cinematic masters as if he was working on the same level as a F.W. Murnau, Bresson, Dreyer, or even P.P. Pasolini. While it is easy to understand why Hitch's films are so commonly taught in film schools as they are so meticulously and obviously manufactured with great geometric precision, there is no way one can truly teach the gifts of a Bresson, Federico Fellini, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, or Werner Schroeter. Still, many filmmakers have tried to make their own equivalent to Psycho and various other Hitchcock films (e.g. D.J. Caruso's Disturbia (2007) is a tedious teenage reworking of Rear Window), yet Hitch still did it best (sorry, Maestro De Palma). In fact, even François Truffaut had to rightly admit that his Hitchcock homage The Bride Wore Black (1968)—a film scored by Bernard Herrmann and based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich who of course also provided the source material for Rear Window—was an artistic failure.

In Psycho, the female lead portrayed by Janet Leigh is brutally studied in the way women judge other women for about forty minutes and then slaughtered like a pig while in a most vulnerable position by a man in a dress with a serious negative Oedipus complex. While Hitch's own sexuality is a matter of speculation, I think it is only fair that film scholars recognize his masterpiece as a classic piece of queer cinema that arguably demonstrates what Jean Cocteau meant when he stated of himself in Vanity Fair in 1922 that he is a, “lie that tells the truth” as it a sometimes campy fictional cinematic work that gets to the heart of certain homosexual truths in regard to sex, misogyny, and mommy issues, among other things, hence why top New Queer Cinema auteur Gus Van Sant—an artsy fartsy director that does much better with loose nonlinear narratives than more convention linear ones as confirmed by his greatest films like My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Elephant (2003)—was given the decidedly dubious job of directing the terrifying tacky remake (which is ultimately gay in the worst sort of way).

In her magnum opus Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Camille Paglia attempts to make the case for elevating Hitch's film to the level of high art by arguing, “The finale of THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES anticipates a classic moment of cinema. Paquita is not just killed but slaughtered, butchered, as in the murder scene of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960). In Hitchcock as in Balzac, a knife-wielding hermaphrodite [...] compulsively slashes the body of a beautiful woman enclosed in a female bower [...] The horror of the two scenes comes from the mutilation of a sensuous female body around which an erotic aura has been painstakingly built up, in Balzac by the stressing of Paquita's ‘luminous’ beauty and in Hitchcock by the voyeuristic display of half-naked Janet Leigh, who models lingerie from the first scene on [...] Balzac and Hitchcock turn the beautiful woman into an object. Marion's blood flows indifferently with the bathwater down the drain. Her body falls awkwardly over the edge of the tub. Her cheek is deformed by the tile floor. And the last we see of her is her dead eye, lingered over by the camera until it has the iconicism of Paquita's golden eyes. Cold and marmoreal but still glittering with beauty, Marion's eye belongs to a fallen statue, an art object vandalized and abandoned. Balzac and Hitchcock record symbolic sex acts by megalomaniacal but phallically impotent cultists. Norman Bates, like the Marquise, has his own sequestered ritual love-object—the body of his mummified mother!” Of course, it would not be a stretch to assume that Hitch was an impotent megalomaniac that was enslaved to some Oedipal trauma and thus a real ‘psycho’ of sorts, which I hope is true as it certainly makes him more interesting as both a man and artist.

-Ty E

Imperium: The Flaccidity of Hollywood and Culture-Distorter (Meta)Politics

2020-04-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

For about a decade or so, I have tried to steer completely clear of Hollywood movies in general, especially nasty anti-white agitprop of the brain-dead neo-nutzi sort where skinheads and other ostensibly pro-white tattooed losers demonstrate that they are even less articulate and cultured than the ghetto negro crackhead and dope dealers that they so ruthlessly and venomously hate yet somehow I forced myself to watch the innately insipid and inanely idiotic Imperium (2016) directed by young Hebraic hack Daniel Ragussis who demonstrated a prior interest in Judaic studies with his short Haber (2008) starring Teutonic mischling Christian Berkel in the titular role as German-Jewish chemical warfare pioneer Fritz Haber. In fact, my main reason for enduring such fiercely phony ADL-approved celluloid shit is due to it being seemingly named after Francis Parker Yockey’s wonderfully arcane neo-Spenglerian tome Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948), which is hardly the sort of book that is read by the tattooed neo-nazi degenerates, neo-confederates, and the various other sorts of terminally retarded and completely culturally deracinated would-be-stormtroopers that make up the so-called ‘white supremacist’ movement. In fact, while a copy of Yockey’s classic text Imperium can be briefly seen quite preposterously alongside Essays of a Klansman (1983) by Louis Beam (whose maritime KKK actions against Vietnamese immigrant fishermen seems to have partly inspired Louie Malle's shockingly horrendous late-era agitprop piece Alamo Bay (1985)), it has nothing to do with the film and simply seems to be the expression of the filmmaker’s fear of an almost mystical book that, quite unlike the cartoonish white nationalism of George Lincoln Rockwell, represents the zenith of post-Third Reich pro-Europid revolutionary thought as a 600-page metapolitical philosophical text as written by an American lawyer turned virtual one-man-revolution that, among other things, abandoned his post as a post-trial review attorney for the Nuremberg Trials while fighting against the Allied Occupation of Germany and later even wrote anti-Zionist propaganda for the Egyptian Information Ministry after an inspiring meeting with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In short, Yockey, who had a genius IQ of 170 according to his extensive FBI records, is the sort of fearless Faustian Renaissance man that hysterical Hebraic types wish did not exist and the film is ultimately a piss poor pathetic attempt to ostensibly confront that ‘neo-nazis’ are not only people, but also that some happen to be intelligent and even extremely cultivated and far from the deranged dipsomaniac bonehead stereotype that absurdly finds a sense of racial identity by chanting Skrewdriver lyrics while chugging cheap canned beer with his similarly boorish bros. Not surprisingly, the film fails in virtually every single regard while quite ironically and unintentionally making the neo-nazis, or at least the more cultivated ones, seem like the good guys, which is funny for a film that uses the played-out and oftentimes misattributed quote, “For evil to triumph, it only takes good men to do nothing” as a tagline. In fact, the only thing that could make the movie more carelessly cliche and intellectually bankrupt is if it featured some George Santayana quote about history or whatever.

Released around the time of 2016 United States presidential election when Donald Trump was still promoting borderline white nationalist ideals and the so-called alt-right and related groups horrified Hollywood and the mainstream media by revealing that pro-white subcultures are now actually cool and somewhat evolved since the largely lumpenprole days of less than elegant ex-con skinheads and bearded pseudo-Odinist LARPers, Imperium is less a serious movie than a considerably clueless PSA that was meant with the disingenuous intent to strike fear in Judaic and leftist elites about the very real possibility of a new white American consciousness that completely rejects the completely counterfeit multculti globalist con and corrupt kritarchy that America has become as a result of the undeniably steady decline of its elite Anglo-Saxon founders. A frivolous failure in virtually every single objective it seeks out to accomplish, the film ultimately also somewhat paradoxically attempts to comfort the sort of compulsively complacent idiots that believe in Hollywood negro scientists, reflexively reference the pseudo-scientific turds of Jared Diamond, and read The New Yorker like it were scripture, which is ironic when one considers the sheer cluelessness of this feckless filmic fart as a movie that confirms that the enemies of white nationalism simply do not understand as to why there is an organic reawakening of the blond beast despite being a largely racially European yet culturally mongrelized country where Nietzsche has never (and will never) be a household name. Of course, one should not expect anything less from a movie meant to appeal to the sort of bourgeois lemming losers that unwittingly adopted degenerate leftist politics as a result reading Harry Potter as children.

Despite being a preposterously flaccid and superficially melodramatic pseudo-thriller sans action and suspense that has literally nothing going on for it, Imperium curiously seems to have been heavily promoted among the mainstream liberal intellectual elite as demonstrated by the extra features of the blu ray release of the film, which includes two different 30-minute The New York Times’ TimesTalks with Daniel Ragussis and Daniel Radcliffe where the non-auteur and his similarly intellectually languid lead actor try in vain to explain the idiosyncrasies of what is oftentimes described as the white nationalist movement as if they are trying to explain the behavior of exotic animals in a zoo. Undoubtedly, what becomes clear in these superficial interviews is that, aside from having an intrinsic racial disdain for these movements, Ragussis and Radcliffe have real no innate understanding of the contra-kosher subculture that they supposedly spent many months, if not years, apparently researching. For example, there is not a single reference to Yockey and his tome Imperium despite the latter strangely acting the inspiration for the name of the marvelously mediocre movie. Of course, the reality is that Imperium inspired many strange things both inside and outside the largely bankrupt WN movement. For example, before providing hipster cred to dead-eyed porn star Sasha Grey—a proud ostensible bad girl with a boy bod that is big on anal—David Tibet created an entire album entitled Imperium (1987) for his longtime neofolk project Current 93 in tribute to Yockey’s book and it features lyrics like: “The jews they crucified the Christ…And the jews they crucified the Christ…And nailed him to a tree…Imperium…Imperium…Imperium.” Additionally, before he ruined his life by getting involved with the so-called Manson Family, psychedelic musician Bobby Beausoleil—a tragic ‘acid fascist’ that created one of the greatest film soundtrack in cinema history for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1972) from the comfort of prison—found influence in Yockey and his book.

As for actual neo-nazis, Imperium has influenced figures ranging from National Renaissance Party leader James H. Madole to lone wolf advocate James Mason of Siege infamy yet his influence on these neo-nazi misfits seems to be more symbolic/superficial than truly (meta)political. Hardly an advocate of the stereotypical (neo)nazi view of race, Yockey—a dark-haired dude of mostly German and Irish stock that grew up in a cultivated Anglophile family—aggressively rejected ‘racial materialism’ in favor of a more ‘spiritual’ idea of race and thus has inspired some more seriously racially dubious stormtroopers over the years, including kosher Nazi Dan Burros, whose tragic life inspired Henry Bean’s The Believer (2001) starring Ryan Gosling, as well as tragic mulatto neo-nazi and would-be-terrorist Leo Felton. Of course, nothing in the moronic movie Imperium gives any idea as to the strange, singular, and oftentimes arcane influence of Yockey, which is, in a way, strangely fitting as the film dares to sympathize with the morally bankrupt plight of an unashamedly underhanded undercover FBI agent and the neo-Spenglerian philosopher was himself the victim of FBI oppression, which ultimately led to his mysterious death.

The sad reality is that most films about neo-nazis/skinheads seem to be, at best, poor philistine attempts at reexamining the more sensational elements of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)—a film largely inspired by its celebrated NYC Jewish director's own conflicted view of Faustian man—in a painfully literal and one-dimensional fashion as is especially exemplified by the decidedly dumb yet somewhat entertaining Australian flick Romper Stomper (1992). Of course, whacked-out Hebrew Tony Kaye’s overrated Edward Norton vehicle American History X (1998) is the most popular and beloved of these films and it fails miserably in its objective by somehow unintentionally romanticizing the white prole power subculture. Undoubtedly, Greek-French commie Costa-Gavras did a more respectable job with Betrayed (1988)—a film inspired by the real-life outfit The Order (aka Brüder Schweigen) and its founder/leader Robert Jay Mathews (who, notably, was burned alive by FBI agents during a disastrous standoff in December 8, 1984)—where the FBI is arguably portrayed as more criminal and terroristic than a neo-nazi terrorist group. Despite the film’s director and actors constantly attempting to claim one of their main objectives with the film was to try to humanize its rather stereotypical collection of neo-nazis characters, Imperium is no more successful in this regard to similar flicks to the point where Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015)—a neo-Carpenterian genre-crusher with vague arthouse qualities—takes a more nuanced approach to depicting skinheads despite being a horror-thriller where heroin-dealing neo-nazis utilize dogs to kill some dumb punk kids.

Although based on the professional experiences of a real-life ex-FBI agent by the name Michael German as detailed in his book Thinking Like a Terrorist: Insights of a Former FBI Undercover Agent (2008), Imperium never manages to seem like it is anything more than the careless and confused result of some SPLC researcher glancing over a couple Wikipedia articles on the most bland sort of white nationalist groups and then assembling what feels like a third rate detective story sans any serious detective work. Indeed, the only thing one really learns by watching the film is that FBI agents live pathetic lives that involve treachery and emotional exploitative and that they are much closer to the losers of Martin Ritt’s classic John le Carré adaptation The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) than some glamorous alpha-male James Bond type as only the morally defective and uniquely unprincipled could pretend to be something they are not while exploiting the trust of people that already find so little to trust in the world. In that sense, it is a sick irony that such a film would be named after the magnum opus of Yockey who had so little trust for the government of his nation that he went renegade by defending the conquered people that said nation destroyed during the so-called Nuremberg Trials, thereupon completely throwing away a very potentially prestigious and lucrative law career in the process.

If it was not obvious from his appearance and overall essence, Daniel Radcliffe is notably a chosenite so it naturally seemed like an absurd prospect when I initially discovered that he of all people would be pretending to be an undercover FBI agent LARPing as a neo-nazi. While I have personally known some rather racially dubious individuals associated with certain ‘pro-white’ and counter-kosher subcultures, including half-Jews and hapas, as it is a scene that—rather unfortunately but unsurprisingly—tends to attract a lot of unhinged and/or terribly troubled individuals, Radcliffe is just too painfully banal and mirthlessly milk-toast in his Judaic essence to ever be even remotely believable as an American neo-nutzi, hence one of the many reasons that Imperium is a fundamentally flawed celluloid shitshow that, at best, would only appeal to the already (kosher) converted. Admittedly, the idea of Harry Potter hanging out with tatted Hitlerites did seem like it could be potentially humorous in an unintentionally absurdist fashion, but the film even manages to fail in that regard as insufferably runty Radcliffe simply lacks the command and charisma of someone like Otto Preminger in terms of a Jew preposterously portraying a nazi. Hell, even with his relatively small secondary role as a paranoiac neo-Nazi in Costa-Gavras’ Betrayed, self-described “hillbilly Jew” Ted Levine makes a seemingly infinitely more convincing and captivating neo-brownshirt. I, for one, certainly have no problem with members of the tribe playing various types of National Socialists and anti-Semites so long as they bring the sort of fierce flare typical of Erich von Stroheim when he was depicting pernicious Prussian officers and Nietzschean monsters, but little boy Radcliffe has about as much life and potency as a meth-addled tranny’s chemically-castrated cock, but I digress.

Undoubtedly, Radcliffe's glaring lack of believability as a soulless FBI stooge posing as a neo-brownshit is only transcended by the sheer and utter unlikeability of the ‘good guys,’ especially the shady bitch boy protagonist’s feministic FBI handler Angela Zamparo (Toni Collette). Indeed, when FBI agent Zamparo—an obnoxiously proud ‘nasty women’ that is certainly a painful reminder of Yockey’s words from Imperium, “Feminism liberated women from the natural dignity of their sex and turned them into inferior men”—notices that pussy protagonist Nate Foster (Daniel Radcliffe), who is, quite unsurprisingly, the annoyingly introverted and effete product of a single mother, seems particularly sympathetic towards a decidedly dark-skinned Jihadist that is more or less entrapped by some scheming FBI goons, she absurdly assumes he is autistic enough to go completely underground and learn to sympathize with neo-nazi types despite his strange affection for said dark-skinned Jihadist. Needless to say, nancy boy Nate is not initially up for the job as he lacks both the testicular fortitude and sense of conviction it takes to pretend to be a hardcore Mein Kampf fan-boy, but the insufferably pushy Zamparo, who clearly suffers from a perennial case of Penisneid, eventually gets her way in what ultimately proves to be one of the most less than uniquely underwhelming and stale spy scenarios in cinema history to the point where the film seems like a personal affront to Alfred Hitchcock as a master of suspense. In short, Imperium lacks virtually everything that makes Hitchcock's anti-nazi spy flick Notorious (1946) great and I say that as someone that has never had a hard-on for Hitch.

Starting nearly at the bottom of the white nationalist scene, Nate—a worm of a lad that is hardly the posterboy for white power prowess—first hooks up with a small-time neo-nazi leader named Vince Sargent (Pawel Szajda) while proclaiming to be a disgruntled Iraq War veteran that, due to his experience as a “WMD squad” bro, can offer special security to the less than motley skinhead crew. Although painfully idiotic in a cartoonish sort of fashion, Vince’s security guy Roy (Seth Numrich)—the sort of rabidly retarded, insanely irrational, and ultraviolent one-dimensional type that you tend to expect from a Hollywood neo-nazi flick—immediately rightly suspects that there is something fishy about Nate, but luckily the protagonist soon moves up the ranks of the white nationalist movement which, of course, has rather low standards and thus he only has limited interactions with the exceedingly erratic troglodyte Hitlerite. In the hope of entrapping them in a terrorist plot, Nate simultaneously attempts to court both an odiously opportunistic white nationalist shock jock named Dallas Wolf (Tracy Letts)—a sort of Hal Turner type (who, of course, was a real-life FBI informant)—and a rather rotund white nationalist leader named Andrew Blackwell (Chris Sullivan) who is the national director of a group called ‘Aryan Alliance’ that espouses a sort of archaic Christian Identity Weltanschauung (of course, this group is modeled after the long-irrelevant neo-nazi organization Aryan Nations founded by shady porn star fan Richard Butler). Needless to say, like in the real-life white nationalist scene, infighting and wild posturing is common but terroristic behavior is a rarity, so Nate wastes a good deal of time before he can find some poor unwitting idealist to bust with his bullshit FBI scheme. Rather preposterously, in the fiercely flaccid kosher-certified Hollywood fantasy that is Imperium, is is ultimately the most successful, cultivated, and respectable neo-nazi types that are involved in a terrorist plot.

In a film that trades in the probable for the pathetically propagandistic, it should be no surprise that the least likely sort of white nationalist type—a loving and well-educated family man of the highly intellectual, soft-spoken, and loving sort—is the one that ultimately gets busted in a monstrous terrorist plot. Indeed, gentleman Aryan Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell of True Blood)—an almost perturbingly pleasant pretty boy—is so wholesome that he detests when his skinhead comrades cuss and smoke around children and he is even cultured enough to confess that Leonard Bernstein is his favorite conductor when it comes to the musical compositions of Tchaikovsky (whereas the skinhead characters absurdly refuse to wear Levi's jeans simply due to their Judaic origins), yet he is totally enamored with the prospect of getting involved in a suicidal terrorist plot that involves utilizing caesium for a dirty bomb, as if such a senselessly destructive scenario will somehow bring about some sort of Aryan utopia and guarantee his place in Valhalla (notably, the film strangely uses Gerry's suicidal terrorist plot comments to allude to belated National Alliance founder William Luther Pierce via his favorite ancient Norse proverb and, in turn, the title of his bio The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds (2001) by Robert S. Griffin). While the Pierce-inspired Norse proverb is too good to be in the film, the following words do pay apt tribute to Yockey: “Cattle die and kinsmen die, and so must one die oneself. But I know one thing that never dies: the fame of a dead man’s deeds.”

Needless to say, FBI stooge Nate is shocked that a mensch as calmly charismatic and cultured as Gerry could be a true blue Nazi but, as the family man explains, a youthful reading of a book called Which Way European Man (which is a clear reference to William Gayley Simpson’s classic WN tome Which Way Western Man? (1978)) and experiences living among black Africans in Kenya imbued him with a strong racial consciousness, especially in terms of his firm belief in terms of the cultural and, in turn, racial superiority of Occidental man. While there have been a couple American neo-nazi terrorist types like David Lane that were certainly not dumb, there has certainly never been one like white bread suburban racial warrior Gerry Conway and one can only come to the conclusion that the character has been contrived to strike fear in stupid normie lemming types that their relatively successful Nietzsche-reading neighbor might be a potential terrorist that wants to violently exterminate mamzers and other untermenschen from the world. In fact, Imperium concludes with Nate’s FBI buddies busting Gerry and other neo-nazi professional types in what can only be seen as a fantasy scenario for Hebraic Hollywood types that would love nothing more than for successful racially-conscious whites to die in prison and their kids be spiritually and psychologically (and probably physically) defiled the sickos of Sunset Boulevard. Indeed, the title of the film only makes sense when one considers how the FBI destroyed Francis Parker Yockey, who was unequivocally the most intelligent and cultivated person ever associated with American white nationalism and a rare example of an American WN that was, as Savtri Devi would describe, a ‘Man Above Time’ who exhibited creative life-affirming qualities and sought to transcend the process of Occidental decay. Of course, Yockey was a somewhat mystifying rebel with certain libertine qualities and hardly a family man type like Gerry.

While Imperium revels in lies and half-truths, probably the most hyper hypocritical and all-around nonsensical message of the film is the claim that the “one essential ingredient to fascism” is “victimhood,” as if that is not really basis for virtually all forms of leftist politics and, in turn, identity politics. Indeed, considering we now live in a country with a slave-morality and victim culture where one's supposed moral superiority is based on what victim group they belong to, it is pretty hilarious that the film would accuse fascists of playing victim when many modern-day fascists were largely inspired to become fascists due to their disgust with victim politics and phony concepts like “equality,” which ultimately drags society down to the lowest common denominator at the expense of superiority. While there are undoubtedly various WN types with victim mentalities, it is simply a form of racial projection (especially in Hollywood's case) to accuse racially conscious whites of suffering from a victim mentality simply because they have identified a hostile group that is working against their interests. Indeed, one does not need to be a neo-nazi to clearly see that there is currently a war against America's largely silent white majority.

Undoubtedly, the petty propagandistic nature of Imperium becomes quite clear when one considers that the film’s ex-FBI agent co-writer Michael German and co-writer/director Daniel Ragussis were interviewed by the anti-white goons of the moronically misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center. Somewhat shockingly, German goes against the grain of the SPLC agenda in the interview and argues against the de-platforming of WNs and other right-wingers, stating, “The vast majority of neo-Nazis strongly believe what they believe and don’t want to share that side of themselves with the rest of society. They’re completely peaceful and have their website, where they can go invent their ethnostate and [organize their] conference once a year. I’m completely fine with that and more power to them; I will defend their right to do that. This idea that we have now of twitter-takedowns and social media-takedowns I think is very dangerous. From my experience within the violent fringe of this movement, that’s exactly what they want. As soon as people feel like they can’t express themselves and can’t engage with others about their ideas, that’s when the person on the fringe who says, ‘No, you have to use violence to change things,’ becomes more convincing.” Of course, this interview was conducted in February 2017 a number of months before the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the hysterical unprecedented mass-banning of WNs from social media sites, banning of alt-right sites like The Daily Stormer by several domain registrars, and complete deplatforming of pro-white politics from pretty much everywhere on the internet aside from the fringes. In short, the Tech companies, mainstream media, Hollywood, and United States government have colluded to create a sort of post-bolshevik softcore authoritarianism that will ironically guarantee the rise of WN terrorists who, feeling they have nothing to lose, will lash out, but maybe that is the point. After all, it does not exactly help the white identitarian movement for unhinged nut-jobs to go on rampages, so it is rather curious that Imperium somehow depicts the nicest and most morally pristine of white nationalist types as a potential mass-murdering terrorist.

Notably, as recounted in the book Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family (2000) co-written by John Gilmore and Ron Kenner, Bobby Beausoleil, who once appeared as ‘Lucifer’ alongside experimental auteur Kenneth Anger as he waves a swastika flag in the film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), declared a somewhat conflicted affection for Yockey and Imperium. Indeed, Beausoleil, who was originally given the death sentence for killing his leftist hippie dope dealer friend Gary Hinman, once stated, “I had this image in my mind of a sword—like it’s pictured on the cover of a book called IMPERIUM, by a guy the FBI was hounding and busted into infinity . . . a hated and feared man by the name of Francis Yockey. He wrote that book under the name of Ulick Varange, a pen name. It was a big book and I read it a lot—studied it and tried to make as much of it as I could—but my course was different. There was something about it—some passive idea that kept me put off by it. I finally would come to believe that I was a man of action, I had to go through things no matter what they were or how dangerous they may have seemed to someone on the outside.” While Beausoleil would go on to create one of the greatest original film scores of all-time for Anger’s Lucifer Rising—a film he was originally also supposed to play the titular the role of—he more or less completely wasted his life by getting involved with the misfit Manson Family and would have probably led a more artistically fruitful life had he stuck with Imperium, which inspired the late-1960s proto-neofolk group Changes led by cousins Robert N. Taylor and Nicholas Tesluk. Indeed, contrary to the confused covert message that the film attempts (and fails) to make about the tome—a virtual real-life Necronomicon for white nationalists (notably, like Yockey, H.P. Lovecraft was heavily influenced by Spengler)—Imperium is a metapolitical text of great artistry that has proven to greatly inspire an artist’s complete Weltanschauung. As for the movie Imperium, it can only inspire disdain for Hollywood and the FBI, which is completely fitting since both are largely Hebraic harbingers of anti-aesthetic authoritarianism and asininity.

While Yockey originally wrote Imperium in 1948 long before the internet was created, his following words are still fairly accurate, “The techniques of American propaganda is inclusive of every form of communication. The leading instrument is the cinema […] During the period of war-preparation, 1933-1939, the cinemas produced an endless succession of hate pictures directed against the European Revolution of 1933, and its 20th century outlook and actualizations.” Needless to say, even Imperium—a film that repeats the lie that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was some sort of white supremacist terrorist simply because he sold copies of The Turner Diaries (1978)—proves that Yockey was clearly right and that little has changed in terms of agitprop when he wrote in regard to WWII era propaganda, “The propaganda was entirely free from any cultural basis, and was completely cynical with regard to the facts. Precisely as the cinema-factories of Hollywood ground out lying plays and ‘newsreels,’ the propagandists of the press created what ‘facts’ they need.” When an autistic part-Jewish nerd diagnosed with schizophrenia by the name of James Fields panicked and crashed his car into some far-left protestors at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in a scenario that is, in some ways, eerily similar to a scene in Imperium and it resulted in the death of a protestor, the mainstream media immediately used the opportunity to unleash a nonstop war on white nationalists and the FBI director at that time even absurdly called it an act of domestic terrorism, thereupon leading to countless frivolous arrests and lawsuits against WN leaders that never even heard of troubled mischling Fields. Of course, a movie like Imperium gives one the impression that such a stupid tragic scenario would inevitably happen, as if the movie was specifically made with the intent of psychologically conditioning Americans for a major clampdown on pro-white voices. Either way, as Yockey's lead demonstrated, both rallies and protesting are completely worthless and can only lead to negative press, among other things.

One reason that Imperium is a strangely fitting, if not incredibly insulting, name for the film is that there exists more than a thousand pages of once-classified FBI documents on Yockey and his revolutionary internationalist exploits as a renegade neo-Spenglerian on the run. In fact, in many ways, Yockey would have made for a great FBI undercover spy as he engaged in purported fascist espionage with a sense of humor. An individual described by the FBI as a loner and “secretive individual who did not tolerate anyone who would not wholeheartedly agree with his solution to world problems,” Yockey never used his real name when phoning associates and even signed his letters with the pseudonym “Torquemada” in tribute to the Spanish Grand Inquisitor of Jewish descent from the Middle Ages who persecuted Jews. Somewhat perversely, Yockey even was a sort of warped James Bond when it came to the ladies and even apparently bashed the gashes of wealthy Hebraic Heiresses for cash or as Martin A. Lee explained in the book The Beast Reawakens (1997), “A relentless womanizer, Yockey had plenty of bed partners when he came to New York, including Hazel Guggenheim (sister of Peggy, the famous art collector and philanthropist). An oft-married Jewish woman of rather large proportions, Hazel dyed her hair blond, wore heavy purple eyeliner, and smoked cigarettes in a long cigarette holder. Apparently she liked young men and found the idea of sleeping with a fascist particularly appealing. ‘I am sure he received some financial remuneration for any services rendered to her,’ alleged [Harold Keith] Thompson.” Of course, all this talk of Yockey points to the fact that there should exist a very different film entitled Imperium as Yockey’s real-life is infinitely more interesting than the dubiously shadowy tactics of any shady FBI spook. Indeed, in a sane world, Yockey would hold the reputation that some shadowy commie revolutionary like Che Guevara—a sociopathic rich kid of the hardly racially sensitive sort that has countless crappy films directed by whorish hacks ranging from Richard Fleischer (Che! (1969)) to Steven Soderbergh (Che (2008)) made about him—maintains today among rebellious teenagers as his face would certainly look much better on a t-shirt (though, of course, Yockey is too good for such tacky corporate branding), but we unfortunately live in a morally and spiritually inverted world where many young kids have their aesthetic and moral tastes destroyed by hokey Harry Potter films where the villain Lord Voldemort is of course a fiendish blood-obsessed fascistic Führer of sorts. After all, in a sensible world, Daniel Radcliffe would portray ressentiment-ridden evil nerds instead of mercurial heroes but, as Yockey would have noted, such is one of the many consequences of the rise of the culture-distorter as a result of Europe being completely destroyed in two World Wars.

In an unpublished 1940 manuscript entitled ‘Life as an Art’ that he wrote at 23-years-old while still a student at Notre Dame University, Yockey made it quite clear the difference between himself and a FBI stooge like the hero of Imperium when he wrote, “Higher men and lower men—the few called to rule and the masses born in order that the higher men may actualize a grander destiny—differ in spirituality so much that they cannot be comprehended otherwise than as two different species. In all reverence it can be said the lower men rely on God and the higher men on themselves. This basic natural hierarchy is the fundament upon which rests all practical philosophy of human nature. It must therefore be definitively set forth.” After all, whereas Yockey lived and died for his quite singular metapolitical vision, Daniel Radcliffe’s character is such a superlatively soulless little worm that he is even willing to get a Nazi tattoo that represents something he completely hates just so that he can play the good little whore of a government agency that is rarely associated with any sort of good. While Yockey was right when he recognized that Hollywood trash movies spread the message of “the total significance of the isolated individual, stateless and rootless, outside of society and family, whose life is simply, the pursuit of money and erotic pleasure,” the one exception to this spiritually moribund message of passive hedonistic nihilism is moronic agitprop movies like Imperium and American History X where the white American is taught they should always actively fight against the interests of their own race as well as against those white individuals that dare to fight for their race, as if it is totally sane and normal for any other living organism to fight against its own survival.

As a literal genius and highly cultivated artist of the somewhat wanton and womanizing sort that spent a good portion of his life traveling the world in the hope of helping to create a Europid Imperium, Yockey breaks virtually all the tired stereotypes associated with (neo)fascist types and that is why it was so important for Hollywood types to disgracefully name a film after the book he is best known for. Considering he was once punched in the nose by (in)famous British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, had a propensity for imitating misanthropic film comedian W.C. Fields, enjoyed holding fascist meetings at expensive Jewish luncheonettes, and remains the most exceedingly enigmatic neo-fascist figure in history despite having two lengthy biographies dedicated to him, Yockey is a name that demands an epic biopic but, rather unfortunately, that is probably even less likely to happen than his dream of an Imperium, though somehow I can see Johnny Depp of all people playing the role. After all, both Jodie Foster and Steven Soderbergh have attempted to create a Leni Riefenstahl biopic. In terms of living filmmakers, only Teutonic auteur Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is intelligent, politically astute, and creative enough to assemble a truly visionary depiction of Yockey’s somewhat tragic and stranger-than-fiction life and considering that the American political revolutionary—a man that tried to help German philosopher Carl Schmitt escape political persecution during the Nuremberg Trials and later even earned the respect of German ace fighter-pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel—was such a hardcore Teutonophile, it would only be fitting.

The patent absurdity of a film about modern-day neo-nazis being entitled Imperium becomes quite clear when one considers that American Nazi Party Führer George Lincoln Rockwell—arguably the single most influential figure on the largely pathetic joke that is post-WWII American neo-nazi scene who was curiously the son of a vaudeville performer that was pals with celebrated Jewish comedians like Groucho Marx—was vocal in his hatred for Yockey who he described as a “Strasserite” in anti-tribute to Uncle Adolf’s ‘left-wing nazi’ rivals Gregor and Otto Strasser. Even four years after Yockey’s death, Rockwell, who was himself assassinated a couple years later under dubious circumstances supposedly by a disgruntled Greek-American (ex)stormtrooper, would complain,“There is rising all over the world, among hard-core National Socialists, a new cult of what I call Yockeyism. I found much of interest in Yockey’s book IMPERIUM and actually helped promote it. But the cult founded on this man is dangerous and, I believe, in some ways downright evil.” Of course, both brain-dead neo-nutzis and kosher commies alike probably have nothing to fear as it has been over 70 years since the publication of Yockey’s magnum opus Imperium and it is quite unlikely that it will ever become a sort of new Mein Kampf as it is just too arcane and aesthetically pleasing to ever appeal to the masses, even if the white nationalist ideas began to flourish among the American mainstream. After all, in Nazi Germany, Mein Kampf was much more popular than National Socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg’s innately more interesting and intelligent tome The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), just as Rockwell’s own virtual Mein Kampf, This Time the World (1961), is considerably more popular than Imperium among WN types today.

Needless to say, Yockey is not only hated among raging Rockwellite types as he oftentimes is referenced in a negative sense by neo-fascist and neo-nazi types even though very few have actually read his work. For example, while white nationalist scholar and professor Revilo P. Oliver—an old school far-right intellectual and professor with a legit palindromic name who once testified before the Warren Commission in regard to the JFK assassination—went to the effort of carefully criticizing Yockey's views with an entire book entitled The Enemy Of Our Enemies (1979), the majority of his critics simply rely on libel, dubious rumors, and downright ludicrous lies like in the obscenely dumb anti-occult text Satanism and its Allies: The Nationalist Movement Under Attack (1998) anonymously co-authored by writers from the British neo-nazi magazine Final Conflict who describe Yockey as “part-Jewish and homosexual” despite the Imperium author's well-known womanizing escapades and hardcore counter-kosher activism. In the end, it might be best think that Ludwig II of Bavaria was also practically speaking for Yockey when he once famously stated, “I wish to remain an eternal enigma to myself and to others.” Incidentally, Yockey once wrote, “The articulation of the Culture has three aspects: the Idea itself, the transmitting stratum, those to whom it is transmitted [...] Who knows whether we would have Wagner's greatest works but for Ludwig II? [...] Not everyone can play a great role, but the right to give meaning to his life cannot be taken from a man.” Somehow, despite his relative obscure, I think the full meaning of Yockey's life remains to be seen.

Unlike glorified agitprop director Daniel Ragussis and most of the rabble associated with supposed neo-nazism, Yockey was first and foremost an artist so it is only natural that Imperium—a book that, not surprisingly, is more talked about than actually read—will forever remain a text appreciated by a special sort of artistic type that dreams of a world that will never be. Somewhat absurdly optimistic for a Spenglerian, Yockey, like all serious artists, lived to create a completely new world so it comes as a great insult that a film bearing the name of his revolutionary text could only dream up a painfully banal and superlatively soulless vision of the ghettoized neo-nazi scene that the philosopher-cum-revolutionary’s intellectual nemesis Rockwell is largely responsible for inspiring. Of course, considering Rockwell’s background as a cartoonist, it almost seems like tragicomical kismet that his ultimate legacy would be something akin to the grotesque image of a morbidly obese Amero-mutt sporting a homemade SS Halloween costume while hysterically screaming lowbrow racial slurs to similarly unsightly and racially dubious protestors. While Francis Parker Yockey will never be a household name, he has at least inspired some interesting art from the likes of Current 93 and NON/Boyd Rice and will probably continue to inspire it well into the future considering the unfortunately imperative rise of racial consciousness among American Europids—a mongrelized group that, as Yockey noticed, is unfortunately decidedly more deracinated and culturally retarded than its mainland European brothers—in the zio-globalist age of Occident decline.

Rather unfortunately, modern-day pro-white movements tend to focus on the negative and critiques and thus are starting to resembling the sort of leftist anti-culture that Yockey critiqued when he wrote, “Liberalism can only be defined negatively. It is a mere critique, not a living idea.” Undoubtedly, one of the greatest things that one can learn from Yockey comes from his words, “But creative force—this will remain forever incomprehensible to those, far more than 99% of humanity—who cannot see deeply into the soul of Culture-man—IS AT BOTTOM ARTISTIC. In the deeps the will-to-power merges with the aesthetic instinct. In the brief moment of satisfaction which follows the completion of a work—a novel, a building, a suspension bridge, a symphony, a victorious battle, the soul of a higher man feels an intense and profound aesthetic satisfaction in the form of self-reverence and a feeling of union with the essence of Being.” While just speculation, somehow I doubt the creators of Imperium felt the ‘profound aesthetic satisfaction’ that Yockey speaks of when they completed their aimless agitprop abortion. Indeed, politics aside, the film can, at best, be seen as an excremental exercise in anti-aesthetic whoredom where artistic, intellectual, and philosophical integrity are completely compromised in a fundamental fashion that speaks to the superlative soullessness of its creators, but I guess one should not expect anything less from an FBI-approved neo-nazi spy flick starring Harry Potter. While the film attempts to make a profound statement about cultivated Yockey-esque types with the Lord Byron quote, “This should have been a noble creature: he hath all the energy which would have made a goodly frame of glorious elements, had they been wisely mingled,” the creators are not even worthy of such a remark as they lack any noble or glorious elements and instead symbolize midbrow mediocrity at its most self-deceptively dull, unwittingly disingenuous, and cowardly conformist as a movie that even has less value than the vintage (anti)neo-nazi doc Blood in the Face (1991). Instead of watching the movie, I recommend that one read Yockey's Imperium and other texts, the anti-Yockey bio Dreamer of the Day (1999) by Kevin Coogan and pro-Yockey bio Yockey: A Fascist Odyssey (2018) by Kerry Bolton, and then contemplate the great sort of film that could be made about his life and struggle. Unfortunately, I fear there will soon be a time in a generation or two when few, if any, understand Yockey's words because, as his great intellectual influence Oswald Spengler once recognized in regard to the precarious nature of art, “One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.”

-Ty E

Trouble in Mind

2020-03-17T05:39:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I find myself appreciating a filmmaker and his craft, even though I sense an innate distaste, if not downright hatred, for their character and overall essence as an individual. For example, I see Billy Wilder as a subversive little semite that, aside from physically resembling a sort of kosher Jean-Paul Sartre, made films that reek of an intolerable venomous bitterness, primitive misanthropy, and covert anti-shiksa vile, yet there is no denying he made some fairly worthwhile films The Lost Weekend (1945) and Ace in the Hole (1951) that say something relatively profound about the (in)human condition. Additionally, while I like The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) and Paris, Texas (1984), I basically cannot watch a Wim Wenders flick without fantasizing about violently slapping the terminally tedious Teutonic auteur in the face for being such a meandering wimp that seems to have forgotten he has a pair of testicles. As for American auteur Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, Breakfast of Champions)—arguably the only true authentic protégé of great freewheeling American auteur Robert Altman—I would be lying if I did not admit that I also see him as a sort of wimpy weasel that would probably benefit from a gym membership and a steady dose of red meat but, unlike the spiritually comatose Wenders, he at least has something of a heart and has directed some truly romantic films that, quite unlike the typical Hebraic rom-com or historical romance à la Miloš Forman's Valmont (1989) and Pride & Prejudice (2005), actually manages to make romance seem cool and sophisticated.

The son of filmmaker Oscar Rudolph who directed the Lenny Bruce-penned low-budget sci-fi oddity The Rocket Man (1954), Rudolph may be of a certain dubious Hollywood pedigree but he is also an unequivocal artiste and cinematic auteur that, naturally, was always more respected in Europe than the United States. Despite being a pussy pothead of sorts, Rudolph has managed to assemble a fairly idiosyncratic oeuvre that pillages the best from film noir and melodrama (not to mention various European new waves) in style, as if attempting to demonstrate to Godard the proper way to shamelessly recycle certain genre conventions without seemingly like a pedantic poindexter with an undying contempt for cinema. Politically speaking, one might assume that Rudolph is a man of the left (and you’re probably right, though his films are fairly apolitical), but his arguable magnum opus Trouble in Mind (1985)—a film that seems to beg for a curious combination of lachrymose and awkward laughs yet ultimately inspires spiritual rejuvenation—would be considered ‘reactionary’ by today’s rather ridiculous standards. Indeed, in the film, cities are a seedy and soulless cesspool of sin that turn good men bad, nonwhite foreigners run most of the criminal realm, beta males get their women stolen by alpha males, art has been reduced to a primitive childish level, and an exceedingly effete evil fat queen portrayed by Divine of Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) infamy in a rare male (yet nonetheless glaringly gay) role is the most loathsomely ruthless of underworld crime bosses.

More importantly, Rudolph’s film is the cinematic work that I originally hoped Godard’s Alphaville (1965)—a virtual tribute to German Expressionism and its masters like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang—would be as a superlatively stylish and genuinely romantic dystopian sci-fi flick where love conquers all in the end and not in a phony emotionally counterfeit sort of fashion (although Godard's film literally concludes with the words, “Je vous aime” aka “I love you,” it does not ring true like at the end of Rudolph's flick where no words are needed to express the life-changing love that the antihero feels). Undoubtedly, more than just a sort of more stylish 1980s American Alphaville, Trouble in Mind is like an anti-Blade Runner as a relatively laid-back, laconic, and low-key film of the aesthetically understated sort that is more dedicated to somewhat hermetic melodrama and poetical pathos than a meticulous mise-en-scène and oneiric atmospheres that manages to, not unlike Ridley Scott’s film, completely swallow up the storyline (which, of course, is of secondary importance in the case of Blade Runner). Indeed, while Scott’s arguable magnum opus manages to provide the viewer with someone akin to a drugless high due to its overwhelming aesthetic allure and initially inexplicably foreboding atmosphere as a film that sincerely feels like it could be set in some dystopian future despite being released nearly forty years ago, Rudolph’s film is first and foremost a story about love and the power of love and its dystopian setting is largely symbolic and secondary to its story, or as the auteur once explained himself, “To me, love is always the turning point, the best hope for any future. And my favorite subject for a film. If nothing else, I hope TROUBLE IN MIND convinces you of that.” While I can only assume due to what I know about him that there is very little that the quirky auteur and I would agree on, I unequivocally agree due to sheer personal experience when it comes to his assessment of love and his film—one of the most leisurely and idiosyncratically romantic films ever made—certainly strengthens his argument. Featuring an ex-cop-cum-ex-con antihero, ditzy yet well-meaning dame with a baby and degenerate baby-daddy as the female love interest, and a violently misogynistic queer queen as the villain, Trouble In Mind might be an eccentric film with an eclectic collection of eccentric characters yet its insights regarding love and human motivations certainly ring true, as if the film was directed by a self-loathing humanist with an unshakeable film noir fetish that wanted to make a feature-length melodrama to accompany the latest New Order album.

For better or worse (and in true pothead style), Alan Rudolph has had one of the most uniquely uneven and less than ideally idiosyncratic filmmaking careers in cinema history and Trouble In Mind is certainly the crowning achievement of said artistically troubling career. Beginning his directing career with the personally disowned hippie horror flicks Premonition (1972) aka Head aka The Impure and Nightmare Circus (1974) aka The Barn of the Naked Dead aka Terror Circus, Rudolph did not seem to take the art of filmmaking seriously until he became the protégé of Robert Altman and acted as an assistant director on such Altman classics as The Long Goodbye (1973), California Split (1974), and Nashville (1975). In fact, Rudolph’s first true auteur effort Welcome to L.A. (1976)—an Altman-produced production that does not coincidentally star such Altman superstars as Keith Carradine, Sally Kellerman, and Geraldine Chaplin, among others—is like a West Coast spiritual sequel to Nashville, albeit somewhat more romantic and, in turn, precisely narratively structured in a fashion that has been compared to Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde (in fact, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Rudolph as a sort of preternatural heir of Schnitzler and, in turn, Max Ophüls who of course cinematically adapted La Ronde (1950) and directed some of the most stylish (dis)romances ever made). While Rudolph is a clear protégé of Altman, by the time he was directing films like Choose Me (1984)—the director's sole hit film—he had already developed his own distinct cinematic worldview, which would only further evolved as the years passed in between occasionally accepting for-hire hack work (e.g. Mortal Thoughts (1991) starring Demi Moore).

Although Welcome to L.A. is undoubtedly the auteur’s first true auteur piece, Rudolph was still relegated to directing some passable hack work like the pseudo-horror-thriller Endangered Species (1982)—a film dealing with cattle mutilation conspiracy sans aliens (!)—and the Sydney Pollack-produced Songwriter (1984), which is an important yet artistically forgettable film in the director’s career in that sense that it introduced the auteur to singularly stoic Trouble In Mind lead Kris Kristofferson. While he might have started out as a singer-songwriter and demonstrated a natural talent for so-called revisionist westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s regrettably uneven Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Michael Cimino’s watchable yet plodding box-office disaster Heaven's Gate (1980), Kristofferson—probably the only cowboy to get down with Mishima in the unjustly overlooked The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976)—demonstrates in Rudolph’s flick that he was born to be the film noir antihero par excellence. As for his mischling costar and Altman/Rudolph regular Keith Carradine, he once again demonstrates that he is the vaguely creepy dorky weirdo par excellence. Indeed, not unlike his buddy Altman, Rudolph has a knack for perfectly casting actors, even when it comes to against-type roles (for example, while Lori Singer plays a relatively innocent and naive girl in Trouble In Mind, she would effectively play the complete opposite in the director's later Equinox, which is also notable for Matthew Modine portraying central two roles in the form of long lost twin brothers that could not be more different in terms of character).

Naturally, as I have gotten older, my perspective of certain films—and the way I look at films in general—has changed drastically. For example, I once tried to watch Trouble In Mind about a decade ago before I was familiar with Rudolph's work and could not even get into as it seemed like cartoonish kitsch noir and apparently I am not the only one. Indeed, as Richard Ness explained in his text Alan Rudolph: Romance and a Crazed World (1996), “As much as CHOOSE ME seemed to excite critics, TROUBLE IN MIND (1986) appeared to alienate them. While the film received some strong notices and a few critics, including Roger Ebert, numbered it among the best of the year, many were unsure whether Rudolph intended the film as a serious revision of film noir or a parody of the genre. Although there are comic elements in the film (such as the increasingly odd appearance of Keith Carradine’s character), they end to grow out of the absurdity of the situations, whereas the humor in CHOOSE ME grew out of the honesty of the characters […] Although it anticipates a whole cycle of later new-wave noir films (producer Carolyn Pfeiffer described it as existing somewhere between Bogie and Bowie). TROUBLE IN MIND also serves as a summation of Rudolph’s work to date.” While the film is, to some degree, absurdly aesthetically goofy in a manner that would anticipate Rudolph’s later films like Made in Heaven (1987) where Debra Winger of all people appears in drag as a sort of neo-greaser guardian angel of sorts, it is also quite deadly serious when it comes to love and the ways of the world. Undoubtedly, it is no coincidence that Divine, in what is probably the most underrated role of his all-too-brief and unfortunately largely terminally typecast career, plays a murderously neurotic queer underworld boss that, owing to his hatred of his own mother and humanity in general, lacks the capacity to love, hence his erratically evil pussy-repulsed essence. Additionally, the film dares to demonstrate that it is much better for a woman to leave the father of her baby for a stronger man than to stay with him, especially if the baby-daddy is a despicable bitch of the constantly criminally bungling and dopey dope-addled sort that curiously resembles a New Romantic drag king.

While the product of a pothead that used to share joints with the belated auteur of the comfortably dumb O.C. and Stiggs (1985) and even co-penned the insipidly anti-white celluloid abortion Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Trouble In Mind is also surprisingly red-pilled in many respects, as if the largely apolitical auteur unconsciously came to a number of truths and naturally could not help but disseminate them due to tackling the dystopian realms. Indeed, Teutonic philosopher Oswald Spengler might as well have been speaking of the dystopian ‘Rain City’ (aka Seattle) of the film when he once wrote, “Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.” As the viewer soon discovers as the film progress, the film’s antihero lead John ‘Hawk’ Hawkins (Kris Kristofferson)—an ex-cop that is released from prison after serving eight hard years on a murder rap that involved gunning down a bigwig gangster for his ladylove—might be a somewhat cynical killer, but his ugly urban environment forced him to become tough and ruthless and it is only when he discovers love in the form of a relatively innocent young lady that he is given a true chance at redemption instead the predictable figurative road to katabasis. Aside from Hawk, the viewer witnesses how city newcomer ‘Coop’ (Keith Carradine)—a country boy that not coincidentally declares at the beginning of the film, “I’ve been to plenty of cities…And they ain’t nothing but trouble”—completely morally and psychologically deteriorates after reluctantly moving to the miserable metropolis at the behest of his young naïve wife ‘Georgia’(Lori Singer) who foolishly believes the city will provide a bright future for their baby son ‘Spike.’

Somewhat ironically, the young family’s move to the city ultimately leads to a bizarre love triangle the concludes with Georgia leaving Coop for Hawk in what is a bittersweet scenario where love conquers all but a baby boy loses his loser beta-boy father. Needless to say, had Coop never listened to his wife’s dubious advice and relocated the family to a big shitty city, he probably would have never hooked up with black criminals that deal in stolen goods smuggled by Koreans and turned into a deranged dope fiend dork that loses his entire family in the end. Indeed, not unlike Blade Runner, Trouble in Mind is set in a grotesquely mongrelized multicultural realm where black neo-gangster speak Korean and curiously practice Buddhism and an overall lack of cultural and, in turn, moral, consistency (and, of course, racial homogeneity), leads to a gynophobic gay queen becoming both a powerful man and proud patron of the (rather entartete) arts. Needless to say, the film hardly depicts so-called multiculturalism in a flattering light and the central dystopian city is something akin to H.P. Lovecraft's view of NYC, albeit nowhere as paranoically portrayed. Not unlike his comrade Altman, Rudolph has a certain inordinate respect for audiences and does not dare to attempt to force the viewer to accept a sort of dichotomous perspective of completely ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in regard to characters as everyone of them displays a certain ‘humanity,’ not matter how vulgar or unflattering. For example, when Coop's colored criminal comrade ‘Solo’ (Joe Morton of John Sayles's vaguely comparable Afrofuturist cult classic The Brother from Another Planet (1984)) spiritually foresees his own demise via being drowned inside his own car (!), one cannot help feel the character's pain.

Aesthetically speaking, the film can obviously be compared to Slava Tsukerman's kaleidoscopic sci-fi cult item Liquid Sky (1982) and Alyce Wittenstein's neo-Godardian hipster joke Betaville (1986), but it seems to be of a more artistically sophisticated pedigree than these two flicks. Indeed, aside from sharing some aesthetic similarities with Germanic cinematic works like Niki List's exceedingly eccentric cult flick Malaria (1982) and mischling dyke Ulrike Ottinger's collaboration with her then-muse Tabea Blumenschein like Bildnis einer Trinkerin (1979) aka Ticket of no Return and Freak Orlando (1981), the film demonstrates somewhat of an understanding of modern art history and its relation to the decline of the Occident. For example, numerous wholesome and romantic scenes in the film depicted from the outside perspective of a diner seem like they were dreamed up by American realist painter Edward Hopper. Rather fittingly, much of the urban graffiti and art gallery paintings in the film, which certainly symbolize cultural and spiritual decay in a rather goofy otherworldly way, seem to be modeled after the Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke movements associated with German Expressionism. Additionally, the colorfully grotesque sculptures featured at the art gallery mansion of the film's gay villain bear a striking resemblance to those of debauched French-American feminist sculpture and occasional filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle (Daddy). While one could try to make the largely pointless argument that Rudolph is, to some extent, himself a degenerate artist, Trouble in Mind is hardly respectful to degenerate art and ultimately carries a fairly aesthetically and morally conservative message of the rather perennial sort.

As for Hawk, who more or less has the total opposite experience as his much younger rival Coop, it is only when he rejects the sickness of the city that he finally achieves his dream of discovering his dream girl and leaving the urban hellhole behind for good. To accomplish this dream love affair, Hawk agrees to save the mostly worthless life of the guy he is cuckolding as Georgia might be leaving Coop but she is a good girl and does not want her no-good-bastard baby-daddy to die despite it being his own fault when he becomes a marked man after robbing a powerful gangster. A blunt man of gristled honor with a stern chiseled face that practically screams indelible stoical strength, Hawk even matter-of-factly declares to his love interest Georgia in regard to reluctantly agreeing to save her worthless husband Coop but also keeping her as his beloved prize, “I’ll save the poor son-of-a-bitch but you’ll owe me something I want. And I’ve just spent too many years wanting and wanting and never having. So once I fix this up and send him on his way, you belong to me—completely. You’ll live with me…and I’ll take care of you and the kid and we’ll have something. Otherwise, let him get what he deserves. Let everybody get what they deserve.” In the end, practically everyone indeed gets what they deserve and luckily hardened cynic Hawk finds true love despite losing love in the past due to his criminal impulses.

In fact, Hawk lost his previous lover Wanda (Geneviève Bujold), who incidentally employs Georgia at her café, as a result of heading to the slammer upon murdering a criminal in cold blood and the two fuck soon after the antihero is released from prison at the beginning of the film but the long-awaited sexual reunion is short-lived. Upset about their seemingly complicated tragic past that includes the antihero receiving a hefty prison sentence after killing a mobster named ‘Fat Adolph’ (Gailard Sartain) to defend his beloved's honor, Wanda refuses to continue the sexual relationship after their first fuck, complaining with the sort of fiery fury of a wounded woman that still loves a man but knows she cannot be with him, “It’s got nothing to do with hunger, Thickhead! It’s a matter of philosophy.” Needless to say, young, fertile, and relatively innocent Georgia is a much better choice for Hawk as she offers the sort of comfort and nurturing qualities that a bitter old bitch like Wanda simply can no longer provide. A lonely little lady that has let her life slip away, Wanda is still a character of strength that, somewhat curiously, provides Hawk and Georgia with the ‘philosophy’ they need to start a healthy romance. By the end of the film, Wanda has abandoned her café and disappeared, as if her one job in life was to hook up her ex-flame Hawk with a much younger dame. Of course, as Otto Weininger noted, women first and foremost excel at being matchmakers.

If I was a bitchy queer, I might conclude that Alan Rudolph is some sort of hipster homo-hater after watching Trouble In Mind as the film's fittingly named antagonist Hilly Blue (Divine)—a sort of obscenely campy Sydney Greenstreet type—is arguably the most ravenously repugnant gay villain in cinema history as a sort of sod spiritual son of kosher carpet-muncher Madame Spivy’s similarly sleazily sexually sinister villain ‘Ma Greeny’ in Ralph Nelson’s Rod Serling film adaptation Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962). While Rudolph’s film is littered with great highly quotable dialogue, Divine certainly steals the show with Hilly Blue with prissily pugnacious lines like, “People that say they care about other people are hypocrites. I prefer priests; they’re at least real hypocrites. I prefer two-faced people who show it.” Notably, Hilly Blue is a morbidly miserable character of the compulsively cynical and homicidally hysterical sort and although he spouts wacky womb-envy-oriented misogyny like, “Women are despicable…especially mothers,” he is not enjoying his life as an ostensibly all-powerful poofter crime lord and even displays glaring weakness by hysterically shouting in front of his entire entourage in regard to a criminal comrade as if complaining about a lover, “Everything between me and Nate is desolation, sadness, disappointment after disappointment.” Undoubtedly, Hilly is a sort of symbol of Hawk’s old immoral life and naturally he violently berates the antihero for wanting to go straight, stating, “You are capable of almost anything, John, but mainly anything bad. You have nothing but bad qualities and, yet, you think you have a heart.” When Hawk expresses his desire to spare Coop’s life, Hilly loses it and declares, “You’re so predictable. You make me want to vomit. The only way you can ever live up to this ideal you have of yourself is from a hole in the ground.” Naturally, it proves to be a symbolic act when Hawk kills Hilly by putting a bullet in his brain. Indeed, out of his love for a young mother, Hawk kills a homo that hates mothers. Notably, Hilly's murder sparks an extravagant absurdist shootout-cum-riot in the villain's virtually magical mansion that is surely the centerpiece of the film and is comparable to the legendary climatic hall-of-mirrors shootout in Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai (1947) in terms of great film noir climaxes.

I am not the only one that has noticed the film’s somewhat idiosyncratic contra cocksucker subtext. Indeed, as Richard Ness noted in regard to the sexual and, in turn, moral degeneration of one of the main characters, “Coop’s increasingly androgynous appearance suggest that his loss of identity may owe in part to a sense of sexual confusion as he goes from a traditional family environment with Georgia and their child to consorting with male companions and attempting to reaffirm his heterosexual identity through liaisons with prostitutes. His androgyny is paralleled by the casting of transvestite Divine in the nondrag role of Hilly Blue. If Coop’s coif becomes a reflection of his search for identity, Hilly’s baldness suggests an emasculated state, and his need for power and control appears to stem from a lack of affection from his mother.” Interestingly, unlike his obscenely over-the-top and low-camp killer dookie-downing characters in classic John Waters flicks like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), Divine, who was eager to finally play a male character and defy his drag stereotype, comes off as sincerely demented and disturbing to the point where his violent murder comes off as a relief to both the viewer and his character as if he was practically begging to be put out of his misery. Indeed, while Divine’s Hilly Blue declares, “Everybody wants to go to Heaven; nobody wants to die,” one suspects he wanted to die even though there was no way in hell that he would get into heaven.

Undoubtedly, one of the things that makes Trouble In Mind such an organically romantic film despite its tendency towards artifice and preternatural pageantry is that, unlike many films—be they romantic-comedies, film noirs, or otherwise—it actually depicts what a couple needs for a healthy love affair. Indeed, when Georgia reveals her reason for leaving her husband by stating in regard to Hawk, “Him and me feel safe together,” she is expressing what every woman instinctively wants and needs. While Georgia's young husband Coop goes from being an unemployed loser to erratic egodystonic dork that tries in vain to be a cool criminal yet fails in every regard, Hawk—in his impenetrable stoicism—radiates strength and demonstrates through deed and demeanor that he can be the real strong man that she so desperately needs. Like any good woman, Georgia also inspires Hawk’s greatness and goodness with remarks like, “I think you’re a good man that’s had bad luck and I think all that can change. The luck, I mean.” Although a man that sincerely believes, “A little bit of everybody belongs in hell,” Hawks also discovers heaven through Georgia and the two even symbolically enter romantic nirvana by leaving Rain City at the end of the film (though, to be fair, said ending is somewhat ambiguous, but their strength of their mutual love is unquestionable).

While I am not sort of moron that believes that people can sincerely change in any meaningful way for the better, Trouble In Mind rightly reminds the viewer in a refreshingly understated way that certain good qualities of a person are deeply buried and sometimes it takes love and the right inspirational lady to dig up such long submerged qualities. In that sense, Trouble In Mind is a rather hopeful film despite being made during what its director felt was a rather hopeless time. Indeed, as Rudolph stated in regard to the metapolitical influence for the film during the 1980s, “My opinion at the time was that despite the warm rhetoric and political smoke screens, our society’s increasingly cold blood could easily turn to ice […] What’s important and desirable would soon be hidden, forgotten or missing altogether. Escape would mostly come through daydream reality, memory imagination. Whether our fictional replica appears more within reach now compared to the soothing form of avarice of the 1980s is for someone else to decide. Where, you might ask, would human affection fit into this bizarre and harsh environment? Would it be worth searching for? Or even possible? To me, love is always the turning point, the best hope for any future. And my favorite subject for a film. If nothing else, I hope TROUBLE IN MIND convinces you of that.” To my surprise, pothead Rudolph’s film—and, of course (and obviously more importantly), real-life experience—has certainly convinced me of that.

While most of Rudolph’s post-Welcome to L.A. output is mostly comprised of highly watchable auteur pieces, Trouble In Mind is probably his only film aside from his later romance neo-noir Love at Large (1990) that I would dare to describe as a personal favorite of sorts and something I could re-watch at least on a yearly basis, even though I would probably stop short of describing it as a masterpiece. Beyond my personal taste, the film represents Rudolph at the height of his auteur powers as a film that, totally transcending the Altmanian influence, could have only been directed by the filmmaker who, naturally being an idiosyncratic auteur, has never really gotten his due and is largely best remembered today among cinephiles as a loyal compatriot of Robert Altman. While the auteur would turn to more ambitious art faggotry the ‘Lost Generation’ flick The Moderns (1988), which is dripping with bohemian chic style and attitude, and even an unconventional biopic on red mischling Dorothy Parker entitled Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) starring Jennifer Jason Leigh in arguably the greatest performance of her rather eclectic career as the titular lead, these films fail to capture the shameless romantic resonance and dazzling oneiric aesthetic allure of Trouble In Mind. While his playfully preternatural fantasy flick Made in Heaven (1987) is undoubtedly romantic to the core, it is just too gimmicky, silly, and full of too many wussy rockers like Tom Petty and Neil Young to be taken as seriously as his great romances.

In terms of aesthetics, positive approach to romance, and successfully subversive genre-tweaking, Trouble in Mind strangely reminds me of a sort of counterpiece film to Peckinpah’s masterpiece Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) which, incidentally, features Kris Kristofferson in a small but unforgettable role as a rapist that gets his just deserts. While I typically subscribe to the Peckinpah School when it comes to patently pessimistic depictions of life and romance, Trouble In Mind is just pessimist and culturally nihilistic enough for one to reasonably accept its unconventionally hopeful happy ending in regard to love. Notably, Rudolph was not so optimistic about love’s healing capacity and ability to save the sick and broken in his subsequent work Equinox (1992) where the quasi-autistic hero loses his chance at serious romance when his would-be-lady-love regretfully fails to flee with him for the Grand Canyon upon being forced to make a split-second decision about the future of their relationship. Of course, the antihero of Trouble In Mind is older and wiser than the lead of Equinox and thus does not waste time in securing his future. As Rudolph's own filmmaking career demonstrates, oftentimes with age comes wisdom, but pain and regrets regarding love can sometimes last a lifetime and Trouble In Mind seems to organically express that while remaining optimistic in regard to the quest for love in a seemingly loveless world of softcore authoritarian asininity where society is shit and culture and art are crap. In that sense, the film is more hopeful and inspiring than when it was originally released some 35 years ago.

Throughout his career, director Alan Rudolph has made no lie about the fact that his unique utilization of absurd humor and equally atypical aesthetics reflects his belief that real-life society is absurd and should symbolically depicted as such, or as he once stated in a 1993 Film Comment interview recounted by Richard Ness, “Once I realized I was going to take the leap with Divine, this was not going to be a conventional film. When Keith got involved we started talking about how this guy should go through these transformations. I never realized we would take it to such an exaggerated level, but then it seemed to be the way to do the story without taking it totally seriously. If you do these retro story plot ideas and take them terribly seriously, then you've made another exercise. The times seemed to be going through that culturally, with Reagan and all that; it just seemed to be an unfamiliar terrain that we were living in. There was an absurdity to the whole film that I kind of enjoyed—people talking funny languages, all the gangsters were inarticulate people who don't even use words so they growl. . . . What it really is is this thing that gets me in trouble all the time, which is this simultaneous serious-humorous. If you ask me to make a film that is the most accurate reflection that you see of our condition right now, I'd make a version of TROUBLE IN MIND or EQUINOX. I see it—it's absurd.” Undoubtedly, in his tendency toward taking an absurdist approach to our putrid (post)modern milieu, Rudolph is practically sugarcoating cyanide, thereupon making the intolerable at least tolerable enough to be eccentrically engrossing in a way where the spiritual and cultural morbidity of modernity is at least recognized but thankfully not embraced in what is ultimately a sort of form of anti-escapism that manages to entertain even the exceedingly alienated and/or ludicrously lovelorn.

Of course, in an absurd society, there is also a morally ambiguous blurring between cop and criminal as completely personified by antihero Hawk who, due to the degenerate world he lives in, had to learn to be a little bit of both and does it well. In that sense, I could not help but reminded of the Ernst Röhm quote, “The soldier turns away from this kind of false morality in disgust. What mattered to me in the field was not whether a soldier measured up to society’s morals, but only whether he was a dependable man or not. An immoral man who achieves something is far more acceptable to me than a ‘morally upright’ fellow who accomplishes nothing. So-called society commits no greater sin and inflicts no greater harm than it does in this way. Suicides of the best people speak only too eloquently here.” In his sort of neoclassical historical fiction play My Friend Hitler (1968), Yukio Mishima speculated that Röhm foolishly stayed in Nazi Germany despite the high probability that he would be killed—as he ultimately was during the infamous so-called the Night of the Long Knives—out of a gay love and romantic allegiance to Uncle Adolf. Of course, cop or criminal, Hawk is, probably unlike tragic rectum-reamer Röhm, a great man and that is why he gets the girl in the end and he does not allow moral questions to get in the way of that fact, but both Trouble In Mind and My Friend Hitler demonstrate that the only truly timeless and respectable sacrifice is for love and death—or at least a willingness to dance with death—is a more worthy route than to betray said love and succumb to soulless mediocrity.

-Ty E

Medea (1988)

2020-02-21T09:33:00.002-08:00

For all of my cinephiliac life, I have been pondering whether or not I think Danish auteur Lars von Trier (Europa, Melancholia)—undoubtedly one of the most interesting and relatively original filmmakers of the post-Fassbinder age—is a great artist, determined dilettante, and/or a downright fraud that simply thrives on trolling in a super sophisticated way and not much more. While I find that Howard Hampton tends to be an obnoxious writer that is oftentimes absurdly wrong, if not downright delusional, in his assertions, I could not help by agree with him when he argued in an essay featured in the writing compilation Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses (2007) that, “There’s something about Lars von Trier’s prodigiously assured films that elicits indignation, as though their labyrinthine descents into the undermined of movie history were affronts to the sanctity of cinema itself.” Indeed, there’s oftentimes something unbearably insufferable about von Trier’s seemingly ambivalent, if not autistic, cinemania, as if the auteur enjoys nothing more than giving himself—and only himself—an extravagant masturbatory massage to his own cinephilia while presuming the viewer is just not on his passive-aggressively megalomaniacal level, but this is not the only problem with much of his work. After all, with his various patently pretentious manifesto/declarations—most of which are a rather loathsome combination of pretension and utter meaninglessness—and curiously drastic changes in style, it is hard not to assume that von Trier is terribly bored with cinema and that he is now mainly just engaging in a self-satisfying game of covert cinematic onanism and that he does not even take his own work that seriously, hence my suspicion that much of what he does is, at best, artistically prestigious displays of trolling and, at worst, completely emotionally counterfeit con-jobs. While von Trier even demonstrated a certain aesthetic aptitude as a child with shorts like Why Try to Escape from Which You Know You Can't Escape from? Because You Are a Coward (1970)—a film that briefly appears in The House That Jack Built in a somewhat cryptic (and ultimately incriminating) fashion that connects the auteur's childhood to that of the eponymous serial killer—his Weltanschauung has always been weak, shallow, and seemingly disingenuous, as if it would be too much of a struggle for the auteur to reveal anything about himself aside from being a morbidly depressed degenerate that makes superficial (meta)political statements because he lacks the capacity to commit to anything aside from acting like a little twat.

If I were to judge Herr von Trier on his latest feature The House That Jack Built (2018)—a mostly sorry Socratic serial killer flick where the auteur merely rehashes his old tricks and does for the art of murder what he did for sex in NYMPH()MANIAC (2013), albeit to a noticeably considerably less ambitious degree—I would certainly have to go with artistic fraud. After all, von Trier, who was clearly spiritually castrated after his ostensibly infamous 2011 Cannes press conference incident where he made some benign Nazi jokes, even decided to sell his soul to promote the film by following the insipid script of the Hollywood mainstream and declaring without even the slightest hint of irony, “THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT celebrates the idea that life is evil and soulless, which is sadly proven by the recent rise of the Homo trumpus – the rat king.” While Trump has certainly proved himself to be a Zionist shabbos goy stooge of sorts that talks big yet not has accomplished a single one of the nationalistic promises he originally campaigned on, von Trier, in his clear political retardation, has clearly revealed he is completely drunk on the cashmere commie Kool-Aid by expressing sentiments worthy of dumb twats like Alyssa Milano despite once being the provocative enfant terrible that directed truly subversive films like Manderlay (2005), which does a brilliant job exposing the hyper hypocrisy, racial fetishism, and disgusting disingenuous of white leftist women like Milano. In that sense, von Trier is undoubtedly more like Trump than he would like to think as they are both supreme bullshitters that talk big but really have no strong principles aside from stroking their own ludicrously inflated egos. Of course, whereas Trump has the insipid spirit of a fat fuck drag queen, von Trier is like a depressed emo girl that just wishes her parents would at least notice the superficial wounds on her wrist from another failed phony suicide attempt.

Rather intriguingly, even when he still wrongly believed that he was Jewish during the early part of his filmmaking career, von Trier dared to depict a Nazi in a sympathetic light in Befrielsesbilleder (1982) aka Images of Liberation, thus one has to question his motivations which seem to be nothing more than a childish desire to provoke as if he has a pathological self-destructive need to be a twat. Featuring totally tasteless torture porn scenes that are clearly a cheap immature attempt by the auteur at shock value (when he’s already done much more maturely shocking scenes in previous films), crappy CGI imagery worthy of some shitty C grade video game, Elvis Presley’s borderline homely granddaughter having her tits chopped off, and von Trier arguably revealing his own petty resentment of handsome masculine American men by having Matt Dillon portraying a psychopathic serial killer (while also arguably attempting to live vicariously through said character despite his typical tendency towards living vicariously through bat-shit-crazy female characters, hence why the film does not work), The House That Jack Built is ultimately a pointless film where the auteur tries in vain to attempt to say about life and its supposed evil banality what Emil Cioran already said more intelligently and elegantly many decades before. Of course, I have other reasons for thinking the film is an exceedingly empty piece of shit that cannot be saved by the shock of butchered tits and dead children, as I have been recently revisiting von Trier’s earlier films and cannot help but notice the difference in terms of aesthetic maturity back when the filmmaker had more of a legitimate reason to consider himself the cinematic heir of fellow Danish auteur Carl Theodor Dreyer.

In fact, von Trier was so arrogant about seeing himself as a sort of new Dreyer that he once dared to cinematically adapt the master auteur’s unused screenplay adaptation of Euripides' play Medea, thereupon forever linking himself to his artistically superior cinematic countryman. Luckily (and somewhat surprising), the film is one of the filmmaker’s soberest and most aesthetically alluring, ambitious, and successfully experimental cinematic works to date, as if even a total troll like von Trier realized it would be nothing short of cinematic sacrilege to defile Dreyer with his typical masturbatory digressions and apathetic cinephiliac references. In fact, Medea (1988) looks, in many ways, as old as the long-dead director that inspired it despite being plagued by an anachronism or two in regard to the wardrobe, as if the film was recently discovered in an ancient bottle on some remote island for future generations to discover. As to why the film has such a distinct ‘timeless’ quality that seems to even transcend cinema history, Jack Stevenson explained in his book Lars Von Trier (2002) in regard to the auteur’s filmmaking method, “He shot the film on ¾-inch video tape, readjusted color and light, transferred it to 35mm film and then copied it back to 1-inch video tape. The result of this laborious experimental process was a train of images that seemed on the verge of dissolving in murk and graininess. The classic dialogue, sounding a bit inappropriate in Danish, was then laid on post-sync.” Aside from the somehow strangely enthralling Boardinghouse (1982)—supposedly the first shot-on-video horror flick ever made—I cannot think of many films that were shot on archaic video and then blown up to 35mm film, but somehow von Trier manages to make this work as Medea, quite unlike the director's Dogme 95 flicks, looks more ancient and archetypal then artificial and artless.

While it is no surprise that von Trier wanted to pay tribute to Dreyer—his nation’s unequivocal cinematic master and a filmmaker that he has routinely quoted throughout his career—the genesis of the film is somewhat less personal. Originally planned by the Danish TV channel DR-TV in 1985 as a fairly normal adaptation of Euripides' play, von Trier did not even get involved in the project until after the original director Søren Iversen quit the production and the auteur was offered the project. Of course, von Trier completely changed the project and basically started from scratch, or as Stevenson explained, “Instead of faithfully adapting Euripides’ tragedy for the screen, he chose to use Carl Th. Dreyer’s script of the same name which the director had written in 1965-6 but had never found financing for. Dreyer’s script was not a straightforward adaptation of Euripides’ play, but rather an attempt to re-create the original story which might have inspired Euripides. Von Trier’s film, in turn, as he states in the prologue, was not an attempt to make Dreyer’s film, but rather was his personal interpretation of the manuscript. In any case, MEDEA was not purely based on von Trier’s own material, and this was exceptional.” Undoubtedly, von Trier’s film is about as far away from The House That Jack Built as far as artistic and ideological purity is concerned as it mostly rings emotionally true, does not wallow in the provocative for provocative’s sake, and arguably has the most seemingly organic and timeless aesthetic of all of the auteur’s films. Despite this, the film received mixed reviews (that leaned towards the majority being negative) from Danish film critics and von Trier has himself criticized various aspects of the film. Indeed, only Danish filmmaker and film scholar Christian Braad Thomsen—a personal friend of Rainer Werner Fassbinder that has paid tribute to his cocksucking kraut comrade with both a great book and documentary—seems to have realized the film's virtual genius.

Notably, von Trier had nil interested in Euripides’ play and was merely obsessed with paying tribute to his filmic forefather, or as the auteur explained to Stig Björkman in Trier on von Trier (1999), “The subject didn’t fascinate me at all! I’ve never been interested in classical drama. I was more interested that it was something Dreyer had been involved with.” Yet, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum—one of the few American film critics worth reading—von Trier’s film is far from an even remotely faithful adaptation. Indeed, as Rosenbaum explained in a brief September 1997 review, “Pay no attention to the claims that this 1988 Danish video feature by Lars von Trier (BREAKING THE WAVES) is a faithful or even remotely respectful realization of the late Carl Dreyer’s unrealized script, cowritten by poet Preben Thomsen. For starters, the Dreyer script, based only loosely on the Euripides tragedy, features a chorus that is omitted here, its lines grotesquely converted into printed titles when they aren’t simply dropped; many of Dreyer’s scenes are eliminated, scrambled, or placed elsewhere in the overall continuity, and some of von Trier’s scenes and sequences are strictly his own invention. That said, this is well worth seeing as a visually inventive and highly dramatic version of the Medea story, with strong performances by Kirsten Olesen and Udo Kier. In some respects it’s as striking as anything von Trier has done, but Dreyer could never have accepted this florid piece of showmanship as even a remote approximation of his intentions.” While Rosenbaum review is mostly favorable, he would later take a much harsher view of the film in his anti-Trier/anti-Trump diatribe ‘“Sad!”: Why I Won’t Watch Antichrist’ featured in the compilation Unwatchable (2019) where he somewhat venomously argues, “…my opinion of the filmmaker himself steadily plummeted as I saw the postmodernist hash he was making out of my favorite filmmaker (and his alleged role model) Carl Dreyer […] MEDEA claims to be based on Dreyer and Preben Thomsen’s unrealized screenplay adapting the Euripides tragedy, but reading the Dreyer text is all that’s needed to expose von Trier as something of a con artist.” Of course, to truly respect von Trier as he really is and not have any deluded expectations, one must accept that he is a sneering con artist, albeit a very talented and aesthetically enterprising one who, rather unfortunately, is unquestionably one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. Undoubtedly, Medea is arguably most notable in that one forgets while watching it that it was directed by film history's foremost #1 troll, so it does not surprise me that von Trier himself is not fond of the flick, as if it pains him to be reminded that he exposed too much of himself by not succumbing to the temptation towards shock value and dark irony.

Although Rosenbaum complains that von Trier excised a supposed ‘radical feminist’ subtext from Dreyer’s script, it would be absurdly deluded to somehow see von Trier as more ‘right wing’ than Dreyer. After all, despite directing subversive cinematic works like Michael (1924)—a silent film with fairly blatant gay themes—and having a troubled childhood as the adopted bastard son of a Scanian maid that he never got to know, Dreyer was a lifelong right-winger that once stated, “Even when I was with Ekstrabladet, I was conservative...I don't believe in revolutions. They have, as a rule, the tedious quality of pulling development back. I believe more in evolution, in the small advances.” As the product of insanely deluded commie nudists, including a Jewish (step)father and self-described “whore” mother that let him do whatever he wanted to as a kid, von Trier hardly received any discipline as a child, let alone, a sort of traditional pre-counterculture Danish upbringing involving Christian teachings and a traditional upbringing, so it is only natural that he would dedicate his filmmaking career to virtually ‘acting out’ like a debauched problem child that, not matter what he does, still cannot get the attention he craves from his self-absorbed and drug-addled parents. Of course, this is why von Trier can never be great like his hero Dreyer as he still has the emotional maturity of a teenager and, as Rosenbaum noted, has glaring maniac-depressive tendencies, which is a good way to describe the behavior of the titular anti-heroine of Medea who, as a scorned cunt that cannot believe she was tricked by a man, decides that the most despicable of revenges is more important than the lives of her two young sons. While Rosenbaum has complained of von Trier’s excising of Dreyer’s ostensible radical feminist subtext, there is no question that the auteur sympathizes with the titular (anti)heroine as her husband is portrayed as an arrogant and idiotic fool that more or less gets what he deserves, at least in the oftentimes hysterical director’s mind.

As a stripped-down adaptation of Medea that was further stripped-down by the director from Dreyer’s original screenplay, von Trier's film naturally contains a very simple storyline, but of course the film is, not unlike F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)—another film that manages to create a great sense of the foreboding via foggy wetlands—largely notable due to its singular aesthetic approach and atmosphere. While the eponymous lead is technically not in every scene and we briefly encounter the perspective of other characters, the film is largely an uncompromising tribute to Medea’s lovelorn anguish and pathos as a brutal bipolar bitch the opts to destroy her virtual entire world and all those that wronged her once she discovers that her husband—a man whose dubious intellect is, unfortunately for him, totally overpowered by his ambition and arrogance—has betrayed her. While scant on dialogue, the film is inordinately quotable in a thankfully non-Hollywood-esque fashion as virtually every single word carries heavy meaning and manages to completely expose the essence of each character, which is rather fitting in a moody little art movie where the actors move around with a certain slow somnambulistic intrigue as if von Trier was attempting to reconcile the very different acting methods of Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman. Indeed, from the carefully stylized acting to the amount of fog in the area, every aspect of the film seems perfectly calculated in a cinematic work that basks in the intentionally imperfect—whether it be character, cinematic technique, or historical accuracy.

To von Trier’s credit, he makes his intentions perfectly clear at the very beginning of the film in an inter-title where he declares: “This film is based on a script by Carl Th. Dreyer and Preben Thomsen after Euripides’ drama MEDEA. Carl Th. Dreyer never realized his script. This is not an attempt to make his film, but due with reverence, a personal interpretation and homage to the master.” From there, we are introduced to Medea (Kirsten Olesen) as she meditatively marinates in a shallow pool of water on the shore as she grasps at the sand beneath as the tide begins to cover her as she is on the brink of some sort of life-changing psychological break. As another inter-title then reads: “Jason built his vessel Argo and sailed to Colchis to fetch the Golden Fleece which he won with the help of Medea, the beautiful and wise, who gave him her love. Her love has now turned to hatred. Jason betrays Medea and the two sons she has borne him. Together they fled from Colchis and arrived in Corinth as outlaws. Medea left her distant country. Jason left her here.” Indeed, a powerful, albeit somewhat evil, woman that practices the dark arts, Medea sacrificed everything for her selfish husband Jason (Udo Kier in probably the most ‘butch’ role of his career) and even plopped out two sons for him in the process but he’s already decided to throw everything away because he has an unquenchable thirst for power and the female protagonist has no place in his future life.

Unfortunately for virtually all parties concerned, King Creon of Corinth (Henning Jensen) wants to secure his throne and he decides to do this by having his beloved daughter Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska)—a rather nubile dame that enjoys exposing her unclad body, as if she sincerely believes that she is god's great gift to humanity—marry powerful warrior and hero Jason. To add insult to injury, King Creon banishes Medea and her sons from his kingdom because he is rightly afraid that she will use her evil powers to get revenge against him and his daughter. Unfortunately for him, King Creon naively agrees to give Medea one day to get her affairs in order before she leaves, thus giving her enough time to perfectly plot her rather ruthless revenge. Needless to say, Medea is success as she not only kills King Creon and his daughter, but also brutally hangs both her sons so that Jason will live with the pain and shame for eternity. Before hatching her pernicious plot, Medea secures her getaway by agreeing to help King Aegeus of Athens (Baard Owe) with family infertility problems. In the end, Jason loses everything and seemingly suffers a mental breakdown while Medea—a hard bitch that rarely expresses any emotions—weeps while sailing away on King Aegeus’ ship after exposing her hair for the first time in the film as if self-induced grief is the only scenario where she can express her sense of femininity. In short, everyone loses at the conclusion of this brutal tragedy, especially Medea, hence the vicious circle that accompanies being a bipolar bitch.

While the characters in Medea do not say much, the very few words that are expressed certainly reveal a certain mutual disappointment when it comes to the opposite sex and biology. For example, while the mother of two boys, Medea is not very proud of her ability to give life and even proclaims she would prefer the life of a warrior to the womb, stating, “I’d rather bleed behind a shield than bearing a man’s children.” As for Jason, he seems willing to forsake women altogether, declaring, “If only men could have children without the agency of women.” Certainly the sort of cold cunt that would give her son autism due to her lack of nurturing qualities, Medea—an assumed closet-romantic—seems to have only had children out of her love for Jason, hence her proclivity towards prolicide. In fact, Medea hints at such a motivation when she declares, “There is no greater sorrow than love,” especially after coming to the bitter conclusion that her husband’s “only ambition was to be the king’s son-in-law.” To Medea’s credit, Jason is such a cowardly self-absorbed piece-of-shit that he dares to proclaim to the heroine that his betrayal was done to benefit her and their children, thereupon also insulting her intelligence in the process. When Jason declares to her, “Your pride is your misfortune,” one cannot help but sympathize with Medea when she replies, “And your pride, Jason…is your good fortune. My weakness and blindness led me to encourage your vanity. You want it to look as if I have left you. You are betraying your own children.” In the end, both parents not only betray their own children, but fall victim to their own pride, thereupon causing mostly relative innocents to die in the end. Undoubtedly, if there is anything that one can learn from the film, it is that no one in a relationship is innocent as shitty people tend to choose shitty partners. Additionally, Medea and Jason are the couple from hell and it is almost fitting that the former executes sort of post-birth abortions by killing her son as if to rid the world of their demonic genes.

Notably, as the decades have passed since the film's over thirty years ago, auteur Lars von Trier has had very few good things to say about Medea. For example, in Trier on von Trier he confesses, “. . . I don’t feel very happy with the film. I think that’s because of all that Viking crap that I never really got a grip on. No matter what you do with things like this, the result is always a sort of fancy-dress party. It’s bloody difficult to get it to look at all sensible. I don’t think we’ve really got enough distance to all this Viking business. But when you look at what Kurosawa does with similar things, it looks impressive. Like THE SEVEN SAMURAI. But if you look at the film more closely, you can see that the helmets they’re wearing are terribly badly made. Maybe Kurosawa thought his films were insubstantial. But both time and geographic distance have eroded that, so you go along with it.” Aside from being someone that has always considered Kurosawa’s films, especially The Seven Samurai, to be absurdly overrated, it is easier for me to embrace the ‘period costumes’ in von Trier’s film than in big budget pseudo-prestige TV bullshit like Game of Thrones (2011-2019) and Vikings (2013-current) where mostly candy ass modern actors preposterously pretend to be medieval bad asses. Not surprisingly, at the end of the same interview, von Trier would ultimately sum up his feelings about the film as follows, “MEDEA doesn’t say much to me these days. It’s got some nice scenes, but only on a superficial level. MEDEA was possibly a precursor to BREAKING THE WAVES in some of its usage of melodramatic form.” Of course, Breaking the Waves (1996) suffers from contrived pseudo-Dreyer-esque flourishes, an absurdly off-putting utilization of pop music, and a ridiculous pseudo-transcendental ending that completely contradicts the film’s entire tone. Personally, it is somewhat hard for me to take von Trier’s opinion of his own work completely seriously as he apparently regards Epidemic (1987)—an abortive mess of a movie of the masturbatory metacinematic sort—as his ‘personal favorite’ of his films while distancing himself from most of his other fair superior early films like his debut feature The Element of Crime (1984). I think what separates Medea from much of von Trier’s oeuvre is that, out of respect for Dreyer, von Trier demonstrated some sensible restraint for the first (and probably last) time in his filmmaking career and did not succumb to the seemingly self-destruction compulsion towards juvenile troll tactics. In that sense, it is arguably the auteur’s most subversive and idiosyncratic work to date and von Trier's sort of equivalent to David Lynch's The Straight Story (1999) as an understated oddity in the filmmaker's oeuvre that benefits from a sort of quasi-Bressonian simplicity.

Of course, von Trier is not the first filmmaker to tackle the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy of Medea, which is a myth that, in general, seems to appeal to more experimental and subversive filmmakers. In fact, von Trier is not even the most subversive or iconoclastic auteur to adapt it as Dutch auteur Frans Zwartjes—undoubtedly one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers that has ever lived—directed a rarely-seen minimalistic version simply titled Medea (1982) where two actresses play all the roles. Taking the tragedy to a totally different extreme, fellow Dutch auteur Theo van Gogh’s posthumously released six-episode miniseries Medea (2005) updates the story for the degenerate world of Dutch democratic politics. Arguably even more unconventional than Zwartjes' film, obscure Italian female experimental filmmaker Pia Epremian's Medea (1969) seems like the sort of film the eponymous anti-heroine might directed if she was a full-blown schizophrenic. In subversive guido auteur Marco Ferreri’s delectably debauched The Story of Piera (1983) aka Storia di Piera—one of the Italian filmmaker's countless criminally overlooked films—great frog mischling beauty Isabelle Huppert portrays a young girl that learns to play the role of Medea in high school and later plays the role as adult actress in a particularly perversely preternatural film that, among other things, features the novelty of borderline mother-daughter incest, among other things. Of course, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969) starring Greek-American opera diva Maria Callas as the brilliantly cast titular lead is probably the greatest and most revered adaptation of the Greek tragedy. Personally, in terms of sheer rewatchability, I prefer von Trier’s version despite my perennial mixed feelings about its auteur and my general preference for Pasolini over the Danish auteur.

Notably, von Trier himself seriously doubts that his Dreyer tribute is actually Dreyer-esque as demonstrated by his words, “The film was supposed to be a bit Dreyerish. I felt very connected to his aesthetic. But a lot of the film is too insubstantial. And we had that model of the Viking castle where Medea lived. I can’t stand that sort of thing. It looked terrible. The problem was that the budget didn’t let us film the whole thing on location. We came up with several Fellini-style solutions instead.” I have no idea what von Trier is alluding to as Medea is one of the least Fellini-esque films that I have ever seen, but I digress. As far as Dreyer’s influence, Medea has an almost fiercely foggy oneiric and ominous essence that is vaguely comparable to Dreyer’s truly nightmarish masterpiece Vampyr (1932). As far as the eponymous heroine’s passion and pathos are concerned, von Trier’s film sometimes feels like a sort of apocalyptic nod to The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with strands of Gertrud (1964).

Not surprisingly, Jonathan Rosenbaum is less convinced of Dreyer’s influence and sees the film as being more Wellesian, or as he stated in his review, “In fact, apart from patches of Dreyer’s dialogue, MEDEA is not at all like Dreyer, occasionally a bit like Ingmar Bergman, and mostly like Orson Welles — the Welles, that is, of MACBETH and OTHELLO. I hasten to add that the two films have very different styles, starting with the studio sets and long takes of MACBETH and the disparate ‘found’ locations and splintered montage of OTHELLO. But von Trier, like many a postmodernist music-video maestro, never lets stylistic consistency get in the way of his stockpile of effects. Insofar as there’s any kind of dramatic logic at all, Medea is usually framed like Lady Macbeth in MACBETH and Jason (Udo Kier) like Othello in OTHELLO.” Indeed, von Trier’s Medea is quite comparable to Welles’ pleasantly peculiar adaptations of classic Western texts as experimental and even borderline avant-garde takes on these all-too-familiar stories that bring new lifeblood to the narratively necrotic. Not unlike Welles’ Shakespeare adaptations Macbeth (1948), Othello (1951), and Chimes at Midnight (1965), Medea does what great cinema should do by adding something to the ancient tragedy that could never be accomplished in theater or any other medium. Of course, the fact that the film features very little dialogue yet is atmospherically hypnotic throughout underscores this fact in terms of cinema's artistic singularity.

Whereas Medea is big on aesthetic and sparse on words, von Trier’s later celebrated ‘USA – Land of Opportunities’ trilogy films Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005) are absurdly aesthetically barren and overly talky as if the auteur went through a nihilistic Godardian phase where he was obsessed with destroying cinema. Indeed, these two films (the projected third and final film in the trilogy, Washington, has yet to enter production) are not much more than glorified filmed theater where von Trier virtually attempts to duplicate what Fassbinder did with his somewhat experimental obscure TV plays Das Kaffeehaus (1970) aka The Coffee Shop, Bremer Freiheit (1972) aka Bremen Freedom, Nora Helmer (1974), and Frauen in New York (1977) aka Women in New York. While it is only natural that Fassbinder would direct such films due to his theater background and experience as both an actor and playwright, von Trier has always been most focused on cinematic technique and cultivating a distinct aesthetic, thus Dogville and Manderlay seem like expressions of a tired old auteur with a contempt for cinema who has gotten incredibly bored with the medium and I say that as someone that finds these to films to be somewhat enjoyable. Of course, Medea and Dogville have one very important thing in common in that they conclude in a rather incriminating way that reveals von Trier’s sort of feminine rage. Indeed, while his latest failed film The House That Jack Built plays out like some murder fantasy fetish piece, it does not ring true the way Medea does where a hypnotically harrowing deluge of resentment, hatred, and misanthropy spills out in the end, thus it is quite fitting that the titular heroine begins the film lying in water as the tide begins to engulf her body. Naturally, considering von Trier’s recent uncharacteristic affliction of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I would not be surprised if he came out as gender fluid or even followed in the step of his virtual artistic nemeses, Wachowski brothers, and came out as an a full-blown autogynephile. Indeed, it is probably no coincidence that von Trier’s greatest films like Medea and Antichrist (2009) involve crazy cunts that make men miserable, especially since the auteur is himself a crazy cunt that likes to make men miserable.

Undoubtedly, it is somewhat ironic that von Trier's anti-Trump turd The House That Jack Built is largely is largely about death, as it feels like the creation of someone that believes in nothing and is totally afraid of death and the uncertainty that surrounds it, especially if one considers things that von Trier has said in the past. Indeed, demonstrating once again that Dreyer is surely one of his most imperative influences, von Trier stated in a manner that even almost borders on nationalist pride, “...people are always sacrificing themselves completely in Dreyer's films—and in mine. It must be a particularly Danish characteristic! So what can we say about sacrifice? [...] someone who sacrifices himself or herself is at least giving their existence some sort of meaning—if you can see a meaning in doing something for others, for an idea, a belief. The characters in these films are struggling to bring meaning to their time on earth. It must feel easier to die if you're doing it for something you believe in.” Of course, as a clearly intelligent and oftentimes iconoclastic individual, von Trier reveals that he believes in nothing, especially sacrifice, when he parrots retarded conformist anti-Trump twaddle and he will probably never become a true cinematic master until he dares to direct a film that he is willing to sacrifice his life—or some aspect of his life—for. After all, at least with Medea he at least sacrificed his ego and exposed a certain vulnerability that he has yet to duplicate in any of his other films, hence the source of its striking emotional potency. After all, I cannot think of another film where I managed to feel sympathy for a sick evil bitch that kills her own children whereas I could not wait for the painfully banal and pedantic serial killer fuck in The House That Jack Built to die so I would not listen to his pathetic pseudo-philosophical pontificating anymore.

-Ty E

Diary of a Country Priest

2020-02-09T21:07:00.001-08:00

I honestly do not know much about the Catholic Church aside from the fact that it is now seems to be controlled by evil antichrist types that seem more interested in phantoms like climate change and the shoah and protecting serial child rapists and other castration-worthy perverts than the teachings of J.C., but I also have to assume that most modern priests are closet homosexuals, pedos, autistic, and/or sociopaths as I cannot imagine any even remotely normal man taking the cloth in our spiritually retarded age. Indeed, I might think Otto Preminger was a culture-distorting piece of shit that was largely dedicated to dismantling traditional white Christian values with his innately subversive films, but I cannot help but feel that his failed epic The Cardinal (1963)—a film inspired by the dubious life of hardcore closet-queen and Baby Doll-hater Cardinal Francis Spellman—exposed some hard truths about the lack of masculine fortitude and hypocrisy associated with the clearly spiritually and morally declining priesthood. Needless to say, I was not prepared to see a film where I came to believe a young wine-addled priest of the socially retarded sort achieves sainthood as is depicted in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) aka Journal d'un curé de champagne—a film based on the 1936 Georges Bernanos novel of the same name—but this cinematic masterpiece was directed by French master auteur Robert Bresson who is one of the few filmmakers that achieved a true sense of the spiritual in cinema, as opposed to simply depicting contrived (yet oftentimes curiously homoerotic) biblical bullshit à la half-chosenite Cecil B. DeMille, and I say that as a largely apathetic agnostic that could not be a believer if I wanted to. While oftentimes associated with the heretically Catholic moral rigor and asceticism of Jansenism, this did not exactly inform the filmmaker's singular aesthetic, or as Paul Schrader—a lapsed Dutch-American Calvinist that has modeled much of his films after Bresson's, especially Pickpocket (1959)—wrote in his groundbreaking text Transcendental Style in Film (1972), “Bresson, the artist, received no aid or comfort from Jansenism; he had to look elsewhere for his aesthetics.” Luckily, Bresson, quite unlike far too many modern filmmakers—both good and bad—looked far beyond the cinematic realm for aesthetic influences.

An anti-modernist that, on an inspirational level, did not give a shit about modern trends—whether they be spiritual, cinematic, or political—Bresson might seem like a right-wing anarchist of sorts to some people (myself included) and his aesthetic interests were neither vogue nor wholly traditionalism, but that is largely why he was such a pleasantly preternatural filmmaker, or as Schrader also wrote, “Bresson cannot be tied down to any one heresy; he is a heretic all his own. His techniques of portraiture come from Byzantium; his theology of predestination, free will, and grace from Jansenism; his aesthetics from Scholasticism. To each tradition he brings the virtues of the other, and to cinema he brings the virtues of all three. Perhaps this is why no religious denomination has ever embraced Bresson’s seemingly religious films; they haven’t figured out what sort of heretic he is yet.” Indeed, religion or not, Diary of a Country Priest is as heretical as films come as a flick that even makes Pasolini’s biblical flicks and sardonic (anti)Catholic satires of Luis Buñuel seem like immaturely and inelegantly rebellious pussy posturing by comparison due to Bresson’s singular devotion to the strikingly transcendent in a world plagued with the positively putrid and material. As someone that lost ‘faith’ (or whatever) as a young kid, Diary of a Country Priest at least made me feel like a believer during its 115-minute running-time and even caused me to momentarily consider that there is much more than life and the shitty people in it. One could even say that, not unlike many of Bresson’s other films, it is a merrily morbid cinematic work that celebrates death to the point where Christianity—or at least the auteur’s splendidly curious version of it—is centered around the worship of death, which is beautifully underscored by the priest protagonist’s final dying words after asking for absolution: “What does it matter? All is grace.” Indeed, Bresson wants the viewer to know that the body is a temporal prison and thus one should never fear death as life is the real hell. In fact, as Bresson's pitch black yet singularly subtle understated humor reveals, life is largely a sick joke at the expense of the good and sensitive like the eponymous protagonist of the film.

Although Bresson’s previous and second feature Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) is a highly worthwhile dark gothic (anti)romance where a scorned bourgeois bitch played by Spanish beauty María Casares dedicates her life to getting a disturbingly intricate revenge against her ex-lover simply because he falls in love with another woman from a less prestigious class, it was not until his third film Diary of a Country Priest—a cinematic work so precisely and immaculately constructed that it makes most films seem like they are layered with lard—that he created the template for the singular ‘transcendental style’ that he is best known for. Indeed, one could argue that the film created a complete paradigm shift in the art of filmmaking as it was surely an imperative influence on the filmmakers and intellectuals associated with the La Nouvelle Vague and later American New Wave masterpieces like Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Schrader's Hardcore (1979), yet no filmmaker—be it Michael Haneke, Carlos Reygadas, Bruno Dumont, Dietrich Brüggemann or countless other examples—has come close to capturing Bresson’s style or aesthetic rigor. In short, Bresson lives in a world of his own, which is fitting for a man that once wrote in regard to his cinematic philosophy, “The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything to be called into question.” Undoubtedly, Diary of a Country Priest offers the first serious glimpse of the singular Bressonian cinematic world where typical movie ingredients like entertainment, star power, psychological motivation, and sexual magnetism, among other things, are scant, if not totally nonexistent, and a rare spiritual experience in celluloid form is offered to those viewers bold enough to embrace it. Undoubtedly, the film is the first good example of why Schrader was right when he wrote, “Bresson’s characters, his movies, and Bresson himself all become icons. . . . Bresson has transcended himself: he is blazed in mosaics in some moss-grown temple.” Indeed, like most of his cinematic works, it is somewhat hard to believe that a single man conceived of such a film, but of course Bresson was not your typical man or filmmaker as one of the greats in the top tier class of cinematograph masters that includes F.W. Murnau and Carl Theodor Dreyer, among few others.

While only a highly intelligent artistic genius could dream up a film like Bresson’s, it is hardly an intellectual exercise, or as the great frog critic André Bazin once wrote, “If THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST impresses us as a masterpiece, and this with an almost physical impact, if it moves the critic and the uncritical alike, it is primarily because of its power to stir the emotions, rather than the intelligence, at their highest level of sensitivity.” Indeed, one would do best to embrace the film like one should embrace death without fear or hesitation as it is a film that bleeds into the soul as it progresses to the point where it feels completely right and hardly dejecting when the young priest—a man that has sacrificed his mind and body for his faith—dies in the end. While the priest technically dies of stomach cancer, which is fitting since he cannot stomach life (not to mention food), one gets the sense that the true source of his death is a spiritual malady and that he is no longer fit for the ‘prison’ of his body. Indeed, there is no doubt from the very first shot of the character that the young ‘Priest of Ambricourt’ (Belgian-born Swiss actor Claude Laydu in his first and most well-known acting role)—a forlorn figure that, not coincidentally, appears framed behind a fence at the beginning of the film in a manner that underscores his status as a virtual inmate in an ‘earthly prison’—suffers greatly with mere existence and is pretty much socially retarded (read: proto-autistic), but he is also a ‘true believer’ and not in the negative pathological sense as he is willing to sacrifice what little health he has to help a small village with an oppressive atmosphere as inhabited by mostly coldhearted and petty people that immediately despise him just due to his mere presence as a character of a sort of simple untainted Dostoevskian good. In fact, even the eponymous donkey of Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) seems to be treated better than the priest as at least the animal is beloved by the kind and innocent but, quite unlike the ass of Bresson's later film, the young Catholic brother makes it quite clear to the viewer how he feels, though his internal pain always feels like a total necessary part of his journey. In fact, one could say that the young Priest’s faith is ostensibly morbidly masochistic as an anxiety-ridden prole that is incapable of praying who attempts to spiritually counsel people that would rather spit on him and write him threatening anonymous letters demanding that he leave the village (which actually happens), yet there is a certain undeniable nobility and purity in his ‘passion,’ even if it arguably contributes to his seemingly unavoidable premature demise.

While it would not be sensible to describe Diary of a Country Priest as a ‘realist’ film, there is certainly an inordinate realism of spirit and essence, as if Bresson personally examined the soul of each ‘actor’ (or ‘model’ as Bresson would say) to see if they were right for the role. For example, Nicole Ladmiral, who plays a troubled young aristocratic girl that threatens suicide, committed suicide in real-life at the age of 28 by throwing herself under a subway train some years after the film was released (to make matters more morbid, Ladmiral previously provided narration for Georges Franju’s abattoir documentary Blood of the Beasts (1949) aka Le sang des bêtes). As for lead actor Claude Laydu, he was borderline brainwashed by Bresson for a year in preparation for the role and he would ultimately take an extreme method acting approach to his ‘performance’ by living with a group of young priests for many weeks, intentionally starving himself to make himself look ill, and sporting an authentic priest cassock and matching boots. As for the priest protagonist’s mentor ‘Priest of Torcy,’ he was actually portrayed by Bresson’s own doctor Adrien Borel who only agreed to do the role so long as he could use a pseudonym (he is credited as ‘Andre Guibert’ in the film). While the acting might be a tad bit more ‘melodramatic’ than Bresson’s later films where the models just act like virtual somnambulists, Laydu’s performance is arguably the most memorable of the auteur’s films aside from possibly Nadine Nortier in his subsequent Georges Bernanos adaptation Mouchette (1967) where a poor young girl chooses death over life before she even reaches full womanhood. Indeed, Laydu plays a pathetic priest but you cannot help but respect the passion behind his, well, passion. Another ‘realist’ aspect of the film is Bresson's utilization of oftentimes grating off-screen noises (e.g. squeaking of a wagon wheel), which helps to subtly intensify the contrast between the everyday and spiritual. Indeed, while Bresson makes great use of chiaroscuro as seemingly influenced by the paintings of Dutch Golden Age painters like Johannes Vermeer and Godfried Schalcken, the film does not utilize special effects or garish pageantry to express the spiritual like so many idiotic Hollywood films. After all, as Bresson once wrote, “It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.”

Beginning with a shot of a sign of Ambricourt—a real-life commune in the Pas-de-Calais department in northern France—the viewer arrives just as the new ‘Priest of Ambricourt’ (Claude Laydu) arrives to the area for his new parish where he soon catches the local rich Count (Jean Riveyre) being a little too intimate with his dejected daughter Chantal’s (Nicole Ladmiral) rather beauteous governess. As the rather literal title of the film indicates, the Priest oftentimes writes in his diary and as his first entry reads, “I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong in writing down daily, with absolute frankness, the simplest and most insignificant secrets of a life actually lacking any trace of mystery.” Undoubtedly, the diary is one of the priest's few sources of solace, as if he needs it to remind himself of his very existence lest him succumb to a sort of self-dissolution. As demonstrated by the fact that the action and drama of the film is oftentimes echoed by his words in what is ultimately a cinematically ingenious use of pleonasms, the protagonist is an honest priest—even maybe too painfully and autistically so to the point where the viewer is forced to suffer silently with him as he routinely puts himself in the most miserable of situations. When a grumpy old fart named ‘Fabregars’ (Léon Arvel) bitches about having to pay for aspects of his wife’s funeral, the Priest is left completely “distraught,” as if it is the end of the world or something, thereupon underscoring the protagonist's complete and utter incapacity to deal with everyday assholes. Aside from adults not respecting him, the Priest is also mocked by the children he teaches. For example, a young girl named Séraphita Dumonte (Martine Lemaire) pretends to be keen on the Scriptural basis of the Eucharist to get his attention, but then embarrasses him for the enjoyment of her classmates by mock-flirtatiously stating in regard to the root of her ostensible biblical prowess, “It’s because you have such beautiful eyes.” When the Priest meets his new mentor, the Priest of Torcy (Adrien Borel), the older and wiser brother instantly berates him for being a sensitive pussy by stating, “You young priests! What have you young men got in your veins these days? In my time they made men of the church, leaders of parishes, real masters!” While the Priest of Torcy is certainly somewhat of a resentful old prick, his heart is in the right place and does provide the young priest with helpful dictums like, “Keep order all day long” and “A true priest is never loved.” In the end, the young priest proves to live and eventually die by these words as he is never loved and rarely even liked, but he does earn the respect of some of his most aggressive and cynical detractors.

Although everyone hates the priest, including little kids, that does not stop him from idealistically attempting to inspires his seemingly impenetrable haters with his own special idealistic Catholic philosophy. To the young Priest's credit, his idealism is pure and his desire to ‘save’ is as equally pure, hence his handful of notable successes. Indeed, the young Priest manages to convince the local Countess (Rachel Bérendt) to get over her deep-seated hatred of god as a result of the premature death of her young son who she practically worships (for example, instead of a rosary and religious paintings, the Countess sports a locket necklace featuring a pic of her dead son and has decorated her room with pics of said dead son). In fact, the Countess is so inspired to let go of her hatred and resume her communion with god after an intense spiritual argument with the young priest, who she initially does not take seriously, that she actually destroys her beloved locket necklace her dead son. In fact, the Countess even writes a heartfelt thank-you letter that concludes with, “I hope I don’t hurt your pride by calling you a child. You are one, and may God keep you so always,” but she soon dies as if her hatred was the only thing keeping her alive. Despite being a sickly wimp, the viewer never doubts the intense sincerity of his words when he sternly warns the countess, “God will break you,” so there is a certain heartwarming irony in her unexpected death, which naturally disturbs her dysfunctional aristocratic family, as if her bodily demise was god's greatest gift. To make matters worse, the Countess’ daughter Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral), who hates her mother for being a pathetic cuckquean, hatefully attempts to blame the priest for her death, thereupon further tainting the protagonist’s local reputation.

While the priest fails in his attempt to get Chantal to give confession, he does somehow magically suspect a suicide letter in her pocket, which he forces her to give it to him and then subsequently burns it without even reading it. Although seemingly half-autistic, the priest was able to read terrible thoughts of suicide in the troubled teenage girl’s unsettlingly penetrating eyes and thus acted accordingly without even the slightest hesitation. In what is probably the most humorous moment of the entire film, Chantal tells the Priest, “You must be the devil” after asking for said letter as if she, as the unloved sole surviving child of bitter old blueblood, is shocked that someone could actually feel her great internal pain for the first time in her entire life. In the end, Chantal seems to believe in the Priest's power and when she asks how he was able to do the seemingly impossible by calming her hateful mother, he replies, “A lost secret. You too will find it and lose it in turn, and others will pass it on after you.” In the end, the Priest dies but his crucial influence on seemingly hopeless people like Chantal lives on.

Aside from learning from the misery of everyday life, the priest also learns a thing or two from the Priest of Torcy, but even he cannot provide the protagonist with any sort of solace when a certain Dr. Delbende (Antoine Balpêtré) assumedly commits suicide because he “lost his faith” as a result of losing patients due to dubious local rumors. Indeed, as the priest complains in regard to the suicide, “I was in no condition to listen to his confidences just then. They were like molten lead poured on an open wound. I have never suffered so much and likely never will again, even when I die.” In fact, the suicide seems to perturb the priest more than when he finally learns that he is dying of stomach cancer, but of course Dr. Delbende committed a mortal sin which is one of the worst things a Catholic can do. Naturally, as the victim of local rumors himself, the young priest certainly sees a kindred spirit Dr. Delbende who even expresses a sort of spiritual kinship to the protagonist before he commits self-slaughter. In fact, the Priest even takes no offense when Dr. Delbende informs him during a medical examination that his poor health is the degenerate genetic consequence of generations of impoverished alcoholics in his family. In that sense, it seems Dr. Delbende is a fan of the writings of Cesare Lombroso and Émile Zola.

Notably, the Priest’s only moment of reprieve is when he receives a ride on the back of motorcycle as underscored by the words in his diary, “By some premonition I can’t explain, I understood that God didn’t want me to die without knowing something of this risk. Just enough for my sacrifice to be complete when it’s time came.” While a simple motorcycle ride where nothing particularly interesting happens, it is obviously a moment of complete bliss for the protagonist as demonstrated by the shockingly large ecstatic smile on his face. Luckily, before he dies, the priest is able to convince an old friend, Priest Dufrety (Bernard Hubrenne), who has lost the faith and is living in sin with a woman, to hook up with the Priest of Torcy so that he can get back on track with God and the Church. In the end, Priest Dufrety sends the Priest of Torcy a brief letter revealing that the young priest was vomiting up blood before he died and then asked for absolution, but then stated with his last dying words, “What does it matter? All is grace.”

Simply put, I don’t give a fuck about Catholic fathers or the Catholic Church, but Diary of a Country Priest made me feel like a believer, especially in regard to the titular protagonist becoming a saint, at least in the spiritual sense. While later filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas and Dietrich Brüggemann have attempted similar things in regard to transcendental, their cinematic works are, at best, mostly deluded expressions of epigonism, especially when contrasted with Bresson's films. Undoubtedly, the same can be said of Paul Schrader’s most recent film First Reformed (2017), which is like a more subversive and less spiritually sound Americanized reworking of Diary of a Country Priest where the American auteur reveals more about his own spiritual sickness than any sort of innate understanding of the somewhat mysterious forces that compelled the no less mysterious French master auteur (who, despite revealing his cinematic philosophy in his classic text Notes on the Cinematograph (1975), still remains a largely enigmatic figure). Still, Schrader’s film is a worthy watch and one of the best films of 2017, yet it also demonstrates the aesthetical and metaphysical degeneration of cinema since the release of Bresson’s masterpiece, as it is clearly the expression of a spiritually lost and emasculated leftist type who no longer believes in himself, let alone the faith of his forefathers.

Speaking of Schrader, he provided an important insight into Bresson’s true power as a filmmaker in Transcendental Style in Film by contrasting him with Carl Th. Dreyer—one of the few filmmakers on the same level as the French master auteur—and ultimately argues in a manner that makes sense of the titular priest’s death in Diary of a Country Priest that, “Bresson, on the other hand, is the artist of the resurrection, the artist of stasis. The cross for Bresson is a means to a resurrected end, and he is careful not to confuse the cross and the resurrection. Like Dreyer, Bresson uses suffering through the prison metaphor (the ‘symbol of the Cross’), but unlike Dreyer, Bresson transforms the prison into a symbol of resurrection. In this manner Bresson is like the Byzantine Christian who, as theologian Henri Daniel-Rops writes, ‘preferred the theology of Glory to the theology of the Cross.’ Suffering for Bresson is never more than a stepping-stone to stasis.” Indeed, the young priest might be barfing up blood in the end, but his premature death, which is not even actually depicted in the film, is among the most joyous, if not the most joyous, in cinema history. Additionally, only in underrated French auteur Maurice Pialat’s sort of neo-Bressonian masterpiece Under the Sun of Satan (1987) aka Sous le soleil de Satan—the third and final of three masterpiece films based on a novel by Georges Bernanos (of course, Bresson directed the other two)—comes as close to Bresson’s film in terms of successfully depicting a particularly perturbed priest’s passion towards sainthood, albeit in a somewhat more fucked fashion.

Notably, in a top ten list of his favorite films, Russian master auteur Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) actually ranked Diary of a Country Priest as his #1 favorite film of all-time. While I personally rank Tarkovsky as one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, I would be lying if I did not admit that I consider Bresson to be the superior auteur and Diary of a Country Priest to be superior to anything that the Russian director ever directed, even if it does not quite compete with the atmospheric aesthetic allure of films like Stalker (1979) and The Mirror (1975). After all, whereas Tarkvosky brings us religious imagery and great pangs of spiritual doubt, Bresson even provides cynical agnostics like myself a sort of cinematic spiritual experience that feels both timeless and perennial as a film that, somewhat inexplicably, feels like it could have been created before the birth of film. As to what separates Tarkvosky from Bresson and other master practitioners of transcendental style like Ozu and Dreyer, Schrader provided a worthy answer when he argued, “To my mind, Andrei Tarkovsky was not interested in the transcendental style per se. He had religious themes, obsessions, and characters. He was austere. He employed distancing devices. But his intent was different. A transcendental guide or guru or film director self-effacingly seeks to escort the respondent to another level of consciousness, a Wholly Other World. The transcendental film director is a ‘spirit guide.’ Tarkovsky was more interested in passing through the portal himself than he was in escorting his viewer.”

Indeed, Tarkovsky's The Mirror is one of my favorite films of all-time, but it seems like an experimental exercise in masturbatory nostalgia when compared to Bresson’s great ‘(anti)coming-of-age’ flicks like Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967). Arguably more importantly, at least to me, Bresson is one of the few filmmakers that, despite the oftentimes deathly dark subject matter of his films, gives me hope as he proved that great timeless and spiritual art could still be produced in the post-Spenglerian age. Indeed, as Richard Roud argued in his excellent text Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980) in regard to Bresson’s penultimate masterpiece The Devil Probably, “Even though Bresson has painted a dark picture of wasted youth and beauty (Truffaut called it Bresson’s most ‘voluptuous film’), one came out of the film with a sense of exaltation. When a civilization can produce a work of art as perfectly achieved as this, it is hard to believe that there is not hope for it.” Indeed, take that Spengler.

One of the reasons I found Christianity to be so revoltingly impotent as a child is due to the obsession with prayer and the sort of mindless docility and acceptance of misery it inspires, so I could not help but feel quite strongly when the young priest declares, “Never had I felt so violently the revolt of the body against prayer.” Instead of praying like a pussy, the priest takes action in, somewhat ironically, an arguably Nietzschean sense and puts both his body and mind on the line while just getting by on cheap wine and stale bread to the point where it results in self-obliteration and he finally escapes from the prison of his body. Indeed, even after getting his terminal cancer diagnosis, the priest does not stop in his seemingly completely genuine acts of Catholic idealism to the point where he gets another priest, who has sinned with a woman and now styles himself as an enterprising intellectual, to replace him in the end. In that sense, the priest is a highly inspirational character like a fanatical artist not unlike Bresson himself. In fact, I could not help but think of Rainer Werner Fassbinder of all people and how the singular workaholic auteur was even working on a Rosa Luxemburg biopic script entitled Rosa L when he overdosed on cocaine and barbiturates. Diary of a Country Priest is not just the passion of a young priest, but also the passion of Bresson who revolutionized cinema in a way that the likes of contemporary pseudo-Bressonian art fags like Bruno Dumont and Gus Van Sant can only dream of.

Undoubtedly, film critic André Bazin probably paid the greatest tribute to the film when he argued at the end of his Cahiers du Cinéma essay on it, “It is hardly enough to say of this work, once removed, that it is in essence faithful to the original because, to being with, it is the novel. But most of all the resulting work is not, certainly, better (that kind of judgment is meaningless . . .) but ‘more’ than the book. The aesthetic pleasure we derive from Bresson’s film, while the acknowledgement for it goes, essentially, to the genius of Bernanos, includes all that novel has to offer plus, in addition, its refraction in the cinema.” In short, Bresson accomplished what very few filmmakers do by totally transcending his source material and ultimately demonstrating the true potential of cinema as an artistic medium. In fact, Bresson proved with his rather idiosyncratic Jansenist Weltanschauung and assumed Byzantium and Gothic influences in his adaptation of a ‘modern’ novel that, despite most movies being mindless trash that is meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator, cinema is the fullest and most advanced art form with the most potential for both aesthetic and thematic evolution. Indeed, while Schrader made a great point when he argued, “Motion pictures were not born in religious practice, but instead are the totally profane offspring of capitalism and technology. If a religious artist in cinema attempts to go back to his origins, he will find only entrepreneurs and technocrats. When the Holy tries to enter into the cinema, the intrinsically profane art, there are bound to be some unusual consequences,” he was ultimately underscoring Bresson's singular genius as an artist that brought transcendence to a commercial medium and with Diary of a Country Priest, which somewhat ironically was a commercial success, he created one of the greatest pieces of art of the twentieth-century and one of the rare films that deserves to be revered to the same degree as great Gothic architecture, Byzantine icons, and other great artistic pieces associated with the Occident.

While Nietzsche was probably mostly right when he wrote, “The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad, has made the world ugly and bad,” Bresson's films would have probably at least make him reconsider. After all, as Roud soundly recognized, “By the end of the film, even the non-believer is forced to acknowledge that the little country priest is a saint—whatever that word may mean. His final liberation comes not only from his acceptance of his approaching and painful death, but from the knowledge that his conflicts have not really been with the Countess, or Chantal, or Seraphita, but with himself. And these conflicts are resolved: tout est grâce.” Of course, Nietzsche also might a good point when he argued, “What do savage tribes at present accept first of all from Europeans? Brandy and Christianity, the European narcotics.—And by what means are they fastest ruined?—By the European narcotics,” but somehow I doubt these savages could embrace the truly Christian Diary of a Country Priest even if they wanted to. After all, the film is the opposite of a narcotic and Europeans, not unlike Bresson, do Christianity best when coming from an ascetic angle as opposed to a pussy proto-humanist prayer version.

-Ty E

The Man with the Golden Arm

2020-01-25T17:25:00.000-08:00

Nobody, including junkies, wants to watch most films about junkies, unless you have exceedingly excremental taste and can somehow trick yourself into believing there is any sort of truth in regard to the dope fiend lifestyle in senseless swill like Askhenazi pseudo-arthouse poser Darren Aronofsky’s pleb-tier clinical con-job Requiem for a Dream (2000) where the soulless smackhead lifestyle is romanticized in a rather retarded MTV-esque fashon full of debasing hip hop montage masturbation and pathetic plastic histrionics, among other aesthetically bankrupt would-be-artsy-fartsy asininities. Aside from being an absolutely aesthetically atrocious film that test the bounds of feckless art faggotry and too-cool-for-school cultural retardation, the film was clearly directed by someone that has no direct experience with heroin or junkies but of course an authentic portrayal of such human debasement would have never been such a big hit with packs of mindlessly rebellious teenagers and sapless liberal academics. While attempting to do their own best Harmony Korine/Larry Clark impersonation, the Safdie brothers utilized their typical cheap gimmick of poorly disguising autistic trash as provocative art for Heaven Knows What (2014) where they utilized real junkies yet managed to say absolutely nothing new or interesting about the junky experience. While I do appreciate films like Barbet Schroeder’s More (1969), Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970), Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971), and Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981) to varying degrees, none of these films also seem to provide the full junky experience, especially in terms of the vicious circle that comes with full-blown junkydom. Thankfully, blue-eyed goombah god Frank Sinatra was able to provide the world with a fuller look at the perturbing perils of heroin hell.

Needless to say, I never expected that a film from the mid-1950s starring alpha-wop performer Sinatra and directed by subversive Austro-American semite Otto Preminger (Bonjour Tristesse, Anatomy of a Murder) would provide in what is my best estimation the full junky experience, at least in a sort of soundly seedy post-noir sense where the most glaring trash on the streets is the people. Indeed, The Man with the Golden Arm (1956)—a film that could not be more immaculately and unforgettably titled—is far from a fun flick as a sort of cinematic equivalent to stale dog shit and old vomit boiling on a hot city sidewalk. In short, the film does what Preminger does best in terms of its hardly covert cynicism, misanthropy, and overall unflattering depiction of humanity; or, in this sad soulless case, subhumanity. In my admittedly counter-kosher yet reasonably artistically fair opinion, Preminger—an Austrian Jew that was oftentimes described as an ‘Nazi’ by collaborators due to his cold and sadistic authoritarian character (not to mention his strange fetish for playing Nazi characters, most famously in fellow chosenite Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 (1953))—was no real artist and he never directed a true cinematic masterpiece despite coming pretty damn close with his classic film noir Laura (1944), but his strong and subversive character secured his place in cinema history as a somewhat memorable auteur that, for better or worse, helped to destroy the censors. As Andrew Sarris once stated of the filmmaker, “His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer […] Preminger’s legend is that of the cosmic cost accountant, a ruthless creature who will mangle the muse for the sake of a shooting schedule.” More than an accountant, Preminger—the son of a once-powerful Austrian public prosecutor who earned a ‘Doctor of Law’ at the recommendation of his father—demonstrated the antichristial spirit of a tyrannical Talmudic lawyer that prides himself on the malefic maneuvering and manipulation of the legal system, which is actually something he both personally attempted and depicted with his films, including The Man with the Golden Arm.

While Preminger apparently originally had little interest in directing a film about a dreary dope fiend, he was quite keen on destroying the Hollywood Production Code, which states in the ‘Crimes Against The Law’ section of film censor Joseph I. Breen's document: “The illegal drug traffic, and drug addiction, must never be presented.” While Jewish leftist actor John Garfield intended to play the lead in a projected cinematic adaptation of kosher quasi-commie Nelson Algren’s 1949 source novel of the same name, the outlaw film noir star died prematurely in 1952 long before Preminger became interested in the project (in fact, Preminger bought the rights for the project from Garfield's estate). In the end, it was ultimately Algren's great misfortune that Preminger ever got interested in the project. Although the filmmaker originally had enough respect for the novelist to have him brought out from his home in Gary, Indiana to Hollywood to write the film’s screenplay, he apparently did not respect him or his screenwriting abilities too much as he soon replaced him with Walter Newman (Ace in the Hole, Cat Ballou) in an artistically disastrous scenario that haunted the writer for the rest of his life, or as hapa film historian Chris Fujiwara explained in his biography The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger (2008), “For Algren, Preminger would become an obsession, a symbol of the crass arrogance of power, an enemy with whom he would grapple again and again in his writing and his reminiscences.” A man that was ruthlessly criticized by none other than his kosher-con racial kinsman Norman Podhoretz for glorifying ghetto trash at the expense of polite society, Algren had what might be described as the quintessential ‘Barton Fink Mindset,’ which is really underscored in a critique of Preminger where he states, “…the life of the common man has never filtered into Otto’s brains and emotions; or into his talent such as he has. The book dealt with life at the bottom. Otto has never, not for so much as a single day, had any experience except that of life at the top.” Unfortunately, the trouble with Algren's critique is that, despite being a Hollywood film featuring the novelty of a famous garlic-breathed singer-cum-star, Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm does an inordinately good job portraying the purgatorial (non)existence of poor dope-shooting and scam-running proles to the point where one feels like taking a shower after watching the film lest you succumb to an unnerving feeling of festering filth.

In his highly worthwhile text Opium, journal d'une désintoxication (1930) aka Opium: The Diary of His Cure—a delightful diary of self-deluding yet insightful spiritual degeneration that makes alpha-Beat William S. Burroughs’ books on dope seem all-too-soulless by comparison—French poet and cinemagician Jean Cocteau states, “The half-sleep of opium makes us pass down corridors and cross halls and push open doors and lose ourselves in a world where people startled out of their sleep are horribly afraid of us.” Undoubtedly, Cocteau’s words are a great way to describe the inordinately haunting and oftentimes debasing experience of watching The Man with the Golden Arm, which is set in a piss poor polack ghetto of the North Side of Chicago where people seem to thrive on nothing more than fear, paranoia, and a special sort of social parasitism where even the feral version of ‘man’s best friend’ is a commodity and suavely sociopathic dope dealers aggressively prey on (ex)addicts in the gleeful hope that they get rehooked. Indeed, as Burroughs once wrote, “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” As soon as the film’s protagonist Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) is released from a federal Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, he makes the mistake of heading back to his crud-crusted Chicago hellhole where his sinisterly slimy dealer Louie (Darren McGavin)—a virtual pimp of human souls that prides himself on underhandedly exploiting human weakness for maximum personal benefit—immediately begins offering him ‘free’ heroin (notably, the name of the drug is never mentioned). Unfortunately for street parasite Louie, at least initially, Frankie has big plans and wants to leave behind his previous criminal career as the ‘dealer’ in illegal card games to become the drummer of a big band. Of course, as Burroughs also wrote, “A junkie spends half his life waiting,” and while waiting Frankie cannot ignore the, “thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.”

Notably, in his book Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2008), English mischling psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple completely demystifies the deluded view of drugs, especially opiates and heroin, as a source of profound artistic inspiration and creativity and instead presents them as a patently pathetic tool of the self-destructively nihilistic and, in turn, oftentimes criminal. In short, it is rare for happy people to become heroin addicts and it is only natural that someone suffering from a spiritual void would try to fill said void with what Burroughs lovingly described as ‘Cocteau’s kick.’ Undoubtedly, such is the case of Frankie Machine who has somewhat tangible dreams but is living a virtual nightmare as the figurative emotional-punching-bag of a deranged wife named Zosh (Eleanor Parker) and the pawn of local small-time criminals. While Frankie deeply loves his ex-flame Molly (Kim Novak), he felt so guilty about (supposedly) crippling Zosh while drunk driving that he pathetically agreed to marry the crazy cunt while she was still in the hospital. In fact, Molly, who works as a server at a strip club, is the perfect dream girl as she encourages Frankie to pursue his dream of being a professional drummer while resentful wench Zosh berates him for even considering doing something that might better him and, in turn, give him a reason to leave her and move on with his life. Frankie also has a goofy best friend named ‘Sparrow’ (Arnold Stang) that runs a silly scam that involves peddling homeless street dogs to unsuspecting customers. While Sparrow is a good friend, he is also a bizarrely nebbish low-life and is involved with the same scumbags that plague Frankie’s life. In short, Molly is the only true bright light in Frankie’s increasingly darkening abyss of a life. Needless to say, anyone that has to deal with an insufferable bitch like Zosh would love to escape to the ecstatic warmth of a heroin high, so it is not long before dealer Louie finally convinces Frankie to embrace the narcotic void. As Louie gleefully states before Frankie shoots his first dope since his prison stint, “Monkey’s never dead, dealer. They monkey never dies. When you kick him off……he just hides in a corner waiting his turn.”

As one can expect from any serious self-destructive addict, the abject misery of Frankie’s personal life parallels the extent of his drug abuse, though the former oftentimes fuels the latter and vice versa; or, in short, the vicious circle that is dope fiend purgatory. Although Frankie knows what he must do due to lessons from a certain Dr. Lennox (who he proudly states of, “He was real good to me”) as demonstrated by remarks like, “See, part of the cure is to keep yourself busy doing things you enjoy. Like for instance, I wanted to learn to drum and music,” the totally callous and craven parasites of his subprole life keep scamming him into their sociopathic schemes. Indeed, aside from the fact that his wife Zosh is keeping him a virtual slave by pretending to be a wheelchair-bound cripple when she is actually perfectly capable of walking, Frankie’s old boss Schwiefka (Robert Strauss)—a man that unequivocally proves that sometimes it is perfectly fine to judge a book by its cover—wants to make him his virtual slave again for his illegal card games and dope dealer Louie largely makes that happen with his highly addictive street smack. While Frankie does manage to make it into the musicians union, he botches his big band tryout due to suffering from drug withdrawal. To make matters worse, Frankie gets caught cheating during a long poker marathon that brings disgrace to his bastard of a boss Schwiefka. When Frankie beats him during an unsuccessful attempt to rob his drug stash, Louie naturally goes looking for him and is in quite surprise when he accidentally discovers that Zosh can actually walk. Afraid that Frankie will surely leave her if he discovers her big lie, Zosh actually kills Louie by pushing him over the railing of her apartment stairwell where he falls a couple floors to his miserable death (admittedly, this is a fairly awesome and completely unexpected murder scene). Naturally, Frankie is immediately suspected of the killing due to being one of Louie's virtual dope slaves, but luckily he is hiding out at his great love Molly’s apartment while he withdrawals from dope. Needless to say, Frankie certainly does not have luck on his side but he does have love in the form of gorgeous ghetto Fräulein Molly who demonstrates through sheer action that she is the only true good element in the protagonist's life (after all, even Frankie's best bud Sparrow is, at best, a sleazy street scavenger that regularly lounges around low-lifes).

Zosh is such a pathetically evil monster that she actually dares to confess to Molly in regard to her long-term plans for her husband, “He put me in this chair. And as long as I sit here, he’ll never leave me. He knows he belongs to me. I wouldn’t wanna live if he left me. And I’d rather see him dead too than have him go to you.” While Molly has come by to convince her to help in regard to his drug problems and being suspected of murder, Zosh—a woman so deranged that she regularly happily glances at a misspelled ‘romantic’ scrapbook chronicling her crippling and subsequent marriage to the protagonist—is only interested in keeping Frankie for herself and she will go to any low to keep him on her gutter grade femme fatale leash. In the end, Frankie, who has decided to leave town, finally discovers Zosh’s handicap ruse and so does the local cop Captain Bednar (Emile Meyer) who immediately realizes that she is actually Louie’s killer. With nothing left to lose aside from her miserable life, which is worth less than nil, Zosh impulsively decides to throwaway said miserable life by jumping off the balcony of her apartment building right in front of Frankie in what feels like a moment of karmic kismet where a murderess dispatches herself the same exact way that she killed her victim. In the end in what is ultimately a fittingly uncomfortable yet largely deserved ‘happy ending,’ Frankie and Molly leave town while perennial ghetto-dweller Sparrow predictably stays behind. Not surprisingly, Nelson Algren’s source novel ends on a more negative and decidedly anti-Hollywood note with Frankie pulling a Rozz Williams and killing himself on April Fools’ Day after being forced to abandon Molly while hiding from the cops. Needless to say, it always feels like a sick joke when ‘love conquers all’ in a Preminger picture.

In my opinion, Preminger might be an authentic auteur but he is also an obviously overrated auteur that never managed to direct a true masterpiece. Indeed, while Andrew Sarris was right when he wrote, “LAURA is Preminger’s CITIZEN KANE, at least in the sense that Otto’s detractors, like Orson’s, have never permitted him to live it down,” I do not think I would ever describe Laura as an unmitigated masterpiece yet, at the same time, none of Preminger’s subsequent output comes even close to it aside from The Man with the Golden Arm. While I have not seen all the director’s films (which would undoubtedly be an unrewarding and redundant task), I have seen most of the notable ones and they are largely too long, insufferably (socio)politically motivated, rambling, and plagued with a sort of obscenely obnoxious arrogance that the director was well known for. When Preminger attempted to make a virtual Zionist The Gone with the Wind via Exodus (1960), he only achieved bombastic banality and a sort of gratingly disingenuous humanism where he tries in vain to care about the plight of Palestinians in between glorifying Herzlian heroics. While the auteur was certainly successful in demonstrating his fetish for law and the manipulation of said law with his classic flick Anatomy of a Murder (1959), no courtroom drama deserves to be at the preposterous length of 160 minutes. With his (anti)Catholic epic The Cardinal (1963)—a film where the auteur gleefully associates both Catholicism and his seemingly much despised Austro-Kraut homeland with the social nastiness of National Socialism—Preminger was unable to hide his hatred for the Catholic Church and lead Tom Tryon (who was apparently at least partly inspired to quit acting due to his experiences with Preminger). As for his Panavision Pearl Harbor epic In Harm's Way (1965), Preminger produced a particularly plodding piece of all-star stagnation where John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Henry Fonda seem like they are pretending to star in a John Ford flick and failing miserably at it. While Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) is a particularly potent preternatural psychological-thriller that, in many ways, defies classification, Preminger, who was ironically not really fond of the film, would never again direct a truly worthwhile movie. When he was not shitting on the American South with unintentionally grotesque tabloid-like trash like Hurry Sundown (1967), Preminger was paying insincere backhanded tribute to the hippies due to their mindless subversion of traditional white Christian American society with insufferably kitschy, pseudo-psychedelic twaddle like Skidoo (1968), which is notable for featuring a virtual graveyard of washed-up actors, including Jackie Gleason, Frankie Avalon, Cesar Romero, and Groucho Marx. As for Such Good Friends (1971) ghostwritten by Elaine May under the pseudonym ‘Esther Dale,’ Preminger made a valiant attempt at being a poor man's Woody Allen in an unintentionally absurd kosher sex-comedy that is about as hot as Whoopi Goldberg's nappy naughty bits.

Of course, one of the things that makes The Man with the Golden Arm so surprisingly enthralling aside from Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak’s performances is that, with the exception of the iconic title sequence by Saul Bass, it is not particularly Premingerian in the emotional sense and it actually feels sincerely sympathetic (as opposed to arrogantly cynical) in its depiction of human degradation and desperation. Aside from source Nelson Algren’s novel, the film probably owes its sense of humanistic authenticity to Sinatra who, unlike a lot of people that worked with Preminger, was unwillingly to take shit from the dictatorial director, which he was able to get away with due to his fame and popularity (notably, Marlon Brando, who snatched the lead role in On the Waterfront (1954) from Sinatra, was also interested in the role). In fact, Preminger was so impressed with Sinatra that he wanted to use him in an adaptation of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, or as the auteur-cum-producer wrote, “Many years later Paramount asked me to direct THE GODFATHER. I thought Sinatra would be wonderful in the lead and sent him the book. I even offered to eliminate the character of the winger, who some people thought was patterned after Sinatra. Nevertheless he said, ‘Ludvig, I pass on this.’” Luckily, Francis Ford Coppola would ultimately direct the film as Preminger has never directed a film as nearly as aesthetically potent and truly epic as The Godfather (1972) despite his tackling of various films with long-running times.

As Chris Fujiwara noted in regard to the film, “Like THE MOON IS BLUE, SAINT JOAN, and, especially, PORGY AND BESS, THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM is in this sense an exception to the main movement of Preminger’s work after his departure from Fox and before SKIDOO: an abstract, hermetic film rather than one that involves itself with a reality that exists outside, and for other purposes than, the filmic project. The sets render Algren’s skid row as an isolated and self-contained world, accentuating both its hopelessness and its lack of historicity. This world has no past and no future; it is read for the bulldozers. The stylization of some of the performances—Robert Strauss’s and Arnold Stang’s, notably—suits this desperate and artificial quality perfectly.” Of course, this ‘artificiality’ that Fujiwara speaks of only underscores the protagonist’s increasing junky jadedness, dirtbag delirium, and lingering lovesickness, as if the character has been condemned to a completely colorless heroin habitué hell. Indeed, the best compliment I can pay the film is that it is like the Fritz Lang's M (1931) of junky films as a boldly fucked flick that somehow manages to utilize studio artifice to underscore the metaphysical malaise of the urban underworld to the point where the viewer feels that they have actually spent a couple hours in heroin addict Hades.

If The Man with the Golden Arm is the junky cinematic jam par excellence where the viewer has the singular luxury of experiencing the spiritually necrotic nadir of narcotic nihilism, Jean Cocteau’s surrealist directorial debut Le sang d'un poète (1930) aka The Blood of a Poet—a film that the poet turned filmmaker alludes to in his opium diary when he states, “My next work will be a film”—is its European arthouse celluloid counterpoint as an oneiric Orphic odyssey as inspired by the auteur’s own apparently life-changing experiences with opium. In short, Cocteau’s film is arguably an example of the ‘positive’ effects of opium. Notably, Cocteau would argue in his drug diary, “Opium, which changes our speeds, procures for us a very clear awareness of worlds which are superimposed on each other, which interpenetrate each other, but do not even suspect each other’s existence.” While I can somewhat respect Cocteau’s somewhat naively romantic view of a drug that debased his soul and his words certainly make for a good description of the otherworldly experiences of the eponymous poet protagonist played by Enrique Riveros, The Man with the Golden Arm is unequivocally more in tune with the hauntingly hideous moral, emotional, physical, and spiritual lows associated with heroin addiction. In fact, I would warn the more impressionable art fags out there to stay steer clear of Cocteau’s Opium: The Diary of His Cure lest they catch a nasty addiction that won’t inspire much art but probably tons of all-consuming misery and quite possibly even death. After all, for every Bukowski and Burroughs, who were both miserable men, there are probably millions of degenerate drunks and junkies with failed artistic intentions and The Man with the Golden Arm does a rather respectful job depicting the perils of such a disgusting dead-end life.

As for a vaguely similar real-life parallel to the character of protagonist Frankie Machine in terms of a junky jazz musician that lives to lose, American jazz trumpeter Chet Baker is a good example and, in that sense, queer fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s documentary Let's Get Lost (1988) certainly makes for a great double feature with Preminger’s flick. Needless to say, superficially romantic pop cinema like The Basketball Diaries (1995) is nothing short of a frivolous emotional con job if you are really looking to get down with dope fiends. While by no means a bad movie, Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996)—a film that seems more aesthetically inspired by psychedelic drugs than the opium oriented sort—has probably inspired more people to shoot junk than steer clear of it. As for junky films directed by actual junkies, Richard Kern (Submit to Me, Fingered) of the so-called Cinema of Transgression movement is probably the most notable example and naturally his films are totally morally retarded. Needless to say, most junky cinema is junk.

Notably, Andrew Sarris summed up Preminger’s artistically curious cinematic career as follows, “We are left with a director who has made at least four masterpieces of ambiguity and objectivity—LAURA, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, ADVISE AND CONSENT, and BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, a director who sees all problems and issues as a single-take two-shot, the stylistic expression of the eternal conflict, not between right and wrong, but between the right-wrong on one side and the right-wrong on the other, a representation of the right-wrong in all of us as our share of the human condition. In the middle of the conflict stands Otto Preminger, right-wrong, good-bad, and probably sincere-cynical.” Indeed, aside from the occasional neo-Sirkian melodrama à la Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), not many films quite achieve the “sincere-cynical” of The Man with the Golden Arm where a marriage is depicted as something as spiritually deadly as narcotic addiction. And, undoubtedly, arguably more than any of Preminger’s other films, his junky flick depicts, for better or worse, the signature penetrating Premingerian moral ambiguity (or lack of morality) that Sarris relatively soundly describes. In short, The Man with the Golden Arm is no pussy film, but a penetrating piece of understated pathos where one gets to the dead heart of addiction in a fashion that does not coddle the viewer or give them wild romantic ideas about addiction.

As someone that has personally known various junkies, including of the dead, undead, and almost-dead variety, The Man with the Golden Arm proved to be at least strong enough to make me (almost) consider taking a nice warm shower lest bask in the metaphysical grudge and grime, but I must confess that the film does not address the philosophical aspect of junkydom. Indeed, as Cocteau once wrote, “The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight. That is why a poet, the revolutionary of the soul, limits himself to the about-turns of the mind. Every fortnight I change my programme. For me opium is a revolt. Addiction a revolt. The cure a revolt. I do not talk of my works. Each one guillotines the other. My only aim is to spare myself Napoleon.” Of course, one also argue that the opioid epidemic plaguing white mainstream America is also a (largely unconscious and supremely misguided) collective nihilistic revolt against Hebraic Hollywood and all it stands for as Tinseltown is merely the propaganda arm for the globalized crypto-kosher post-white multicultural America. And, of course, it was Preminger, who literally utilized The Man with the Golden Arm as one of his various cinematic weapons to crush mainstream white Christian morality, who helped to pave the way to this Hollywoodland hell. In that sense, I somehow feel much better about recommending Victor Sjöström’s silent dipsomaniac delight The Phantom Carriage (1921)—an aesthetically pioneering film that takes both a literal and figurative approach to depicting the haunting horrors of alcoholism—instead of Preminger’s lumpenprole dope fiend flick when it comes to films depicting the purgatorial perils of addiction. Indeed, if non-junky Preminger's greatest contribution to the art of cinema was a junky flick featuring a popular wop crooner that was at least partly motivated by quasi-legal reasons, one comes to a rather dubious conclusion about his value and legacy as an artist. In that sense, Preminger was probably on a similar moral plane as a junky, albeit with the spirit of a Wall Street cokehead type. Of course, I say that as someone that considers transcendental European arthouse films like Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably (1977) and Adriaan Ditvoorst's White Madness (1984) to be the absolute apotheosis of junky cinema, but such hermetic flicks were not made for the same American prole audience that The Man with the Golden Arm was meant to appeal to. After all, even when it comes to junkies, not all people are equal.

-Ty E

The Skin (1981)

2020-01-10T07:03:00.002-08:00

Aside from her fundamentally flawed SS sadomasochistic danse-macabre Il portiere di notte (1974) aka The Night Porter and to a lesser extent her dystopian sci-fi flick I cannibali (1970) aka The Year of the Cannibals and Nietzsche horn-dog hagiography Al di là del bene e del male (1977) aka Beyond Good and Evil, Italian auteuress Liliana Cavani—a filmmaker that is always more interesting when she is more intemperate artsploitation than plodding arthouse—has never been a filmmaker I seriously respected yet she certainly won me over with a recent viewing of her exceedingly eccentrically epic Curzio Malaparte adaptation La pelle (1981) aka The Skin. Curiously feeling oftentimes more Fellini-esque than Fellini in terms of combining the post-neorealist humanism of something like I Vitelloni (1953) with the surrealist situational travelogue-like approach of Roma (1972) and a sort of primordial dago decadence à la Fellini Satyricon (1969), not to mention a weird inexplicable monster fish scene that recalls La Dolce Vita (1960), the film is, in my obscenely obnoxious opinion, Cavani’s greatest contribution to the art of cinema in terms of apocalyptic intrigue and downright sheer sleazy entertainment. Indeed, quite unlike the filmmaker’s other films which, not unlike those of cosmopolitan commie Bertolucci, are completely deracinated and rarely guido-esque in a flagrantly gommbah fashion like the films of Pietro Germi and Ettore Scola, this wayward WWII epic—a delightfully degrading tribute to human debasement and desperation—is shamelessly and insanely Italian in its essence to the point of bordering on full-blown whacked-out wopsloitation à la Scola's Ugly, Dirty and Bad (1976) aka Brutti, sporchi e cattivi. In fact, the film is the ultimate ‘antifascist’ flick in terms of completely contradicting the Mussolinian ideal and portraying the Italian people, or at least the Neapolitan people, as a superlatively shameless people without pride or scruples.

Indeed, in the film, mothers literally sell their little boy’s buttholes to pedo-prone Moroccan Muslim invaders and fucked fathers hold group shows where American soldiers get to take turns fingering a rare teenage virginal vagina. Likewise, Sicilian slags—a less than gorgeous group that invades Naples and causes the drastic depreciation of dago pussy for everyone—are so desperate for the dollars of darkie GIs, who are quite stereotypically only interested in fucking blonde white women, that they wear blonde wigs on their overly punished sub-prole pussies. Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, but somehow I seriously doubt that the all-the-more-demolished krauts had reached such ungodly extremes of virtually transcendental whoredom, even if the kraut capitulation resulted in the unwanted births of various Günther Kaufmann bastard types. In short, The Skin—a sometimes vertiginously vulgar film full of venal vulgarians that manages to find a certain assuredly aberrant joy in the collective degeneration of a sub-piss-poor peoples—exemplifies the sort of scathing cynicism, shameless honesty (paradoxically combined with grandiose dishonesty), and ‘unflattering humanism’ that guidos do best. Forget Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948), Cavani’s odious odyssey of obscenity dares to plunge the viewer into the true dark disgusting depths of despair and destitution that plagued the defeated peoples of the Axis Powers in a manner that no Teutonic filmmaker has ever dared to touch despite the New German Cinema obsession with WWII and its virtually post-apocalyptic aftermath. Still, Cavani’s underrated flick makes for a great double feature with Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).

While The Skins is uniquely unflattering in its depiction of Italians, it is strangely ‘pro-American’ in a sort of cynical backhanded Italian sense where the dumb uncultivated yank is ridiculed for his naiveté. Indeed, as Cavani stated in the featurette At the Frontier of the Apocalypse in regard to the source writer’s view of dumb yanks, “Malaparte sees the Americans in THE SKINS as a young and naïve people, which is somewhat true, and he’s very attached to them. He has a love for them. There’s a love for this quality, as if they were still clean, somehow untouched by sin, by the sin of war, the sin of butchery, by these things. He sees them in a positive way, as a person who has a positive view of the world would. And this comes out. He sees them as naïve because a city like Naples is the complete opposite of the American mentality. It can’t get any more different.” As to the right sort of symbol of strong puritanical American naïveté, Cavani felt that Burt Lancaster—a cultivated American that already contributed greatly to guido cinema via masterful Luchino Visconti flicks like The Leopard (1963) and Conversation Piece (1974)—was the right mensch for the job, or as she explained, “…I needed an American that didn’t seem malicious at all. That really represented the idea of the American liberator. In that sense, ariose, with traits of goodness. Rough, but rough like a father.” Of course, as the same singularly stoical actor that portrayed the strangely paternal and harshly heroic GI lead Major Abraham Falconer of Sydney Pollack’s underrated WWII flick Castle Keep (1969)—another apocalyptic Europa-in-ruins epic of eccentricity that combines tragicomedic realism and surrealism—Lancaster was the perfect man for the job, but great Latin lover Marcello Mastroianni shines no less as the lead. Speaking of Pollack’s flick, Mike Nichols' similarly overlooked dark war dramedy Catch-22 (1970) seems like an obvious influence on The Skin, especially in terms of its playfully preternatural depiction of American GIs and unhinged depictions of guidette whores, among other things.

As The Skin fleetingly makes reference to as if to absolve the writer of guilt, Curzio Malaparte—a half-German by birth that was born Curt Erich Suckert but a 100% Italian in terms of effortless charm and unscrupulous spirit—was originally a card-carrying fascist to the point where he was a vocal intellectual supporter of the rise of the National Fascist Party and Benito Mussolini, but he was too uncompromisingly individualist to properly play the game and opportunism eventually led him to switching sides to communism and Catholicism after WWII (though one would not realize that by watching the film). In Cavani’s fucked flick, Malaparte comes off seemingly like a sort of spiritually decadent aristocrat of spirit that is easily able to adapt to the most ungodly and atrocious of circumstances, including being elegantly passive-aggressively hospitable to an uncultivated conquering army made up of largely blond-haired and blue-eyed soldiers that are quite generous when it comes to terms like “wop” and “greaseball.” For example, although ostensibly working from a pro-fascist perspective while a war correspondent on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, Malaparte’s oftentimes uncensored articles acted as the genesis for his unclassifiable magnum opus Kaputt (1944) that is more of a razor sharp amoral literary masterpiece of despair and destruction than a tribute to any sort of fascist ferocity or Mussolinian martial prowess. While Kaputt managed to achieve official Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum (‘List of Prohibited Books’) status and the author was once a hardcore atheist that later supported the atheistic commies, he was even trying to scam god at the end of his life by getting close to the Catholic Church. As to his contributions to cinema aside from being the debauched brain behind The Skin, Malaparte made one attempt at directing with the largely forgotten Il Cristo proibito (1951) aka The Forbidden Christ. Additionally, the writer's legendary house ‘Casa Malaparte,’ which he once proudly showed-off to legendary German general Erwin Rommel, appears in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris (1963) aka Contempt.

In The Skin, one certainly gets the sense that Malaparte—a man with a pseudonymous surname that means “evil/wrong side” (and is also a play on Napoleon’s family name ‘Bonaparte’ which in Italian means ‘good side’)—is the ultimate cultivated conman as a effortless charmer that knows how to tell a person to eat shit without even causing the slightest bit of offense yet you cannot help but love him, so naturally Mastroianni is the perfect man for the role. After all, not unlike Malaparte, Mastroianni was a sort of unofficial ambassador for the Italian people and Italian culture, which is exactly the thankless job that Mastroianni-as-Malaparte performs in The Skin—a film that probably deserves the distinguished honor of being the mostly uniquely unflattering tribute to Italy in all of cinema history. Indeed, if you thought Spike Lee did a spectacular job of goombah-bashing in films like Do the Right Thing (1989) and Summer of Sam (1999), you have not been bombarded with rotten garlic that Cavani's film reeks of. Speaking of Lee, his hopelessly Hollywood-esque WWII flick Miracle at St. Anna (2008) penned by Judaic mulatto James McBride turns the Italian campaign into a negro fantasy with cardboard characters that includes a preposterous love triangle between an Italian partisan chick and two black GIs instead offering a honest look at the horrors and whores of war like Cavani's flick.

In Teutonic dandy auteur Werner Schroeter’s brutally beauteous The Reign of Naples (1978) aka Nel regno di Napoli—a sort of Pasolinian neo-neorealist epic where communism and Catholicism battle for the soul of Italy while the people wallow in impoverished misery—a woman sells her daughter’s virginity to a negro sailor for a bag of sugar in what ultimately seems like a completely unbelievable scenario. Admittedly, I found this scene, which is apparently historically accurate, to be fairly disturbing despite Schroeter’s laconic approach to the material, yet it is nothing compared to the sheer and utter human depravity and abject desperation of the fittingly titled The Skin where human flesh of the most intimate sort is much cheaper than beef and pork. Indeed, as Malaparte (Mastroianni) somberly states, “We lost the war. Women and children lost if more than anyone else.” The year is 1944 and, aside from 112 German POWs that are being ‘fed’ by a scheming Camorra mobster named Eduardo Marzullo (Carlo Giuffrè), there are no more fascists or Nazis in Naples, or so do members of the United States Fifth Army learn as they arrive in town with the expectation of doing some serious fighting and instead find a virtual city-sized whorehouse. Led by the largely benevolent yet no-bullshit General Mark Cork (Burt Lancaster)—a man that hates his own elites and finds it easy to like a deceptively affable chap like Malaparte—the army and various other foreign soldiers certainly treat the city as one big giant bordello as the locals aggressively attempt to sell gash for cash lest they starve.

Aside from being hired by General Cork to broker a deal for the 112 German POWs who are being intentionally overfed by mob boss Marzullo with the intent of scamming more money out of the Americans, Malaparte is also assigned to act as the chaperon and sort of cultural tour guide of a bitchy blueblood female aviator named Deborah Wyatt (Alexandra King) who also happens to be the wife of a U.S. senator and is thus absurdly made an honorary Airforce officer. A supposed ‘Queen of the Sky’ that flies into Naples as part of a nonsensical publicity stunt that, much to General Cork's chagrin, is backed by both Eisenhower and FDR, Mrs. Wyatt—a superficially cultured dame whose beauty is only transcended by her hubris—is an uptight cunt that immediately demonstrates a sense of racial superiority over the lowly swarthy guido people that she has ostensibly come to pay tribute to. Of course, being a man of subtle almost-Svengali-like seduction talents that oftentimes relies on projecting a deceptive image of adoring obsequiousness, Malaparte effortlessly gets his revenge on Mrs. Wyatt when she least suspects it by forcing her to virtually bathe in her own sanctimonious hypocrisy. Indeed, Malaparte brings Wyatt to a virtual white slave market where Italian mothers pimp their prepubescent sons to Moroccan soldiers and the upperclass lady naturally completely loses it when she witnesses an Islamic pervert examining the anuses of these poor forsaken boys, thus resulting in her losing a not-all-that-small segment of her hair after the swarthy sexual savage takes a swing at her with a dagger (notably, said sand savage then proceeds to showoff his ‘white woman hair trophy’ to his equally thrilled savage comrades). Needless to say, the voyage to Italy does not end well for Mrs. Wyatt as she crashes her plane after Mount Vesuvius erupts and is subsequently the victim of a gang-rape scenario by her own American GIs in an unsettling scenario where the flying diva is brought down to the same level of abject degradation as the Neapolitan people that she previously looked down on in a scenario that would probably provide catharsis to certain guido viewers.

Aside from General Cork, Malaparte also befriends a young naïve but well-meaning GI named Jimmy Wren (Ken Marshall) who does not think twice about partaking in as much as guidette pussy as he can possibly penetrate, or so one would assume from all his bragging. In fact, when a Judaic comrade named Goldberg complains, “Are you crazy? Every nigger this side of the Atlantic has been in them wop broads. You forget them movies about what happens to your pecker if you get the clap?,” Jimmy boy simply mocks his fellow GI for sticking to pathetically masturbating to porno magazines despite having unlimited vaginal opportunities in Naples. Despite partaking in prostitutes and even obtaining an Italian girlfriend (Rosaria Della Femmina), Jimmy eventually unexpectedly falls in love with a young Italian peasant girl named Maria Concetta (Liliana Tari) after encountering her selflessly comforting a dying GI whose guts and intestines are literally hanging outside his stomach. Needless to say, Jimmy suffers a mental breakdown of sorts upon discovering that his beloved Maria Concetta is part of a sick sideshow attraction as the supposed ‘only remaining virgin in Naples’ where he father charges GIs to finger her hymen-intact honeypot. In fact, Jimmy is so disturbed by this quasi-incestuous scenario that he angrily uses his fingers to break Maria’s hymen and then proceeds to wipe the fresh blood on her father-cum-pimp’s face in disgrace. Luckily, Jimmy finally gets over it and decides to bring Maria Concetta home as a war bride, or so he tells a less than enthused Malaparte who is probably not proud about being the member of a defeated nation where all the hot young girls are desperate to leave. Of course, despite the degradation that she suffers at the hands (or, in this case, fingers) of horny GIs, Maria Concetta is one of the lucky ones because, as Malaparte explains to Jimmy in regard to the prostitution situation in Naples, “Well, you know, the price of human flesh is below that for beef or pork. A week ago, you could get a 20 year old girl for 10 dollars. Now she’d be worth no more than four … bones and all. The Sicilian girls flooded the market. They’re older, so they cost less.” Needless to say, the Sicilian streetwalkers are depicted as the most grotesque and ill-shapen of pussy-peddlers.

As an ex-fascist turned reluctant pro-American that seems to simply opportunistically support whoever is winning, Malaparte may not seem like a serious man of principle but as he proudly proclaims to Miss Wyatt and some dinner guests, “The real Italian flag does not show three colors but the male organ. Morality, Honor, Family, the cult of religion are all there, between the legs.” In short, Malaparte is a covert pagan of sorts that has experienced what happens when civilization is stripped away and untamed libido reigns. Indeed, more than anywhere else, defeated nations reveal that sex sells and that everyone is willing to sell it if they are desperate enough, especially when conquering armies can simply pillage pussy for free as some of the GIs attempt to do in the film. Somewhat subversively, the film also dares to depict the racial character of sex and how certain groups are more hopelessly depraved than others. Indeed, whereas various Muslims are depicted as boy-buggering barbarians and “sodomite who likes sunflowers,” negroes are depicted as sort of anti-alchemists that love defiling golden hair. In fact, civil rights saint Emmett Till’s father Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army on July 2, 1945 after taking part in the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others while surviving in the Italian Campaign as an American soldier (notably, great modernist poet and fascist propagandist Ezra Pound, who was imprisoned alongside the colored lust killer, mentions Till in lines 171-173 of Canto 74 of his Pisan Cantos). Of course, in general, the American GIs, especially of the Anglo-Saxon sort, come out looking as the least sexually debauched. Needless to say, aside from the love affair between Jimmy Wren and Maria Concetta, all the sexual behavior depicted in The Skin is simply grotesque and that this completely loveless lust exposes human-beings as being nothing more than bestial animals, albeit worse as at least (some) humans have a conscience and thus should know better. In that sense, war and it its aftermath is where man is at his most unflatteringly atavistic, or so one discovers while watching The Skin.

Naturally, The Skin would not be the artsploitation war film par excellence if it did not conclude in a highly sensational apocalyptic fashion where a Boston Brahmin-like bitch crashes her plane and faces a world of pain in the form of rape-happy GIs and is forced to learn a little humility for once in her luxurious life. Undoubtedly, Mrs. Wyatt’s nightmarish night in Naples almost seems like the auteuress’ revenge as the American aristocrat is previously depicted going on a hateful anti-Italian rant and spitting the following acidic vile at protagonist Malaparte, “I hate your attitude, you Latin snob! Know-it-all! All of you! Backwards! Scummy! Oily! Hairy, dark, greasy gigolos! Wop! Wop! And you’re laughing at me? You can stick your flag right between your legs, up your ass!” Rather regrettably, Malaparte does largely prove to be a know-it-all as far as his patently pessimistic perspective is concerned and the film even concludes with the hapless hero becoming hopelessly dejected after witnessing a happy Italian peasant man celebrating the American occupation being completely crushed by an American tank in an allegorical scene that more or less sums up the cultural effect of the American occupation on Italy. Needless to say, it is no coincidence that the film concludes with the arrival of the U.S. Fifth Army in Rome through the rather paradisiacal Appian Way. As Malaparte somberly states to his young American ‘friend’ after witnessing the crushing of a fellow goombah by an American tank, “You can go, Jimmy. You are the winners.”

In terms of its absolutely scathing and sardonic sentiments that are in stark contrast to the heavyhearted humanism of classic Italian films like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Umberto D. (1952) and Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), The Skin is like the anti-neorealist film par excellence and a tastefully tasteless tribute to maestro Malaparte's almost otherworldly cynicism in relation to the American so-called liberation of Italy. Indeed, as Peter Bondanella noted in his classic text Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (1983), “Cavani investigates a moment of Italian history already familiar from many well-known neorealist films; however, she captures it from an entirely different perspective. In place of the nobler values of sacrifice and courage neorealist films celebrate, Cavani forces us to reconsider the dramatic story of occupied Naples as the relationship between the victor and vanquished. The director implicitly protests the cultural hegemony of America over Italy that began during the last year of the war. Malaparte’s grotesque realism survives from the novel […] The romanticism associated with the war by those who fought on the winning side, or who participated in the Resistance, is removed from Cavani’s story, and what remains is a tale of survival, of saving one’s skin in the midst of hardship, starvation, depravity, and uncertainty […] Cavani reminds us, human history is made at the expense of human sacrifice, literally from our hides.” As American half-wop Abel Ferrara’s rather depressing documentary Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009) reveals, it seems that Naples has yet to completely recover from the Second World War, but then again this is a historically degenerate place that, as depicted in The Skin, there is, among other things, an old ‘womb envy’ tradition of ‘gay birth’ where a gay guido pretends to go into labor and give birth to a sort of mock baby boy with a large cock after nine months of ‘gay marriage.’ Of course, this absurd ‘gay birth’ celebration is organically Neapolitan and should stay that way as it would be a shame if it replaced by American trash like Queer Eye and Drag Queen Story Hour in terms of representing gay goombah identity.

Despite being assuredly antifascist, The Skin does follow in a certain distinctly Italian tradition as exemplified by the proto-fascist aesthetic perversity of Malaparte and his contemporary Gabriele D’Annunzio who, on top of writing decadent Nietzschean literary, was the first ‘Duce’ and a great national war hero that Benito Mussolini stole most of his best ideas from. Of course, Cavani’s most (in)famous film The Night Porter is even more of a reflection of this sort of perverse fascist aestheticism, but I digress. In my opinion, what The Skin ultimately demonstrates is that Cavani is, at best, a sort of inordinately cultivated exploitation auteur that, due to her gender and propensity towards controversial subject matter, scammed her way into the arthouse, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, even in a film like Francesco (1989)—the second film of the director’s career-spanning St. Francis of Assisi trilogy—where Cavani attempts what Paul Schrader has described as ‘transcendental style,’ the almost absurdly amoral female filmmaker cannot help but include a scene where a completely unclad Mickey Rourke, who curiously portrays the titular lead, literally fucks snow. As for anyone that knows anything about Nietzsche or his philosophical weltanschauung, Beyond Good and Evil manages to make John Huston’s obscure cinematic disaster Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) seem like a respectable biopic by comparison. As for her Jun'ichirō Tanizaki adaptation The Berlin Affair (1985)—a film depicting a bizarre love triangle between a Nazi diplomat, his wife, and the daughter of a Japanese ambassador—it is about as erotic and aesthetically potent as a mid-1990s Showtime softcore flick, but I digress.

Undoubtedly, there is no sharper contrast to the films of Cavani and novels of Malaparte than the writings of Italian ‘super fascist’ Julius Evola who denounced the stereotypical dirty debauched dago types that The Skin so unforgettably depicts. Indeed, in a chapter entitled ‘Latin Character—Roman World—Mediterranean Soul’ featured in his book Gli uomini e le rovine (1953) aka Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, Evola makes a dichotomous comparison between two very different Italian types. Indeed, whereas the ‘Roman’ type is stoic, noble, disciplined, loyal, hierarchal, and orderly, the ‘Mediterranean’ type is histrionic, amoral, undisciplined, disloyal, resentful, disorderly, and proudly sexually ill-restrained. Needless to say, Evola believes that the Mediterranean type has come to define the Italian people, or as the magical baron once wrote, “The qualities of the ‘Roman’ type represent the positive limit of dispositions hidden in the best parts of our people, just as the qualities characterized as ‘Mediterranean’ correspond to the negative limit and the less noble part of it; these limits are also found as components in other peoples, especially in the ‘Latin’ group. However, we must realize that too many times behaviors resembling the ‘Mediterranean’ type have been identified, especially abroad, as typically Italian, and that the ‘Mediterranean’ component appears to have prevailed overall in Italian life following World War II.” Of course, The Skin and most of Cavani’s other films confirm Evola’s unflattering thesis.

When reading Evola’s remarks on Nietzsche, it almost seems absurdly ironic that Cavani—a woman that, not unlike fellow Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, certainly had a German obsession of sorts—would even dare to direct a biopic about the Teutonic philosopher yet, at the same time, some of his ideas also strangely support the Cavanian style of filmmaking and a sort of ‘Italian’ romanticism in general. Indeed, as Evola wrote, “Nietzsche himself warned against every morality that tends to dry up every impetuous current of the human soul instead of channeling it. The capability of control, equilibrium, continuity in feeling and in willing must not lead to a withering and mechanization of one’s being, as seems to be the case with some negative traits of the central-European and Anglo-Saxon. What matters is not to suppress passion and to give to the soul a beautiful, regulated, and homogenous, though flat form; but rather to organize one’s being in an integral way around the capability of recognizing, discriminating, and adequately utilizing the impulses and the lights that emerge from one’s deep recesses. It cannot be denied that passion is predominant in many Mediterranean Italian types, but this disposition does not amount to a defect, but rather to an enrichment, provided it finds its correlative in a firmly organized life.” Of course, it can be argued that, in terms of the artistic life she has lived, Cavani somewhat ironically achieved this lofty Evolian ideal. Additionally, The Skin undoubtedly proves that Evola, Malaparte, and Cavani share similar sentiments in regard to the racial differences between Italians and Anglo-Saxons. It is certainly hard for me to imagine some uptight WASP stating in regard to his daughter’s virginal vagina “It doesn’t bite” while exposing during some superlatively sleazy sexual sideshow attraction, but such is Cavani’s singularly sick cinematic realm of depraved dago sexual abandon and sodomic desperation.

-Ty E

Slaughterhouse-Five

2020-01-02T09:47:00.000-08:00

A nonlinear big budget Hollywood sci-fi arthouse flick addressing the Allied powers unofficial war crime of the totally terroristic firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War certainly seems like a sort of wishful alt-right fanboy fantasy yet, somewhat inexplicably, such an insanely idiosyncratic cinematic work actually does exist and naturally it is not exactly a famous film despite being based on a relatively famous novel. Luckily, it is also a great film that, despite being nearly half-a-century old, is rather fresh despite technically belonged to a genre that does not typically age gracefully. Indeed, Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)—a film based on American postmodern writer Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 novel of the same name—is, in my less than humble opinion, one of the greatest films of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’ era and certainly more deserving of notability than the various classic films associated with the movement as directed by the likes of Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, Miloš Forman, and Arthur Penn, among countless others. Likewise, I would also argue that it is a rare film that, not unlike Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), is superior to its source novel (in fact, Vonnegut was quite happy with the film and would even state, “I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel”). Of course, the film’s director George Roy Hill is best known for the New Hollywood classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)—a sort of American Western answer to François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962)—which is a film that I have always found to be hopelessly soft, sentimental, and obscenely overrated.

Not unlike his American New Wave contemporaries Michael Ritchie (Prime Cut, The Bad News Bears) and Alan J. Pakula (Klute, Sophie's Choice), Hill is a good argument against auteurism as a talented filmmaker that, relatively speaking, lacked a potent personalized approach and signature style, which was arguably a benefit to a preternatural picture like Slaughterhouse-Five that could have easily been an absolutely abominable artistic disaster were it helmed by a more monomaniacal and/or fetishistic filmmaker (speaking of, Guillermo del Toro, who has certainly demonstrated his commitment to the cultural marxist cause by introducing interspecies miscegenation in the fiercely fishy The Shape of Water (2017), announced in 2013 that he plans to remake the film in collaboration with silly semitic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman). That such a film was ever made in Hebraic Hollywood—a place that, more than any other, clearly has no sympathy for the complete destruction of an ancient German city and countless priceless pieces of architecture—is nothing short of a miracle and virtual fluke of cinema history that reveals Hill's inordinate artistic integrity as a rare Hollywood filmmaker that was clearly not willing to bend-over for Zion (notably, underrated kiwi mischling auteur Vincent Ward would later depict the firebombing of Dresden in a somewhat less effective yet nonetheless still potent fashion in his rarely-seen film Map of the Human Heart (1992)). Needless to say, had Hill prostituted himself by directing a holocaust film on a similar scale to Slaughterhouse-Five, he would probably be better remembered and more revered today.

Notably, the full title of Vonnegut’s book is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death and the author is described on the title page as “A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES ON CAPE COD [AND SMOKING TOO MUCH], WHO, AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT HORS DE COMBAT, AS A PRISONER OF WAR, WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING OF DRESDEN, GERMANY, ‘THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,’ A LONG TIME AGO, AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE. THIS IS A NOVEL SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC MANNER OF TALES OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE, WHERE THE FLYING SAUCERS COME FROM. PEACE.” Indeed, as Vonnegut’s author description (possibly unwittingly?) alludes to, one of the greatest absurdities of WWII, not unlike WWI, is that German-Americans made up the largest ethnic to fight for the United States against Germany and Vonnegut—a battalion scout with the 106 Infantry Division that was captured on December 22, 1944 during the Battle of the Bulge—even had the singular displeasure as “fourth-generation German-American” of witnessing an irreplaceable Teutonic city from his ancestral homeland being completely eradicated by his own countrymen while a POW in what was ultimately a literal ‘holocaust’ (aka ‘sacrificial mass slaughter via fire’). Notably, Jean-Luc Godard of all people noticed the absurdity of this situation in his obscure feature Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) aka Allemagne 90 neuf zero where it is narrated, “The US never understood the war, or took part in it. At best, their fight was not the state’s fight, nor on the same battleground. The US can only imagine a civil war. It’s always themselves and their own defects, personified by the enemy, that they combat in all wars. For them, war is a moral dilemma. When they were English, they fought the English. When they became Americans, they fought Americans. Once sufficiently influenced by the Germans, morally and culturally, they attacked the Germans. The first American to take a prisoner in 1917 was Meyer. The prisoner’s name was also Meyer.” Of course, life’s great dark absurdities are what Slaughterhouse-Five is all about, hence its lack of popularity among the general public which prefers disposable neatly-packaged feel-good banalities to mercurial movies that challenge the mind and seep into the soul.

Alien abductions, the firebombing of Dresden, homicidal wop psychopaths with lifelong grudges, and a seemingly autistic affectless hero are just a couple of the seemingly discordant ingredients that make Slaughterhouse-Five so insanely yet ideally idiosyncratic, yet the film is no less exceptional in terms of its form as a nonlinear flick with a virtual ‘jigsaw’ approach to editing (courtesy of editor Dede Allen of such classics as The Hustler (1961) and Night Moves (1975)) that manages to mimic human memory in terms of switching back-and-forth between major events from the protagonist’s fairly eclectically traumatic life. Indeed, it is an extraordinary film about an extraordinary life as lived by a largely less than extraordinary individual that just floats through existence yet somehow achieves a sort of strange truly out-of-this-world transcendence in the end. While technically a sci-fi film and undoubtedly one of the first to deal with the theme of alien abduction, Vonnegut clearly has no special love for the genre and merely uses it trappings for mostly philosophical reasons (of course, for Hebraic Hollywood to make a film about the horrors of the Dresden Bombings seems like science fiction in itself, but I digress). Just as in the novel, the film is a quasi-existentialist work where the magnificent meaningless of life is given a vaguely optimistic spin where the viewer is asked to focus on the good and forget the bad, even in a demented culture-destroying world where the Dresden tragedy occurred. Notably, in a special introduction featured in the 1976 Franklin Library edition of the novel, Vonnegut stated of the event, “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.” Undoubtedly, Vonnegut’s sentiments sum up the overall charmingly dispiriting spirit of the film, which is very much beauteous in a bitingly surreal fashion comparable to blood splattered across fresh white snow (which, quite fittingly, actually appears in the film).

Although a man that probably could be best described by the title of Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s unfinished three-volume novel The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943), the film’s protagonist Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks)—a tall blond American boy with an all-American Norman Rockwell-esque essence—has led a virtually magical life filled with great tragedy and heartbreak but also great wonder, intrigue, and splendor. A virtual cipher of a man that lead actor Sack portrays quite perfectly as far as effectively radiating a flat affect is concerned, Billy is clearly a model for the eponymous heroes of Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) and Forrest Gump (1994), Chance the gardener in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979), Léon in Andrzej Żuławski’s L'Amour Braque (1985), and Dougie Jones in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), among various other examples. Luckily, Billy’s character is perfect for such a story as it allows the viewer to more easily embrace a film that deals with both the very real horror of war and a sort of goofy science fiction that defies reason. Falling somewhere in between an ‘Everyman’ and Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ with a good bit of autism thrown in for good measure, Billy is also in many ways quite typical of an American male of his era in that he goes off to war, gets married and has two kids, has a relatively successful career, and then retires, but only two events from his life give it true meaning: the Dresden firebombing and alien abduction. Of course, the latter is pure fantasy and a sort of expression of Vonnegut’s own pseudo-metaphysical wishful thinking in regard to some intangible humanist heaven where even autists like Billy Pilgrim get to fuck premium grade pussy for eternity for an exceedingly erudite all-alien audience.

While the film begins during WWII with a seemingly lost Billy roaming around in a considerably chaotic snowy Europa, the film rather seamlessly weaves back-and-forth between his life, including before and after that war that seemingly left indelible scars on his curious psyche. The son of a fierce fat father that—to impress his equally big boorish friends—put him in a traumatizing ‘sink-or-swim’ scenario as a small child where he was thrown into the deep-end of a public pool while completely naked and a comparably ludicrously large-and-in-charge mouthy mother, Billy hardly has the makings of a martial soldier and he virtually sleepwalks through the entire war despite it also having a totally traumatizing effect on his life. For example, when the Germans give him a woman's coat to wear in an attempt to emasculate him, Billy is completely clueless that he is being mock until a British POW makes it crystal clear to him and even then he does not seem to care. Aside from surviving the horrors of the Dresden terrorist bombings and being forced to move countless charred kraut corpses with other GI POWs, Billy also witnesses the senseless execution of his sole friend Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche)—a kindhearted teacher and family man that acts as a sort of much-needed father figure for the hapless protagonist—who is punished for ‘theft’ by some overly enterprising SS men after randomly being spotted rather innocently grabbing a Hummel figurine from some ruins. Undoubtedly, Derby's absurdly senseless death, which is over a cute inanimate object that, rather innocently and sentimentally, reminds the poor character of his son and that one of the SS men subsequently throws away like trash after having the middle-aged GI swiftly executed, completely personifies the spirit of dark tragicomedic absurdism that guides both the film and novel. Although Billy made a short-lived but completely unforgettable friend in Derby while a POW, he also becomes the #1 eternal enemy of a psychotic Sicilian-American named Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman)—a loudmouthed lunatic of the suitably swarthy sort that, arguably quite revealingly, has turned irrational homo-hating into a sort of unintentionally humorous poetic art—that vows to kill him one day because he quite wrongfully believes that he caused the death of his comrade Roland Weary (Kevin Conway), or as he initially threatens the protagonist, “A fag frolic in Wyoming. I’ll be there, Pilgrim, waitin’ for you.” Needless to say, Lazzaro does kill Billy and, as someone hopelessly “unstuck in time” that experiences various events from his life at various times multiple times, the protagonist is well aware this death-by-dago awaits him.

While Billy survives the Dresden Bombing and, in turn, the Second World War, and then gets married, has two kids, and becomes a successful optometrist, he seems completely detached from his ‘life’ and instead seeks sanctuary in his beloved doggo ‘Spot.’ After catching his son Robert (Perry King) masturbating to a centerfold of a sexploitation starlet named Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine of Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974)), Billy also finds a rare source of solace in the sensual lady and the silly sword-and-sandal (aka peplum) films that she stars in (and that his incessantly nagging lard ass wife, who he clearly does not love, highly disproves of). The Tralfamadorians—a group of highly intelligent and sophisticated extraterrestrials who exist in all times simultaneously—seem to realize this and transport both Billy and Montana to a virtual human zoo located on their planet of Tralfamadore, thereupon leading to an unlikely love affair between the protagonist (who is now middle-aged) and voluptuous diva that eventually leads to the birth of one son. As Billy tries in vain to explain to his pedantic son-in-law in regard to the important insights that he has acquired from these aliens, “On Tralfamadore you learn that the world is just a collection of moments, all strung together in beautiful, random order. And if we’re going to survive, it’s up to us to concentration on the good moments and ignore the bad.” In the end, Billy even learns to accept his own rather absurd assassination at the hands of his deranged wop nemesis Lazzaro who kills him while he is giving a speech on the subject of Tralfamadore while in the guido’s shitty home city of Philadelphia. Despite Billy’s insistence on remembering the good, the Dresden bombing, which acts both as the climax and ‘centerpiece’ of the film, sticks out the most in the end (as it should). After all, it is hard to forget the complete incineration of a singularly striking place full of happy children and old people (as Hill underscores during the pre-bombing scenes) that the protagonist initially describes upon first seeing it as, “the Land of Oz.” Indeed, right before the climatic bombing scene, the viewer is teased with a quasi-travelogue of sorts featuring the most beauteous pieces of ancient Teutonic architecture juxtaposed with a composition by Johann Sebastian Bach in a virtually aesthetically angelic combo that arguably represents the height of apolitical German high kultur in an exceedingly ethereal scenario where it seems ‘nothing bad can happen,’ henceforth perfectly underscoring the true apocalyptic horrors of the firebombing of Dresden.

When I was in college, I once had this insufferably whiny slave-morality-ridden professor—a seriously shameless shabbos goy that once asked all the Jewish kids in my class to stand-up in a bizarre scenario of seemingly worshipful racial fetishization—that used to use his monotonous lectures to cry about being persecuted for being a “polack” (which, considering his relatively young age, seemed rather unlikely) or to philo-semitically proselytize for the chosen amongst god’s chosen. During one fairly unforgettable lecture where he rather recklessly exposed the pathetic heights of his craven ressentiment-driven bloodlust, this exceedingly erratically effete professor did an impassioned speech on how good the Dresden firebombings were and even went on to describe in great detail the cultural importance of the city and how it was easily incinerated because it was largely made up of wood buildings due to being so ancient. After witnessing this bitchy biddy—a virtual middle-aged boy with the sad sick soul of a neurotic sex-starved old woman that probably still has not gotten over the ostensible trauma of a jock shoving him into a locker during high school—practically drool with a certain sadistic glee at the mere thought of the totally senseless brutal extermination of German woman and children and destruction of great German culture, I naturally came to the conclusion that those that ordered the senseless bombings were operating from a similar unhinged mindset. After all, rabid Jewish United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. infamously came up with the Morgenthau Plan with the odious objective of turning Germany into a depopulated wasteland, not to mention the fact that Albert Einstein lied to FDR about Germany’s advancements in nuclear science so that he could get the Manhattan Project started in the hope that his ex-homeland would be nuked. Of course, what makes Slaughterhouse-Five such a successful antiwar film is that it is not plagued with the sort of hatred or resentment that inspired the pseudo-heroic Morgenthau and Einsteins of the world or the literary frauds like Elie Wiesel and Jerzy Kosiński. Indeed, it is only because Germany was destroyed and Zion prevailed that we even know of the zio-media-hype names of Einstein and Wiesel today while ignoring real geniuses like Nikola Tesla and a peaceful Aryan humanist like Vonnegut (who, if he was not a leftist of sorts, would have surely been completely ignored).

While Slaughterhouse-Five is unequivocally the greatest Vonnegut film adaptation of all-time as the novelist himself recognized, Mother Night (1996) directed by Christine (1983) lead Keith Gordon surely makes for a great double feature with George Roy Hill’s film. Based on the 1961 Vonnegut novel of the same name, the film, which features an iconic cameo from the German-American writer, centers around the considerably conflicted antihero of Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—a character that seems to be inspired by both American modernist poet Ezra Pound and William ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ Joyce—who lives a sort of double life and overall schizophrenic existence as an American Nazi propagandist that quite deceptively uses his radio show to spread hidden messages that can only be decoded by Allied intelligence. Notably, the character also appears in Roy’s Slaughterhouse-Five during the early part of the Dresden bombing scene in a red-white-and-blue swastika uniform that whacked-out wop Lazzaro describes as a “fag outfit.” While neither film is even remotely ‘pro-Nazi,’ they both manage to question the official WWII narrative and, quite unlike virtually any Hollywood WWII films, make light of atrocities committed against the Germans (in fact, Mother Night director Gordon is a member of the tribe, but he doesn’t let his ethno-racial loyalties get in the way of a good weird paranoiac story, as the film even makes reference to the mass rape of German women by Soviet hordes). As for other Vonnegut adaptations, the Jerry Lewis/Sam Fuller vehicle Slapstick of Another Kind (1982) is one of the worst films ever made and Breakfast of Champions (1999)—a film that should have worked since it was directed by offbeat auteur Alan Rudolph who, not unlike his friend-cum-mentor Robert Altman, is totally suited for such subject matter—is a total mess that the author apparently felt was “painful to watch.”

As far as I am concerned, George Roy Hill is one of the most underrated filmmakers associated with the so-called American New Wave and Slaughterhouse-Five is superior to anything that was ever directed by more respected filmmakers associated with the movement like Paul Mazursky, Norman Jewison, Sydney Pollack, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, and countless others. A sort of spiritual cinema son of Hollywood maverick William A. Wellman (Wings, The Ox-Bow Incident) as both filmmakers were man’s men that served as fighter pilots and had a lifelong love of flying in general as demonstrated by their respective films, Hill brought a certainly inordinate masculinity to American cinema during an exceedingly emasculated (post)hippie era with underrated films like the mesmerizing männerbund aviation drama The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)—a film that pays tribute to the singular glory of Teutonic fighter pilots and the similarly daredevil-ish American pilots that, despite technically being enemies, respected them—and the vehemently anti-p.c. hockey dramedy Slap Shot (1977) starring Paul Newman in a rare lovably sleazy role. With The World According to Garp (1982)—a personal childhood favorite that, until relatively recently (last year), I could not recall the name of despite it being burned into my mind nearly thirty years ago—Hill directed a film that was clearly a (quite superior) model for Forrest Gump, albeit darker and more inordinately eccentric. While not one of his masterpieces, Hill brought some unexpected much-needed-nuance to the whole perennial Israeli–Palestinian conflict with his John le Carré adaptation The Little Drummer Girl (1984) starring Klaus Kinski of all people as a sort of Machiavellian Mossad agent in an uneven yet reasonably enthralling film where the Israelis ultimately come out looking like the most underhanded of international terroristic exploiters. In my less than humble opinion, it is a damn shame that Hill will always be best remembered for the softcore western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Americans love their westerns and hate their war crimes.

While the curious combination of real-life war atrocities and alien abductions might seem a tad bit silly, especially to those that take the Dresden firebombing seriously, the two things somehow work together perfectly in Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five and their seemingly discordant combo make even more perfect sense if one has consulted the UFO writings of the great ‘Aryan Christ’ Carl Jung. While Jung did not completely rule out the possibility of space aliens and flying saucers, he did feel that the whole UFO phenomenon that more or less kicked off during World War II was part of a psychological and, in turn, spiritual crisis that was plaguing the Occidental mind. Indeed, as Jung argued in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1959), “One can hardly suppose that anything of such worldwide incidence as the Ufo legend is purely fortuitous and of no importance whatever […] The basis for this kind of rumor is an emotional tension having its cause in a situation of collective distress or danger, or in a vital psychic need. This condition undoubtedly exists today, in so far as the whole world is suffering under the strain of Russian policies and their still unpredictable consequences […] Precisely because the conscious mind does not know about them and is therefore confronted with a situation from which there seems to be no way out, these strange contents cannot be integrated directly but seek to express themselves indirectly, thus giving rise to unexpected and apparently inexplicable opinions, beliefs, illusions, visions, and so forth. Any unusual natural occurrences such as meteors, comets, ‘rains of blood,’ a calf with two heads, and suchlike abortions are interpreted as menacing omens, or else signs are seen in the heavens.” Undoubtedly, despite his general autistic demeanor, Slaughterhouse-Five protagonist Billy Pilgrim—an absurdly lucky survivor of the hell-on-earth Dresden nightmare—is a man plagued with a certain ‘emotional tension,’ which he is ultimately relieved of with the best next thing to heaven: a sort of extraterrestrial fuck factory where he gets to make love with the literal girl of his dreams in a baroque out-of-this world setting where his alien overlords, the Tralfamadorians, tell him everything he needs to know about life and existence, thereupon elevating him of every single fear and worry that he has. In that sense, both Vonnegut’s novel and Hill’s film adaptation act as sort of esoteric escapism where the ‘emotional tension’ that has resulted in the UFO phenomenon is cured by said UFO phenomenon; or at least Vonnegut’s fantastic fictional humanist version of it.

Notably, in attempting to describe the nightmarish state of painting in the post-WWII UFO age, Jung remarked, “Just as women’s fashions find every innovation, however absurd and repellent, ‘beautiful,’ so too does modern art of this kind. It is the ‘beauty’ of chaos. That is what this art heralds and eulogizes: the gorgeous rubbish heap of our civilization. It must be admitted that such an undertaking is productive of fear, especially when allied to the political possibilities of our catastrophic age. One can well imagine that in an epoch of the ‘great destroyers’ it is a particular satisfaction to be at least the broom that sweeps the rubbish into the corner.” While Slaughterhouse-Five—a film that literally depicts one of the greatest cities in human history as a sort of grotesquely gorgeous rubbish heap as partly caused by largely cultureless American philistines—does have a certain ‘soothing’ quality, it is also indubitably an expression of the ‘beauty of chaos’ that Jung describes in our pre-dystopian age of ‘great destroyers’ of the innately cosmopolitan alien culture-distorting sort. In that sense, the film is more potent than ever, not to mention radically red-pilled compared to the rancid raunch and cultural retardation that epitomizes most recent Hollywood sci-fi flicks (and movies in general). After all, you will not find another Hollywood movie that makes positive reference to English historian and supposed ‘holocaust denier’ David Irving who, as the film alludes to, was the first to seriously study the Dresden atrocity with his revolutionary text The Destruction of Dresden (1963). As for Vonnegut’s novel, it might even eventually prove to have predicted the forsaken future of the U.S. when it notes that, “The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen. So it goes. It is all brand new.” Indeed, so it goes.

-Ty E

Blast of Silence

2019-12-24T06:15:00.001-08:00

While I recently felt a certain degree of long buried nostalgia upon re-watching the classic Xmas TV movie special Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (1977)—an inordinately cute, clever, and shockingly kindhearted production courtesy of none other than great muppet auteur Jim Henson—as it is one of my earliest film memories and something I probably have no seen in well over twenty years, I would be lying if I tried to pass it off as reflecting my current mentality or how I feel about the so-called holiday season. Surely, it is keeping with my current cynicism that I was not at all that surprised to just learn that the film’s 1971 source children’s book of the same name was penned by chosenite Russell Hoban (which explains the film's somewhat grating ‘class consciousness’) and mischling hack Frank Oz had to taint the film with his voice, but I digress. Feeling like I might be able tap into a smidgen of Xmas spirit with a quasi-arthouse slasher featuring a bunch of Warhol Superstars in the quite fitting roles of mental patients, I decided to re-watch Theodore Gershuny’s Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972), but it reminded me more of hokey Halloween hijinks than jingle bells and red-nosed reindeer. Hell, I even gave Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) a re-watch after two decades or so, but I was distracted by its odd neo-Orientalism and the fact that the recent PSYOP-like emergence of ‘Baby Yoda’—a sad unintentional symbol of Werner Herzog's strange newfound Hollywood whore status (though, to be fair, the Bavarian auteur started heading into this direction with his soullessly sentimental Spielberg-esque shoah shit show Invincible (2001))—has forever tainted the memory of the film in my mind. Indeed, I am somewhat ashamed to admit it, but the only film that could get me into the Christmas spirit—or, more specifically, the anti-Christmas spirit—is the nasty little neo-noir Blast of Silence (1961) directed by one-anti-hit-wonder Allen Baron who also acted as the film’s writer and antihero.

Despite being a relatively obscure figure that was mainly involved in doing completely irrelevant hack directing for popular (and not so popular) TV shows including The Brady Bunch, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Charlie's Angels, and The Love Boat, Baron was recently a casualty of the yeast-infected Me Too campaign at the ancient age of 91 after being exposed by his former personal assistant Anna Dey who not only accused him of doing disgusting things like throwing cum-rags at her, but also curiously accused him of the following in a July 2018 lawsuit: “Baron is a person of Jewish faith and expressly discussed his disdain for [Dey’s] Christian religion.” Of course, any non-pozzed thinking person that has seen Blast of Silence will see this as no big surprise as the film is devoutly anti-Christmas in a sort of marvelously mean-spirited and misanthropic fashion as if the writer-director fantasizes about a sort of semitic (anti)Santa Claus using his magical Kabbalah-charged sleigh with evil Golem-like Reindeer to drop a nuke on happy Christmas carolers. Indeed, Baron’s debut feature offers the viewer the opportunity of spending Christmastide with a half-crazed coldblooded hitman killer of the absurdly alienated and perverted sort who glorifies solitude and ultimately achieves a perennial sort of solitariness with his much-warranted grisly demise. In short, there is no doubt in your mind that Baron absolutely loathes Jesus Christ's b-day and the great joy, happiness, and spirituality associated with it, thus making the film a must-see film for ‘spiritual Ebenezer Scrooge’ types. Like a more morbidly mental Melville movie for sleazy American philistines created years after the release of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958) when film noir had already more or less died, the film is no immaculate masterpiece yet it manages to bleed alienation, despair, and a certain hardboiled nihilistic fervor that makes this film an apt experience for those less than jolly beings that can’t get into the Christmas spirit but don’t necessarily want to blow their brains out. Whereas sadistic sod gutter auteur Andy Milligan's proto-slasher Seeds (1968) offers the ultimate depiction of family dysfunction where hate epitomizes the holidays, Blast of Silence wallows in a lethal sort of loneliness where murder is merry, at least for the absurdly aberrant antihero.

Aside from obvious racial and cultural reasons, I have always been counter-kosher for largely aesthetic reasons because I cannot stand the innate artificiality and overall phoniness that plagues Judaic artists, especially filmmakers ranging from Mel Brooks to Steven Spielberg to Darren Aronofsky to J.J. Abrams. Indeed, as Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in a more articulate fashion, to be kosher is to be cosmopolitan and, in turn, completely culturally bankrupt which leads to soullessly ‘universalizing’ the art of the people of their host nation, hence the oftentimes obnoxious Judaic propensity towards satire and parody where an artistic model is manipulated and subverted for (at least partly) comedic (but more often subversive) ends. Over the years, I have realized that the Hebraic filmmakers that I actually do like, quite unlike softboys like Spielberg or Abrams, tend to come from rougher backgrounds where their art comes from the rather organic source of the streets. Indeed, even in their big budgets films, the street smarts of tough jews like William Friedkin and Michael Mann is quite apparent (whereas Spielberg's films reek of a certain insipid suburban soullessness and sapless artificiality). Before switching to artless Zionist propaganda, streetwise semite Peter Emmanuel Goldman almost made the desperation and nihilism of gutter-dwelling counterculture types seem cool in underrated films like Echoes of Silence (1965) and Wheel of Ashes (1968) in between whoring himself out for sexploitation trash like The Sensualist (1966). Indeed, it is hard to imagine that early Martin Scorsese flicks, especially his first feature Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), would exist were it not for Goldman’s largely unknown influence. Similarly, Actors Studio co-founder Jack Garfein—a supposed shoah survivor that had a certain glaring contempt for white America—demonstrated with his two fictional features The Strange One (1957) and Something Wild (1961) a certain singularly scathing depiction of human psychology and abnormal behavior that makes the films of John Cassavetes seem like sentimental children’s films by comparison. Needless to say, Baron does for film noir with Blast of Silence what Goldman did for underground arthouse cinema and Garfein did for adult drama in terms of bringing a certain uncompromising vehemence and viscerality to the medium. As to the defining trait of Baron’s first and only worthwhile feature—a film that makes The Lady from Shanghai (1947) seem quite campy and Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) seem humanistic by comparison—it is its pure and unadulterated venom as if the filmmaker needed to create it lest he commit a mass murder spree.

Just judging by the opening scene of Blast of Silence, one might suspect it would be more fitting for the film to have the Cioranian title The Trouble with Being Born as a nasty and nihilistic virtual antinatalist film noir where the strangely angsty antihero ‘Baby boy Frankie Bono’ (writer-director Allen Baron)—a covert wop character that is, somewhat believably, portrayed by a Jew—immediately begins narrating his great displeasure with being born juxtaposed with a train emerging from a pitch black tunnel like a bastard baby being violently blasted out of its mother's monstrous womb. Indeed, as Frankie narrates (by way of blacklisted kosher card-carrying commie Lionel Stander), “Remembering, out of the black silence…you were born in pain […] You were born with hate and anger built in.” Needless to say, Frankie will also die in pain with his hatred and anger still intact as if it was a fate he instinctively understood all along. A deranged hitman that, unfortunately for him considering the particularly perturbed state of his psyche, largely lives in his own mind as highlighted by the film’s exceedingly effective and superlatively sleazy narrated ‘internal monologue’ (notably, celebrated screenwriter Waldo Salt of Midnight Cowboy fame wrote the narration under the pseudonym ‘Mel Davenport’) where fucked Frankie boy practically seems like his head might explode at any moment. Indeed, Frankie is a virtual ticking time bomb, but some other gentlemen do him the honor of extinguishing him before he can explode on his own in what ultimately proves to be a pathetic end to a patently pathetic life.

A resentful ex-orphan that seemingly spent his entire childhood in an orphanage and thus never received critical things like love and affection as a childhood, Frankie naturally has mixed emotions about traveling all the way from Cleveland to his hometown in Manhattan to execute a hit on a mid-level goombah gangster. As Frankie gloats to himself in a self-deluding manner upon first arriving via train while suavely sucking on a cigarette, “You’re alone. But you don’t mind that. You’re a loner. That’s the way it should be. You’ve always been alone. By now it’s your trademark. You like it that way.” Unfortunately for Frankie, he won’t be alone for long as he bumps into some old childhood friends by mere chance, including an old love interest, thus leaving him vulnerable and warping his plans in an ultimately rather pathetic scenario that underscores the angst-ridden antihero’s incapacity to completely connect with other people on any meaningful level. In that sense, it is surely fitting that splenetic psycho Frankie meets a miserable end on a cold and rainy day in a scenario that hardly inspires lachrymose in the viewer. Like a rabid dog that is begging to be put down, Frankie's somewhat predictable yet nonetheless delicious demise ultimately acts as a source of solace for the viewer. In short, Frankie is a sick animal and his great suffering finally ends when he is put down.

Although Frankie would certainly agree with Baron’s racial kinsman Heinrich Heine words, “Sleep is good, death is better but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all,” his boastful street philosophy of misanthropy and self-isolation are clearly the defensive psychological tools of a forsaken literal and figurative bastard that has no good reason to be happy about life as a poorly socialized lapsed orphan that is ill-equipped to deal with life, hence why he has dedicated his career to taking the lives of others as if he is unwittingly offering his victims the sweet sort of death that his sick self-destructive subconscious is driving him towards. Before executing his murder contracts, Frankie likes to channel all of his internalized hatred into these forsaken fellows. Indeed, when first mentioning his target Troiano (Peter Clune), Frankie states while practically dripping vile, “You know the type. Second-string syndicate boss with too much ambition…and a mustache to hide the fact he has lips like a woman…the kind of race you hate.” While stalking Troiano, Frankie also rationalizes the murder he is about to carryout by hatefully stating of his target, “He runs the girls and the dope and the books and the numbers. There’s a guy you could really learn to hate.” Although not his initial intention, Troiano is not the first scumbag that Frankie wastes as he impulsively yet still rather sneakily brutally beats and strangles to death an ‘old friend’ named ‘Big Ralph (Larry Tucker)—a fiercely foul and seemingly fecally unsound fat fuck that owns multiple pet street rats—that dares to attempt rip him off for a “thirty-eight with a silencer” after already agreeing to a contract. Indeed, while being a contract killer is technically Frankie’s job, one certainly gets the sense that he simply chose the career as an opportunistic outlet for his overwhelming bloodlust. Needless to say, a woman also helps inspire Frankie’s homicidal rage after temporarily softening his cold black heart during a moment of weakness that clearly contributes to his demise.

While incessantly complaining about his need for solitude, Frankie somewhat changes his tune upon being reunited with an old female friend named Lori (Molly McCarthy)—a hot dame that is able to have a rare ataraxic effect on the seemingly impenetrable antihero—and instantly falls for her. When Lori invites Frankie over for Christmas out of what seems to be nothing more than an altruistic sense of pity, he more or less attempts to rape her, but not before going on an insane rant that exposes him as a perturbingly pathetic whack-job that cannot even hold a conversation with a woman without it ending in disaster of the mutually embarrassing sort. Undoubtedly, Lori is right when she recommends that Frankie get a girlfriend as it would at least warm his seemingly half-rotten heart and give him a temporary relief from his hate-ridden psychosis, but he seems to be too hopelessly socially alienated and emotionally retarded to maintain any sort of sane love interest. Aside from killing Big Ralph, Frankie also makes the mistake of attempting to renege on his contract and is immediately threatened by the guy that hired him with the carefully expressed words, “All right. Now listen careful, Cleveland. Item one: For just thinkin’ what you just said…you’re in real trouble…and they’re gonna hear about this call. Item two: You made a contract with us, so you’ll do the job and you’ll do it right. Then we’ll listen to your problems. You’ve got till New Year’s Eve. And remember, you’re in trouble now.” While Frankie manages to commit the contract hit on Troiano with a certain savagely sadistic gusto that involves shooting the mobster while he is carrying a plush panda for his mistress and then kicking over his corpse while on the way out the door, he does not manage to escape from NYC alive as the men that hired him decide to assumedly cover their tracks by executing him. Indeed, despite being clearly threatened over the phone by the mobster that hired him, Frankie does not think twice about meeting him at a secluded pier outside the city where he is jumped by two hoods that, rather fittingly, look just like him. After being shot by the two doppelgängers and failing from a pier into the sea, Frankie tries in vain to climb out of the water by grasping for mud as the two killers continue to blast him into silence, or as the now-dead-narrator states at the very end of the film, “’God moves in mysterious ways,’ they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases…wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again. Back in the cold, black silence.”

For whatever reason, I recently decided to re-watch Dan Gilroy’s somewhat overrated Nightcrawler (2014)—a film that seems to have made with the objective of petrifying tech industry dorks and other spiritually neutered types—and was amazed at how much more unlikable Jake Gyllenhaal’s exceedingly effete sociopathic ‘gutter capitalist’ character is compared to the crazed contract killer of Blast of Silence. Indeed, while Allen Baron’s film is a singularly dark and nihilistic neo-noir that ends in a fittingly dejecting fashion, there’s at least a certain underlying humanity to the proceedings whereas good goy Gilroy’s film is almost as sterilely cynical as its sociopathic antihero as if it is a (pseudo)arthouse film made specifically to remind long-suffering office bureaucrats that they might not actually be autistic automatons after all despite all evidence to the contrary. In short, Baron’s film is sympathetic towards its aberrant antihero to the extent that, unlike Gyllenhaal’s stone cold yet sapless character, he wants to love and fuck just like anyone else despite his comments to the contrary. Additionally, Hebraic hack Ariel Vromen’s superlatively shallow hitman flick The Iceman (2012) seems like an insipidly stylized piece of shit by comparison despite feeble attempts at pathos and poignancy. In short, most contemporary film villains, especially in neo-noir, are unsympathetic garbage that are rarely worthy of even being described as caricatures as they lack more substance than a Looney Tunes cartoon character and Baron’s film—where an exceedingly erratic ex-orphan expounds on his perturbing primitive prole philosophy in a manner worthy of Panzram—arguably underscores this better than any films of its era. While English auteur John Boorman's masterful Point Blank (1967) is certainly the superior tragic hitman flick in almost every regard, Baron’s dementedly daring directorial debut is certainly on another level in terms of tapping into the almost-evil essence of a damned dude that lives for death and personifies the Christian phrase: “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

Despite being an irreligious film with an anti-Christmas spirit as directed by a racially conscious Jew, Blast of Silence ultimately has a certain strange spiritual dimension if we listen to Emil Cioran, or as the Franco-Romanian philosopher once wrote in a piece entitled ‘Annihilation by Deliverance’ featured in his classic book A Short History of Decay (1949): “A doctrine of salvation has meaning only if we start from the equation ‘existence equals suffering.’ It is neither a sudden realization, nor a series of reasonings which lead us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of ‘wisdom.’ But, supposed we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts—what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection.” Indeed, in his own sick sad way, Baby boy Frankie Bono—the most lonely of god’s losers and a virtual spiritual brother to Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver (1975) fame—achieves salvation and, in turn, total transcendence in the end. Speaking of Scorsese, the famous guido filmmaker apparently once described Blast of Silence as, “my favorite New York City movie,” which says a lot considering the filmmaker once directed a cocaine-fueled musical entitled New York, New York (1977) and later a slightly better film entitled Gangs of New York (2002). Additionally, the camera operator for Baron’s film, Erich Kollmar, acted as the cinematographer of Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes’ jazzy debut feature Shadows (1958).

As a film that makes the grittiest of Sam Fuller flicks seem about as hardcore as a transman's neo-penis and features a fiercely foreboding fatalism that might inspire suicide in less psychologically sound viewers, Blast of Silence—a minor masterpiece of misery and misanthropy where hate manages to effortlessly metastasize as the film progresses—is probably the ultimate anti-Xmas trip and a fittingly aesthetically abrasive testament to the soul-sucking power of solitude, especially when you are a lonely individual during what is supposedly the happiest time of the year. In short, Black Christmas (1974) seems like director Bob Clark’s later Fellini-esque classic A Christmas Story (1983) when compared to the stark and dark spiritual decrepitude that engulfs Baron’s virtual cinematic bomb. Considering that Baron spent the rest of his career being a for-hire hack that only managed to direct a couple mostly worthless films, including the uncharacteristically anti-cosmopolitan Foxfire Light (1982) where a rich city slut is tamed by a Southern rancher, one can only assume that Blast of Silence is the filmmaker’s sole auteur work and a true reflection of his seemingly twisted soul. Aside from apparently bragging about various dubious sexual conquests, including scamming his way into then-Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett’s panties, the July 2018 lawsuit filed against him by his ex-assistant alleges that, “Baron also claimed to have forced numerous Cuban women to have sexual intercourse with him in exchange for roles in the 1959 movie CUBAN REBEL GIRLS.” Needless to say, for better or worse, the recent allegations against Baron only add to the creep factor of Blast of Silence where the completely socially sick antihero seems to absurdly believe that dancing with a girl somehow immediately leads to aggressively trying to fuck them.

While I don’t really believe in New Year's resolutions and can never deny the raw aesthetic power of Blast of Silence, I think my goal for next year is to make sure that I have no desire to watch the film ever again, at least not during the Christmas season. Indeed, I am perfectly fine with making Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) my reliable Christmastime favorite lest I succumb to a ‘schism of the heart,’ or as Cioran once so pitilessly described, “We are doomed to perdition each time life does not reveal itself as a miracle, each time the moment no longer moans in a supernatural shudder […] And it is not the miracle which determines tradition and our substance, but the void of a universe frustrated of its flames, engulfed in its own absences, exclusive object of our rumination: a lonely universe before a lonely heart, each predestined to disjoin and to exasperate each other in the antithesis. When the solitude is intensified to the point of constituting not so much our datum as our sole faith, we cease to be integral with the whole: heretics of existence, we are banished from the community of the living, whose sole virtue is to wait, gasping, for something which is not death. But we, emancipated from the fascination of such waiting, rejected from the ecumenicity of illusion—we are the most heretical sect of all, for our soul itself is born in heresy.” In fact, I think I am going to spend Christmas day re-watching Ronald Neame’s classic Charles Dickens adaptation Scrooge (1970) starring British screen legends Albert Finney and Alec Guinness and just try be grateful that my ancestors derive from the Western European countryside instead of dreary Eastern European shtetls which clearly provided a sort of atavistic spiritual influence on a film like Blast of Silence where man is completely deracinated and an abstracted slave that is no longer in tune with nature.

Needless to say, re-watching Carroll Ballard's Nutcracker: The Motion Picture (1986)—a near-masterpiece of sight and sound that is like the 1980s Christmas equivalent of classic Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger productions like The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)—helped to cleanse my soul after watching Baron's gleefully seedy celluloid bomb and it also reminded that the right film can help even the most Scrooge-esque of individuals find some small glimmer of the yuletide spirit. Indeed, despite the virtually malefic message a film like Blast of Silence might communicate, it is important to remember that the world is not a shtetl and that Christmas can even be enjoyed be spiritually and/or seasonally sick niggas that, despite hating Hollywood in general, can still enjoy Clive Donner's Dickens adaptation A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott without succumbing to the figurative wizard of poz that is hollyweird. Still, I have more faith in someone that prefers Baron's film to fiercely phony crypto-kosher Christmas crap like mischling hack Jon Favreau's Elf (2003)—a radically retarded film that was written, directed, and largely starring members of the tribe—where Santa Claus is portrayed by Ed Asner who, not coincidentally, could easily pass for Baron's brother. After all, there is something innately sinister about a world where Will Ferrell is considered funny and Blast of Silence—an inordinately metaphysically aggressive film that acts like acid on the psyche in terms of completely wiping away what might have previously been on your mind—acts a sort of ideally corrosive antidote to such mesmerizingly moronic crypto-anti-Xmas insipidity. After all, better a Christmastide cynic than a buffoonish shabbos goy fairy like Ferrell.

-Ty E

The Woman on the Beach

2019-12-16T06:16:00.000-08:00

Just like with goombah giallo flicks, I tend to prefer classic film noir films that completely break the conventions of the ‘style’ by being set in the country (as opposed to the stereotypical shitty city) and feature femme fatales that are not necessarily fatal like in Nicholas Ray classic films They Live by Night (1948) and In a Lonely Place (1950) and Edgar G. Ulmer’s magnetically melancholic filmic road-to-nowhere Detour (1945), so naturally it came as no surprise to me that I absolutely loved French master auteur Jean Renoir’s much maligned final Hollywood film The Woman on the Beach (1947). A rare example of ‘beach noir’ featuring surreal and phantasmagoric imagery in a cinematic work that might be best described as an ‘allegorical ghost story’ as the main characters are haunted by a perturbing past that has resulted in a forsaken present, the film is undoubtedly my second favorite Renoir flick and certainly an eccentric entry in his oeuvre as a decided downer of the delirious dream-like sort where the prospect of death almost seems like a great gift from the gods. Indeed, aside from his poetic realist masterpiece La Bête Humaine (1938) aka The Human Beast—a deathly dark picture where suicide ultimately acts as the greatest of permanent reliefs for the foredoomed protagonist—the film is the only one that Renoir directed that bleeds misery, misanthropy, and just downright meanness, which were certainly not innate characteristics of a good goofy and jolly humanist like Monsieur Renoir. With that said, it should be no shock that Renoir was not particularly fond of the flick to the point where he was even bored during its pre-production, even complaining to his older actor brother Pierre, “My agents have stuck me with a film, at RKO, a studio where I’m dying of boredom.”

In fact, in his autobiography My Life and My Films (1974), Renoir, like a good little idealistic humanist, expresses his innate philosophical discomfort for the subject matter, stating, “It was a story quite opposed to everything I had hitherto attempted. In all my previous films I had tried to depict the bonds uniting the individual to his background. The older I grew, the more I had proclaimed the consoling truth that the world is one; and now I was embarked on a study of person whose sole idea was to close the door on the absolutely concrete phenomenon which we call life. It was a mistake on my part which I can explain only by the relative isolation enforced upon me by my limited knowledge of the language of the world in which I now lived.” In short, not unlike La Bête Humaine, The Woman on the Beach is a film where Renoir demonstrates his majesty as a cinematic auteur by directing a great gloomy and doomy film that was completely at odds with his own personal Weltanschauung and overall personal human spirit and in that sense, more than any other, one truly comes to understand the cinematic artist’s genius for his chosen artistic medium.

Based on the novel None So Blind (1945) by Stella Adler’s physicist-turned-novelist hubby Mitchell A. Wilson and originally plagued with the terribly unfitting title Desirable Woman, The Woman on the Beach was actually originally a project of great horror producer-auteur Val Lewton, but he abandoned the project not long after disagreeing with female lead Joan Bennett’s demand that Renoir direct as he felt that Fred Zinnemann, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, Lewis Allen, and Edward Dmytryk would make for more suitable directors. In fact, although the producer quit the film long before it began shooting, it oftentimes feels more like a Lewton flick than a Renoir one (which might be partly explained by the producer’s possible (co)writing of the screenplay, which was soundly theorized by Pascal Mérigeau in Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012)). Interestingly, Renoir’s description of Lewton in his autobiography is more or less in tune with the spirit of the film, as the auteur states of the producer, “Then he too died, alone or nearly so. His solitude certainly did not surprise him: he had often said that the closet groups were nothing but solitudes brought together.” Speaking of Lewton, The Woman on the Beach certainly has much more in common with Curtis Harrington’s favorably Lewtonian debut feature Night Tide (1961), which is also a darkly romantic film with a gothic beach setting where the oceanic becomes oneiric, than any of Renoir's other films. Indeed, I honestly cannot think of any other films aside from these two that seem inspired by the spiritually essence of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem ‘Annabel Lee,’ especially the final line, “In her tomb by the sounding sea.”

It seems that, despite being made for a Hollywood studio, even Renoir regarded the film as a sort of artsy horror flick as indicated by his words, “To conclude, THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH was the sort of avant-garde film which would have found its niche a quarter of a century earlier, between NOSFERATU THE VAMPIRE and CALIGARI, but it had no success with American audiences.” Of course, as a fiercely foreboding, moodily morose, and paranoia-plagued film that flirts with a sort of ‘Liebestod’ involving a bizarre love triangle between a damaged Coast Guard officer with PTSD, a cold cunt proto-goth whore, and her blind resentment-ridden ex-artist husband, the film was doomed to fail on all fronts. Totally devoid of any phony ‘good guy’ and ‘good gal’ types, the film is also notable for having a trio of ‘broken’ characters that are almost equally unlikeable yet, somewhat paradoxically, somehow similarly sympathetic in terms of all-too-human failings and tragic characters (or, as the famous quote from The Rules of the Game goes, “everybody has their reasons”). In that sense, the film feels more European than America and it is no surprise that such a romantically moribund movie would be an abject failure with the Tinseltown-narcotized American audiences of that time. As Renoir wrote in regard to these ‘solitary’ characters, “There is a race of genuine solitaries, but they are rare. Those born to be solitary contrive to isolate themselves in a world entirely of their own making. Most solitaries only appear to belong to this category, having been born to play a part in the world around them. It is only after what is as a result a deeply hurtful event that they have become solitaries. If they fight against it, it is generally at the cost of fearful inward turmoil. This drama of isolation is for the artist an episode in the tragedy of which we are all actors and which ends only with our departure into eternity. The artist is simply a man endowed with the gift of making these inward conflicts visible. Art is the materialization of an interior and often unconscious dream.” Naturally, Renoir utilizes nightmarish dream-sequences to expressionistically underscore the inwardly infernal metaphysical hell that plagues the haunted protagonist in what ultimately proves to be a practical use of avant-garde techniques. In short, no one can watch The Woman on the Beach without being reminded that they have been plunged into the dark despairing abyss that is the perturbed protagonist's mind.

When Camille Paglia wrote, “At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts,” she certainly could have been thinking of The Woman on the Beach where the quest for love, or even just maintaining a thoroughly necrotic love with a person that used to love you but now hates you, reeks of a sort of grotesque desperation comparable to the theft of items from half-rotten corpses on a bloodstained battlefield. Indeed, the film’s pathetic protagonist Scott (Robert Ryan)—a tall, dark, and handsome would-be-hunk that, aside from suffering from bad dreams, is absurdly all-American, like a figuratively puss-filled parody of the banal American military type—is engaged to marry a classically beauteous blonde named Eve Geddes (Nan Leslie) but he soon finds himself considering murdering a blind (ex)painter named Tod Butler (Charles Bickford) after falling for his cold cunt wife Peggy (Joan Bennett) who dreams of of escaping her miserable life with her all the more miserable husband. Of course, as as half-crazed military bro that is having reoccurring nightmares involving romantically embracing a ghostly underwater ‘siren’ of sorts resembling his fiancée that lurks inside a quasi-apocalyptic oceanic realm of the creepy chthonic sort full of skeletons and wrecked ships, Scott—a Coast Guard officer that, rather inconveniently, is now afraid of the mere sight of a busted up boat—is probably in the ‘right’ frame of mind to fall for a proudly whorish femme fatale that wants to free herself from the obsessively jealous husband that she was responsible for blinding during a drunken row.

A man that lived to paint and did his best work in the form of nudes of his wife just before he lost sight at the hand of his greatest source of inspiration, Tod—an unconventionally charming chap with a name that, not coincidentally, means ‘death’ in German—is now a resentment-ridden shell of a mensch that lives hopelessly in the past and both literally and figuratively cannot see the present. In fact, Tod is so obsessed with holding onto the past that he refuses to sell his last paintings despite their great value as the final creations of a painter that can no longer paint. While Peggy feels some guilt for blinding Tod and, in turn, ruining his life be leaving him incapable of doing what he does best, she is also a calculating cuckolding cunt and thus cannot help lust after Scott as soon as they meet. Naturally, Peggy eventually realizes it might be wise to kill her husband and sell his valuable paintings, which she hates, so that she can start a new life and Scott makes for the perfect pawn for such a scheme as the two both dream of a better life. Unfortunately, Scott is too unhinged and Peggy to emotionally erratic and scatter-brained for the pernicious plot to work.

Although Scott will be discharged from his dreaded Coast Guard position in a week and thus will soon get his dream of leaving the seaside area for good as it reminds him of a past monstrous maritime tragedy that has haunted him with nightmares ever since, his life is completely changed one day while riding on the beach with his horse and unexpectedly encountering gorgeous proto-goth bitch Peggy—a drop-dead gorgeous dark-haired dime-store diva that, due to her almost delectably demonic essence, seems like she has had her fair share of eclectic dick—as she curiously scavenges from the ruins of a shipwreck (which is surely symbolic as the protagonist’s fiancée Eve is the total opposite as a blonde beauty that builds ships at a shipyard). As the sight of the ruined ship clearly incites his PTSD, Scott somewhat irrationally berates Peggy for gathering the rather crappy wood and she responds by noting his quite glaring spiritual unease, even stating, “You even looked at me as if I were a ghost.” While Peggy is not a phantom in the literal sense, she might as well be as she lives a static ghostly existence in a quaint shack with her husband in a lackluster life of mutual stagnation and (self)hatred. While Scott takes an instant liking to Peggy to the point where he seems to instantly forget about his fiancée, he feels somewhat annoyed when the older and wiser Tod attempts to befriend him and even begins to question whether he is actually blind or not as if he cannot bear to have sympathy for the man whose wife he so desperately wants to fuck. In fact, Scott intentionally puts Tod is a precarious situation where he almost dies after falling off a cliff in the hope it would prove that the retired artist would be revealed to be faking his own blindness. While the incident proves that Tod is not a fraud, Scott is still not interested in being his pal, especially after he discovers the ex-artist physically abuses Peggy and comes to the conclusion that he will commit his life to freeing the poor little harlot from her rather repressive husband. Rather sickly, Scott's sexual desire for Peggy seems to be largely intertwined with the degree of misery and abuse that plagues his lover's disharmonious marriage, as if he gets a hard-on just thinking about her being brutalized by her husband. In that sense, this is a beachside bizarre love triangle that only sad sickos would find romantically.

Needless to say, when Scott starts pounding Peggy’s pussy (despite her openly admitting to him her lack of virtue by boasting, “I’m a tramp. You just finding that out?”), it does not take much for the protagonist be motivated to murder Tod so that he can start a new life with his femme fatale lover, but he is such a sad self-destructive sack of shit that he uses borderline suicidal means to accomplish this decidedly demented task. Indeed, in what is the biggest of two major climaxes of the film, Scott takes Tod on a fishing trip where he rather absurdly attempts to drown his blind rival by piercing a hole in the boat during a nasty storm, thereupon causing both men to be swallowed up by the waves. In a scenario that contradicts the protagonist’s reoccurring nightmare of an Eve-like virtual sea witch seducing the protagonist in a skeleton-ridden underwater hell, Scott and Tod are saved by a small group of Coast Guards that includes the protagonist's long-suffering fiancée Eve. Of course, Tod is not happy after barely surviving Scott's murder plot, so he decides to take his revenge against his scheming wife despite the fact that, unbeknownst to him, she tried to stop it at the minute and ultimately saved both men's lives by alerting the Coast Guard of the situation. In the end in what is ultimately the second and final climax, Tod goes completely berserk and not only burns his remaining paintings—art pieces that are apparently worth tons of money due to being created by a famous ‘dead artist’—but also his beach house, as he no longer wants to be a prisoner of his past and finally plans to move on with his life. Of course, that also includes letting Peggy go, or as he tells Scott as they watch the house burn down, “I had to do it. Those paintings meant everything to me. But they became an obsession. They had to be destroyed. Now I’m free. I’ve new work to do. I’ve things to say. Many things. And Peggy’s free. I clung to her as I did the paintings. To the past. I made her live in it with me. I had no right to do that.” Somewhat ironically considering the circumstances, Tod and Peggy seem to reconcile in the end despite the ex-painter’s promise to let her go. As for pathetically forlorn protagonist Scott, he literally walks away with nothing, which is even less than he started with as his fiancée Eve has even left him. Since Scott is a psychotic prick and Tod is at least a man of wisdom that learns something in the end, I would have to say the film concludes on a relatively happy note.

Notably, The Woman on the Beach was such a disastrous flop that it resulted in Renoir having to abort a planned adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (which, interestingly, he had already adapted in 1934 with less favorable results) that he already had in pre-production. In fact, the film put a complete end to Renoir’s career in Hollywood, or as the auteur stated in his autobiography, “I was under contract to make two films for that company. A few days after the premiere I had a visit from my agent, Ralph Blum, who reported that they were ready to buy me out for a fixed sum. I am no fighter; I accepted, and that was the end of it. But it was the end in the widest sense. The failure of THE WOMAN ON THE BEACH marked the finish of my Hollywood adventure. I never made another film in an American studio. It was not only that particular failure that was held against me. Darryl Zanuck, who knew something about directors, summed up my case to a group of film-people. ‘Renoir,’ he said, ‘has a lot of talent, but he’s not one of us.’” Of course, the fact that Renoir was not a for-hire-hack-whore type like so many in Hollywood is why The Woman on the Beach is such a great film as not even subversive mavericks like John Huston or Howard Hawks would ever dream of directing such an unsettlingly dark and experimental film. As for Renoir, he was not really fond of any of his Hollywood films except for The Southerner (1945) aka L'Homme du sud, which he once described as “really the only thing that justifies my trip to America.” Personally, I cannot agree with Renoir's assessment of his own work, as The Southerner—a sort of proto-neorealist film clearly informed by the auteur's idiotically idealistic leftist politics—is certainly worth a watch yet ultimately seems like like a prosaically patronizing experiment in proletarian fetishization when compared to deep dark aesthetic and emotional extremes of a rare arcane aesthetic object like The Woman on the Beach.

Notably, it was not until the film was rediscovered by film critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma that would later become major filmmaker of the La Nouvelle Vague that The Woman on the Beach finally received some positive praise, or as French film critic Pascal Mérigeau explained his massive text Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012), “Éric Rohmer would make the film the touchstone for his admiration of Renoir. Truffaut would cite a certain scene showing Joan Bennett crawling on all fours as one of the ten most erotic in the history of film. Jacques Rivette would speak of ‘pure cinema’; and, with the hindsight of years, he’d call the film ‘the first in a trilogy of great masterpieces.’ All such loving protests are also a defensive reaction to the extent of the rejection to which the film was subjected, and all of them are perhaps justified and accurate. However, they would be more convincing if Renoir’s name on the credits hadn’t contributed to steering the vision of the film and constructing opinions about it.” Personally, I could not disagree more with Mérigeau as I found the film to be great in part because it is rarely Renoirian unless one compares it to the auteur’s similarly unconventionally dark and morbid La Bête Humaine. In short, it is no surprise that the film had its genesis with Val Lewton—the great producer-as-auteur that even managed to overpower a great filmmaker like Jacques Tourneur with his almost devilish esoteric influence.

Despite Renoir's supposed apathy for the subject matter, the film has certain undeniable autobiographical elements, especially in regard to the filmmaker’s famous painter father. Indeed, not unlike Renoir’s Impressionist painter padre Pierre-Auguste Renoir who painted nude portraits of his mother Aline Charigot, the eponymous femme fatale is the subject of her husband’s much beloved nude paintings. Strangely, neither Renoir nor his biographer Mérigeau reference this seemingly obvious connection between the film and auteur's famous family. Interestingly, whereas Renoir would once state of his father's paintings in his book Renoir, My Father (1962), “His nudes and his roses declared to men of this century, already deep in their task of destruction, the stability of the eternal balance of nature,” the nude paintings of Tod in the film are such a source debilitating internal sickness that he must burn them so that he can get on with his life. Of course, on a more personal level, the subject of an artist that becomes blind is a visceral fear that should appeal to any serious filmmaker (notably, the character Tod more or less described himself as a ‘dead’ painter due to his blindness), which probably partly explains why the auteur drastically changed the storyline from its source material (in the novel, Tod just pretends to be blind). As to what a filmmaker might create if they went blind, Gay English auteur Derek Jarman provided at least one example with his AIDS-addled swansong Blue (1993). Notably, Renoir would never again direct anything so serious and instead would stick to virtual celluloid confections before fizzling out like a weak old fart. While the auteur directed one or two more notable films after his failed career in Hollywood, I am certainly more than tempted to see The Woman on the Beach as Renoir’s virtual artist obituary as a film that is not only consumed with doom and gloom that features a retired artist that no longer wants to live life but also because it was the consequence of artistic compromise on the filmmaker’s part. On the other hand, I believe the film probably greatly benefited from artistic compromise as apparently the dream-sequences were not added until late into the film’s production after Renoir was forced to reshoot a good portion of the picture (according to the filmmaker’s own varying statements, between 1/3 and ½ of the flick had to be reshot).

As someone with artistic inclinations that is somewhat haunted by the past and grew up with a close blind relative, I probably found The Woman on the Beach more relatable than most people would to the point where it at least partly inspired me to write this review. As a goofy man motivated by humanistic impulses and, for a time, shallow leftist idealism, Renoir is certainly not an artist I can seriously relate to on any innate personal level, so to me it proves his artistic genius that he was able to somewhat successfully take a poesy Poe-esque approach to such uncharacteristic material, as if he was temporarily haunted himself. Of course, Renoir had his own objective with the film, or as he once wrote in regard to his first version of the flick, “This is a film in which I wanted to proceed more by suggestion than by demonstration: a film of acts never carried out.” In the end, The Woman on the Beach is largely about the (in this case, negative) influence of a female lover on an artist, as Tod is virtually metaphysically magnetized to Peggy before and after she caused his blinding (and, as the viewer assumes at the end of the film, her influence enters a third and more positive phase at the end of the film). Notably, in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s classic modern romance Betty Blue (1986) aka 37° 2 le matin—another frog-helmed film depicting the perturbing perils of l’amour fou that is (at least partly) set on the beach—the male lead ‘loses’ his eponymous lover once he finally achieves his artistic dream of penning a successful novel, as if such self-destructive vaginal venom has already completely served its purpose and thus he can finally move on. Notably, even the non-artist protagonist of The Woman on the Beach is driven to action by Peggy in an almost magical fashion as he self-deludes himself into believing that it is his mission to ‘save her’ from her ostensibly sinister husband and not because he has a fetish for fiendish femme fatales, hence his loss of interest in good girl Eve. As the film demonstrates, women tend to inspire both the best and worst in men as if the so-called fairer sex is god's greatest curse.

Of course, as Luis Buñuel and his Surrealist comrades believed, “desire is the one true motor of the world,” hence why the ‘ship sunk’ in the end when it comes to Scott and Peggy as the latter has finally achieved reconciliation with her husband. It is also no coincidence that Scott (ex)fiancée Eve tells him “I finally realized you’re sick” as he is consumed with the sort of l’amour fou that causes an otherwise rational man to degenerate into a Dionysian dildo that lives to fuck a void of a hole. Undoubtedly, only in a fantasy flick like Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson (1935)—a truly idiosyncratic film based on a story by George du Maurier that, not unlike Renoir’s flick, is a rare example of a Hollywood movie with dream-like avant-garde elements—does l’amour fou lead to something truly eternally heavenly as The Woman on the Beach so ruthlessly reminds the viewer in a somewhat ambiguous ending where a lovelorn young man loses his great love to a defeated old fart that has finally decided to let her go free as if the truest way to a woman’s heart is getting over her. Needless to say, Tod probably had the better idea when he was following a path more in tune with the Marquis de Sade’s words, “The only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment.” In fact, Tod, who is easily the most intriguing character in the film, is certainly a sort of low-key Sadean of sorts and his misguided abuse towards Peggy assuredly reflects the Marquis’ words, “Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.”

While Renoir originally intended for The Woman on the Beach to be “a story about love in which the reasons for attraction between the different parties were purely physical, a story in which sentiment would play not part at all,” he ultimately assembled something much more insanely intricate and metaphysically infernal where love becomes more or less one and the same with the Todestrieb and where artistic obsession and the abject desperation associated with a premature ‘artistic death’ compels a desperate ex-artist to virtually keep his favorite artistic subject prisoner. While the film certainly led to the death of Renoir’s career in Hollywood and, in turn, his artistic decline in general, the film is unequivocally the most enigmatic, preternatural, and esoteric film that the auteur ever created, not to mention one of the most radically recherché film noir flicks of all-time. Indeed, the film is arguably the unintended artistically fruitful consequence of Renoir being forced to endure a sort of Bressonian method of filmmaking as demonstrated by French master auteur Robert Bresson’s words, “These horrible days—when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles—are part of my method of work.” Undoubtedly, a lack of suffering causes an impoverishment of spirit, especially artistic spirit, and Renoir—a man that had a fairly privileged bourgeois bohemian upbringing—rarely suffered until he was forced to flee his homeland in May 1940 after Germany invaded France and relocated to Hollywood where he worked under artistically unfavorable circumstances. Had Renoir suffered even more and earlier in life, one can only speculate the sort of masterpieces he might have churned out as a sort of potential frog Bergman. Speaking of the great Swedish auteur, The Woman on the Beach certainly shares aesthetic and thematic similarities with Bergman flicks like Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968), among others. In terms of strange seaside cinematic works that helped to sink the career of a once-respected European auteur, the film is also comparable to Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick's uneven yet somewhat underrated Don't Make Waves (1967)—a rather idiosyncratic late entry in the ‘beach party’ sub-genre that benefits from a rather nubile Sharon Tate—which Tarantino recently paid tribute to in his latest film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

As Renoir stated himself in regard to how the conquering of his homeland effected the film, “It was natural that I should look for themes having nothing to do with a motherland who was no longer herself. I had a horror of sentimental images of pre-war France. Better a void than the pointed bear of the film Frenchman. But a void offers no solid foothold. Realizing the fragility of the thing I was making, I tried to change the story while the film was being shot. The result was a confused scenario leading to a final work which I consider interesting but which is too obscure for the general public.” Of course, nowadays the totally dumbed-down and obscenely aesthetically retarded general public would find most of Renoir’s films to be totally inexplicable, thus allowing a film like The Woman on the Beach a more notable place in the auteur’s singular oeuvre as an ostensible oddity that underscores the filmmaker’s unexpected eclecticism and capacity to embrace the entire range of human emotions. Indeed, I certainly never expected that it would be a cheap RKO B-movie that finally enabled me to fully appreciate the Gallic greatness of Monsieur Renoir. In short, fuck the totally trying Technicolor xenophilia of The River (1951) aka Le Fleuve, evil wanton white bitches on the beach are forever.

-Ty E

Classe Tous Risques

2019-12-09T06:00:00.001-08:00

Admittedly, the older I get, the more François Truffaut’s classic film Jules and Jim (1962) seems like phony bullshit as dreamed up by an effete poser that has never had a genuine masculine friendship and I recently discovered that I was not the only one with this canon-contradicting opinion after reading a tribute to Gallic auteur Claude Sautet (Max and the Junkmen, Mado) by fellow French auteur Jean-Pierre Melville. Indeed, in the short yet superlative tribute entitled ‘The Quiet Courage of a Great Filmmaker’ featured in the March/April 192 issue of Présence du Cinéma, Melville soundly argued when comparing the masculine friendships of Sautet’s masterful second-feature Classe Tous Risques (1960) aka The Big Risk aka Consider All Risks to Truffaut’s film, “People often speak of films where the relationships between men, their friendships, have an enormous importance. I believed in the friendship of Abel Davos and Stark absolutely. It is interior, and does not appear by means of dialogue. The two men’s behavior makes explicit their feelings, without either of them having to speak of their friendship. On the other hand, I was not able to believe in the friendship of Jules and Jim, even though they speak of it often.” While Melville opens his tribute by confessing, “I offer my friendship rarely,” Sautet’s film had such a huge impact on the filmmaker that he not only gave his friendship to the fellow frog auteur but also somewhat copied his singular gangster film style, which is somewhat ironic when one considers the source material of the film. Indeed, despite being a French Jew that famously fought with the French Resistance during WWII as he would so painstakingly pay tribute to in his film Army of Shadows (1969) aka L'armée des ombres, Melville would (somewhat unwittingly) take imperative influence from a film based on a 1958 crime novel about real-life French Gestapo agent Abel Danos (alias ‘le Mammouth’ due to this robust/muscular build)—a bodacious bad ass that refused to wear a blindfold upon being confronted with the firing squad that would execute him—as penned by Corsican-blooded card-carrying-fascist collaborationist José Giovanni (real name Joseph Damiani) who was involved in the torture, blackmail, and murder of various French Jews and resistance fighters. In fact, gentleman Giovanni was, not unlike Danos (who he befriended in prison), even sentenced to death himself for three premeditated murders but luckily (and unlike Danos) he escaped the guillotine when his sentence was commuted by President Vincent Auriol and instead he served eleven and a half years of an initial twenty years of hard labor. Fierce fascistic source aside, I suspect that Melville, himself part of a criminal underground, could sense a certain intrinsic authenticity to the less than glamorous crime and grime of Sautet’s film.

While Melville arguably had an imperative influence on the filmmaking of French master auteur Robert Bresson with his debut feature Le Silence de la mer (1949) aka The Silence of the Sea—a more or less avant-garde chamber piece featuring a reluctant Nazi officer apparently partly inspired by German Conservative Revolutionary movement intellectual and supposed Nazi-fellow-traveler Ernst Jünger—there is no question that Classe Tous Risques was a crucial influence on the filmmaker’s legendary gangster flicks, including Le Doulos (1963), Le deuxième souffle (1966), and Le Cercle Rouge (1970). In fact, I would argue that Sautet’s film is more immaculate and enthralling than all of Melville’s flicks aside from possibly Le Samouraï (1967) and apparently I am not the only one that thinks so as source writer José Giovanni himself would once say, “CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is the best film adaptation of any of my books. It doesn’t have any nightclub scenes. It doesn’t treat the subject as folklore. And it has more heart than LE DEUXIÈME SOUFFLE.” Indeed, Melville’s Le deuxième soufflé is also a Giovanni adaptation that stars Lino Ventura, but it spends about an extra 40 minutes to do what Sautet’s film accomplishes more effortlessly in terms of sheer underworld pathos, paranoia, and pessimism. As someone that experienced much of Melville’s oeuvre long before ever even hearing of Sautet, I can safety say that watching Classe Tous Risques felt like the result of the mastering of the Melvillian universe as if all of the ‘excess fat’ and static plodding that sometimes plagues the Judaic auteur's films was carefully cut with the carefully calculated precision of a seasoned Fleishmaster.

Indeed, whereas most of Melville’s films are something I might be inclined to revisit every couple of years, Sautet’s second feature is a seemingly flawless flick of the good and hearty sort that demands to be re-watched regularly and can be re-watched when you’re in any sort of mood despite its rather bleak and pessimistic subject matter. Of course, being the kind of person that prefers Once Upon a Time in America (1984) to all of Sergio Leone’s other films combined, The Fire Within (1963) aka Le feu follet to any of Malle’s other films, Taxi Driver (1976) to Scorsese’s later Goodfellas (1990), La Bête Humaine (1938) to Renoir’s purported magnum opuses La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), and even Luca Guadagnino’s ostensible Suspiria (2018) remake to Dario Argento's 1977 original, Classe Tous Risques is like the cinematic equivalent of ‘cold comfort food’ as a rare gangster flick of almost Spenglerian pessimistic proportions that dares to question humanity as a whole in its delightfully despairing depiction of a foredoomed gangster on the run that quickly loses everything that makes life worth living. Indeed, if any film acts as an apt eulogy for the gangster genre, it is Sautet’s underrated black-and-white masterpiece.

Notably, Jules and Jim is not the only obnoxiously overrated La Nouvelle Vague film that would eclipse Classe Tous Risques—a film that still has not completely gotten its due despite now being regarded as a masterpiece among certain cinephiles and film historians—in terms of sheer popularity. Indeed, as French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier (Death Watch, Coup de Torchon)—a loyal protégé of both Sautet and Melville—explained in a tribute to the film entitled ‘Beautiful Friendships’ in regard to its unfortunate history, “Sautet’s film was also eclipsed by BREATHLESS, released just a few weeks before; all the credit for bringing out the talent of Jean-Paul Belmondo went to Godard, despite the fact that in CLASSE TOUS RISQUES, Belmondo shows us a completely different side of his great gift as an actor, his remarkable versatility, by making credible an authoritarian character with radiant charm, by stunningly fusing virility and childlike innocence, in a performance that is in a totally different register from the one he gives in BREATHLESS.” Admittedly, due to my general loathing of Godard’s debut feature and especially the lead character, I initially disliked Belmondo and would not really realize his brilliance and effortless charisma until seeing him in relatively mainstream films like Georges Lautner’s The Professional (1981) aka Le Professionnel and against-type arthouse roles like in Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest (1961). In short, Godard neutered Belmondo in films like Breathless and Pierrot le Fou (1965) as if to make the actor more autobiographically autistic. In Classe Tous Risques, Belmondo does what Belmondo does best by being both the ultimate man’s man and lady’s man as a suave young cocksman that knows exactly how to fight and fuck (despite the film technically not depicting much of either).

Not surprisingly, both Melville and Sautet were completely unaware of the covert fascist flavor of Classe Tous Risques, which is probably a good thing as the film probably would not exist otherwise. Indeed, as Sautet stated in an interview featured in the book Conversations avec Claude Sautet (1994) by Michel Boujut when asked if he know that the film’s lead was based on an infamous fascist, “If I had known, I might not have made the film. I was not aware that Abel Danos—Davos in the film—had belonged to the Bony-Lafont [collaborationist] gang during the occupation. It was only after the film was released that one day, in a bistro, some underworld types tipped me off: ‘It’s great that you made a film about Abel!’” In fact, apparently Sautet did not even realize that his screenwriter, José Giovanni, who he described having “got along perfectly” with, was also an (ex)fascist as the novelist (and, later, filmmaker) was not revealed to be a collaborationist until October 1993 after being exposed by two trashy Swiss dailies. Undoubtedly, Giovanni’s experiences as a once-condemned man certainly informs the decidedly desperate and even sometimes downright nihilist tone of Classe Tous Risques, which ultimately concludes with the lead antihero passively accepting his date with death despite technically getting away with his crimes as the character has been condemned by fate after losing virtually everything that meant something to him, not least of all his pride and dignity.

Although his crimes are never made clear, French gangster Abel Davos (Lino Ventura) has been tried in absentia and sentenced to death, so he is now hiding in Italy with his wife and their two little boys after being forced to flee Switzerland. After committing a successful holdup on a busy Milan street with the help of his rather agile accomplice Raymond Naldi (Stan Krol)—a completely fearless fucker that demonstrates complete loyalty to his comrade—that concludes with an insane getaway that involves motorcycles and carjackings, the group decides to, somewhat curiously, head back to France. Rather tragically and quite unexpectedly both Raymond and Abel’s wife are gunned down by custom agents just as they arrive at a deserted beach cove in the middle of the night in an almost surreally nightmarish scenario that marks the beginning of the end for the seemingly forsaken antihero. Virtually trapped in Nice, France with his two extremely young sons, who are clearly scarred for life as they witnessed the coldblooded murder of their mother and family friend Naldi, Abel is seriously screwed in more ways than one, but luckily some people owe him a “debt,” or so he naively assumes as a man of honor that seemingly never heard the timeless sentiment that there is, “No honor among thieves.” Indeed, Abel might be a violent crook, but he has a strict moral code that gets put to the test when his old comrades break said moral code.

Abel expects to have good help from his old underworld buddies as Henri ‘Riton’ Vintran (Michel Ardan) owes him a big favor for funding his successful bistro and Raoul Fargier (Claude Cerval) practically owes him his life for somehow getting him out of prison, but unfortunately it never occurred to the antihero that his old pals are nowhere near as honorable, grateful, or respectful as he is. While a third friend, Jean ‘Kid Jeannot’ Martin (Philippe March), wanted to promptly arrive in France with a machinegun and ambulance to smuggle him back to Paris, he is talked out of it by Riton and Fargier as he is on parole and cannot risk such a precarious move. Since Fargier is a self-centered coward and Riton has been emasculated by his nagging barmaid wife, the ‘old friends’ decided to do what amounts to the bare minimum and reluctantly agree to hire a young stranger, Éric Stark (Jean-Paul Belmondo), to pick up Abel and his sons. Needless to say, Abel is highly offended to the point of feeling deeply betrayed when a total stranger as opposed to his old friends arrives in Nice, but, unbeknownst to Fargier, who hired him, Stark is actually an old comrade of Raymond Naldi or as he confides to the protagonist while trying to alleviate his worries, “I had a friend named Raymond Naldi. They don’t know in Paris. I didn’t want to tell you either, but with what you’re thinking, it’s better if I did.” While technically a mere hired mercenary, Éric ultimately proves to be the only real friend that Abel can count on in a relationship where the young up-and-comer learns to respect and protect an old pro in decline.

It is immediately apparent that, despite their age difference, Abel and Éric have great chemistry and become immediate friends despite not saying much to each other as if the two have an instinctive understanding of one another. While Éric acts as a phony ambulance driver as Abel pretends to be an injured patient, he happens upon a beauteous beauty named Liliane (Sandra Milo of Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965)) being beaten on the side of the road. Naturally, Éric promptly knocks out the pathetic woman-abuser and then boasts to Liliane, “The nice thing about me is my left.” After Éric tells her a phony story in regard to their ambulance masquerade, Liliane agrees to join the group as a phony nurse and even maintains the charade after noticing a hidden machinegun inside the vehicle. Needless to say, Éric has not only found a new friend but also a new lover, as Liliane immediately starts a hot and heavy romance with the young gangster despite her quite different background as a theater actress. As for Abel, he may have acquired a new young friend, but he has lost two old ones as he ruthlessly berates both Riton and Fargier upon being reunited with them. Indeed, as Abel states to his old comrades with a certain visceral intensity, “But who sent a total stranger to Nice for me? It was you. And you. You two are pretty sly. You figure I didn’t have much of a chance. So it starts off with a driver you hope not to find, and it ends with a cousin in Brittany.” While Fargier remarks “He hasn’t changed a bit” after Abel throws a violent fit that concludes with him smashing a large mirror and then storming out of his ex-pal's bistro, both he and Riton have become bourgeois bitches of the superlatively soft and pathetically self-centered sort. When Éric tries to comfort Abel by remarking, “You know…Riton and Fargier…you should forget them,” the antihero calmly replies, “I already have. They don’t exist any more.” Since there is no way that he can provide a safe or healthy life for his poor now-motherless children, Abel decides to give them to his friend Chapuis’ sister and then he proceeds to live a lonely life where he spends most of his time silently brooding in a tiny maid’s room located inside the same apartment building where Éric lives. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before Abel cracks or, more specifically, completely gives up on life altogether.

Since he needs escape money and future funds for the care of his children, Abel decides to do one more job that involves robbing a sleazy fence named Arthur Gibelin (Judaic Renoir regular Marcel Dalio), but unfortunately the miserable miser makes the ultimately fatal mistake of getting Fargier and, in turn, the police involved in a desperate attempt to get his stolen money back. Indeed, a certain police officer named Inspector Blot (Jacques Dacqmine) begins making threats against Riton and Fargier and they know they are next after Abel kills Gibelin. Leading a revenge campaign the begins with the murder of Gibelin after discovering that he hired a private investigator to follow Éric (whose identity he got from Fargier), Abel then kills Fargier by shooting him outside of his house in what proves to be a fittingly anticlimactic shootout between a virtual rabid bull and a bitch. Unfortunately, Fargier’s wife Sophie (Michèle Méritz)—a beloved figure among the gangsters—dies in shock of a heart attack upon finding her husband’s corpse, thus inspiring Abel to stop his revenge campaign just before he kills Riton. Aside from Sophie’s shocking demise, Abel is also demoralized after Éric is shot in both his legs by Inspector Blot and arrested while in the process of warning the protagonist about the cops. Completely consumed with guilt and seemingly wishing for death, Abel tells his old friend Kid Jeannot that he is done for good because, as he states with a certain manic intensity, “… I’m calling it quits. This is goodbye, Jeannot. Thérèse. Naldi. Sophie. And now Stark. I can’t do anything for him. Understand? […] Abel’s gone. There’s nothing left. Get the hell out, Jeannot. Do me a favor. Get out of here.” In fact, Abel's proclamation of defeatism is so decidedly unbecoming and uncharacteristic that it even deeply disturbs a hardened criminal like Kid Jeannot who scampers out of his friend's hideout like a shocked child. Indeed, in the end, Abel disappears into a crowd of people on the street just as he once appeared at the beginning of the film. As the narrator notes in regard to Abel’s patently pathetic and ultimately uncharacteristically passive acceptance of total defeat, “A few days later, Abel Davos was arrested. He was brought to trial, sentenced and executed.” As for Éric, one can only hope that his love affair with Liliane works out and that he quits organized crime as the last honorable gangster, Abel, is dead.

While regarded as both a classic and masterpiece among many Francophile film fans today, Classe Tous Risques was such an abject failure upon its initial release that its auteur decided to give up filmmaking altogether, or as Sautet scholar N.T. Binh once explained, “That CLASSE TOUS RISQUES turned out to be a commercial failure was such a bitter disappointment to Sautet that he announced the abandonment of his career as a film director. But only two years later, when the film was discovered by a group of young cinephiles (including future director Bertrand Tavernier) and was rereleased on the art-house circuit, it had a spectacular reception and quickly became a cult favorite. Meanwhile, Sautet had returned to another career—as a clandestine adviser and script doctor on other directors’ projects (including films by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Louis Malle, Alain Cavalier, and Robert Enrico).” Speaking of Malle, although quite different aesthetically as a pastoral war drama, his film Lacombe, Lucien (1974) certainly makes for a great double-feature with Classe Tous Risques as a rare piece of cinema that dares to ask the hard questions and brings unexpected nuance and inordinate empathy in terms of depicting the desperate decline of an underworld collaborationist that eventually finds death in the end (notably, neither film depicts the execution of its antihero, as if it would be in ‘bad taste’ to depict the state-sanctioned murder of a strangely likeable fascist thug).

Despite its age, Classe Tous Risques also deals with timeless themes that still inform the philosophical essence of film and television today, not least of all The Sopranos (1999–2007) where one soon discovers that, typically, the only way out of a life of organized crime is either prison or death. Indeed, as Abel attempts to warn Éric, “Let me tell you something else, if you ever decide to do something else, something where you’re sure to sleep in your bed every night, I’ll be glad to hear it, wherever I am. I’m telling you because we always think we’re clever. But if you stop standing your ground, you’re nothing. You slip a little more every day…until…until you’re nothing. Like today.” Of course, the lead antihero of the hit HBO show spoke similar words and that is why it would not be a stretch to describe Abel Davos as the (proto)Tony Soprano of French (ex)Gestapo agents, albeit slightly less sociopathic (of course, it does not hurt that guido lead Lino Ventura has a bull-like build comparable to Amero-wop James Gandolfini). Undoubtedly, my only complaint in regard to Classe Tous Risques is that it does not conclude on a similar note of disconcerting ambiguity as The Sopranos, even if it is not hard to predict what Abel's fiercely foredoomed future might be like.

In a somewhat recent review of Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s Befrielsesbilleder (1982) aka Images of a Relief, I expressed my interest in films depicting the misery and desperation that typically haunted fascist types after World War II and I would certainly argue that Classe Tous Risques is one of the greatest of these films despite the director apparently having no clue it was based on a real-life French Gestapo hood. Additionally, I would argue that the novels of José Giovanni—a man that remained vocally ‘right-wing’ his entire life and clearly paid tribute his fascist comrades via his books—are a sort of wonderfully lowbrow post-fascist continuation of the grand frog tradition of so-called ‘literary fascism’ as associated with Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lucien Rebatet, and Thierry Maulnier. After recently re-watching Classe Tous Risques, I was certainly reminded of an unforgettable quote from P.P. Pasolini’s swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) when the fascist ‘Duke’ played by Paolo Bonacelli declares, “We fascists are the only true anarchists.” And, of course, such an innately anarchic spirit explains how José Giovanni could have a successful artistic career after prison without anyone initially realizing his less than kosher background, hence why a Jewish (ex)Resistance fighter like Jean-Pierre Melville—a self-described “right-wing anarchist”—could so thoroughly identify with and deeply respect a work dreamed up from the mind of a man from the opposing fascist side. As for commies, they apparently were not interested in Sautet’s deceptively meaty masterpiece or any of the great frog gangster flicks of the era as they preferred soulless social realist twaddle, or as Tavernier once explained, “Yet CLASSE TOUS RISQUES’s strength and orginiality were underestimated upon its initial release. It is true that gangster films had never been particularly popular with a whole segment of the French critical establishment. Journalists loyal to the Communist cause followed Georges Sadoul’s lead in routinely panning them, even those like NIGHT AND THE CITY and TOUCHEZ PAS AU GRISBI, directed by filmmakers close to the party, insisting it was better to take an interest in workers and tradesmen than in criminals.”

Of course, as a film that puts a premium on true masculine friendship, honor, respect, loyalty and masculine virtues in general, the film would certainly be considered ‘fascistic’ by today’s exceedingly effete and self-destructively feministic film critics who despise any male character that is not a virtual eunuch. In that sense, Classe Tous Risques is not only a sort of crypto-fascist film noir, but also—in the Peckinpahian sense—a visceral Gallic celluloid ‘death poem’ on the twilight of French masculinity, so it is only nature that Sautet would go on to direct lavish arthouse dramas like A Heart in Winter (1992) aka Un cœur en hiver and Nelly and Mr. Arnaud (1995) aka Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud featuring exceedingly emasculated and broken (yet ostensibly ‘misogynistic’) proto-nu-male protagonists that have less testosterone in both their entire bodies than the technically-defeated Abel Davos has in his dehydrated piss. Of course, it is also no coincidence it is effeminate guys like Fargier and Gibelin that betray Abel as they are symbolic of a new spiritually neutered post-Vichy frogland where hos and dough come before true bros. Luckily, Sautet at least had an eclectic collection of friends including Giovanni, Tavernier, and Melville that supported his film and ultimately got him out of early retirement as a cinematic auteur. Although Sautet would go on to more ‘highbrow’ material like A Heart in Winter about the perils of being a romantically-retarded autistic introvert and receive much warranted critical acclaim for such films, Tavernier was probably right when he once wrote during his pre-auteur days as a film critic, “People say CLASSE TOUS RISQUES is a B Movie. Better B like Boetticher than A like Allégret.” Likewise, better a männerbund than a mangina, hence the difference in quality and testicular fortitude of the gangster films of Sautet and Melville to those of an overly-intellectualized autist like Godard who even managed to make Über-bro Belmondo seem like a buffoonish bungling bitch that probably dreams of blowing Bogart. Of course, Abel Davos would have thought old ‘Bogie’ was a dick-downing queer.

-Ty E

Star 80

2019-12-02T05:08:00.000-08:00

Despite the recent so-called Me Too movement where a bunch of bigwig Hollywood types, mostly of the Hebraic sort, were rather predictably exposed as sleazy sexual predators, the perennial semitic stereotype of the shiksa-defiling chosenite has yet to reach the mainstream public consciousness due to the mainstream media carefully portraying these pathetic perverts as ostensible “white men.” Indeed, while absurdly presented as “white,” disgraced Miramax cofounder and top Democrat supporter Harvey Weinstein—a physical monster of a man that was the subject of an article entitled ‘The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein’ at the Judaic publication Tablet magazine—is the virtual living and breathing physical embodiment of a nasty Nazi caricature straight out of Julius Streicher’s tabloid trash Der Stürmer. Of course, anyone even remotely familiar with the hermetic history of Hollywood knows that Weinstein was simply part of a grand Hollywood tradition of goy-gal-exploiting that, rather conveniently, has rarely been depicted in Tinseltown movies despite the fact that Hollywood loves making masturbatory movies about itself (hence the abject commercial and critical failure of a film like The Day of the Locust (1975) where the sins of Sunset Boulevard are laid bare). Of course, there are exceptions and it took a good degenerate goy boy like Bob Fosse—a rather handsome mensch born to a Norwegian-American father—to depict such a scenario, albeit in a somewhat atypical fashion that really underscores the innately sexually unsavory and sickening nature of Hollywood as opposed to focusing on the racial character of such corruption.

Indeed, Fosse’s cinematic swansong Star 80 (1983)—a film depicting the meteoric rise and brutal demise of Dutch-Canadian Playboy model Dorothy Stratten who was infamously murdered by her Hebraic (ex)pimp husband Paul Snider—is a notable film in that, on top of being inordinately aesthetically alluring for the time, it depicts how a wholesome blonde beauty can be transformed into an international sex object and ultimately destroyed in Hollywood in such a short time in a deceptively captivating cinematic work that hypnotically highlights the heinous debauching character of Hollywood and the sort of conmen, parasites, whores, hucksters, and sociopaths that lurk there. In terms of being based on the real-life tragic death of an attractive young girl from a decent (albeit fatherless) family that got murdered after getting sucked into a lurid lifestyle in the (post)counterculture age, Star 80 is like the Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)—a film that also features an older Jew lover grooming a young shiksa and leading her on a road to ruin—of the 1980s, albeit all the more infuriatingly tragic. Undoubtedly, what makes Fosse’s film somewhat more provocative than Richard Brooks’ criminally-underrated cult classic is that it mainly focuses on the killer to the point of empathizing with his personal and professional failures as the discarded husband of a hot Aryan ‘it girl.’

While Fosse fanatics—if they exist—would surely disagree, I have no qualms about confessing that, as a proud hater of musicals and everything they stand for, Star 80 is unequivocally my favorite flick directed by the dancer turned auteur. Indeed, while I can appreciate Lenny (1974) as an unconventional biopic despite my disgust for its titular subject and All That Jazz (1979) as the American answer to Federico Fellini’s surreally autobiographical masterpiece 8 1⁄2 (1963), I find Cabaret (1972) to simply be an aesthetically and sexually sickening film that, in my mind, can only inspire fantasies of defenestration. While some people might find the flick to be redundant as the Stratten-Snider story had already been depicted two years earlier via the totally mundane made-for-television movie Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story (1981) starring the all-too-absurdly-improbable-and-masculine Jamie Lee Curtis as the eponymous lead, it is also an indubitable auteur piece where male fox Fosse finds great conflicted personal sympathy with a coldblooded killer and necrophile. Indeed, as Sam Wasson noted in his book Fosse (2013) in regard to the auteur and the overly wanton world that created him, “Bob Fosse was the best thing ever to come out of burlesque, and he would pay for it forever.”

In short, Fosse spent his younger years as an underage dancer being sexually exploited by old debauched strippers and it would have an imperative influence on how he looked at sex in the entertainment world. For example, as Wasson retells in his book, “Strippers—twice Bobby’s size in two directions, and twice as sharp—preyed on him before the show as he stood in the wings about to go on […] When the girls found out he wasn’t the eighteen-year old he said he was, they started messing with him. Feathered gorgons appeared […] They pulled Fosse from his Latin conjugations onto their laps, crushing his face in fingers and tongues, twirling his perfect hair and the cock in his tuxedo pants. Scared and alone, he did as he was told. Even if that meant doing what no good boy should do, he did it, because if he cried out, they’d blow his cover and he’d be out of the show for good, and what would he tell his mother? […] Something must have been seriously, shamefully wrong with him, because, despite everything he should have run from—the fondling, the sinning, the heckling, and the shirking—to him, having the strippers’ attention felt a little like being a star […] He was drawn to the girls, then hurt by them. ‘It was schizophrenic,’ Fosse said. He couldn’t get away from it and he didn’t want to.”

Not surprisingly considering Fosse’s cumming-of-age story, sexual (and social) grooming is one of the main themes of Star 80, which is a film that rather fittingly takes its name from the real-life vanity plate on the signature black Corvette of psychopathic groomer-cum-killer Snider. Indeed, it is no coincidence that, early on in the film, the virtual antihero Paul Snider played Eric Roberts—a character that was largely influenced by both Fosse's own personal experiences and Montgomery Clift's tragic character George Eastman in George Stevens' A Place in the Sun (1951)—remarks upon seeing Dorothy Stratten for the very first time working at a Dairy Queen, “Get ‘em while they’re young,” which he proceeds to do. During his rather lecherous life, Fosse learned to go from prey to predator and, in that sense, he identified with sicko Snider in the worst sort of way, or as drama critic Martin Gottfried explained in his book All His Jazz: The Life & Death of Bob Fosse (1990) in regard to the auteur, “There can be little doubt that he identified with Paul Snider […] As Dan Melnick said, ‘Bob was projecting the worst part of himself on Snider.’ […] The differences between Snider and Fosse, of course, were greater than the similarities […] Like Paul, who depended on women to support him, Fosse had married strong, older women. Like Snider he turned to young girls, who posed no challenge and could be ignored. Like Snider, he had hoped to be a movie star, and like Snider he failed. Like Snider he was regularly criticized for being tasteless. Unlike Snider, he was not tasteless to his soul. Paul Snider created a star in Dorothy Stratten, only to be denied credit for it, just as Bob felt he had been denied credit for his part in Gwen Verdon’s success. ‘I was always interested,’ he said during an interview about STAR 80, ‘in the man behind the woman, especially the show woman.’”

In short, the film is like the Aryan goyization of a most monstrous coldblooded murder where Fosse somehow brings preternatural humanity to the innately inhumane in a manner that is, in many ways, hopelessly goyish yet ultimately more provocative than the real-life story. In fact, the film does not even mention the obvious fact that Snider was a member of the tribe despite the fact that the killer regularly wore a Star of David necklace and people knew him by the name “The Jewish Pimp.” Of course, Fosse's glaring dejudaization of the subject matter is probably explained by the fact that Hebraic screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky was his friend and mentor. In fact, Fosse was hoping that Chayefsky would do a rewrite of his Star 80 script, but the screenwriter had already become completely disillusioned with Hollywood due to his nightmarish experiences on Ken Russell's Altered States (1980), not to mention severe health issues that resulted in his death in 1981 (and, like a surreal scene straight out of All That Jazz, Fosse even performed a tape dance routine at his funeral!).

Although Jewish, Paul Snider was an uncultivated philistine who, in terms of verbal IQ, only managed to master the lowly art of remembering everyone’s name and redundantly (mis)quoting his degenerate virtual pimp heroes like Hugh Hefner. In terms of predatory street smarts as a parasitic bottom-feeder, Snider made quite the impression on the hopelessly naïve Dorothy Stratten who, on top of having very little experience with men (for example, she only had one previous boyfriend), she seemed to be looking for a father figure as her padre abandoned the family when she was young (born Dorothy Ruth Hoogstraten, Stratten was actually a first-generation Canadian as the progeny of Dutch immigrants). As depicted in Star 80, Snider saw the perfect unconsciously beauteous victim to exploit in Stratten and the fact she was underage and nine years younger made this extremely easy for him, at least until she achieved fame and fortune on her own and finally came to the bitter realization that her beau was a no-good-bastard. Indeed, Snider took it for granted that Stratten would always be her meal ticket, so naturally he became completely unhinged when she began to get famous and dumped him for a powerful Hollywood filmmaker that was previously in a much publicized relationship with famous beauty Cybill Shepherd.

The real-life Dorothy Stratten, who was blessed with rather large lips and shapely tits, was infinitely more beautiful than boyish Mariel Hemingway who portrays her in the film. Achieving virtual dyke status for her oftentimes unclad performance in prized Hebraic screenwriter Robert Towne’s overrated directorial debut Personal Best (1982), Hemingway was naturally not Fosse’s ideal choice for the role but she did have a certain innocent “unused quality” like Stratten and getting breast implants more or less sealed the deal for her in terms of the singular role. Needless to say, beloved male bimbo Eric Robert—an actor that is impossible to hate, even when playing degenerate junky criminals like in convicted pervert Victor Salva's The Nature of the Beast (1995)—is certainly more charming and handsomer than the real Paul Snider, but Star 80 is less a historical document (despite being largely factually sound) than an aesthetically pleasing exposé on the perils of sexual exploitation and fame-seeking in Hollywood in the age of (post)sexual liberation. Indeed, not unlike the hapless heroine of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Dorothy Stratten is ultimately a victim of so-called sexual liberation and feminism as her rise and demise would be unthinkable otherwise, or as 20/20 senior producer Muriel Pearson recently remarked to the Montreal Gazette in regard to the new documentary The Death of a Playmate: The Dorothy Stratten Story, “The advent of the pill liberated women to make new choices about their sexuality. But it was, at times, a double-edged sword. We highlighted the duality of past and present by depicting a kind of double standard that was part of the PLAYBOY philosophy.”

While Playboy Führer Hugh Hefner—a supposed goy with certain semitic physical and political sensibilities—was very supportive of the production of Star 80 to the point where he allowed Fosse to use the Playboy logo and even granted him access to his mansion for research (in return, Fosse cast Cliff Robertson instead of Harry Dean Stanton to portray Hefner at the glorified pornographer’s recommendation), the film does not portray the ‘publisher’ in an altogether positive light. In fact, Hefner comes across seeming like a more pretentious and self-satisfied yet no-less-full-of-shit version of pathetic-wannabe Snider; or, in short, a scheming glorified pimp acting like a father figure to stupid lost girls. In fact, as depicted in the film, horn-dog Hef even attempts to pass off his porno company to Stratten as a family (and, in turn, the family she never had), even stating with a certain glaring lack of sincerity, “PLAYBOY is a very special magazine, Dorothy. There’s no other magazine like it. All the writers, editors, photographers, the girls, etc. We all have a very special relationship. It’s not like any other magazine. We’re all like a, well, we’re just like a family.” A pseudo-sophisticated creep that smugly roams around his own lavish parties in insufferably flamboyant pajamas while routinely having his soft ass kissed by a carefully selected collection of adoring ass-kissers and brain-dead whores, Hefner represents the superlatively shallow and soulless dream that Ashkenazi simpleton Snider is so senselessly chasing (in fact, Snider, who founded the Chippendales Dancers, modeled the look of these male strippers after ‘Playboy Bunny’ costumes). Of course, both men act as the father that Stratten never had but, unfortunately for Snider, Hefner does a better job of it.

While Dorothy Stratten comes off looking hopelessly naïve like a lamb unwittingly be led to the slaughter, virtually everyone else in her life (sans her poor mother) is totally shallow and/or painfully narcissistic, including her covertly kosher plastic surgeon housemate Dr. Martin ‘Geb’ Geber (David Clennon) who brags that he owns a Rolls-Royce simply as “an investment” and not as a “status symbol,” as if that is some sort of important distinction. Needless to say, being a super shallow guy that is hopelessly high on his own supply and clearly only cares about himself, Geb is completely oblivious to the fact that his housemate Snider is a ticking time-bomb and is a great danger to Stratten, even after his girlfriend points out the obvious. In fact, when Snider acts with a certain lovelorn lunacy after Stratten leaves her, Geb responds by smugly complaining, “I can take a bragging Snider, I can take a conniving Snider. I just can’t stomach a sentimental Snider,” as if heartsickness and sentimentality are the same exact thing. Of course, Geb is no different than anyone else in Stratten's life in that he ultimately fails her in the end, hence the value of Fosse including pseudo-interview scenes with these largely superficial and/or unsavory characters who talk a lot but never say anything that truly matters. In that sense, Star 80 oftentimes feels like a sort of anti-murder-mystery where the murder is already solved and the characters seem incapable of offering any real clues.

While Stratten reluctantly agrees to marry Snider despite Hefner hypocritically objecting due to the kosher Canadian having “the personality of a pimp,” she is killed by her hubby only after 16 months of miserable marriage after leaving him for a sensitive filmmaker. Indeed, while Stratten marries Snider because she believes “I owe it to him” since he was responsible for jumpstarting her career, she cannot help but swiftly dispose of him upon meeting ‘cinematic auteur’ Aram Nicholas (Roger Rees)—a fictionalized character based on filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich who unwisely cast her in his box-office bomb They All Laughed (1981) and made her the subject of his dubious memoir The Killing of the Unicorn - Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980 (1984)—as he is the complete opposite of her Hebraic husband as a kind, thoughtful, and empathetic ‘artiste’ that, quite unlike most men in her life, seems to see her more than just a tasty piece of fresh meat. As a one-guy kind of gal, Stratten, quite unlike her hubby, is fond on monogamy and refuses to maintain the charade of her sham marriage after falling for Aram. Of course, after a series of disastrous business ventures that are all funded by the success of his wife, Snider—a hyper hypocritical huckster that regularly cheats on his lover throughout their rather one-sided relationship, including with less than lovely negress prostitutes that seem like insipid street slime compared to his positively pulchritudinous spouse—sees it as the ultimate blow to his already fragile ego when Stratten cheats on him with a big name Hollywood director.

While Stratten tries to buy him off with a relatively generous offer of $7,000, perennial loser Snider feels entitled to much more because, after all, he ‘discovered’ her. Needless to say, if Snider cannot have Stratten, no one can, so the Jewish pimp buys a shotgun and blows her brains out, but not before virtually ritualistically raping and brutalizing her. As if to confirm his position in the afterlife in some otherworldly Gehenna where he will be able to play pool with Oskar Dirlewanger and Carl Panzram, Snider then straps Stratten’s bloody naked corpse onto a ‘sodomy rack’ and then proceeds to commit necrophilia with his dead wife off-screen while the camera focuses on various nudes of the tragic heroine as if to starkly contrast her nightmarish reality to the pseudo-sophisticated erotic illusions that Playboy contrived. Before blowing his own brains out, Snider triumphantly declares, “You won’t forget Paul Snider” and the rest is history. Luckily for Snider, Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story—a largely forgettable TV movie turd of the subpar soap-era-esque sort that features the less than handsome Bruce Weitz portraying Snider—was not the only film made in tribute to his infamy, as Star 80 is a near-masterpiece in terms of style that somehow manages to be respectful to both the real-life murderer and his victim (whereas the TV movie only inspires feelings of apathy and banality as manly mischling Jamie Lee Curtis, who already looks rather ‘used up,’ seems completely incapable of expressing even an inkling of innocence or naivety, among other important nubile qualities that the real-life Stratten so effortlessly radiated).

Despite featuring many morally dubious subjects, Star 80 is a strangely moral film, or, more specifically, the sort of covertly moralistic movie you might expect from a deeply troubled man that personally experienced the sins and debasement that it almost gleefully depicts as if to entice the viewer while mocking them at the same time by giving them unrivaled beauty and then ruthlessly ripping it to shreds with a certain understated elegance. On top of Fosse utilizing the film as a sort of covert self-criticism via the Paul Snider character, Star 80 acts as a sort of stylish cinematic condemnation of the people, places, and professions that the auteur was so personally accustomed to. Indeed, featuring an aesthetic that falls somewhere between a post-Cries and Whispers Ingmar Bergman film (notably, Sven Nykvist acted as the cinematographer) and, well, vintage Playboy smut, the film ironically utilizes glamour to goad the viewer into asking questions about morality in an era that basked in shallow spectacle and disposable escapism, hence the commercial failure of great dark 1980s films like Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981) and James Bridge’s Mike’s Murder (1984), among countless others. While the film portrays the fictionalized Bogdanovich character in a mostly favorable light, Teresa Carpenter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Village Voice source article ‘Death of a Playmate’ is considerably less flattering to the point where it accuses both the filmmaker and Hefner of causing Stratten’s death. To make things somewhat creepier, in 1988, 49-year-old Bogdanovich married Dorothy’s 20-year-old little sister Louise Stratten in a dubious childless marriage that ended in divorce in 2001 (notably, as depicted in the film, Snider was already ‘grooming’ Louise when she was just a little girl). While Fosse was a philandering man, he certainly never reached the degeneracy of overrated auteur Bogdanovich who not coincidentally did a great job portraying a sleazy Hebraic psychiatrist on The Sopranos. If anyone can learn anything from the Stratten sisters, it is that girls abandoned by their fathers make easy prey for predators, especially if they are young, dumb, and beautiful.

As his films surely demonstrate, Bob Fosse was a considerably haunted and self-loathing man and while looking around a club on Sunset Boulevard during the production of Star 80 he even went so far as to confess, “I’m going to die in one of these places. Here’s where I was born.” While Fosse did not croak in a pile of his own vomit in some sleazy strip club surrounded by topless hags with saggy its, he did, not unlike his semi-autobiographical character in All That Jazz (1979), succumb to a heart attack and, rather fittingly, it was in the arms of his own virtual Dorothy Stratten, Gwen Verdon, whose career he made and (at least in his own mind) he never got enough credit for. Indeed, Verdon was Fosse’s wife-cum-muse and the auteur acted as the director–choreographer for both the stage and film musicals she was best known for, including Damn Yankees! (1958) directed by Stanley Donen and George Abbott. As to what Fosse actually thought about the uxoricidal necrophile of his film, he would state, “Paul Snider was a guy who seemed a product of the sort of shallowness that comes from buying hook, line, and sinker the slick-magazine philosophy of what the American male should have. That is, if you have the right kind of car or the right kind of clothes, learn people’s names, learn how to say hello charmingly, and all that, then the world will be your oyster.” While I agree with Fosse to a degree, I believe he is bit too generous in his assessment of the semitic souteneur. After all, Snider came from a fucked family that, fulfilling the worst sort of racial stereotypes and surely using Talmudic reasoning, successfully petitioned a court to grant them all the assets of both Snider and Stratten after the murder-suicide because the Playmate died first and thus her homicidal hubby technically ‘inherited’ her wealth. Speaking of strange familial connections, Bogdanovich virtually unwittingly predicted the casting of Star 80 when he opted to include a rather dark passage from female lead Mariel Hemingway’s grandfather Ernest Hemingway’s popular antiwar novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) as the epitaph on Stratten's grave marker.

While All That Jazz is a painfully personal film that makes Fosse seem like a self-destructive blackhole that sucks up everyone and everything around him, Star 80 is arguably even more uniquely unflattering, albeit in a considerably more cryptic fashion. Indeed, as Martin Gottfried argued in his biography, “‘In STAR 80,’ John Kander said, ‘Bob was saying the same thing he was saying in CHICAGO. That everything sexual is disgusting, [but] I never knew him well enough to understand what demons he was exorcising.’ Perhaps the demon was sexual guilt. Perhaps STAR 80 was an exorcism of that demon, or perhaps it was an expression of his anger with Hollywood and its failure to make him a movie star. Perhaps finally, in some way, he was linking both of these major themes of his life as reflections of the qualities that he feared might be discovered within himself: shallowness, fraudulence, a self who, like Paul Snider, he secretly believed was cheap, unmanly, incompetent, and unlovable. Riff.” Indeed, it is certainly hard to believe a heterosexual man would be such a great dancer, musical-theatre choreographer, and theatre director and it surely is not particularly traditionally masculine that he would utilize such feminine skills to woo women. Of course, one cannot also forget that Fosse was forced to experience being molested by much older predatory woman to establish such a career, which is certainly something that probably haunted him for the rest of his life. Indeed, as Gottfried also argued, “…what emerges in sharp focus in STAR 80 is Fosse’s inclination to blame public sex—as if something had to be blamed—for private lust […] But there is so much shabby sex in STAR 80 that even with the PLAYBOY sensibility as a theme, it seems excessive. Yet the brilliance of the movie, its power, probably could never have been achieved without the crass sex. It is as if the exorcism of Bob Riff required an overdose on sleaze.” Of course, ‘Bob Riff’ is the stage-name used as a teenager when he was being molested by slutty strippers. As a victim of a group of virtual female Paul Sniders, Fosse ultimately learned to become a Paul Snider himself, at least in his own troubled mind.

Not surprisingly, lead Eric Robert go into Brando-esque method-acting-mode during the filming of Star 80 to the point where he became a sort of demonic composite of both Snider and Fosse, which is apparent during the film, or as Gottfried explained, “As Dorothy’s assurance grows, Paul’s cracks. He changes his style and goes Hollywood in a clothing-store scene, putting together snakeskin boots, gold chains, and an unmistakable Fosse costume of black—black shirts, black pants. He would wear Fosse black for the rest of the film as STAR 80 begins its ascent to climax, and with full rhythmic music Fosse makes this wordless costuming scene into a virtual dance number.” Naturally, Fosse went further than making Roberts dress like him, or as the actor explained in Gottfried’s book, “He educated me on the life of the strip clubs. He wanted me to know it wasn’t about fucking, that every stripper who was a ‘lifer’—that’s what he called them—has the same issues as children who were molested. Bob believed that. He wanted me to know that this guy [Snider] had expertise, that this guy, if he weren’t a psychopath, would have been hugely successful.” And Fosse was successful because he was not a psychopath, but an inordinately sensitive man that could empathize with the damaged dames that both preyed on him and were assumedly preyed on themselves. As someone that has dated (ex)strippers and victims of molestation, I can safely say that Star 80 left a sick feeling in my stomach and reminded me of why it would be a blessing if both Hollywood and the entire so-called adult entertainment industry became the object of a complete scorched-earth policy. While Paul Snider only killed Stratten and (thankfully) himself, one can only imagine how many souls he destroyed during his short pathetic life via sexual exploitation as a pimp.

Notably, Star 80 begins with a potent opening credits sequence featuring glossy pin-up shot of Hemingway-as-Stratten juxtaposed with the tragic heroine stating to a journalist, “PLAYBOY’s motto is the girl next door. They look for girls that are wholesome and fresh and young and naïve. They look for all of that. So most of those girls do have that type of background.” During this same sequence, a journalist can be heard asking Stratten’s teenage sister, “Would you like to be just like your sister when you grow up?” and she replies, “Yeah. Because I’m proud of her.” Undoubtedly, in this opening credit sequence before the film has really even started, Fosse has established a clear anti-Hollywood/anti-porn message where both Hollywood and Playboy are blamed for the seduction and, in turn, sleazy sexual debasement of youth who come to believe that flashing their boobs and beaver will lead to fame and fortune. Of course, Fosse, who dreamed of being the next Fred Astaire as a child, knew this all too well and he paid the ultimate price, but luckily it at least eventually resulted in great films like All That Jazz and Star 80 where the shady side of show business begins to resemble a sort of metaphysical hell that not even the gloss and glitter, which the auteur's films have plenty of, can disguise the pangs of debasement and spiritual destitution. In some ways, one could even argue that Stratten's death was an unintentional mercy killing as the beauty at least never had the opportunity to degenerate into a forsaken creature like self-slaughtering porn diva Shauna Grant or harpy-like ‘Me Too’ messias Rose McGowan. Indeed, whereas McGowan now seems seriously possessed by some sort of fiercely demonic feministic force and (at least, to me) is quite hard to even look at due to her crazy-dead-eyes despite once being quite beautiful in her early films like Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation (1995), Stratten followed in the tradition of James Dean and will remain forever young and beautiful.

As for Fosse, Star 80—a film that the auteur expected would win him an Oscar—was so severely savaged by both film critics and former allies alike that the filmmaker decided to give up on filmmaking altogether and never directed another film. Indeed, bitch boy Andrew Sarris went so far as describing it as “one of the most glumly misogynous movies ever produced on this continent” with “The gruesome ending, particularly, is the biggest treat for women-haters this side of the underground snuff circuit.” A notorious beta, Sarris, who was not a bad film critic, seems to be projecting his own fantasies and/or conflicted feelings onto the film, as Star 80 derives its singular pro-female/anti-Hollywood majesty by devastatingly depicting the destruction of what Bogdanovich once somewhat rightly described as a ‘unicorn’ as Dorothy Stratten was a woman that was so strikingly statuesque and pure in her pulchritude that here mere presence in Galaxina (1980) is the sole thing that makes such stupendously stupid sci-fi-scat watchable. Undoubtedly, what Sarris and other critics of the film cannot deal with is being forced to confront the fact that such a breathless beauty was so savagely murdered and defiled in the dream realm of Hollyweird in an aesthetically flavorsome film that utilizes a slick Playboy perfect style to underscore such frivolous post-sexual liberation fantasies of fame and fortune. Indeed, to fully embrace a film like Star 80 one must reject the lies of feminism, sexual liberation, and Hollywood and accept a certain cultural cynicism where the exploitation and commodification of feminine beauty is seen as something virtually satanic and ultimately anti-human. After all, the greatest celebration of Dorothy Stratten's beauty would have been if she had children with a similarly attractive man (as opposed to unattractive kosher conmen like Snider and Bogdanovich) and not as the heavily edited subject of a semen-soiled porno mag that some pussy-starved loser used as a quick masturbation aid. In that sense, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that Fosse's film is the greatest thing to come from Stratten's life as a nearly cinematically immaculate warning on the perils of the road to stardom in a Der Stürmer-esque Sodom where girls must be virtual gorgons if they hope to survive, let alone thrive.

-Ty E

Land Without Bread

2019-11-28T20:46:00.001-08:00

As a virtual lifelong loather of the sort of debasing deluded dreams that Hollywood so sickingly sells like a pimp attempting to pass off a seasoned slack-jawed STD-ridden streetwalker as a prized virgin beauty, I have naturally always been more attracted to a sort of realism that borders on the surreal; whether it be Bavarian sensation Werner Herzog’s morosely morbid depiction of infamous necrophile Ed Gein’s hometown in Stroszek (1977), the somehow mystifying yet simultaneously demystifying avant-garde docs of Dutch auteur Henri Plaat (Fragments of Decay, El cardenal), or the hypnotically darkly humorous aesthetically nihilistic excesses of Harmony Korine’s delightfully deranging debut feature Gummo (1997). Needless to say, as both a cinephile and longtime Luis Buñuel fan, I should have probably watched the Spanish auteur’s third film and sole documentary contribution, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933) aka Land Without Bread aka Unpromised Land, a very long time ago, yet I just recently endured it for the first time after being inspired by the animated feature Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (2018) aka Buñuel en el laberinto de las Tortugas directed Salvador Simó. While I am not a huge fan Simó’s of film—a somewhat superficial and even hagiographic semi-fictional tribute to Buñuel’s personal mein kampf while making Land Without Bread that, at least partly, feels inspired by the troubled Walt Disney-Salvador Dalí collaboration Destino (1945/2008)—it certainly did its job in terms of inspiring me to finally watch the documentary, especially after I watched the extra features included on the Shout Factory blu-ray and discovered the Dutch documentary Buñuel's Prisoners (2000) aka De gevangenen van Buñuel where modern-day descendants of the Spanish region depicted in the doc express both great hatred and loving respect for the Spanish auteur.

Indeed, Buñuel’s 28-minute doc—a pioneering cinematic work that is described as both a ‘pseudo-documentary’ and ‘Ethnofiction’ on Wikipedia yet anticipates cinema-vérité and is surely both more intriguing and subversive than anything Jean Rouch has ever directed—has ultimately proved to be such an influential film that it has inspired multiple documentaries and a virtual children’s animated feature, yet it seems that no one can actually agree on what the film actually is or the auteur's intent in what is arguably a playfully morally dubious experiment in understated cinematic savagery of the delectably distastefully tragicomedic sort where the misery of man is ruthlessly rubbed into the viewer’s face with an almost demonic dispassion. Depicting the everyday destitution and surely surreal poverty of the Las Hurdes region of Spain, the short does the seemingly impossible and equally nonsensical by being a true ‘Surrealist documentary’ that makes a mockery out of the sort of nauseatingly naive proto-Rouch-esque ethnographic racial fetishism associated with frog surrealists like Michel Leiris. In short, in Land Without Bread, the viewer is shocked to discover that even parts of Europe exhibit the same sort of perturbing sub-Lumpenproletariat impoverishment and almost transcendental backwardness that is typically associated with the Dark Continent.

As a cinematic work that was directed by one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, funded by the lottery winnings of an anarcho-syndicalist sculptor-cum-painter named Ramón Acín that was murdered by supposed fascists during the first year of the Spanish Civil War (which, ironically, the film supports the start of!), and co-written by a commie Surrealist named Pierre Unik who died in a concentration camp in 1945, Land Without Bread is undeniably an important piece of both cinema and (meta)political history where the loony leftist idealism of its creators now seems genuinely absurd on retrospect. In that sense, the film seems even more innately surreal today than when it was first released in what is ultimately a great example of an artist (or, in this case, artists) becoming a victim of his own youthful political naïveté (not surprisingly, Buñuel's political views, or lack thereof, would only become more nuanced and cynical as he aged). Taking its title from a reference by Russian anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin about how every social and political problem can supposedly be cured with mere bread, the film would seem relatively political ambiguous if Buñuel had not later added a sort of patently preposterous postscript that reads: “The generals’ rebellion aided by Hitler and Mussolini would restore together with the privileges of the owners, the peasant workforces. But the works and peasants of Spain will defeat Franco and his accomplices. With the help of anti-fascists all over the world, tranquility and happiness will make way for civil war and forever eradicate the pockets of misery this film has shown you.”

Of course, as everything from intentional Soviet famines like Holodomor to the current starvation plaguing much of Venezuela today, commies are not very good at feeding people—whether it be moldy Bolshevik bread or otherwise. Idiotic youthful idealism aside, the doc was a valiant act of cinematic rebellion and a film that apparently could have gotten Buñuel killed, or as the auteur explained in his memoir My Last Sigh (1982), “When the Republican troops, backed by Durutti’s anarchist column, occupied Quinto, my friend Mantecon, the governor of Aragón, found a dossier with my name on it in the files of the civil guard. In it, I was described as notoriously debauched, a morphine addict, and the author of that heinous film, that crime against the state, LAS HURDES. If I could be found, the note said, I was to be turned over immediately to the Falange, where I would receive my just deserts.” Of course, Buñuel collaborators Acín and Unik were not so lucky, but such was the spirit of the age as artists were purged from both sides of the political spectrum. For example, upon France's so-called liberation during WWII, French filmmaker Jean Mamy—a one-time leftist that acted as the editor of Jean Renoir's Baby's Laxative (1931) aka On purge bébé—was executed in part for directing the Vichy anti-Freemasonry propaganda film Occult Forces (1943) aka Forces occultes (in fact, the film's writer Jean Marquès-Rivière and producer Robert Muzard were also sentenced to death, but they both managed to ultimately survive).

Notably, despite only covering a couple pages of Buñuel’s excellent book, you arguably learn more about the history of Las Hurdes, which the auteur was initially inspired to make a film about after reading the anthropological study Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by Maurice Legendre, by reading the auteur’s autobiography. As Buñuel explains in My Last Sigh, “Once upon a time, the high plateaus of Las Hurdes were settled by bandits, and by Jews who’d fled the Inquisition,” though one surely would not know that after watching the film as Jews and banditos seem like otherworldly Übermenschen compared to the fiercely forlorn modern-day inhabitants of the region. In Land Without Bread, the viewer discovers a seemingly endless arid wasteland that is described as follows by narrator Abel Jacquin, “Throughout this labyrinth of mountains…the 52 villages that make up Las Hurdes are scattered…with a total population of 8,000 people. Ahead, we must descend a steep slope…and cross the splendid valley, Las Batuecas…currently inhabited by an old monk who lives here…surrounded by a few servants.” Apparently, for four centuries, the valley was inhabited by monks, the Carmelites, who preached Christianity in the main villages of Las Hurdes, but now the monasteries are completely deserted aside from a sole monk and his handful of loyal servants. Despite the decline of spiritual leaders in Las Hurdes, the nicest buildings in the area are all churches, which surely reminds its lowly inhabitants of their ultimate value in the face of god almighty. In fact, it seems that the only thing these pitiful peasants have is religion as that don’t even really have a folk culture, or as Buñuel explained in his memoir, “As for folk dances, those trite expressions of misplaced nationalism, Las Hurdes didn’t have any.” Indeed, instead of pesky fascistic volk dances, the area is plagued by roaming packs of rock-throwing inbred mutants, or so one discovers while watching Buñuel's oftentimes organically grotesque yet hardly garish film.

Due to poverty, malnutrition, poor hygiene and inbreeding, among other things, genetic degeneration in Las Hurdes is a serious problem to the point where the area is plagued with dwarfs and violent mental retards that tend to throw rocks and attack people, including Buñuel’s small film crew. Indeed, while the auteur's intent is certainly dubious, there is no denying the nightmarish reality of the genetically forsaken sub-troglodytes featured in the film. Naturally, senseless death is also an everyday occurrence in the area, as Buñuel encounters a small little girl lying on the ground that, as the narrator reveals, apparently died only a couple days later after the footage was shot. At one point, the viewer encounters a seemingly elderly woman breast-feeding a baby with her completely deflated bean-bag boobs, only to be told by the narrator that she is actually only 32-years-old (admittedly, I found this claim to be more than a little bit improbable). Most people in the area only have the choice of potatoes and beans as food (with the slightly richer inhabitants occasionally partaking in pork), though, every so often, goat meat becomes available when said livestock accidentally falls off a cliff (for the film, Buñuel did not have time time wait for such an accident so he shot a goat off a cliff himself!). Dysentery is also a big problem in the area as the locals tend to eat unripe cherries out of sheer desperation. Even death is not easy in the region, as corpses have to be carried many miles as most of the villages lack cemeteries (for these admittedly rather realistic scenes, Buñuel had an infant ‘play dead’ and somehow the fly-plagued babe does a good job acting!). While the primary food industry in the area is beekeeping, the locals do not actually own the bees, thus making it all the more absurd that goats, mules, and people are ofentimes killed by said bees. In short, death seems to be the main concern for the locals of Las Hurdes and, as an old woman says at the very end of the doc, “Nothing keeps you more awake than to think always of the dead. Recite an Ave Maria for the peace of their souls.” Of course, considering Buñuel’s own staunchly cynical stance on his ancestral faith, the inclusion of the poor wretched old woman's words seems all the more bleak yet simultaneously playfully nihilistic.

At the end of the film, the narrator less than passionately declares, “After a two-month say in Las Hurdes…we leave the country,” but, as referenced in the documentary The Journey of a Surrealist, Buñuel later remarked, “Once you’ve been to hell, how do you get out?” Cynical exaggeration or not, the doc makes its case with very little effort that Las Hurdes is a miserable virtual pre-medieval hellhole and, as the auteur intended, the idiotic sort of European xenophiles that fetishize African poverty merely need to travel a couple miles to find the ugly extreme of abject of human suffering, just as the white liberal and Judaic intellectuals of today pretend tend to weep for the melanin-privileged people of the world without batting an eye for the poor whites of Appalachia (who, in their disgustingly deluded slave-morality-ridden minds, believe that these poor whites deserve it due to imaginary privilege being part of their magical racial birthright). Rather ironically, despite the film’s contrived commie postscript, Buñuel was later forced to concede to Mexican actor and screen writer Tomás Pérez Turrent that Francisco Franco enriched Las Hurdes, confessing, “Yes, some years ago I went to Las Hurdes. It had changed somewhat because it had become part of Franco’s favorite region. There was electricity in some towns and they made bread everywhere.” In short, ostensible fascist Franco brought bread to the land without bread. Political intent aside, Buñuel felt the doc was part of the same personal Surrealist Weltanschauung as his previous two films Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930), noting, “It’s in the same line. The first two are imaginative, the other is taken from reality, but I feel it shares the same outlook.” Still, the film was distinct to the auteur in at least one way as he stated to José de la Colina, “Nothing is gratuitous in LAND WITHOUT BREAD. It is perhaps the least gratuitous film I have made.”

In the worthwhile compilation The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (1975), André Bazin noted, “With LAS HURDES (LAND WITHOUT BREAD), a ‘documentary’ on the poverty-stricken population of the Las Hurdes region, Buñuel did not reject UN CHIEN ANDALOU; on the contrary, the objectivity, the soberness of the documentary surpassed the horror and the forcefulness of the fantasy. In the former, the donkey devoured by bees attained the nobility of a barbaric and Mediterranean myth which is certainly equal to the glamour of the dead donkey on the piano. Thus Buñuel stands out as one of the great names of the cinema at the end of the silent screen and the beginning of sound—one with which only that of Vigo bears comparison—in spite of the sparseness of his output.” Indeed, while Land Without Bread does not quite transcend the singular shock of an eye being slit like in Un Chien Andalou (1929), it manages to defile the soul in a striking fashion to the point where death feels like it can be virtually touched and the smell of decay is not too far away, which was surely the auteur’s intent in depicting his homeland as a place of deathly destitution and dystopian delirium where the crucifix is a symbol of death and the legacy of Catholicism is one of starved disease-ridden corpses and perennially smirking retards. While Bazin would also argue in regard to the film, “The documentary on Las Hurdes was tinged with a certain cynicism, a self-satisfaction in its objectivity; the rejection of pity took on the color of an aesthetic provocation,” I personally deeply respect Buñuel—a bourgeois boy that had no real innate personal understanding of the human misery he encountered—for not succumbing to conspicuously contrived bleeding-heart buffoonery by taking the easy gutmensch route and pretending to weep for people that need everything but misspent tears.

Notably, at one point in Land Without Bread, Buñuel plays virtual art critic in a scene featuring morbid midgets and mental defectives juxtaposed with the deadly serious narration, “The realism even of a Zurbarán or of a Ribera falls far short of such a reality. The degeneration of this race is primarily due to hunger, lack of hygiene, poverty and incest.” While some might find such sentiments to be as cold as an unclad Icelandic female corpse, I am also reminded of the auteur’s words, “I’ve always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.” After all, only Buñuel could arrive to such a charmingly twisted yet aesthetically truthful conclusion after being confronted with such miserable misbegotten untermenschen that have no time or taste for the bourgeois luxury of fine art. Thankfully, Buñuel did not pull a Forough Farrokhzad who, after finishing her sole film The House Is Black (1963)—a 22-minute doc depicting the horribly disfigured individuals of an Iranian leper colony—decided it would be wise to adopt two leprotic children due to her haunting experiences while working on the film (notably, she died only four years later in a car wreck, thus assumedly leaving those kids orphans once again). The last thing the world needs, especially the cinematic world, is another documentary where we are supposed to feel sorry for poor brown people and thus it comes as a great relief that one of cinema’s greatest and most singular artists created a classic documentary that is the total opposite of the Michael Moore school of ludicrously lame liberal agitprop of the unwittingly shamelessly grotesque sort. In short, Buñuel was a pinko-leftist the same way German Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn was a National Socialist.

Literal documentary or not, it is hard to imagine Werner Herzog’s underrated second feature Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) without the existence of Buñuel's short doc due to certain striking aesthetic similarities, especially when it comes to the ‘ecstatic truth.’ Although Buñuel would never again direct a documentary, he apparently edited together an abridged version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) featuring elements of Luftwaffe auteur Hans Bertram's Feuertaufe (1940) aka Baptism of Fire for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), but it unfortunately has never been released. While Buñuel would even demonstrate an apparent antifascist stance in later works like Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), I somehow doubt his MoMA edit of Naziland is as unflattering as his depiction of Las Hurdes in Land Without Bread. After all, as certain wise people sometimes say, you cannot polish a turd but you can certainly polish a Stahlhelm. Either way, I think it is safe to say that no modern-day leftist would believe the film was made by one of their brethren. As for the poor people of Las Hurdes, thank god that Franco could do what Buñuel’s (or, more literally, André Gide's and Jean Cocteau’s boy toy Marc Allégret’s) camera could not. Admittedly, while Land Without Bread is one of the Buñuel films that I am least likely to revisit anytime soon, if I am feeling in enough of a masochistic mood to experience very vintage human suffering, I will certainly choose it over French master auteur Alain Resnais' obscenely overrated shoah showcase Night and Fog (1956) aka Nuit et brouillard. In describing one of his later masterpieces, Manny Farber—the virtual Sam Fuller of film critics—argued in regard to Buñuel, “His glee in life is a movie of raped virgins and fallen saints, conceived by a literary old-world director detached from his actors but infatuated with his cock-eyed primitive cynicism. It's this combination of detachment and the infatuated-with-bitterness viewpoint, added to a flat-footed technique, that produces the piercingly cold images of THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL.” Of course, the same could also be said of Land Without Bread but it is exactly Buñuel’s so-called “cock-eyed primitive cynicism” that allows us to face the harsh truth of the dreadfully primitive in a wondefully wicked way that reminds one of the classic Spanish phrase: “¡Viva la Muerte!”

-Ty E

The Moon in the Gutter

2019-11-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

Personally, I cannot think of a cooler and more aesthetically appealing film title than The Moon in the Gutter (1983) aka La Lune dans le caniveau and I came to that conclusion years before I actually got around to watching French auteur Jean-Jacques Beineix’s almost grotesquely gorgeous celluloid oddity. As far as I am concerned, the film is associated with one of the biggest tragedies of cinema history in a sad cinematic scenario that rivals Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), Tod Browning's London After Midnight (1927), Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Andrzej Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe (1988), and most of gutter auteur Andy Milligan’s early films in terms of a potential masterpiece needlessly succumbing to studio stupidity, negligence and/or petty vindictiveness. Indeed, the French studio, Gaumont Film Company, absurdly and nonsensically (and, apparently, quite illegally) intentionally destroyed Beineix’s original fully-edited 4-hour and a 3-hour versions of the film to supposedly “make space” in the film vaults despite such film reels taking up relatively little space. Apparently, Gaumont, which forced the auteur to cut the film to a mere 137-minute running time (as it exists today, which, according to the filmmaker, apparently destroyed the entire “rhythm” of the film), was so unhappy that the film was such a critical and commercial box-office bomb that they took a sort of symbolic revenge for ostensibly destroying the reputation of the studio by maliciously destroying these two original cuts. In fact, Beineix, who is still haunted by the nightmarish artistic experience even to this today, only discovered of this great betrayal after assembling a 3-hour director’s cut of his subsequent feature Betty Blue (1986) aka 37° 2 le matin and requesting to give the same special director's treatment to The Moon in the Gutter.

Still, even as it exists today, the film is, at least in my less than humble opinion, Beineix’s unmitigated magnum opus and one of the greatest masterpieces among flawed masterpieces as the cinematic equivalent of a back-alley opium high where the viewer comes up and down but, not unlike the protagonist, is ultimately left in the same melancholic metaphysical hell as he began. Oftentimes feeling like it is set in a different purgatorial port city of the same narcotizingly artificially-stylized, chthonic Genet-esque cinematic universe as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982)—a film that, incidentally, was also produced by Gaumont in a big studio city—the film is masterpiece of meticulously stylized mise-en-scène where Beineix demonstrates with nil vainglorious CGI visual sophistry the great aesthetic heights of the cinematic form while lavishing the viewer with some less-than-feel-good archetypal truths. One of the key works of the so-called Cinéma du look—a movement that Fassbinder’s later films, including Querelle, aesthetically influenced—the film makes it seem as if the La Nouvelle Vague never existed and that it is merely the gothic/darkwave contribution to the ‘Tradition de qualité’ that the pedantic frogs of the Cahiers du Cinéma so passionately despised. In short, the film has more to do with Marcel Carné and Jean Cocteau than Godard and Truffaut, though it also seems to be influenced by the most obscure and esoteric of film noir flicks like Arthur Ripley's labyrinthine Cornell Woolrich adaptation The Chase (1946) and John Parker's exceedingly experimental Dementia (1955) aka Daughter of Horror.

While fiercely French in many ways, The Moon in the Gutter is actually adapted from the 1953 pulp-noir novel of the same name by Jewish-American novelist and screenwriter David Loeb Goodis—a cinephile fave that provided source material to various important directors, including Delmer Daves, Jacques Tourneur, Sam Fuller, and François Truffaut, among others—and thus has the pedigree of an eclectic cinephile’s wet dream. Attracted to the novel’s decidedly dark essence, Beineix described it as, “A totally negative story, very black, it was a dark journey with flashes of light, shimmers, glows … There was also the eruption of a particular embodiment of woman, that girl who arrives in that car, it really was the myth of the femme fatale at its purest … And then there was gnawing doubt, jealousy … In short, lots of things which affect the unconscious.” Indeed, one of the film’s greatest attributes is its ominous and oppressive oneiric essence, as the viewer is engulfed in the antihero played by Gérard Depardieu’s perversely paranoid unconscious as he grapples with his beloved late-sister’s rape-turned-suicide and the sensual charms of an almost otherworldly femme fatale portrayed by Nastassja Kinski. A film that practically reeks of tacky designer perfume, stale piss, rank pussy, and cheap beer where the Nietzschean sense of the ‘eternal feminine’ reigns supreme, The Moon in the Gutter is a film that, unlike the director’s previous big hit Diva (1981)—an enthralling exercise in action-packed style that, rather unfortunately, succumbs to quixotic xenophilia and an exceedingly embarrassing sort of racial fetishism—is hardly politically correct and is set in a wayward ghetto realm of evil obese negress stepmothers and lonely synagogue-side-suicides. In fact, instead of subscribing to some trendy quasi-marxist message like frog filmmakers from the previous generation, Beineix strived to make a completely apolitical flick, even once stating, “I am not interested in political or philosophical demonstrations, they are too simplistic. In LA LUNE DANS LE CANIVEAU there is a contrast between poverty and wealth, but it is resolved in a common distress, which is a metaphysical distress where the social divide is no longer operable.” Or, to quote the auteur again as referenced in Phil Powrie’s insightful text Jean-Jacques Beineix (2001), “I wanted to make the subconscious materialize on the screen. I didn’t want to be in the service of logic, of reality.” Exceedingly stylish, sensual, steamy, surreal and even sophisticatedly sleazy, the film is thankfully not completely senseless despite whatever certain spiritually and/or culturally cucked film critics had to say when the film was originally released.

A virtual cinematic drug, The Moon in the Gutter is a film that, not unlike Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), one need not remember the plot for it to be one of the most memorable movie experiences of your life. In fact, not unlike Scott and Gilliam’s flicks, I probably could not give a coherent description of the film’s storyline the first couple times I saw it, as to do such a thing seems almost redundant and completely missing the point (notably, somewhat ironically, the film has sort of intentionally redundant narration, as if Beineix reluctantly included it at the behest of the studio). After all, one is not compelled to critique a dream for its supposed incoherence, yet The Moon in the Gutter is hardly incoherent (in fact, the storyline is, relatively speaking, fairly simple) and it is certainly more accessible than most of David Lynch’s greatest films (and, of course, most cinephiles will probably be tempted to compare it to Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), though that would largely be pointless). In short, the film is, first and foremost, an understatedly phantasmagoric experience of the ruthlessly romantic yet ultimately demystifying sort where a seriously messed up man is in both literal and figurative reach of his greatest dream in the form of a dream girl from a dream world where the air doesn’t smell like a sort of slightly fishy salty semen and things like self-respect and dignity have actual currency.

While I cannot say I have had the luxury of being with a real rich bitch or true blueblooded aristocrat, my experience is that, the higher social class a chick, the more innately insufferable and sensually sterile she is, thus I can understand the hatred for bourgeois or—more specifically—the sapless (upper)middleclass that fears the smell of human bodies and always puts material wealth above culture and security over love and affection. In fact, out of all the women I have been with, the poorest and most low-class was also the most loving, affectionate, and sexual and she is probably the one I most regret fucking things up with, but I digress. In The Moon in the Gutter, tough street frog Gérard Delmas (Gérard Depardieu, who would later trash the film by referring to it as, “The Film in the Gutter”)—a moody and broody stevedore from a decidedly dysfunctional white trash family that includes a rather abusive uppity negro stepmother—finds himself the reluctant object of desire in a bizarre love triangle involving his main whore-cum-stepsister Bella (Victoria Abril in a role originally given to Robert De Niro's high yellow then-wife Diahnne Abbott) and the wealthy yet wild woman of his dreams Loretta (Nastassja Kinski). Unfortunately, Gérard is pretty mentally perturbed and not quite in the soundest of minds to make such a big romantic decision as he has a pathological obsession with finding the malevolent mystery man that raped his beloved sister Catherine (Katya Berger)—a virginal beauty that was apparently too pure for the pernicious lumpenprole world that ultimately destroyed her—who immediately committed suicide with the protagonist’s shaving razor. Indeed, the titular moon in the gutter is reflected via Catherine’s ruby red blood in the dark slimy alley where she abruptly committed self-slaughter in a perversely poetic scene that finds great beauty in ungodly human brutality. While technically a neo-noir flick, The Moon in the Gutter—a film that, aside from a couple scenes, was shot entirely in a studio—brings a certain preternatural glamour to the gritty as if god himself decided to polish the demented dirty work of his misbegotten (sub)human creations.

Not surprisingly considering Gérard’s obvious incestuous feelings for his dead lil sis, both Bella and Loretta look vaguely similar to Catherine to the point where the three could be sisters (in a drunken dream-sequence of the borderline necrophiliac sort, the protagonist has a somewhat erotic encounter with Catherine’s unclad corpse at the morgue, only to discover Loretta's face on said corpse). Gérard is even convinced that his alcoholic brother Frank (Dominique Pinon)—a small and grotesque frog that seems like the genetically accursed consequence of France's Alpinid majority's virtual genocide of the Huguenots—was responsible for raping Catherine, but one almost gets the sense that the protagonist is merely projecting his own sense of guilt. After all, Catherine was raped after she fled a hospital as a result of Gérard asking her, “Now you dress like a hooker?” after she went to the trouble to dress nicely for him and borrow a white dress after he was injured at work, hence the protagonist's undying guilt. Undoubtedly, Gérard’s pathological paranoia eventually rubs off onto the viewer to the point where one cannot help but even suspect the protagonist of the crime. Notably, quite unlike the mysterious murder of Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, the crime is never solved but it is almost irrelevant as The Moon in the Gutter is first and foremost a uniquely uncanny mood piece where dark dreams and repressed desires are one and the same. A miserably melancholic man that lives in a nightmare, Gérard is ultimately unable to embrace his dreams even though, rather improbably, they are practically served to him on a shiny silver platter.

Somewhat intriguingly, Gérard finds a wealthy counterpart in the form of nihilistic drunk named Newton Channing (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) who also happens to be the brother of darling dream femme Loretta. While Gérard has been left with an indelible internal wound as a result of the rape and suicide of his little sister, Newton also suffers inwardly in isolation, even while technically in the company of others, as a result of killing both his parents in an intentional car wreck that involved him insanely driving his white BMW into a big rig truck. As Bella states to Gérard in regard to Newton, “He’s weird… He doesn’t like himself” and he has decided to start lurking in the local Mikado Bar—the protagonist’s virtual second home—because he can, “...play games the rich don’t allow. Anything goes here.” As with virtually every other male character featured in the film, Gérard initially suspects that Newton, who he competes with in a bizarre ice-eating contest, might be his sister’s rapist, but instead the rich playboy unwittingly provides him with the literal/figurative girl of his dreams—a voluptuous beauty that is like both a dream lover and substitute sister—in the form of his own sister. Indeed, being his self-described “Guardian Angel,” Loretta—a gal so glamorous that wind seems to be always blowing in her hair—arrives at the Mikado Bar to pick Newton up and encounters ungentlemanly gentleman Gérard as a result.

Undoubtedly, the initial encounter between Gérard and Loretta recalls the Nietzsche poem “Accidentally a Seducer” that reads, “He shot an empty word…Into the empty blue; But on the way it met…A woman whom it slew,” as the protagonist spouts nonsense yet seems to cause the little lady to fall in love with him at first sight. Indeed, when Gérard half-jokingly gives Loretta his address after inviting her to dinner, Loretta actually shows up at the preposterous time of 2 a.m. in her fancy convertible beside a billboard that all-too-symbolically reads “TRY ANOTHER WORLD.” From there, Loretta takes the protagonist on a ride to the docks where she practically offers him a dream life with a dream girl—an almost preposterously paradisaical prospect that simply seems too unbelievable to such a terminally miserable man—and even attempts to talk him out of his gloomy defeatism, stating, “I frighten you! One day you’ll tell me. You’ll open your heart. You’ll see blue skies. A highway to the sun. Ships like birds… Gentleness… You won’t be frightened… Things’ll be fine. No one is doomed.” Instead of accepting Loretta’s quite glowingly warm embrace, Gérard literally turns his back on her and then once again visits the sad site of his sister’s murder as if to rationalize his own infuriatingly idiotic rejection of virtual romantic bliss.

While Gérard initially rebuffs Loretta’s rather bold romantic advances in an oftentimes obnoxious and even aggressive fashion, he eventually gives in, dresses virtually like Newton with a fancy suit and slicked back hair, and even marries the dream dame at an extra eerie gothic cathedral where the priest absurdly declares “Faith isn’t a matter of size” in regard to dildo-like Virgin Mary statues that are sold at the church. Needless to say, Bella—a fiery prole femme and assumed prostitute that, at one point, attempts to stab the hero with a broken bottle just because she suspects he might be cheating on her—does not take too kindly to the dubious mixed-class marriage and plots with Gérard’s pathetic dipsomaniac brother Frank to have the protagonist brutally murdered. Indeed, since life is cheap in the barf-and-feces-filled frog ghetto, Bella only has to pay a mere $100 to two ex-con thugs to have Gérard snuffed out, but the hired amateur assassins fail miserably as the protagonist has enough visceral pent-up hatred to give him the inspiration to virtually slaughter an entire army. When the protagonist confronts Bella by nonchalantly whipping out the $100 and declaring, “A guy’s life comes cheap. Here’s your money back,” she completely breaks down, practically denies culpability, and blames perennial fuck-up Frank. Naturally, Gérard decides fratricide is the answer and prepares to kill Frank, but Bella, who clearly genuinely loves the protagonist despite conspiring to kill him, attempts to stop him by telling him to leave town with Loretta, stating, “Don’t do it! Stay here! You’ll spoil everything! Listen…take your ride uptown. She’s waiting. You’re right, she loves you! Go away, never come back!” but he complains “I don’t deserve so much love.” Of course, Gérard is the sort of self-destructive guy that likes doing things the hard way and is more interested in satisfying his deep-seated desire for bloodthirsty revenge than simply embracing the more sensible route of romantic rapture with his new wife Loretta.

Although Gérard proceeds to attempt to kill his brother in the very same gutter where his sister died using the same exact razor that she used to kill herself, he is stopped at the last minute when a local painter named Jésus (Bernard Farcy)—a painfully gawky art fag that loved Catherine so much that he painted her portrait—hits him over the head with a bottle and declares, “You’re crazy! You know…he didn’t do it.” In the end, Loretta finds Gérard at the site of the suicide and softly cries, “I’m cold,” but their surreal storybook romance is not meant to be and the hero ultimately goes back to his main brown bitch Bella. Indeed, as the narrator states at the end of the film, “Gérard dreamed of a white city…of proper blinds, shady lanes…hidden tennis courts, smooth lawns… He heard the sound of fountains, of birds singing. But he was afraid of that city…of feeling out of place…of that opening door… And the woman waiting for him.”

In an excerpt that would certainly confound Marxist materialists, Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “He is now poor, but not because everything has been taken from him, but because he has thrown everything away:—what does he care? He is accustomed to find new things.—It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.” And, indeed, it is the ‘poor’ that will be confused by Gérard's decision in the end, as if it is better to be a rich automaton and married to a virtual Victoria's Secret mannequin than being yourself and married to a wonderfully wanton woman that understands everything about you, including your insatiable masculine appetite (indeed, it is no coincidence that Gérard immediately declares that he is “hungry” upon coming back to Bella in the end). Far from unconventionally picturesque ‘poverty porn,’ The Moon in the Gutter demonstrates that home is where the heart is, even if you live in a sort of nasty neo-Sodom hellhole.

Over a decade ago, my long-time girlfriend at the time, who expressed more love and passion than a dozen ‘normal’ basic bitch white girls combined, once told me that, if we ever broke up, she would eventually randomly show up unannounced at my house and assumedly cause chaos with whatever girl I might be with in a dramatic attempt to get me back. While this girlfriend, who both physically and psychologically resembled the eponymous babe portrayed by Béatrice Dalle in Betty Blue, never did this (in fact, she is currently married with a kid), sometimes I feel like I’m still waiting for her to arrive. After all, as devastatingly depicted in Maurice Pialat's classic anti-romantic We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) aka Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, it is oftentimes not until someone finally leaves your life that you realize what you have truly lost. In that sense, I somewhat suspect that if I saw The Moon in the Gutter when we were together and realized what we had (and understood her oftentimes warranted rage, which was not unlike Bella’s, as an irrational yet well-meaning expression of her love), I might not have senselessly sabotaged our relationship but, as obnoxious boomers and bourgeois people sometimes say, hindsight is 20/20.

Despite its almost ominously oneiric essence as dreamlike film filled with dream-sequences and pseudo-dream-sequences where a mensch is confronted with a dream girl and dream life, Beineix's butchered masterpiece is, in my mind, ultimately a film about embracing reality and appreciating those individuals—no matter how irreparably fucked up—that actually love you as opposed to fantasizing about idealized phantasmagoric femmes that will never exist in any tangible reality. While Nastassja Kinski’s character Loretta Channing technically does not do anything evil like attempting to get the protagonist killed (while, rather ironically, the protagonist's true love Bella does), she is still a femme fatale in a sort of figurative and symbolic sense as she puts Gérard on a precarious path that leads to the death of authenticity and selfhood (which, not coincidentally, is Loretta’s spiritually necrotic bourgeois brother Newton’s main objective, hence why he gets engaged to a nearly-ancient and, in turn, infertile, prostitute). Undoubtedly, The Moon in the Gutter is probably the only noir-ish film I can think where the femme fatale is not someone you to learn to hate, thereupon making her seem all the more preternaturally sinister on retrospect, especially on subsequent viewings of the film.

While the general storyline of The Moon in the Gutter is finally burned into my brain after multiple viewings, it will forever remain, most importantly, a cinematic drug of delirious lovelorn lunacy and paranoiac intrigue for me where—not unlike F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934), and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner—I watch for the not-altogether-mindless drugless high that sends me into a bittersweet deluge of emotions that ranges from romantic nostalgia to a sort of hypnotic regretful heartsickness, among other things. As to auteur Beineix’s main method in accomplishing this delectable dream cinema, he once noted, “I sought to make the real a bit unreal and vice versa so as to place the whole thing half-way between dream and reality. To take an example we colored the smoke coming out of a chimney-stack.” Of course, whereas Francis Ford Coppola failed terribly with his would-be-romantic exercise of absurdly ambitious artificiality One from the Heart (1982)—a film that was not a total failure in that it influenced Beineix to cast Nastassja Kinski—The Moon in the Gutter manages the conjure the darkly soulful and archetypically sound in a film where most characters are virtual ciphers and artifice acts as a sort of cockeyed spiral stairway to the primordial truth, at least as far as sex and romance are concerned and, in that sense, it could not be more immaculately (not to mention aesthetically pleasingly) titled.

In describing his artistic objective with the film, Beineix once confessed his intent was to create a completely new cinematic language, remarking, “I asked myself what the essence of cinema was, what was the language of the image. I sought another dimension of this language. The cinema is not necessarily at the service of a story, in other words chronology and reality; it is perhaps also at the service of matter.” While it is questionable as to whether or not he truly accomplished this (notably, pseudo-arthouse hack Olivier Assayas of all people went so far as to write in Cahiers du cinéma that “…there is no film”), there is no denying that The Moon in the Gutter is a singular cinematic achievement and that Beineix would never again create something quite as aesthetically alluring, cinematically revolutionary, or endlessly engulfing. Indeed, while Betty Blue is an eccentrically epic amour fou masterpiece and Roselyne and the Lions (1989) aka Roselyne et les lions manages to be both classically romantic and carnally carnival-esque, they just cannot compete with the strangely cold blue ‘heat’ that practically radiates from the screen of the deceptively darkly romantic celluloid dream that is The Moon in the Gutter. As for Beineix's latest and certainly least greatest features IP5: The Island of Pachyderms (1992) aka IP5: L'île aux pachydermes—an aesthetically excremental exercise in would-be-zany xenophilia and negrophilia with an ugly and would-be-triumphantly-morally-retarded unhinged untermench spirit—and Mortal Transfer (2001) aka Mortel transfert—a sometimes visually alluring yet ultimately vain and superficial genre-bender without brains—they are probably best left completely forgotten, as it pains one to be reminded that they were directed by the same dude that started his filmmaking career with three arguable masterpieces.

Not unlike Michael Powell with Peeping Tom (1960) and John Schlesinger with The Day of the Locust (1975), the critical and commercial failure of The Moon in the Gutter seems to have destroyed Beineix's artistic will as if he ultimately became too afraid to once again test the bounds of cinematic possibility. Largely unsung auteur Eckhart Schmidt (Der Fan, Alpha City)—a sort of Teutonic low-budget Beineix that also took a romantic anti-intellectual approach to cinema—attempted something similar the same year as The Moon in the Gutter with his underrated nocturnal celluloid nachtmahr Das Gold der Liebe (1983) aka The Gold Of Love, which is like a punk/new wave Dementia meets Eyes Wide Shut, but few other filmmakers have dared to take a similarly darkly dreamlike path lest they be accused of aesthetic (crypto)fascism or some nonsensical horseshit. Needless to say, the cinematic neo-romanticism of Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)—a protege of queer agitpropagandist Rosa von Praunheim of all people—seems like frivolous fluff when compared to Beineix's greatest films, hence his collaboration with the Wachowski weirdos.

Clearly working from sort of quasi-Freudian perspective, Phil Powrie sees the ending of The Moon in the Gutter as extremely negative and tragic, arguing, “Gérard’s crime is to have desired his sister, and therefore his mother. His punishment fits the crime: he will marry his stepsister and be hen-pecked by his stepmother, as his father was before him, the ideal Loretta forever refused so that he can continue to expiate incest and voluntary castration.” While Powrie has made a fairly good argument given the details of the film, my personal experience tells me otherwise and I am reminded of the Carl Jung quote, “May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience.” Love aside, the film also deserves credit for rivaling Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) in terms of featuring what is probably the most shamelessly sensual and exquisitely beauteous female corpse in cinema history. Indeed, when it comes down to it, I would not be surprised if both the public and critics alike still have not forgiven Beineix or The Moon in the Gutter—a film that should have a cult following that at least rivals any retarded slasher franchise—for providing the world with the most devilishly delectable of dead dames in a flavorsomely fucked film opening that reminds viewers of the unfortunate truth that sometimes women are just as hot when their bodies are cold. In that sense, if you ever needed evidence for the innate anti-aesthetic idiocy of the Bechdel bull-dyke test, Beineix's films, especially The Moon in the Gutter, nuke such flippant feministic pseudo-intellectual ordure altogether as one exquisite female corpse will always beat hundreds of ugly squawking hens.

-Ty E

La Bête Humaine

2019-11-18T06:15:00.002-08:00

Genetic taints and evil loose women are two of my favorite cinematic subjects (and, of course, subjects in general), so it is only natural that La Bête Humaine (1938) aka The Human Beast aka Judas Was a Woman—a film that also belongs to my preferred frog cinema movement of ‘poetic realism’—is unquestionably my favorite Jean Renoir (The Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game) film; or so I just discovered this past week after watching the film for the very first time and joyously discovering a totally timeless and haunting romantic tragedy that reminded why thots kill. Indeed, featuring the ultimate femme fatale portrayed by Simone Simon—a little lady with the perfect femme fatale pedigree as a half-heeb/half-guido mischling with a rather revealing taste for less-than-handsome wealthy chosenites—the film undoubtedly sparked my less than latent misogyny and contempt for cold cunts that use their cunts as weapons. While Renoir’s masterpiece might be nearly ancient in terms of age, it is as fresh as a Mormon teenage girl in terms of offering forgotten perennial wisdom, which you will not find in contemporary cinema, in regard to the ways of women; or at least the sort of woman that is a true whore and beyond any sort of redemption when it comes to love. A rare cinematic example of the degeneration theories of Judaic proto-eugenicists Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau where a scheming whore meets her match in the form of a genetically forsaken train engineer that is plagued with sexually homicidal tendencies due to being the degenerate descendant of countless hardcore dipsomaniacs, La Bête Humaine—a film that is more or less an extremely abridged adaptation of the 1890 Émile Zola novel of the same name—is also a grim yet gorgeous celluloid love letter to love, sex, death, and locomotives where man and machine almost seem to become one in terms of visceral intensity of libido. While the film does not feature a literal train wreck, the film’s protagonist’s cataclysmic demise is certainly an apt substitute as he literally and figuratively kills his love and then himself in the end after succumbing to the contrived charms of a cunty conniving succubus.

By sheer happenstance, I watched La Bête Humaine for the first time only days before watching the documentary Maurice Pialat: Love Exists (2007) where criminally unsung French auteur Maurice Pialat (À Nos Amours, Under the Sun of Satan)—a new personal favorite who, in terms of unmasking the nasty nuances of humanity, is like a sort of heterosexual frog Fassbinder—credits Renoir’s masterpiece as influencing his decision to become a filmmaker, stating, “The film that made me realize…I guess you could call it a vocation…It was the film that, at that time, oddly…We’d see a film one, never twice. But this one I saw 3 or 4 times. It was Renoir’s LA BÊTE HUMAINE.” In the same doc, Pialat also expresses his love and admiration for Renoir’s technically-unfinished 40-minute featurette A Day in the Country (1946) aka Partie de champagne. As a recently devout Pialat fan, I am not surprised by his assessment of Renoir’s work as these two films express a purity of aesthetic spirit and sort of perverse poetic humanistic realism that certainly transcends the director’s more famous flicks like The Grand Illusion (1937), The Rules of the Game (1939), and The River (1951). In fact, even Renoir’s The Southerner (1945)—a sort of proto-neorealist exercise that was heavily influenced by the documentary work of New Deal propagandist Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty—does not come close to these films in terms of presenting certain archetypal truths. Depicting the ultimate femme fatale from hell in a petite doll-like form, La Bête Humaine is a beauteously bleak bittersweet tragedy where forsaken genetic destiny and feminine evil collide and ultimately cancel each other out in an almost ironical fashion. While Renoir’s film contains a fairly simple yet sensually-charged (anti)love story that would make for a nice subplot on Twin Peaks, it is ultimately a timeless tale about the miserable absurdity of human relationships, especially of the ‘romantic’ sort where the hopelessly despoiled conspiring whore finally meets her match in the murderously passionate male genetic degenerate. In short, the central ‘couple’ was practically made for one another in the worst sort of way in what seems like a sick joke of fate.

Notably, in her magnum opus Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Camille Paglia—a virtual degenerate dago dyke Spengler—remarks in regard to male’s greatest weakness, “Love is the spell by which he puts his sexual fear to sleep.” Despite knowing full well that he gets the homicidal urge to strangle women to death when sexually aroused, La Bête Humaine protagonist Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin)—a strong and stoic workaholic that is able to repress his well-hidden deep-seated sadness via his virtual lust for train work—makes the mistake of a lifetime by falling in love with a married harlot named Séverine Roubaud (Simone Simon) who he knows full well was involved in a murder. The bastard broad of a lecherous maid, Séverine—a pernicious pedomorphic parasite that lives off bad men yet then has the audacity to cry for herself when said bad men treat her badly—certainly has a stereotypical whore background and her involvement in the robbery-cum-murder of her wealthy godfather, ‘Grandmorin’ (Jacques Berlioz), was partly a means to appease the undying jealously of her rather pathetic husband Roubaud (Fernand Ledoux). Indeed, when Roubaud discovers that his beloved moonfaced wife is a serial liar and that she did not disclose the fact that she was being defiled by Grandmorin (who the film hints may actually be her biological father) when she was still just a little girl before the two got married (as he reasonably remarks, he did not realize his was marrying an “old man’s cast-off”), he irrationally decides robbing and killing the old fart will somehow help him deal with his murderously malicious jealousy. Rather ironically, instead of dissolving his jealousy, the coldblooded killing of Grandmorin leads to Roubaud’s flagrant cuckolding as Séverine is forced to utilize her fierce femme fatale wiles on the film’s hapless yet hearty hero Jacques Lantier as he is a passive witness at the scene of the crime. Unfortunately for Séverine, Lantier is a man with a genetic taint that causes him to ‘see red’ when sexually aroused and the femme fatale might not have many talents but she does know how to prime a guy's pump.

In what proves to be the perfect setting for an inordinately fluidly moving and rhythmically immaculate film, the murder of Grandmorin takes place on a train. As a man of such fiery passions, it is quite fitting that Lantier is a train engineer, though his co-worker Roubaud—a somewhat sad and pathetic fellow with a degree of superficial charm and certain antisocial qualities—might not be the best choice for deputy stationmaster at Le Havre. While Roubaud clearly cares more about his wanton wife Séverine than his job, Lantier is so proud of his job that he describes his train as his “wife,” even stating quite joyously, “I’m already married to Lison. She’s good enough for me.” Of course, Lantier has good reason to prefer his work to any sort of woman, as he nearly strangles to death an (ex)lover named Flore (Blanchette Brunoy)—a voluptuous blonde beauty that rather enjoys mocking men sans the protagonist—near the beginning of the film as the two attempt to make love on a grassy hill. Rather symbolically, it is only when a train passes by that Lantier falls out of his homicidal haze and releases poor Flore (who is not nearly as nice in Émile Zola’s source novel) from his seemingly demonic grip. As Lantier explains to Flore in regard to the strange nature of his aberrant actions, “I didn’t even know what I was doing […] It’s like this haze fills my head and twists everything out of shape. I start feeling like a mad dog. I never drink, mind you. Even a drop and I go crazy. I feel like I’m paying for all those fathers and grandfathers who drank. All those generations of drunkards who poisoned my blood and saddled me with this madness. It’s a terrible thing. But I love you with all my heart. So much that I was afraid to come here.” Despite nearly killing her, Flore still expresses her desire to marry Lantier, but the protagonist seems to love her too much to put her in such a precarious predicament where every potential sex act could bring more literal meaning to the French phrase La petite mort. Needless to say, succubus Séverine—a deceptively cutesy ice queen that practically drenches men with perfumic pussy juice with her mere sweet-eye glance—makes for a more fitting lover for lady-killer Lantier, especially after she attempts to get him to kill her husband and thus loses any marginal degree of empathy the viewer might have originally granted her.

Not only is Séverine a superlatively salacious slut that has no qualms about getting involved in the coldblooded killing of a godfather that apparently provided her much materially, but she also seems to really bask in such sadistic seductress savagery as demonstrated by the fact that she slyly smirks while stating, “There must be a way to win over a fellow like that” after coming to the instinctual decision to seduce Lantier and, in turn, cheat on her husband. Of course, considering her almost vampiric good-looks, Séverine—a virtual proto-goth girl that knows how to drain a man of both his emotional and ejaculatory juices—does not have to do much to completely seduce Lantier despite the fact that the protagonist is fully aware that she and her husband were responsible for the dubious demise of Grandmorin. In fact, even when a goofy poor prole named Cabuche (Jean Renoir in the most unforgettable acting role of his career) is charged with the murder, Lantier still cannot bring himself to tell the truth as sassy slut Séverine has already completely invaded his mind and compromised his godforsaken soul. As more than hinted by an unforgettable scene where Lantier and Séverine have a long coital session in a muddy shack that symbolizes the purity (or lack thereof) of their unsavory union, the two seem to have great sexual chemistry so it is only natural that their uniquely ungodly romance eventually concludes with the most permanent of releases.

Not merely satisfied with simply cuckolding her long-suffering husband, Séverine soon conspires to have Lantier kill Roubaud. Indeed, Séverine dubiously promises to be Lantier’s wifey if he kills her husband, as if she would not do the same exact thing to him in the future if she got the chance. The most shamelessly flagrant of femme fatales, Séverine even follows Lantier—a fairly uncomplicated man that sentimentally dreams of a simple future where he comes home from work everyday to a wife that loves him—along and provides him with inspirational kisses on his first failed attempt to kill Roubaud. Of course, Lantier does not want to kill Roubaud and when his conscience gets the best of him only seconds before he is about to bash in the brains of the stationmaster during a quiet night at the tracks, Séverine immediately expresses her dissatisfaction by disappearing into the night like a runaway Maenad looking for a new victim. Fully committed to becoming a young widow, Séverine immediately begins using various forms of manipulation to inspire Lantier to kill, including openly flirting with much younger men and saying contrived melodramatic bullshit like, “There’s no way forward for us now. We can’t go any further. Tomorrow will be just like yesterday: the same grief and sorrow. It doesn’t really matter. What happens, happens.” Not unlike most women, it is hard to tell if Séverine is telling the truth or merely strategically exploiting some manipulative distortion of the truth, but she does seem to be expressing some honesty when she remarks to Lantier, “We should have stayed like we were in the beginning, when we loved each other but didn’t pursue it. You remember those innocent walks we used to take? They helped me forget about Grandmorin. When you’ve experienced all the disgusting things I knew as a young girl, it’s madness to hope for a true love of your own.” Indeed, aside from revealing the female tendency toward embracing escapism at all costs when being confronted with even the slightest degree of discomfort, Séverine’s remark hints at the incapacity for a whore to actually truly love someone. Just like Grandmorin and Roubaud, Lantier would be nothing more than a means to an end for Séverine were he to carry out the killing. Luckily, a genetic taint intervenes and Séverine’s venomous vaginal menace is eradicated from the world.

Rather interestingly, in his classic (yet scientifically dubious) text Degeneration (1892) aka Entartung, pioneering Zionist theorist and eugenicist Max Nordau argues that genetic degeneration is a sort of self-solving problem as degenerates do not tend to reproduce. Undoubtedly, this can certainly be said of protagonist Lantier and his beloved femme fatale Séverine. Aside from randomly impulsively murdering Séverine in her bed instead of her husband (as he originally intended), Lantier is so consumed with lovesick grief and guilt that he soon commits suicide by jumping off his beloved train Lison, thus leaving his best friend and co-worker Pecqueux (Julien Carette) behind to pick up the pieces. Shortly after committing the killing and before arriving at work to eventually commit suicide, Lantier—like a train that has derailed and is about to smash into eternity—forcefully treads down the train tracks in an unforgettable scene that anticipates the similarly bleak conclusion of Peter Lorre’s sole directorial effort The Lost One (1951) aka Der Verlorene. Not unlike Lorre’s character, Lantier is a virtual walking and talking ghost after killing his lover and thus his suicide seems like not much more than an incidental detail from a tragic wasted life. As Pecqueux remarks while looking at the corpse of his dead comrade, “Poor guy. How he must have suffered to come to this. I haven’t seen him look so peaceful in a long time.” Notably, Lantier’s corpse is found in a place near train tracks that looks strikingly similar to where the protagonist almost strangled to death his (ex)lover Flore at the beginning of the film in a poetic scene that underscores the tragically accursed nature of his love life; or literal La petite mort.

While La Bête Humaine has many simple (yet perennial) themes, one of the more obvious yet easily overlooked ones is the incapacity of man and woman ever becoming one despite the seemingly indomitable force of attraction that might have initially thrust them together. Indeed, as Pecqueux wisely states to Lantier, “Love is best early on, before you know each other well, when you’re both on your best behavior.” Of course, had Lantier actually killed Roubaud and gotten away with it, sinful slut Séverine would have no need to be on her best behavior and would probably immediately begin cuckolding the protagonist as being a homicidally hypergamic ho is, of course, her recklessly whorish nature as the femme fatale par excellence. In that sense, Séverine is the ugly extreme of femininity and, in turn, one of cinema’s greatest archetypical villainesses. As for Lantier, he is a sad symbol of male naïvety when it comes to the so-called fairer sex and the potentially deadly blinding that comes with love. As La Bête Humaine rather viscerally reveals, it only takes one woman to come along to destroy a happy man that has passionately mastered a trade—not coincidentally, a trade that no woman could ever master (which is something Renoir really underscores during the film's unforgettably triumphant opening scene where Gabin's character looks quite joyously glorious as he operates the train as if it is an extension of both his body and soul). Of course, human progress is largely the story of man’s instinctual desire to impress women, yet it is ironically oftentimes women or womanly men (read: Weininger) that impedes this progress. While La Bête Humaine does not express the sentiment that a man should find a woman that inspires and supports his work and evolution as an artist or artisan, the film certainly reveals the sort of woman one must avoid: the whore; or the reproductively retrograde harpy that uses her sex as a deleterious weapon for infantile person gain.

As Paglia noted in regard to the sort of cuntcentric creature that La Bête Humaine delightfully depicts, “The femme fatale can appear as Medusan mother or as frigid nymph, masquing in the brilliant luminosity of Apollonian high glamour. Her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power.” Personally, I can say that virtually every single woman that I have ever ‘known’ embodied these anti-qualities to some degree at some point, for the femme fatale, not unlike like male lust killer, is just the ultimate ugly extreme of feminine evil personified. As to why one might want to rethink the opportunity to fuck a whore—no matter how hopelessly hot—Paglia offered some unsettling food for thought when she wrote, “I follow Freud, Nietzsche, and Sade in my view of the amorality of the instinctual life. At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts. We are only for something by being against something else. People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger, are blocking from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they block the hostile clashings of their dream life. Family romance operates at all times. The femme fatale is one of the refinements of female narcissism, of the ambivalent self-directedness that is completed by the birth of a child or by the conversion of spouse or lover into child.” Undoubtedly, La Bête Humaine depicts a sort of idealized version of the femme fatale that has enough agency in terms of carefully calculating her kills, but the modern-day world seems plagued with a new sort of degenerate whore (of the usually Cluster B sort) that, completely incapable of love (let alone keeping a man), uses her body to defile as many men as possible as a sort of pathetic substitute for a real relationship (as if a bloated ‘body count’ is not an expression of self-hatred/self-annihilation, at least for women). Of course, just like the archetypical femme fatale, this tragic degenerated ‘failed femme fatale’ will bring chaos and destruction to your life, albeit of the totally nonsensical nihilistic sort.

Notably, near the end of his autobiography My Life and My Films (1974), Jean Renoir notes while singling out some of his best films, “Whether the setting is natural, or imitates Nature, or is deliberately artificial, is of little importance. I used external truth in so-called ‘realistic’ films like LA CHIENNE and LA BÊTE HUMAINE, and apparently total artificiality in films like LA PETITE MARCHANDE D’ ALLUMETTES and LE CARROSSE D’OR. I have spent my life experimenting with different styles, but it all comes down to this: my different attempts to arrive at the inward truth, which for me is the only one that matters.” And, undoubtedly, La Bête Humaine certainly achieves this truth in a manner that, not unlike Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer, is akin to the raw rhythmic precision of a locomotive in Mussolini’s Italy and does so with a stark brutalism that makes it hard to believe it was directed by the same auteur that dreamed up the singularly goofy and relatively lighthearted Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). While a penetratingly pessimistic film for its time, the romantic realm nowadays certainly resembles something more in tune with Delphic delirium and purgatorial paranoia of André Delvaux’s masterpiece One Night... a Train (1968) aka Un Soir, un Train where, among other things, a surreal apocalyptic nightmare scenario offers a temporary reprieve from a catastrophic train accident. Still, despite its age and relation to the present, Renoir’s film is an all-around decided downer and a film that even transcends the auteur's previous masterpiece La Chienne (1931) aka The Bitch—a film so unforgettably stark and pessimistic that Fritz Lang remade it as the film noir Scarlet Street (1945)—in terms of devastating anti-romantic dejection.

In his excellent tome Jean Renoir: A Biography (2012), French film critic Pascal Mérigeau underscores the all-encompassingly forsaken spirit of the film when he notes that, “Of all the films directed by Renoir in the thirties, LA BÊTE HUMAINE is the one that could be said to resemble a film by Renoir the least […] In choosing to ascribe Lantier’s wound to heredity, as announced by a quotation from the Zola novel at the beginning of the film, the director evokes a fate that at the time would stick to Gabin’s roles one-screen, condemning to certain death some of the characters he played. Stretching from Pepel in THE LOWER DEPTHS to Jacques Lantier in LA BÊTE HUMAINE are all the hopes born of the Popular Front and abandoned along the way, and everything Renoir liked to believe, or pretended to want to believe. That dark fate is shared with the other main characters […] Never in Renoir’s work has fate had such crushing weight. Lantier cannot stand it, and he kills himself by throwing himself off the top of la Lison as it is running at top speed, whereas in the novel Pecqueux and he kill each other. ‘They’ll be found without heads or feet, two bloody trunks still pressed together, as if to suffocate each other.’”

At the risk of sounding like a humorless philistine, one of the reasons I liked La Bête Humaine so much and was totally shocked by it is because its totally devoid of the sort of the satirical silliness that one expects from a Renoir flick (in fact, the only goofy aspect of the film is Renoir's admittedly quite humorous performance as a bombastic boor). Of course, the fact that Renoir opted to not use some of the more darker elements of Zola's source novel and changing of Lantier's death from brutal murder to guilt-ridden sucide reveals how much of a hopeless humanist that the filmmaker really was. Aditionally, there is no doubt that the film owes much of its pathos and melancholic intensity to lead Jean Gabin as demonstrated by the actor's similar perturbingly potent performances in classic films like Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows (1938) aka Le Quai des brumes, among various other examples. Naturally, being a great artist, Renoir was even great when dealing with subjects and moods that were not exactly innate as the La Bête Humaine underscores (and, as Nietzsche noted, there is “praise in choice” as “The artist chooses his subjects; that is his mode of praising,” hence Renoir's use of Zola's nasty novel). As to Renoir's support of idiotic leftist politics, Nietzsche also offered a clue when he wrote, “Liberality is often only a form of timidity in the rich.” Luckily, Renoir was not timid when it came to whores and genetic taints.

As to the value of a film like Renoir's in our certainly more degenerate and gynocentric age where virtually every form of sexual sickness is celebrated by everything from public schools to multinational corporations and virtually every aspect of society is meant to appeal to the petty whims and wants of female narcissism while normal heterosexual male behaviors are routinely pathologized and treated as grotesquely criminal, I am reminded of Paglia's words, “The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed. She is the spectre of the West's bad conscience about nature. She is the moral ambiguity of nature, a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.” In a world where the dumb fictional dragon bitch of Game of Thrones is celebrated as a hero among grown wine-addled women, a sapless modern witch like Elizabeth Warren is a serious presidential candidate, and a half-retarded autist-cum-downsie like Greta Thunberg is taken seriously by the U.N., a classic femme fatale like the one portrayed by Simone Simon seems almost refreshing. Luckily, as Paglia also notes, “Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be ‘fixed’ by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society.” After all, there will always be femme fatales like the one featured in La Bête Humaine, but Warren and Thunberg are special aberrations that come with an absurdly abnormal repressed society of the morally and culturally inverted sort where the complete transvaluation of values has made the tranny queen and the culture-distorting ex-ghetto-dweller king. In that sense, it is better to become a happy victim of an old school femme fatale like Simon than live in a world where fecund-free feminist feces like Ghostbusters (2016) exists.

-Ty E

De Palma

2019-11-11T05:38:00.003-08:00

Unlike superlatively soulless anti-poets-cum-pop-artists like Quentin Tarantino and prosaically pretentious pseudo-arthouse posers like Darren Aronofsky, who I will always loathe with an unrivaled passion, Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill, Scarface)—a virtual deracinated wop Hitchcock, albeit even more materialistic and pathologically-inclined—is a filmmaker that I used to really, really hate but have somewhat warmed up to over the years, in part because I look at him and his oeuvre from a quite different perspective than when I initially judged his work. Indeed, when comparing De Palma to great cinematic artists like Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer or truly subversive auteurs like Fassbinder and Pasolini, his films seem like shallow exercises in masturbatory technical aptitude and excess-ridden escapism, but when one looks at him like his hero Alfred Hitchcock (who, not surprisingly, came from an engineering background that involved, “mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation”) as a sort of hyper rational scientific and mathematical-minded nerd of sorts as opposed to an intuitive artist or poet (in fact, De Palma first studied Physics, Math, and Russian in college), his films can be appreciated as sort of insanely immaculately stylized sleaze and the masterful expressions of a corpse-cold megalomaniacal mind; or, in short, the diseased Faustian male mind of modernity. In short, De Palma is a sort of ‘tyrannical technical auteur’ with the virtual mind of an Aspergery surgeon (which was his much resented father’s trade) that somewhat curiously got involved in the art of cinema, yet an auteur nonetheless as his entire body of work is riddled with the same obsessive themes/tropes (e.g. perverted voyeurs, slutty/bitchy blondes, antisocial antiheroes, political conspiracy/corruption, etc.) that one would expect from an artist with his own distinct Weltanschauung.

While De Palma still makes films, he is clearly well past his prime and has now become, not unlike his American New Wave/New Hollywood buddies like Peter Bogdanovich and especially Martin Scorsese, a sort of prematurely enshrined cinematic hero and legend among young filmmakers that fetishize that era (without question, out of all the modern young filmmakers that are obsessed with this period, Paul Thomas Anderson, who is like the cinematic broad of Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, has been the most successful in in terms of capturing its spirit). Undoubtedly, probably the greatest example of this new De Palma hero worship is the hardly-popular documentary De Palma (2015) co-directed by fellow mischling filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow where the eponymous auteur gets in virtual VH1 Behind the Music mode and summarizes his entire career in a fairly candid and vaguely personalized fashion that emphasizes his professional highs and lows (yet mostly ignores his failed marriages, children, etc.). Just as Bogdanovich once did the same by promoting the work of older cinematic heroes like Orson Welles and John Ford, Baumbach followed in this tradition by not only producing the De Palma doc but also co-producing (with fellow exceedingly emasculated hipster humorist Wes Anderson) the mostly mediocre screwball comedy She's Funny That Way (2014). Rather unfortunately, quite unlike Bogdanovich, who certainly paid his dues in terms of cinematic research, these younger hipster filmmakers seem to be way less literate and cultivated than their filmic forefathers so instead of getting something like the classic film text Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966) by François Truffaut (which, incidentally, acted as the subject of a 2015 documentary of the same name directed by Kent Jones), we get a sort of less involved documentary equivalent where the filmmaker is never seriously challenged but instead offers a mostly chronological summary of his failures and successes while (rightly) condemning the corrupt industry that oftentimes failed him as a filmmaker. Indeed, as De Palma states in the doc, “The Hollywood system we work in, it does nothing but destroy you. There’s nothing good about it in terms of creativity. So, you’re battling a very difficult system, and all the values of that system are the opposite of to what goes into making original, good movies.” Starting in the underground as someone influenced by everything from static Warhol trash to Michelangelo Antonioni's existential (anti)melodramas and learning the trade by making propaganda for the NAACP and amateur shorts for underground film festivals, De Palma's life has certainly been one long strange cinematic journey so it is not surprising that Baumbach and Paltrow's 107-minute doc feels like the CliffsNotes version of his career.

Aside from a couple exceptions, including Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972) and the apparently-uneven commercial sci-fi-horror-thriller The Fury (1978), I am very familiar with De Palma’s oeuvre and even went to the effort of watching his endearingly crude experimental cinephiliac short Woton's Wake (1962), formative meta-horror feature Murder a la Mod (1968), and ‘avant-garde’ split-screen doc Dionysus in '69 (1970), so I am very well aware that the auteur has a big veiny pulsating hard-on for Hitchcock and, to a lesser extent, Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, De Palma’s glaring flaunting of these influences is one of the reasons that I initially found his films to be so outstandingly annoying, as I may be a cinephile but it is hard for me to respect a filmmaker that knows a lot about cinema but very little bit about real-life (not to mention, culture, philosophy, etc.). Yet, as the documentary, which rather fittingly begins with footage from Vertigo, reveals, De Palma’s personality is indubitably intertwined in his work as he is, not unlike a character from one of his many films, a voyeuristic pervert of sorts that not only played peeping tom on his philandering father, but also broke into his padre’s office to get photographic evidence of these traumatic extramarital excursions (not surprisingly, as he alludes to in the doc, De Palma is a mommy's boy). While he does not say it outright, De Palma recognizes he is an exceedingly emotionless prick that, due to circumstances, was forced by circumstance to develop a fighting spirit, or as he explains in a relatively cold and collected fashion, “I lived in a family full of these incredible egotists who seemed to be very insensitive about the kind of damage they were doing to each other and my middle brother is very sensitive. I don’t feel that he was powerful enough to stand up to these forces. I used to protect him all the time. He doesn’t have the kind of combativeness that I have. So, it would be like this little kid trying to say, ‘Stop shouting, it’s not his fault.’ And nobody would pay any attention to me and I was basically ineffective, and I became very tough because of that.” Indeed, while De Palma did not get the opportunity to cut up human flesh like his father, he got to cinematically simulate it many times in a highly sensationalized fashion and ultimately project such unsavory fantasies to millions of people from around the world via his fucked films. In short, De Palma's films, which are big on a certain unnerving soullessness and artifice, are the natural, albeit patently perverted, consequence of the innate soullessness and artifice of suburbia.

In the doc, De Palma makes it quite clear that he was big on babes from an early age and was prone to do stupid things to impress them, including quite characteristically secretly filming an all-female sex ed class. Naturally, the auteur would eventually use his success as a filmmaker to become a would-be pussy-magnet of sorts and this led to three curiously short-lived failed marriages, including his first (and longest) marriage to Dressed to Kill (1980) and Blow Out (1981) star Nancy Allen (who undoubtedly owes the best roles of her career to De Palma). Not exactly the handsomest or most kindhearted of bourgeois goombah chaps, it is not easy to see why it might be somewhat hard for De Palma—a reasonably educated fellow from a well-off yet dysfunctional upper-middleclass family—to keep a dame, but there seems to be more complicated reasons, namely his obscenely obsessive workaholic loner mentality. Indeed, as the filmmaker proudly boasts in the doc, “That’s the upside of being a loner, for the most part, you can suddenly say, ‘This isn’t working.’” Somewhat surprisingly considering his dorky exterior, De Palma also reveals an alpha-male-mentality when it comes to women and work, even boasting in the doc, “People in your life can be threatened by your intense concentration, your complete immersion in what you’re doing. My true wife is my movie, not you.” Of course, this also explains De Palma’s sheer and utter lack of a knack for the truly romantic despite his flagrant obsession for fine (unclad) female flesh. In that sense, De Palma’s films are about as sexually mature as the sort of slasher trash that he wonderfully parodies in a Psycho-esque fashion at the beginning of Blow Out. Undoubtedly, it is also fitting that De Palma’s failed Nicholas Cage vehicle Snake Eyes (1998)—a morally confused political-thriller that begins with a bang but fizzles out like lame sex—concludes on a question mark as far as the semi-sleazy antihero Rick Santoro’s romantic interests are concerned. While De Palma might be a sometimes obnoxiously formulaic filmmaker, he’s also somewhat of a realist and cynic that knows nothing in life is guaranteed, especially where love is concerned.

As his incredibly uneven Godardian comedy Greetings (1968)—a film even more insufferably dated than Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) and La Chinoise (1967)—reveals in a rather obnoxious fashion, De Palma is a proud draft-dodger and he even goes so far as to detail his experiences in a shamelessly self-satisfied manner in the doc, remarking with a certain sickening degree of bourgeois chutzpah, “I mean, if you wanted to stay out of the war, and you were a middle-class kid, you could figure out a way to do it. I finally had to go in and I had a letter from a doctor. I took everything to make me allergic, so I could hardly breathe. I was up all night and I was running around, wheezing. They took me right to the psychiatrist. I had to dead stare right at his forehead and talked about my homosexual feelings. I was a communist. I was a homosexual. I was crazy. And I think with my letter from my doctor, that got me out.” While I can certainly see why someone would not want to fight in the Vietnam War, De Palma—a rather soft guy that seems like he's never even been in a fistfight—would go on to cinematically heap insult on injury to the young vets of his generation by directing the trying antiwar turd Casualties of War (1989) where he uses his privileged position as a famous filmmaker to depict GIs as sociopathic rapist killers of the inordinately ravenous redneck sort (and, of course, it is urban half-Hebrew Sean Penn of all putrid people portraying such a preposterous caricature).

Aside from working with rather redundant material on a case that had already been covered almost two decades earlier in a more intriguing and subversive fashion by German auteur Michael Verhoeven’s O.K. (1970)—a film so controversial that it literally caused the end of the 1970 Berlin International Film Festival after the jury president, overrated Hollywood maverick George Stevens, demanded that the flick be removed, thereupon resulting in the resignations of the festival directors—De Palma’s Vietnam War flick is pure sensationalized shit; or, more specifically, grotesquely emotionally manipulative celluloid manure as directed by a shameless draft-dodger that actually dares to shit on men that were considerably less fortunate than him. After all, De Palma's Scarface collaborator Oliver Stone might have some rather retarded political beliefs, but he at least served bravely in the Vietnam War (where he was injured twice in combat) and thus earned the right to direct a film like Platoon (1986), which is naturally totally superior to Causalities of War. Notably, De Palma would do almost the same exact thing with his all-the-more-insufferable digital diarrhea pseudo-doc Redacted (2007). Aside from being audaciously aberrant agitprop of the lowest order, this positively putrid abortion demonstrates De Palma's desperation in terms of attempting to be relevant as a filmmaker as it is found-footage-feces—a popular cheap gimmick at the time it was made—where the auteur discards what he does best in terms of technical prowess. Needless to say, Palma's war films have about as much sincerity and credibility as a serious dramatic film about child sexual abuse as directed by Roman Polanski or Woody Allen.

Admittedly, another reason I used to have a much lower opinion of De Palma is because he is responsible for directing the favorite films of wiggers, rappers, and gutter-dwelling gangsters, including Scarface (1983) and Carlito's Way (1993), henceforth making him responsible for at least inspiring some of the most savage untermenschen criminality of the past couple decades. Indeed, I can remember being in middle school during the late-1990s and noticing that seemingly every single male negro and wigger that I encountered was sporting a Scarface t-shirt that was two or three sizes too big with matching saggy pants. In fact, it took me well over another decade to ever to gain the open-mindedness to actually watch the film as I naturally associated it with the worst sort of retarded rabble. Luckily, in the documentary, the viewer discovers that De Palma—a distinguished dork that has virtually nil in common with the ghetto lumpenproletariat that the film inspired—is seemingly disgusted by this phenomenon and refused to endorse it despite the potential for monetary reward, or as he explains in regard to the ultimate legacy of Scarface, “A decade or so later, it found its audience with the hip-hop generation. Well, since I’m not a big fan of hip-hop, I knew nothing about it until people basically told me about it. Universal came to me and asked if I would approve a hip-hop soundtrack to SCARFACE, and I said absolutely not.” Still, it is rather curious that a sheltered bourgeois boy like De Palma would inspire such insipid savage delinquency, as it reveals a certain sense of primitive sociopathy and emotional retardation. In that sense, it is no surprise that De Palma always fails miserably when it comes to depicting drama.

Despite his seemingly lifelong covert philo-semitism (aside from once being married to Jewess Gale Anne Hurd and having a daughter with her, De Palma's virtual autobiographical stand-in in Greetings and its 1970 sequel Hi, Mom! is a swarthy anti-white degenerate would-be-pornographer named ‘Jon Rubin’), De Palma has mostly shied away from PC bullshit as demonstrated by the rabid anti-wop rhetoric of Sean Connery’s heroic mick cop character Jimmy Malone in The Untouchables (1987) and the various unflattering racial caricatures featured in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), including an evil Hebraic district attorney that opportunistically uses an interracial hit-and-run case to help further his re-election. Of course, it also goes without saying that De Palma has also deeply offended various LGBT authoritarian types over the decades with his depictions of trannys and lesbians in films like Dressed to Kill and Passion (2012). One also cannot forget that De Palma has mostly been an equal-opportunity-hater when it comes to the so-called fairer sex, as you arguably won’t find a film with a more unflattering depiction of horny high school girls than his classic Stephen King adaptation Carrie (1976). Even in his later failures like Femme Fatale (2002) and The Black Dahlia (2006), De Palma manages to seamlessly create an association between feminine beauty and unbridled sociopathy, as if femininity itself—or at least femininity in its most physically fine and statuesque form—is innately deadly and destructive, but I digress.

Interestingly, in an interview with Joseph Gelmis featured in the book The Film Director as Superstar (1970) conducted when De Palma was a virtual unknown, the then-young-filmmaker would confess, “Godard’s a terrific influence, of course. If I could be the American Godard, that would be great.” Of course, De Palma, who is not even in the same universe as Godard in terms of artistic and cultural literacy (in fact, I would argue that there is more references to high kultur in an obscure Godard flick like Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991) than in De Palma's entire oeuvre), would inevitably take the virtual opposite route, which he foretold at the very end of the same interview when he stated in regard to his next film, “It’s probably going to be a Hitchcockian suspense movie, which I think will be good for us. I’d like to try a change of pace and concentrate on a technical, stylistic exercise. I’m interested in things like split-screen and 3-D. I’d like to work in a different form for a while. I wouldn’t mind doing something like PSYCHO the next time, something that reprieves me from the political and moral dilemmas of our society for a while.” Needless to say, I do not think it is a coincidence that mechanical-minded De Palma ended up a successful Hollywood filmmaker and the rather mercurial Godard would eventually isolate himself into increasing esotericism that undoubtedly reached its zenith with the 8-part avant-garde video project Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). After all, while Hitchcock—a fairly literal-minded perfectionist that was rarely genuinely poetic—merely continued to master his craft throughout his career as if he was simply focused on directing a different version of the same exact film, Godard has never stopped evolving as an artist to the point where it has had a dubious impact on his career and left him completely isolated. Of course, De Palma's evolution (or lack thereof) as a filmmaker could not be more different from Godard's, thereupon making the French auteur's early influence on the Hollywood filmmaker seem almost absurd on retrospect.

While there are many criticisms that can be made against De Palma and his films, I think it is safe to say that he is Hitchcock’s greatest and most ambitious heir, as he has cleverly utilized some of Big H’s greatest tools and techniques and taken them to their natural degenerate conclusion, at least in his greatest films like Dressed to Kill. Compared to Hitchcock's Australian disciple Richard Franklin (Patrick, Psycho II), who undoubtedly made some entertaining films despite being somewhat of a hack, De Palma seems like a great master. While one could certainly argue that François Truffaut was the superior filmmaker, I think it is safe to say to De Palma even manages to show a greater innate affinity with his uneven Vertigo-esque Schrader-penned feature Obsession (1976) to Hitch than the French auteur did with flagrantly Hitchcock-esque The Bride Wore Black (1968). Likewise, Sisters (1973) might be an obscenely onanistic hodgepodge of hyper Hitchcockian cinematic debauchery that can be accurately described as a glorified slasher, but it still works. Thankfully, De Palma has always given credit where credit is due and has never obscured his influences, even if he probably should have had more eclectic influences. Of course, if you're a very literal-minded math/science nerd type that does not understand poetry or art in general, Hitchcock—a virtual cinematic engineer—is probably the most apt filmmaker to steal from as his films were practically created in pre-production and storyboarded to death to the point where the English auteur apparently found the actual directing of the films to be the most boring part.

Naturally, in the doc, De Palma constantly references Hitchcock, though the most revealing moment comes when he remarks, “People talk about Hitchcock all the time, you know, being so influential. I’ve never found too many people that followed after the Hitchcock school except for me. Here’s a guy that developed those incredible visual storytelling vocabulary, and it’s sort of going to die with him. And I was like, the one practitioner that took up the things that he pioneered and built them into different forms in a style that I was evolving. It’s like a whole modern form that he created. Having studied a lot of directors and having lived now to practically being 70, you see that your creative periods are in—most directors are in—in their 30s, their 40s, and their 50s. They, and obviously, they can go on and make another 20 movies or 10 movies, but you’ll probably only be talking about those movies they made in their 30s, their 40s, and their 50s. You know, and I’ve always thought Hitchcock was a great example, because, you know, after VERTIGO and PSYCHO, and you can talk about THE BIRDS all you want and all the movies he made after that and then of course, the critical establishment finally caught up with him and started to write about what a genius he was. Except those movies aren’t as good as the ones he made in his 30s, his 40s, and his 50s.”

While I have to disagree with De Palma’s assessment of Hitchcock’s oeuvre (Undoubtedly, I think Vertigo and Psycho are assuredly his greatest films), the Italian-American auteur seems to have personally found a parallel with his hero in terms of the trajectories of their filmmaking careers. In my opinion, De Palma has not directed a truly great film in well over three decades. Indeed, aside from Body Double (1984) being what I would describe as the last great truly De Palmian film, I would argue that the filmmaker’s underrated genre/gender-bending horror-musical Phantom of the Paradise (1974) is also superior to anything he has done in the past three decades. Additionally, at best, I see films like The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible (1996) as not much more than expertly-crafted hack work and De Palma even more or less admits in the doc that he was chasing fame and fortune when he chose these specific highly commercial projects. While De Palma has somewhat gone back to his roots in recent years, including depicting deadly dykes in Passion and rather cynical utltra-violence and political corruption his latest Domino (2019), he seems incapable of matching his contemporary William Friedkin with a film as insanely and intoxicatingly idiosyncratic as Bug (2006) or as freshly fucked as Killer Joe (2011). In that sense, the documentary De Palma feels more like a sort of autobiographical obituary of a filmmaker than a mere career-spanning tribute. Either way, I hope I don’t live to see the day when such a film is made in honor of Noah Baumbach or his shabbos goy compatriot Wes Anderson (indeed, it is no exaggeration for me to say that De Palma is easily Baumbach’s most entertaining and least insufferable film). Compared to documentaries on European arthouse auteurs like Daniel Schmid - Le chat qui pense (2010), Mondo Lux : The Visual Universe of Werner Schroeter (2011), Roland Klick: The Heart Is a Hungry Hunter (2013), and Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands (2015), the documentary certainly feels more superficial and less arty and intimate, yet that also seems somewhat fitting considering the almost clinical filmmaking method and demeanor of its titular subject. In that sense, we should be extremely grateful that Jem Cohen did not direct the doc. I also found it rather fitting that De Palma is a one-man-show and not plagued with the sort of prosaic puffery or pedantic pontificating that typically plagues film docs featuring actors and film historians. I am not sure about De Palma's philosophical influences, but Thus Spoke De Palma would have certainly been a more appealing name for a doc about such a cinematically monomaniacal man.

Say you will about deathly dry and deracinated dago De Palma—a weird wop that attended a Quaker school as opposed to a Catholic one—but he has earned his place in cinema history by creating some of the most exciting Hollywood films during the most exciting time in Hollywood history when he could have just as easily degenerated into an autistic basement-dwelling dweeb like actor-turned-auteur Keith Gordon’s character in Dressed to Kill and today be an elderly virgin that collects action figures as inspired by film franchises created by his more money-grubbing-inclined buddies George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. One must also respect De Palma’s lifelong use of split-screen and putting the technique to better use than Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey did in their playfully plodding experimental anti-epic Chelsea Girls (1966). As to what makes a real ‘auteur,’ De Palma provides a simple yet fairly concise answer at the end of the doc when he states, “You make a certain kind of movie because that’s the way you see things. And these images keep reoccurring again and again in your movies. And that’s what makes you who you are.” As to the meaning of an uprooted guido Quaker of the spiritually vacant sort being one of the more interesting mainstream Hollywood filmmakers of his generation, Spengler certainly foresaw the future of art when he wrote, “Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be ‘believers in God,’ were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness was mirroring itself. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities.” Undoubtedly, with his hopelessly urban fetishistic post-Christian voyeuristic gaze, De Palma has—whether he knows it or not—artistically embraced the twilight of the Occident.

Undoubtedly, De Palma’s films represent—in their nonchalantly nihilistic depiction of sex and death and sheer and utter lack of authentic pathos despite constant depictions of extreme human suffering—this decidedly detached modern materialism where the figurative Nietzschean ‘Death of God’ has inevitably lead to such pathetic things as spastic scopophiliac killers and bourgeois-endorsed performance art that involves negroes raping white women (e.g. the ‘Be Black, Baby’ segment from Hi, Mom!), among other things. Of course, I would argue that Mission: Impossible is the sickest of De Palma’s films as its popularity reflects the collective cultural, artistic, and spiritual bankruptcy of the majority population (whereas, despite its degeneracy, a dreary De Palma flick like Blow Out at least recognizes an innate spiritual sickness of sorts that ripples throughout society). Likewise, Vertigo feels like a deeply spiritual film when compared to the metaphysically barren landscapes associated with virtually all of De Palma’s films. While the documentary does not make the case for De Palma being a sort of hopelessly spiritually despoiled M. C. Escher of genre filmmaking (which is how I see him), it does (largely unwittingly) demonstrate that the auteur—an anti-authority type that, somewhat paradoxically, has done quite well for himself working within the system—is a sad symptom of his era and his films are a symptomatic of his own sicknesses, or as the filmmaker states himself, “Most of my movies are about megalomania and guys that live in the insulated universes and the crazy things that happen within those insulated universes, which is something that continues to fascinate me.” In the age of technics, De Palma—a cold and almost creepily calculating character that seems to interpret every aspect of life as some sort of scientific experiment or technical problem to be rationally solved—is the auteur we deserve but probably don’t need, as no one, no matter how hopelessly cratter-brained or fiercely philistinic, deserves the ungodly horror of living in a morally and spiritually inverted world full of ebonics-literate troglodytes sporting size-XXXL Scarface t-shirts. Still, there's no denying that Dressed to Kill is one of the most shamelessly stylish films ever made, not to mention a nice escapist aesthetic antidote to the tyrannical tranny terror that has recently plagued the Occident.

-Ty E

L'Age d'Or

2019-11-04T03:32:00.000-08:00

A number of years ago, I had a somewhat peculiar experience after getting a blowjob on a large coastal island-cum-park. As my then-girlfriend and I were walking back to her car, a wild Spanish pony appeared out of nowhere on the path and scared the shit out of my lady friend due to the loud noise it made as it galloped by us. In fact, her fear was so frenetically intense that it initially scared the shit out of me too, as if I had to immediately prepare to take on a homicidal killer with nil notice. Upon getting back to my girlfriend's car, I discovered between twenty and thirty tiny deer ticks crawling up my foot and sock, which were surely the consequence of the partly wooded beachside BJ. Needless to say, when my girlfriend and I finally got home, we administered full-body cavity searches on each other shortly after sharing a long warm shower. While we did not find any ticks, my girlfriend felt something on her head a couple hours later after we were lying in bed together and I soon found myself using tweezers to carefully pull off the parasitic bloodsucker. Naturally, the gf was postively pissed and took her revenge by repeatedly brutally stabbing the less than sentient Ixodidae to death in what was a genuinely sadistic rage that I will never forget. While everything I said above really happened, I cannot help but think the story is somehow allegorical, at least after recently watching the surrealist masterpiece L'Age d'Or (1930) aka The Golden Age directed by Spanish master auteur Luis Buñuel (The Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour) and somehow saw it as a depicting something akin to my own failed love affairs. While most people might find the film to be indistinguishable from bad gibberish of the arcanely archaic sort, I somehow found a kindred spirit lurking inside the film, as if I—a proud conservative libertine and born-again post-Yockeyite—found my soul in sync with a nearly ancient film that once caused right-wing riots against commie scum.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine liking a film directed by a filmmaker that was then-flirting-with-communism and that was produced by the part-Jewish mischling descendant of the great Marquis de Sade, but a lot has changed in the Occident in the nearly-90-years since the film was first released and even some leftists back then actually had balls (also, while the film’s co-writer Salvador Dalí was literally obsessed with Hitler’s testicles, Buñuel would eventually realize that commies and other related rabble are retarded). Oftentimes feeling like a romance film created by a lovelorn schizophrenic lunatic that dreams of engaging in orgies in hell with the mangled corpse of Pasolini and de Sade in the vain hope that he will finally get over his forsaken perennial lovesickness, L'Age d'Or is unequivocally a rare piece of technically-quite-antiquated celluloid iconoclasm that still has the power to offend and disturb today. A radical piece of gleefully scathing cynical romanticism where the seemingly foredoomed cultural history of the Occident is blamed for the innate impossibility of love conquering all in the spiritually moribund modern age, the film is also anti-Christian in the best sort of way by depicting Christ as a two-faced Sadean killer of hot young nubile girls and, in turn, worshiper of death and female defilement. Indeed, in the film, the protagonist is more or less cockblocked by civilization, which is indubitably one of the most audaciously absurd premises in cinema history and something that makes Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) seem like the patently prosaic expression of a posturing prole philistine, but I digress.

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons I loathe leftists, especially leftist activists, so much as the majority of them tend to be self-loathing hypocrites and the nadir of the very bourgeois they loathe (indeed, Judaic background aside, Marx was also a failed bourgeois, not to mention the fact that he never worked a single day in his entire life). While one could accuse Buñuel—a Spaniard from a distinguished background that, as recounted in his memoir, looked down on the poor as a youth—of such glaring hypocrisies, he never really tried to hide his roots and as he eloquently explained in his short-but-sweet memoir My Last Sigh (1982), “Like the señoritos I knew in Madrid, most surrealists came from good families; as in my case, they were bourgeois revolting against the bourgeoisie. But we all felt a certain destructive impulse, a feeling that for me has been even stronger than the creative urge. The idea of burning down a museum, for instance, has always seemed more enticing than opening of a cultural center or the inauguration of a new hospital.” While this might seem like harsh words, especially considering Buñuel, who was initially influenced by Italian Futurists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was already fairly old when he wrote them, L'Age d'Or is so intoxicatingly iconoclastic and awe-inspiringly aberrantly absurd in its essence that one cannot help respect the great passion of the auteur, especially since he manages to seamlessly express such savage surrealist sentiments alongside a strangely endearing (ill-fated) love story as the bourgeoisie—and its retarded rules and customs—becomes the ultimate callous murderer of love. Indeed, as Buñuel also wrote in his memoir, “Although Dalí compared it to American films (undoubtedly from a technical point of view), he later wrote that his intentions ‘in writing the screenplay’ were to expose the shameful mechanisms of contemporary society. For me, it was a film about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever become one.” Speaking of love, Buñuel and Dalí, who previously demonstrated to be great collaborators on Un Chien Andalou (1929), had a major falling out after the former choked the latter’s new whore muse-cum-future-wife Gala, thus the film is mainly the brainchild of its director (according to Buñuel, only one scene, which involves a guy walking around with a rock on his head, was written by Dalí). In fact, even more than his debut film Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or is like a virtual artistic manifesto where Buñuel outlines the themes, obsessions, fetishes, and visuals that would come to dominate his truly singular filmmaking career. In short, it is an imperative (albeit technically formative) work from one of the greatest and most important filmmakers of cinema history.

L'Age d'Or begins in a fashion that is considerably less fairytale-like than Un Chien Andalou as it is comprised of primitive vintage orthochromatic footage of scorpions doing evil scorpion things and related creature qualities that are ultimately compared to humans, including toxic aggression, ungodly survival instincts, and tendency towards the most evil forms of treachery against its own species, among other things. Just as the scorpion has “five prismatic joints” and a “sixth vesicular joint,” the film has five main segments and a savagely subversive Sadean concluding segment. As British surrealist scholar Robert L. Short noted in regard to the possible esoteric meaning of this literally quite gritty documentary opening, “The scorpion is the zodiac sign that governs the genitals and the anus. As such, it’s the symbol of sex, excrement, and death. Thus, this opening sequence introduces the ambivalent dynamic that powers our impulses of attraction and repulsion alike and officiates at the alchemical marriage of shit and gold.” Needless to say, L'Age d'Or is a film with an intrinsically ironical title as a tragicomedic romance trapped inside of a purgatorial absurdist cinematic nightmare where nothing goes right and evil, especially of the nasty Nazarene sort, triumphs in the end. In short, aberrant avant-garde cinematic alchemy where human shit is elevated to artistic gold.

After the scorpion doc that opens the film, a group of ornamentally dressed Catholic bishops, who certainly look more glamorous than the average meth-addled drag-queen, practically wash up onto some rocks where they soon turn into ornamentally dressed skeletons yet their dubious ‘sacrifice’ seems to be totally triumphant as they leave an indelible mark on the land as demonstrated by the fact that their martyrdom (or whatever) is soon followed by a ‘golden age’ as a large colonial entourage subsequently arrives that includes priests, military men, government whores, etc. and it is soon declared, “Upon this rock I shall build my church.” Naturally, the group of humorless bureaucrats becomes exceedingly angry when a sort of religious ceremony that they're performing is interrupted by the great ecstasy of two lovers (Gaston Modot and Lya Lys) engaged in exceedingly orgasmic mud-wrestling. At this point, the lovers—the film’s main protagonists—are separated for the first time and the rest of the main section of the film involves the man played by Modot’s strange quest to be reunited with his beauteous beloved. As the film eventually reveals via spasmodic flashback, Modot is a special agent of the so-called ‘International Goodwill Society’ and is ostensibly on a “goodwill mission” that, as described by his ‘Minister of Interior,’ is based, ”On your spirit of self-sacrifice and proven valor depend many lives. Children, women, old men. The honor of our Fatherland rests on the outcome of this noble enterprise.”

Needless to say, lovesick Modot completely ignores his audaciously altruistic mission as he has much more important things to think about than the lives of children, namely being reunited with his lover. Hardly a humanist or lover of animals, Modot is not beneath kicking little dogs like soccer balls, senselessly stomping on beetles, and assaulting blind men, yet one finds it hard to fault such a passionate lover. Suffering from a sort of Freudianism is reverse, immediately visualizes women masturbating when encountering advertising (or as British film theorist Raymond Durgnat described, Modot “‘sees through’ the impersonal, commercialized eroticism of the posters to his anima”). As for Modot’s lover Lys, she has her own problems, including suffering the banality of her bourgeois parents, large cows invading her bed, and a magic mirror with racing clouds that seem to express her lovesick erotic longing. Of course, the two lovers are soon reunited but, like most great romances, the love affair does not last and ultimately concludes on a quite chaotic, if not downright cataclysmic, note that inspires apocalyptic dreams.

Using a special certificate that proves his on a certified “goodwill mission” to supposedly save millions of children and elderly people, Modot is able to finally escape from two cops that are senselessly parading him around the absurd decaying civilization “Imperial Rome”—a modern metropolis that looks nice from a bird's-eye view yet is quite brittle and decayed as revealed by the fact that buildings randomly collapse—so that he can make his way back to his lover. While never made totally clear, Modot may have once been a true idealist and humanistic do-gooder like so many naive and/or otherwise idiotic young people, but now he simply has a monomaniacal obsession with lady Lys. After his odious odyssey, Modot eventually makes his way to a large party at Lys’ family chateau where many absurd things occur, including a maid being blasted with a roaring flame and a pesky Mongoloid child being shot after daring to annoy a man while he was rolling a cigarette. Clearly infatuated with Modot and his masculine majesty, Lys can only look on in delight when the hero slaps her mother in the face for the crime of spilling a drop of wine on his rather stylish suit. Plagued by the spiritually moribund etiquette and the callously contrived civility of the ball-less bourgeoisie, Modot finds it seemingly impossible to get to Lys at the party as he is constantly approached by pestering guests attempting to make small talk with him. In what is arguably one of the most shamelessly yet touchingly romantic scenarios in all of cinema history, Modot and Lys’ eyes remain ecstatically glued to one another while being hassled by party guests as if they are the only two people in the entire world, at least in their own minds. Unfortunately, fate has different plans for the ill-fated lovers and it does not even involve full-on fucking.

It is only when the party guests begin congregating at a garden in preparation for a sort of makeshift Wagnerian concert that the lovers are able to finally reunite outside with some privacy near a male statue. Rather unfortunately, the reunion is only momentarily happy and very much abstractly resembles the most absurd of botched orgasms. Indeed, not long after the two begin smooching, Modot is forced to take an emergency phone call where he is berated by his boss, who subsequently commits suicide, for causing the deaths of men, women, and especially children due to his negligence. Undoubtedly, in his eager willingness to sacrifice the lives of millions of innocent children for the sake of a love that isn't even guaranteed, Modot's behavior symbolizes the ugly emotional extremes of romantic obsession. Meanwhile, Lys, who is clearly quite horny, begins fellating the toe of the statue as if she cannot wait to mouth Modot's member. When Modot finally gets off the phone and reunites with Lys after a two minute ordeal that feels like a decade in terms of abject anticipation, the two seem incapable of properly channeling their repressed passion for one another as if their love has become necrotic. For example, Modot hallucinates that Lys is an elderly grey-haired woman and the two become very sleepy. While the couple continues to kiss as if trying to chase a bliss that just doesn't exist, they are soon rudely interrupted by a seemingly demented conductor that walks over to them with his hands gripping head like a neurotic somnambulist on acid, as if his performance of Richard Wagner's “Liebestod”—a splendid piece of music that reveals Buñuel's own monomaniacal tendencies, which are almost always characteristic of all great men, in that he used the same exact work in his previous film Un Chien Andalou—has caused him to suffer a complete mental breakdown. Immediately inexplicably spellbound by the unhinged old fart as if she suffers from serious daddy issues, Lys leaves Modot and then proceeds to embrace and French kiss the cracked conductor with a certain girlish gusto. After his love affair comes to a swift and brutally bizarre end, Modot gets his revenge against his (ex)lover by immediately going to her room where he proceeds to tears up some pillows like a tyrannical toddler and then begins hurling stuff out of the window, including a wooden plough, bishop, bishop's staff, burning Christmas tree, and giraffe statue, among other phallic items that arguably hint at a sort of spiritual castration. At this point, Modot is probably done with love and ready embrace de Sade.

While the film’s love affair ends on a rather erratically brutal note where the protagonist suffers soul-crushing defeat in the romance department in the most preposterously pathetic of ways, the quasi-epilogue—a virtual homage to the Marquis de Sade’s posthumously published The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage (1785/1904)—is a sort of allegorical final nail in the coffin of Western Civilization that begins with a long scrolling inter-title that reads: “Just as these feathers fell but a long way away…the survivors from the Château de Selliny…emerged to return to Paris. 120 days earlier, four godless and unprincipled scoundrels had, driven by their depravity, shut themselves away…to indulge in the most bestial of orgies. To them, the life of a woman mattered no more than that of a fly. They took with them eight lovely adolescent girls…to serve as victims for their criminal desires…plus four women well versed in debauchery…whose narrative skills would serve to stimulate…their already jaded appetites…whenever interest flagged.” After the pseudo-moralistic inter-title, a bearded Jesus/Duc de Blangis figure—a character that may or may not be a ‘liberated’ post-love Modot—emerges from an ominous (yet somehow goofy) gothic castle where he is followed by a couple similarly tired and debauched-looking aristocrats. When a wounded young woman, who may or may not be Modot’s ex-lover Lys, emerges from the castle, Jesus takes her back inside and assumedly murders her. In the end, Jesus loses his beard and a couple female scalps are depicted hanging from a large Christian cross as snow falls from a sky in a scenario that arguably allegorically symbolizes the twilight of romance in (post)Christian Western Civilization.

While Buñuel bemoaned the tragic character of love and the impossibility of two lovers becoming one, L'Age d'Or is, somewhat ironically, the artistic consequence of the auteur’s one-time collaborator-cum-friend Salvador Dalí finding his great love-cum-muse Gala and thus only playing a minor role in the film. Of course, despite his anarchic spirit, Buñuel was rather bourgeois in his romantic dealings as he courted his future wife, Jeanne Rucar Lefebvre, in a formal Aragonese manner—complete with a chaperone—and stayed together with her for nearly half-a-century for what was the rest of his life after marrying her in 1934. As noted by Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf (1927), the artist is one of the few things that redeems the bourgeoisie and Buñuel was certainly one of the greatest masters of this form of critique, especially in regard to the modern post-religious bourgeoisie. After all, it is no coincidence that the auteur wrote in his memoir, “I’m lucky to have spent my childhood in the Middle Ages, or, as Huysmans described it, that ‘painful and exquisite’ epoch—painful in terms of its material aspects perhaps, but exquisite in its spiritual life. What a contrast to the world of today!” A man of the past that created art of the future, Buñuel was, in the sense described by Uncle Adolf's #1 fan-girl Savitri Devi in her magnum opus The Lightning and the Sun (1958), a ‘Man Against Time’ that ultimately used a destructive aesthetic power for life-affirming purposes, thereupon performing a sort of aesthetic alchemy by turning the shit that is modernity into artistic gold. Considering that L'Age d'Or caused reactionary riots and was banned from public exhibition in late-1930 after the Prefect of Police of Paris arranged to have it banned, one could certainly say that Hesse was right when he wrote that, “The bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.” On the other hand, Buñuel—a man once associated with communist cunts and other degenerates—is now attacked by ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) leftists—undoubtedly the nadir of the slave-morality-ridden priest types that Nietzsche condemned for destroying Europa—with ad hominem oriented buzzwords like ‘misogynistic,’ ‘xenophobic,’ ‘homophobic,’ and other completely meaningless modern vile, thus confirming that his fears about the future of the Occident were not in vain as things have only gotten ten times worse in terms of their surreal stupidity and inanity.

Undoubtedly, after recently re-watching L'Age d'Or and doing research on Buñuel, I could not help but reminded of the following excerpt from Steppenwolf: “Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, real hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.” When I watch Buñuel’s films, especially L'Age d'Or, I fell as if I am being confronted by the excremental excesses of the Occidental collective unconscious in an eccentrically esoteric form; or, the prophetic cinematic daydreams of a very real future nightmare from a mensch with the keen artistic sensitivity to foresee that which should not be seen, at least by those that still value their sanity. In that sense, it is only fitting that the film was funded by the direct descendant of de Sade who, in all his savagely sadistic degeneracy, still expressed something very real about the ‘liberal’ future to come (as a far-left degenerate aristocratic revolutionary that was an elected delegate to the National Convention during the French Revolution, de Sade also actively created that forsaken future). After all, child drag-queens, the chemical castration of children, sex changes, wiggerism, and fat rights activists are modern phenomenons that are more surreally disturbing and/or absurd than anything that you might find in a Buñuel flick.

Recently, I discovered that the ‘great love’ of a childhood friend of mine was recently tragically killed after a police cruiser ran her over. Notably, this girl brought great misery to my friend and everyone around them when they were together (for example, she would sneak into my parent’s home to get to my friend while they both had restraining order against each other), yet I could not help but feel a certain degree of sadness for my old comrade, as if the final lingering sense ecstasy of his l'amour fou had been finally fully extinguished for all of eternity via absurd tragedy. Even today, I cannot help but be reminded of bittersweet memories from a love affair that began nearly a decade ago, or feel an irrevocable sense of loss for a fairly recent all-too-brief romance that happened that—for better or worse—reminded me what l'amour fou feels like. If you want to experience what it feels like to be in heartsick hell and back in a film that somehow manages to unintentionally reconcile the miserably melodic lovelorn lyrical pathos of John Maus and pre-apocalyptic Occidental despair of Oswald Spengler with a certain Dirlewangerian depravity thrown in for good measure, L'Age d'Or is certainly the film to see. As to why the average spiritually neutered bourgeois would find both l'amour fou and a film like Buñuel's quite disagreeable, Hesse summed it up quite well with the words, “The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”

-Ty E

That Obscure Object of Desire

2019-10-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

Out of all the great cinematic auteur filmmakers, Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel (Los Olvidados, Belle de Jour)—a virtual one-man-cinematic-revolution—was probably the greatest in terms of sheer longevity, eclecticism, and artistic consistency as a succulently scathingly sardonic morcillismo humorist with an intrinsic flair for the intoxicatingly (yet elegantly) iconoclastic, sensually absurd, playfully pessimistic, and merrily misanthropic. Indeed, whether it be the uniquely unforgettable eye-slicing and juxtaposition of surreal sexual sadism with Richard Wagner's “Liebestod” from his opera Tristan und Isolde in his debut Un Chien Andalou (1929), proto-Aguirre, the Wrath of God action-adventure jungle allegory of Death in the Garden (1956), preternatural depictions of race-hate in the unconventionally humanistic southern gothic The Young One (1960), simultaneously psychotic yet erotic religious allegory of Simon of the Desert (1965), or the plot-free aesthetic anarchy of his perfect penultimate film The Phantom of Liberty (1974), Buñuel—with his big brown bull-sized balls—always produced something strikingly singular that defied classification, expectation, and impressed his contemporaries, including respected figures ranging from a Hemingway-esque Hollywood maverick like John Huston to a melancholic Nordic master like Ingmar Bergman. As far as I am concerned, only Robert Bresson is comparable in terms of being able to manage to churn out subversive modernist masterpieces in the late-period of his career when he was technically already an old fart. In that sense, it was probably not a simple cope when Buñuel once declared, “Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.” In fact, I would argue that Buñuel’s swansong That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) aka Cet obscur objet du désir—a film that is truly like no other aside from sharing some aesthetic/thematic similarities with other Buñuel flicks—is unequivocally one of his greatest masterpieces, which is somewhat ironic when one considers it also one of his most linear and, in turn, accessible. Admittedly, unlike with a lot of Buñuel’s films, I found myself especially enthralled for somewhat personal reasons upon a recent re-watching of this singular cinematic masterpiece for the first in well over a decade, thus confirming to me that the auteur’s films only improve for viewers with age and experience.

Undoubtedly, watching a man put pussy on a pedestal is a putrid thing to witness and surely something that revolts both men and women alike, albeit for somewhat different reasons. While both sexes are appalled by the emasculation that comes with such groveling behavior, women are especially disgusted by it as it spells desperation and—arguably, worst of all—a sure-thing as ladies like a chase and are bored by a pathetic bastard that is ready to commit to the figurative monogamal ball and chain. In That Obscure Object of Desire, the viewer watches with oftentimes Fremdscham-inducing delight as an old mustached frog of the rather wealthy sort as portrayed by Spanish leading man Fernando Rey disposes of all self-respect and becomes an emotional wreck over a hot twat Spanish flamenco dancer as portrayed by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). Concluding in a virtually apocalyptic manner with the violent deaths of both the lovesick hero and his fiercely frigid would-be-beloved in a film set in a world plagued by an increasingly-tedious terrorist insurgency, the film also manages to express Buñuel’s lifelong obsession with linking sex and death, or as the auteur once expressed in his memoir My Last Sigh (1982), “And although I’m not sure why, I also have always felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and death. I’ve tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in UN CHIEN ANDALOU when the man caresses the woman’s bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask.” War oftentimes results in death and, as they say, love is a battlefield, but Buñuel does not depict the pangs of lovesickness in a fruity fashion as That Obscure Object of Desire presents it as the most obscenely odious of irrational obsessions; or, the most pleasantly painful path to senseless self-destruction.

By mere coincidence, I recently watched That Obscure Object of Desire back-to-back with Marcel L'Herbier’s singularly striking silent avant-garde feature L'Inhumaine (1924) aka The Inhuman Woman—a film that somehow manages to reconcile Expressionism with Art Deco—and could not help but notice the stark contrast between handling the central theme of a lovelorn gent going to great extremes to warm the cold cunt of a seemingly impenetrable ice queen. In L'Herbier’s aesthetic hypnotic flick, a young playboy-cum-Dr. Frankenstein not only fakes his own death to ‘impress’ his rather evil Gorgon-like opera singer love interest, but he also manages to use his pioneering techno-wizardry to bring her back from the dead in what is ultimately a rather unconventionally happy ending that almost (seemingly unintentionally) manages to mock the absurdity that comes with romantic pursuit. Not surprisingly considering the auteur behind it, That Obscure Object of Desire is nowhere near as classically romantic or heart-wrenching in terms of its depiction of the perils of all-consuming love as it is a virtual autist-garde anti-love story where the viewer begins to eventually feel contempt for both the frog protagonist and Spanish cocktease that has completely contaminated his psyche. Indeed, quite unlike L'Inhumaine, the film not only does not provide any sort of solace in the end, sort of like a ruined orgasm during self-immolation, but it is rarely, if ever, romantic, as if one of Buñuel's main objectives with the film was to completely demystify the majesty of love and romantic conquest altogether. Undoubtedly, if that was his goal, he certainly succeeded as That Obscure Object of Desire is a virtual contra Casablanca (1942) and brazenly brilliant because of it.

Notably, That Obscure Object of Desire is based on French lesbo-lover Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin (1898) aka The Woman and the Puppet, which was previously adapted no less than four times, with Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) starring Marlene Dietrich undoubtedly being the greatest and best known of these earlier adaptations (filmmakers Reginald Barker, Jacques de Baroncelli, and Julien Duvivier also adapted the novel). Of course, it goes without saying that Buñuel’s version is easily the most subversive and anarchistic of these adaptations. It should also be noted that the auteur apparently previously made a failed attempt at tackling the source novel, henceforth revealing his strong commitment to the project. When asked by actor and screenwriter Tomás Pérez Turrent what interested him about Louÿs’s novel, Buñuel replied, “The idea of a man who wants to sleep with a woman and never manages to. In the book, of course, the man ends up sleeping with her. Then she tells him, ‘If you want to see me sleep with another man, come to my house tomorrow.’ The next day he went, and there she was with another man. But I was more interested in the story of an obsession that can never become a reality.” Ultimately, the film is a morbidly merry tale of male masochism and the female sadism the propels it, or as Buñuel explained in regard to what motivates the (anti)heroine’s heinous behavior, “A sadistic feeling. She takes advantage of him, she knows it’s in her best interest to keep him happy, but at the same time she hates him to death, she enjoys tormenting him.” In that sense, the film is a reminder as to why it is never a good idea to let a woman know how you really feel about them, lest you become a pathetic pawn in a grotesque gynocentric game where no gash will be smashed and all hope will be lost. Better yet, the film is also a reminder to all men that, in regard to women, one must: “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Obsessing over any one woman, especially those that you’re not even sure you can obtain, is never good and oftentimes a glaring sign of beta-boy bitch behavior yet, as someone that finds very few women attractive, including those that are technically physically attractive (yet have the personalities of gnats), I have personally fallen into this pathetic trap. For example, I somewhat recently started a ‘romance’ with a girl that, despite all the obvious red flags and qualities that I would usually consider major ‘deal-breakers,’ I could not help but be inordinately infatuated with her to the point where I felt as in control as a negro on PCP in a titty bar. Needless to say, as my intellect informed me it would probably be from the very beginning, this erotic excursion was rather brief and cost much more (especially emotionally) than it was ultimately worth, but such is the tragedy of a tyrannical testicular trance. Still, I can thankfully say that, as someone that does not physically resemble a sort of decrepit old Super Mario like the film's protagonist, I have never been in a position that was as sexless or patently pathetic as that of the rich old fart in That Obscure Object of Desire who dedicates his life and tons of his money and energy to attempting to defile a dumb dame that repays him with nothing but sadism, indifference, and heartbreak. Personally, I wanted to slap the shit out of the protagonist, as his superlatively self-deluded campaign for cream of the crop cooch is absolutely sickening to watch in a film that deserves credit for featuring the most irksome depiction of a dude thinking with his dick in cinema history in what is ultimately one frivolous farce of a dis-romance. In short, That Obscure Object of Desire is the renegade anti-romantic-comedy par excellence and a prophetic expression of avant-garde anti-thottery.

That Obscure Object of Desire ‘hero’ Mathieu (Fernando Rey)—a wealthy middle-aged widow that is hardly handsome yet seems to think his wealth makes him worthy of a real-life Venus de Milo—demonstrates a special sort of hatred for a young woman at the beginning of the film when he sadistically dumps a bucket of water over her head as she attempts to board the same train he is taking from Seville, Spain to Paris, France. The woman in question is the protagonist's young (ex)girlfriend Conchita (as portrayed by both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) and the viewer soon discovers how Mathieu got to hate her so much in a series of flashbacks that are told to a small group of fellow travelers, including a midget psychology professor, in the same train car as him after they bear witness to his water bucket belligerence. As one can except from an old fart attempting to cultivate a clearly one-sided romance with a much younger woman that is way out of his league, Mathieu is at least partly responsible for putting himself in the pathetic position he is in as he was dumb enough to almost immediately offer virtually the entire world to Conchita soon after they initially met at a house where she was working as a friend’s maid. Of course, Mathieu probably also felt it would not be too hard for a rich prick like himself to obtain a mere maid, but he could not have been more wrong.

Undoubtedly, Conchita’s behavior almost immediately raises a number of glaring red flags, including her patently preposterous claim that she is an 18-year-old virgin despite looking at least decade older and her naturally slutty behavior (among other things, she's a stripper with a loyal following of male friends). Additionally, aside from the fact that her father committed suicide under seemingly dubious circumstances, Conchita’s mother (María Asquerino), who Mathieu almost immediately begins financially supporting, is a somewhat nutty old bitch who, owing to being once-rich, refuses to work, bragging, “I’d rather kiss church steps then sweep doorsteps. My daughter helps me but I don’t want her to work. Because of the bad influences.” Notably, Conchita is similarly worthless as a woman as revealed by the fact that she proudly boasts after admitting she refuses to give her dubious virginity to Mathieu, “I don’t like sewing. I can’t cook.” On top of everything else, Conchita is friends with a group of handsome young twink criminals that rob Mathieu, yet the protagonist seems completely blind to the profound dubiousness of this. In short, aside from being bloated with all sort of personal and emotional baggage, Conchita has nothing to offer aside from her statuesque beauty yet Mathieu just cannot get over her despite not being able to get a little carnal taste of said beauty in a sad scenario that is akin to being friend-zoned by a Maenad.

As the film progresses, Mathieu’s patience is increasingly tested as he chases after Conchita while trying in vain to penetrate her main vein as a terrorist insurgency brings chaos to Europe in a backdrop that somewhat parallels the protagonist’s seemingly perennial failed (anti)romance. Although Conchita eventually allows Mathieu to touch her titties, she adamantly refuses to give up her much prized virginity as if it is the only thing she really has to offer (it is!). Eventually, Mathieu gets so fed up with Conchita’s callous cockteasing that he attempts to penetrate her by force, but ultimately fails after spending no less than 15 minutes attempting to takeoff a canvas corset that acts as a virtual chastity belt. On top of everything else, Conchita derives a sort of sadistic glee by cuckolding Mathieu, including sneaking young handsome males into her room, dancing naked for Japanese tourists, and even forcing the protagonist to watch as she fucks a male friend (though she later tries to play off such behavior as a ‘joke’ and claims the male friend was actually a homosexual). Needless to say, Mathieu completely loses it after being so ruthlessly cucked and beats her to a bloody pulp, thus inspiring the heroine to questionably proclaim as blood drips from her face, “Now I know you love me. Mateo, I’m still a virgin.” In the end, after telling his entire savagely sordid story to his rather attentive traveling companions, Mathieu still cannot help but desire Conchita despite the fact she pays him back by dumping a bucket of water onto his head. Luckily, the rancid romance comes to a swift explosive end when the two are killed in a terrorist explosion at a mall shortly after mutually admiring a seamstress that is symbolically mending a bloody nightgown.

Although a virtual cipher of a character, the titular twat of That Obscure Object of Desire also happens to be one of the most intensely intriguing love interests of cinema history as a sort of archetypical Madonna–whore creature that embodies qualities of both the naïve virgin and savage slut in the most insufferable ways (hence the incidental brilliance of utilizing two actresses to play one character), as if it was Buñuel’s goal to create the greatest she-beast—a cravenly cruel character-without-character (like so many women) that basks in inducing male anxieties and lovelorn lunacy, sort of like a young child slowly killing a fly—in cinema history. In that sense, it almost comes as a great cathartic relief when the protagonist and his love object are blown up in the end, as if the tension created by their emotionally terroristic disharmonious romance could only conjure up such a cataclysmic scenario. Despite the glaring pulchritude of the two lead female actresses, their beauty is almost completely extinguished in the viewer's mind by the end of the film, as the character embodies some of the most repugnant negative female stereotypes, including jealousy, pettiness, sadism, shallowness, narcissism, histrionics, stupidity, hypocrisy, projection, unreliability, flakiness, and deceptiveness, among other things. While an absurdist masterwork of cinema that is packed with plenty of playful dark humor, the film’s heroine is ultimately scarier than the greatest of female villains of both cinema and television history, including Elsa ‘Rosalie’ Bannister of The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Catherine Tramell of Basic Instinct (1992), Alexandra of Alexandra's Project (2003), and Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones (2011–2019), among countless other examples. Undoubtedly, only fellow Mediterranean Marco Ferreri (The Seed of Man, Dillinger Is Dead) has come anywhere near to Buñuel in terms of exquisitely yet brutally depicting the unflattering character of European women in the age of Occidental decline.

Rather humorously, despite being a wealthy widow that should be worldlier when it comes to the wayward ways of women, the film’s protagonist Mathieu seems like a pussy-novice compared to his lowly servant Martin (André Weber) who declares when asked by his boss about the so-called fairer sex, “I have a friend who loves women very much, but he claims they’re sacks of excrement.” In a humorous misquote of Nietzsche, Martin also declares after examining the room where Mathieu has just brutalized Conchita, “If you go with women, carry a big stick.” In fact, the Nietzsche quote in question is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883) and actually reads: “You go to women? Do not forget the whip!” Rather revealingly, it is only when Mathieu uses his figurative whip and beats Conchita does she express any sort of love to the protagonist in what can certainly be read as a classic display of female masochism (though one certainly doubts the sincerity of her rather conveniently timed declaration of love). Either way, there is no doubt that Mathieu was too ‘terminally nice’ to Conchita to the point where the viewer could not help but feel a certain deep-seated disgust for him, especially after multiple viewings of the film. Going back to Nietzsche, he also once wrote, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.” Of course, the tragedy of Mathieu’s character is that, not unlike Nietzsche with his supposed great love Lou Andreas-Salomé, he does not really even get to experience any sort of high and thus comes off as the lowest of men despite his wealth and social prestige, thereupon revealing the true innate chaotic destructive power of women.

While Nietzsche is probably not the best guy to seek for advice on women, he probably had a point when he wrote, “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution – namely, pregnancy,” hence the proliferation of uniquely unhappy and prematurely-aged spinsters and wine aunts of the sexually used-up sort that now pollute the Occidental world and promote such socially deleterious things as intersectional feminism, xenophilia and third world alien ‘refugees,’ child drag-queens, government-subsidized abortion-on-demand, Holocaustianity, general neo-commie horseshit, and Marvel movies, among various other forms of garbage that appeals to infertile ressentiment-ridden broads that are in total denial that they wasted their lives on the false song of sexual liberation. While one could utilize Freudian psychobabble to argue that Conchita is a symbol of the male libidinal drive and the continual frustration of said drive naturally causes the explosion in the end, That Obscure Object of Desire proves to be a more enriching experience when viewed today as a cautionary tale about putting modern-day post-feminist pussy on a pedestal. Despite the film’s rather unflattering depiction of women, it apparently offended the sensitive sensibilities of gay terrorist extremists in a rare instance of ‘life-imitating-art,’ or as Buñuel—a man that, incidentally, practiced fag-bashing in his youth—explained in his autobiography, “Ironically, a bomb exploded on October 16, 1977, in the Ridge Theatre in San Francisco, where the movie was being shown; and during the confusion that followed, four reels were stolen and the walls covered with graffiti like, ‘This time you’ve gone too far!’ There was some evidence to suggest that the attack was engineered by a group of homosexuals, and although those of this persuasion didn’t much like the film, I’ve never been able to figure out why.”

Interestingly, despite concluding his career with a film as radically anti-romantic as That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel—a proud lapsed Catholic atheist and iconoclast that seemed to believe in nothing aside from the power of biting humor aimed at all form of authority (including the commies he once sided with in his youth)—was apparently a strong believer in not only love, but sacrificial love, as indicated by his words, “I would willingly sacrifice my liberty to love. I have already done so . . . I would sacrifice a cause to love, but each situation would have to be considered separately.” Indeed, as British film critic Raymond Durgnat noted in his book Luis Buñuel (1968), “He declared that he would renounce being the person he could be, if that were the cost of being sure of his love. He would think highly of a man who, to please the woman he loved, was willing to betray his principles.” While Buñuel also replied “I don’t know” when asked if he believed in love’s victory over the sordidness of life (or vice versa), he would also state, “I should still ask him not to betray his principles—in fact, I’d insist on it” in regard to the sacrifice of self for love. Of course, Buñuel’s belief in love can be seen in his depiction of l'amour fou in his rarely-seen Emily Brontë adaptation Abismos de passion (1954) aka Wuthering Heights. While it has certainly did little good in the long run for my life, I also believe in the power of love, including ‘mad love,’ which is also why I find the one-sided lovesickness of the protagonist of That Obscure Object of Desire to be so completely infuriating as it is a waste of pure diabolic energy on an unloving dumb dud of a dame that is probably lame in bed and really has nothing to offer outside the aesthetic appeal of a carefully manicured mannequin, hence the ‘object’ of the film’s title. After all, at least from my experience, love tends to be a carefully cultivated post-coital phenomenon that requires a certain degree of mutually expressed emotional and physical intimacy (and anything less seems to be simple beta-boy infatuation conjured from too much fantasizing about the totally intangible). After recently re-watching That Obscure Object of Desire, I can safely say that Buñuel was onto something when he wrote, “Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.” And, while I find the idea of a woman being able to rape a man somewhat equivocal (and I say that from experience!), Buñuel’s film demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that a woman—even an insufferably stupid woman—can certainly completely ravage a man’s soul and turn him into a pathetic shell of his former self.

-Ty E

Befrielsesbilleder

2019-10-21T04:24:00.000-07:00

While we are constantly beat over the head virtually at birth with tired tales of shoah survivors and victims of Nazi persecution that resemble something out of some bad melodrama (or, worse, a Spielberg movie), we rarely ever hear about the forlorn fates of the other side, especially those that made the less than auspicious decision to fight for Europa against communism via the Third Reich as so many foreign recruits believed they were doing (as the post-WWII enslavement of half of Europe by the Soviet Union demonstrates, that is certainly what they were doing). Indeed, it cannot be a good feeling to be on the losing side in what was probably the most disastrous and nightmarish war in human history while so many criminals and killers on the (so-called) ‘resistance’ side would be regarded as heroes and be free to execute bloodthirsty Judaic eye-for-an-eye vengeance on the ‘guilty’ and—sometimes—not at all guilty. While SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger probably deserved his (suspected) grisly fate, one has to really question the motives behind the recent craven and inordinately petty harassment of virtually zombified 90+-year-old retirees (John Demjanjuk being probably the most well known example and Bruno Dey the most recent) being persecuted by conspicuously corrupt western courts under the suspicion of being concentration camp guards when they were young and dumb (while, rather notably, Israel is infamous for refusing to extradite its savagely sadistic genocidal mass murderers like Salomon Morel).

While my Dutch grandfather was involved in the resistance and his family even hid teenage Jewesses inside their home, he had cousins in the Waffen-SS and apparently they spent the rest of their lives in exile in Germany after WWII lest they succumb to prosecution and very potential execution in some Nuremberg-esque show trial where Judaic justice reigns. While it was always very clear to me that my grandfather suffered immensely as a result of WWII as the trauma it caused has acted as a virtual inter-generational family curse of sorts, I could not help but wonder about the lives of his black sheep Waffen-SS cousins. Needless to say, not many films exist on the subject of a relatively sympathetic portrayal of the misery of ex-German soldiers in a post-WWII Americanized world aside from a couple notable examples like Belgian master auteur André Delvaux’s surely underrated Een vrouw tussen hond en wolf (1979) aka Woman in a Twilight Garden starring Rutger Hauer as a terminally dejected Flemish (ex)Waffen-SS officer and Danish director Martin Zandvliet’s rather mid-brow Land of Mine (2015). Undoubtedly, Jan Troell's Knut Hamsun biopic Hamsun (1996) does a good job depicting the patent absurdity of how the Norwegian Nobel-Prize-winning writer was robbed and persecuted in his old age by the post-WWII government, but it is not a particularly aesthetically alluring cinematic work like the auteur's previous films. Arguably, the most subversive and certainly most experimental of these films is Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s little-seen fiercely fucked and forsaken celluloid fever dream Befrielsesbilleder (1982) aka Images of a Relief aka Liberation Pictures—an ostensible war film that defies classification yet also undeniably demonstrates the auteur learned a thing or two from Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Dreyer.

Although von Trier would eventually discover in 1989 that his biological father was a WWII resistance fighter of German goy extraction by the name of Fritz Michael Hartmann, he believed at the time that he made Befrielsesbilleder that he was Jewish via the pseudo-father he was named after, thereupon making the film, which practically bleeds Wehrmacht blut, seem all the more subversive and insanely idiosyncratic in terms of post-Auschwitz sentiment. After all, von Trier himself portrayed a creepy Jewish artist named Victor Marse in his previous film Orchidégartneren (1977) aka The Orchid Gardener that not only curiously dresses in both Nazi cosplay and drag, but also concludes the film by molesting a little girl pushing a baby doll carriage. Right before discovering he was actually Aryan as opposed to a chosenite, von Trier appeared as a character simply credited as ‘Jew’ in his classic film Europa (1991) in a curious director cameo comparable to Fassbinder’s kosher character in Lili Marleen (1981). As Jack Stevenson noted in his worthwhile text Lars von Trier (2002), von Trier, who grew up in a degenerate hippie nudist far-leftist household, had even contrived a false Jewish identity of sorts as exemplified by the filmmaker’s words, “I am very taken with my Jewish background. Jewishness has something to do with both suffering and historical consciousness which I miss so much in modern art. People have left their roots, their religion behind.” Notably, in Befrielsesbilleder, not only does von Trier conjure pangs of suffering and preternatural historical consciousness, but he also unwittingly gets in contact with his Teutonic roots in both a historical and deeply atavistic fashion as if he had been possessed by the spirit of Hermann Löns after attending a Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film retrospective. Indeed, the Danish auteur that added the German nobiliary particle ‘von’ to his name in tribute to great Judaic filmmakers with phony aristocratic titles like Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg arguably reveals with Befrielsesbilleder that sometimes the Volksgeist can appear deeply on a subconscious artist level as surely no true blue Hebrew has ever directed a film that is even remotely similar both in terms of aesthetic and subject matter, but I digress.

Despite the fact that probably virtually no one would suspect so much upon viewing it, Befrielsesbilleder—a sort of mid-length feature at just under 60-minutes in length—was actually made by von Trier as his film school graduate project (for a similar example of an enterprising young auteur, checkout Aryan Kaganof’s aberrant-garde Bataille adaptation The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man (1994)). Of course, to even mention such a perversely poetic cinematic work was created in film school is an unfortunate fact that surely undermines it, but facts are facts and von Trier is—for better or worse—not your typical filmmaker but a born-artist from an Aryan family with a long artistic legacy (in fact, von Trier's communist mother attempted to defend her cuckolding of her kosher husband by telling the filmmaker that she wanted to bless him with “artistic genes”). Aside from revealing an unbelievably mature degree of aesthetic and technical refinement, the film also demonstrates von Trier’s unconventional dedication to the historical documentary record as the auteur dared to dig up unseen documentary footage of resistance fighters tormenting supposed Nazi collaborators in the city of Copenhagen in the wake of the liberation of Denmark in early May 1945. Undoubtedly, in its shockingly seamless combination of vintage documentary footage and almost surreally stylized footage directed by von Trier, the film anticipates the auteur’s later utilization of different sorts of stock footage and film and digital formats in works like NYMPH()MANIAC (2013). Ultimately, the entire film feels if it is set in some purgatorial post-Hitler hell where a limbless human-torso Dirlewanger is being double-penetrated by the devil with a big black razor-sharp dildo for eternity, though the Nazi (anti)hero does curiously ascend to heaven in the end in what is indubitably one of the most shockingly transcendent moments in all of von Trier’s work.

Although he has a very Jewish-sounding name, Leo Mendel (Edward Fleming)—a four-eyed nerd that radiates a certain pathological pitifulness and deep-seated despondency—is an officer in the Wehrmacht and his prestigious position has now turned him into a virtual dead man walking as he is caged in a nightmarish POW prison in Copenhagen after the liberation of Copenhagen in May 1945. Like his kraut comrades, Leo plans to blow his brains out and prepares for the big event by writing his lover Esther (Kirsten Olesen) a rather brief ‘goodbye letter’ of sorts that reads: “Darling, Esther. This frightful war, which brought us together, has now separated us again. It is terrible to write that we shall never meet again. But so it must be. Don’t forget that what you do for love stands above good and evil. Forever yours, Leo.” Unluckily for him, Leo does meet Esther again after he escapes from prison upon failing to successfully commit self-slaughter after his gun malfunctions and gets somewhat of a dark surprise. Surely, Leo's incapacity to even kill himself really underscores his loser status, though things only get much worse from there. Rather unfortunately, while lurking in the shadows in preparation for reuniting with his lover, Leo gets the sickening shock of a lifetime under already less than ideal circumstances when Esther eventually shows up in the arms of an American buck negro GI in a scene that recalls a similar scenario of interracial romantic disharmony in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s hit film The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). While the jigaboo liberator kisses and sensually embraces Esther, she pushes him away by complaining “Can we do something else?” while looking clearly dejected as if she is painfully cognizant of the fact that she is nothing more than an involuntary spoil of war and that she probably much preferred being a Nazi slut.

While one might initially suspect that Esther would be eternally grateful to see her assumed-dead lover, she is more or less a total bitch in the sort of way a women get when they still love a man but realizes that the relationship is completely doomed. Indeed, after bitching to Leo, “What do you want? You promised, didn’t you?,” Esther momentarily complains about lanterns blowing away and then accuses Leo of being culpable for war crimes, stating, “Everybody’s talking about what you did. The partisan boy you took last week. You ruined his eyes!” Leo seems to believe he is equipped with plausible deniability by coldly retorting “SS—they were from the SS,” but Esther—being an intuitive bitch that knows bullshit when she hears it—replies, “I know you were there. Don’t you see that you have a responsibility too? You’re so brilliant. You don’t care what you see. You can be used. What sort of morality is that? But you store it up. At some time a reaction will come. When will you scream?” Ultimately, Esther provides the answer to her own question the next day by causing Leo to unleash a deathly scream after playing the femme fatale, luring him into an insidious trap, and betraying him in the most cravenly personalized sort of fashion; or, a one-sided sort of Liebestod.

While it is hard to tell considering he is a marked man and officer in the most hated military in the world and thus probably not completely mentally sound, Leo has a rather flat affect as if he is an autist of sorts and Esther hints at this by complaining to him, “I could never see my reflection in your eyes.” Indeed, one gets the sense that if Leo was less cold and mechanical and offered more of himself, Esther might not betray him. Leo seems to sense this—or at least the impossibility of satisfying a uniquely unhappy woman—when he remarks “For a woman it’s always something different” after Esther complains, “It’s different now” in regard to their current less than ideal predicament. Undoubtedly, things are different and Leo is so ludicrously low that he can only go up; or so he does after reaching the lowest of lows in terms of abject desperation and infernal isolation. While he should probably know better, especially after seeing Esther with the yank spade stud, Leo agrees to meet her the next day at a secluded place in the woods in what ultimately proves to be an almost quintessentially Teutonic fairy-tale settling where the protagonist actually manages to briefly break out of his seemingly impenetrable shell and embrace life and nature just before he dies. Indeed, while Esther stands with her back to him while dressed like some sort of drag king Gestapo agent, Leo declares with the utmost conviction and sincerity, “Something happened to me yesterday—which disturbed me. All at once I found myself thinking of the world of my childhood. The forests—and the birds. It’s never happened to me before. To have images coming back. When I was a boy I could talk to the birds. When I was a boy I could talk to the birds. And they would answer me.” While Leo attempts his childhood talent for talking to the birds at Esther’s dubious recommendation in what ultimately proves to be a trap, American soldiers and their Danish comrades begin encircling the protagonist. After a soldier ties Leo to a tree, Esther declares “Those eyes. They don’t love. They don’t despise” and then personally blinds him in a brutally primitive fashion by stabbing him in each of his eyes with a sharpened branch in a literal/figurative ‘eye-for-an-eye’ scenario that concludes with the protagonist literally ascending to heaven during sunrise while his treacherous yet nonetheless clearly guilt-ridden beloved sobs in his car. In the end, the film is not just the paradoxically uplifting yet dispiriting story of an autistic Aryan Christ, but also the timeless (yet transcendental) tale of a woman betraying a mensch she loves because he did not make her ‘feel’ the right way at the right time; or, the real perennial war of the sexes.

Despite the fact that Befrielsesbilleder is, in many ways, a more aesthetically alluring and arcane cinematic works than many of his later films ranging from the Dogme 95 retard-a-thon The Idiots (1998) to his latest serial killer effort The House That Jack Built (2018), apparently the auteur had a somewhat troll-ish mindset when he conceived of it, or as Jack Stevenson explained, “Von Trier later claimed that many viewers fainted during the 18 June screening at the Film School, ‘because’, as he put it, ‘I quite on purpose gave no release for the excitement which had been built up. … I purposely increased the excitement by setting the characters in extreme situations.’” Of course, anyone that has seen the film’s co-writer and cinematographer Tom Elling’s own directorial efforts like Perfect World (1990) will know that he clearly had a strong aesthetic and technical influence on the overall quality of the film, yet it is still assuredly Trier-ian in its provocatively and preternaturally haunting essence. As with von Trier’s greatest films, the auteur reveals his innate disdain for the Hollywood model by refraining from making insufferable moral judgments against his characters—whether it be the Nazi officer or the Danish whore who betrays him, which says a lot considering he was under the impression that he was an Israelite at the time. Of course, as a man that regards Liliana Cavani’s vaguely esoteric exercise in SS sadomasochism The Night Porter (1974) as one of his favorite films, one should not expect anything less from von Trier.

Naturally, despite depicting a naughty Nazi is a sympathetic light, von Trier was not trying to express any sort of pro-Hitlerite message with the film as revealed by his words, “I have not taken the side of the German officer because he is a Nazi but because he is the loser. … I permit myself to be fascinated by that which has always fascinated people, among other things, death. War is always a good subject.” Not surprisingly in our ultra-PC Zio-authoritarian times, such a rare open-minded mentality would get von Trier in deep trouble during a now-infamous press conference for his film Melancholia (2011) at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where he joked about how he “understands” and “sympathizes” with Hitler and expressed some negative sentiments regarding Israel and the horrendous Hebraic hack Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, Bird Box). Of course, as a subversive European ‘artiste’ with a deep interest in politics and history, especially WWII, it is only natural that von Trier would try to understand Uncle Adolf and his undeniable influence and the auteur's early films like The Orchid Gardener, Befrielsesbilleder, and Europa certainly proves that. After all, artists are oftentimes interested in politics because, not unlike art, it gives them the opportunity to create their own world, which is something that, despite his eventual failure and defeat in the end, Hitler fully achieved, hence his special interest in architects like Albert Speer and sculptors like Arno Breker.

Despite winning the ‘Special Award’ at the European Film School Festival in Munich in 1982 and receiving some positive reviews, Befrielsesbilleder was naturally met with much controversy and attacks, namely due to its unflattering depiction of the Danish resistance, or as Stevenson explained, “Liberation Day in Denmark had really been Judgment Day: passive collaborators and fence-sitters became patriots overnight – old scores were settled and accusations, true and false, were leveled. Five years of pent-up emotions boiled to the surface in a blind frenzy of anger, joy, patriotism and lust for revenge. While today public debate about the sensitive issue of the Occupation in Denmark is wide ranging, in 1982 perception of this complicated time conformed to a much more ‘official’ line: Germans were bad, Danes were good, and the Resistance had been heroic and widespread. Von Trier’s attempts, however perhaps half-formed, to investigate the ambiguous nature of good and evil and guilt and innocence within the sensitive context of the War, was sure to offend many, particularly his elders.” Undoubtedly, aside from the rare exception like the somewhat esoteric Death In June song “C'est Un Rêve,” there are not many similarly fearless examples of European art comparable to von Trier’s film where an artist dares to confront the cold black hypocritical heart that inspired some of the harsher actions of the ‘freedom fighters.’ Of course, as the film hints, not unlike Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun did before it, the outcome of WWII becomes more than a little bit dubious when it involves American negro ‘liberators’ taking native European women as whores and neighbors killing neighbors after the war had already ended. Also, certainly no common sense or humanity was applied when pioneering French film theorist Robert Brasillach—one of the first Western critics to seriously study great Japanese auteur filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi—was executed for his pro-fascist journalism after Charles de Gaulle refused to grant him a pardon. After all, until the Third Reich began losing the war and yanks and Brits invaded the continent, the German occupation of fellow Germanic countries like the Netherlands and Denmark was relatively peaceful. One certainly cannot say the same of the many countries that the United States have occupied since then and Europe has hardly benefited from the Americanization of the continent as its moral and spiritual degeneration, cultural retardation, dwindling populations and perpetual invasion by hostile so-called ‘refugees’ from the global south clearly reveals. In that sense, it is somewhat of a surprise that a filmmaker as great, revolutionary, and relatively young as von Trier even exists today in modern-day Europe, but then again, he still seems like a childish dilettante compared to his fellow Dane and cinematic hero Carl Theodor Dreyer (surely not coincidentally, Medea (1988), which is based on Dreyer's unused screenplay adaptation of Euripides' classic play, is among von Trier's maturest and most metaphysical works).

When the great frog film critic André Bazin wrote, “If there is a cinema of cruelty today, Stroheim invented it,” he certainly could not have predicted von Trier or his singular talent for bringing immense poetic pulchritude to such striking cinematic cruelty as is fully apparent in Befrielsesbilleder—a film that is quite probably the auteur’s most underrated cinematic effort to date in the sense that virtually no one has seen it despite the fact that it was directed by one of the most important and iconoclastic filmmakers working today. A film that begs for interpretation due to its hyper hermetic symbolism and ominously oneiric atmosphere, I cannot help but interpret it as a (probably largely unintentional) eulogy for Europa. Indeed, in a scene where a pocket watch burns in a fire while German soldiers—the last defenders of Europe against communism and other innately anti-Occidental alien forces—commit suicide in rather brutal fashions that really highlights the almost otherworldly desperation of their situation, one cannot help but reminded that time has run out and the so-called West is dead, or, at the very least, on its last gasp. Additionally, it goes without saying that the Nuremberg trials—a craven charade that involved the torture and lynching of men like philosopher Alfred Rosenberg for writing philosophy and propagandist Julius Streicher for writing sleazy yellow press propaganda, among other patent absurdities—were, as the late great Francis Parker Yockey noted while working as a lawyer there, a fiendish farce guided by a Judaic sense of justice and, in that sense, it is only fitting that a white European woman commits brutal literal/figurative eye-for-an-eye justice against her lover in von Trier's film.

As General George S. Patton—a truly honorable military man that, rather conveniently, died under beyond dubious circumstances after wisely criticizing America's nonsensical stance on the Soviet Union and support of so-called denazification processes—once wrote regarding the Nuremberg Show Trials, “I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and is semitic.” After all, as Nietzsche once wrote, “Sin, as it is at present felt wherever Christianity prevails or has prevailed, is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention; and in respect to this background of all Christian morality, Christianity has in fact aimed at ‘Judaizing’ the whole world.” In short, for better or worse, Befrielsesbilleder—a rather original film with a sometimes primeval paganistic spirit directed by a virtual novice with the flare of a master—deserves a special place in cinema history as a rare expression of a sort of ‘cruel humanism’ and almost transcendental pathos that dares to confront the harsh reality of the post-WWII German plight and go beyond good and evil whilst ironically flirting with Christian symbolism. Undoubtedly, von Trier would master this approach while tackling the woman question in Antichrist (2009) where feminine irrationalism and betrayal also leads to a nasty time for a dude in the forest.

-Ty E

10 to Midnight

2019-10-14T01:16:00.001-07:00

While it can certainly be argued that an immaculate exploitation film is an innately oxymoronic concept, some fucked flicks, not unlike porn sluts or fast food joints, are certainly better than others, even those produced by the fine kosher smut-peddlers of Cannon Films. Indeed, despite my increasingly disillusionment with the value of virtually all forms of trash cinema, I recently saw two exploitation films, Gary Sherman’s Vice Squad (1982) and J. Lee Thompson’s 10 to Midnight (1983), that reminded me that sometimes you need the cinematic equivalent of a big sloppy juicy back-alley blowjob from a cheap worthless whore. While both films involve a deranged white villain that butchers wanton white bitches with a certain penetratingly uncanny tenacity, these sexually unsound murderers have quite different motivations and pathologies. Whereas Vice Squad features the grand delight of featuring Wings Hauser portraying a violently unhinged pimp that mutilates the genitals of mainly gutter-dwelling white whores (but also the occasional bumbling negro male), 10 to Midnight features a terminally pissed-off proto-incel of sorts that uses a knife as a sort of compensatory phallus against beauteous young babes that dared to make a mockery of his irreparably broken masculinity. Needless to say, the latter is easily the better of the two films, which largely has to do with Gene Davis’ performance as the killer and director J. Lee Thompson’s surprisingly competent directing abilities.

While surely a hack of sorts that was responsible for directing such lame franchise sequel films as Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), he also directed some quite notable cinematic works ranging from the WWII epic The Guns of Navarone (1961) to the campy Shirley MacLaine whore show What a Way to Go! (1964). Certainly more importantly, Thompson has demonstrated a talent for horror and thriller cinema with an inordinate sort of pathos and perversity, including the original Cape Fear (1962) starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, the spiritually incestuous The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), and the slightly underrated canuck slasher flick Happy Birthday to Me (1981), among others. While I am not sure if I would cite 10 to Midnight as the director’s single greatest achievement, it is unequivocally his most tasteless and, in turn, wildly entertaining film and surely a notable accomplishment in that the filmmaker only agree to direct the film the night before shooting began after the original director was apparently let go (notably, Thompson previously worked with lead Bronson on films like St. Ives (1976) and The White Buffalo (1977)). A sort of super sod slasher on steroids that is big on the sensual and sensational in a largely unabashedly morally retarded fashion, the film oftentimes feels like it is set in the same sexually sociopathic universe as William Friedkin’s killer cocksucker classic Cruising (1980) as both are pleasantly politically incorrect flicks featuring gay serial killers that never capitulate to bourgeois bitch taste. Additionally, both films star Eugene M. Davis—the somewhat lesser known (and seemingly gayer) younger brother of actor turned AIDS victim Brad Davis (Midnight Express, Querelle)—and surely benefit from it (notably, lapsed teen idol Leif Garrett also auditioned for the role in 10 to Midnight and luckily he did not get it).

While I am not sure if Davis was also sexually abused by both of his parents like his brother Brad apparently was, he certainly does demonstrate a seemingly innate proficiency for portraying patently perverse characters (which probably explains his fairly uneven and rather limited acting career that includes roles ranging from a virtual man-whore in Roger Vadim's obscure Night Games (1980) to Nicolas Winding Refn's somewhat underrated Fear X (2003)). Indeed, whereas Davis portrayed a bitchy leather-clad quasi-tranny hooker in Cruising that surely could never pass for a woman despite how unconventionally ‘pretty’ he is, he’s especially believable as an autistic psychopath that likes making dirty phone calls and killing bitchy cunts that won’t give up their cunt despite the fact that he seems about as straight as a circle. Made long before the LGBT monster shot its viral load on unholywood, the film features what might be described as an ‘ambiguously gay’ serial killer that not only leaves queer porno mags on his toilet but who was also clearly modeled after Richard Speck who infamously gleefully spent his prison years as the tranny whore of a negro cocaine dealer (notably, this was not the first film inspired by the Speck murders as indicated by the curious exploitation flick Naked Massacre (1976) directed by Denis Héroux and starring German arthouse stars Mathieu Carrière and Eva Mattes). Just like Speck, the killer targets a group of nubile nurses. Unlike Speck, the killer receives quick and swift justice for his less than gentlemanly crimes.

Despite being a reasonably handsome guy with a muscular body and sculpted physique, the killer is a glaring creep that could not smash a gash if he had a hundred horny ovulating hos begging to be banged standing before him as he lacks a certain organic masculine heterosexual assertiveness, hence his compensatory need to penetrate women with sharp inanimate objects while in the nude. Rather curiously, aside from the female lead, most of the ill-fated chicks that the psychosexual killer kills with his virtual metal prick are hardly likeable ladies, thus adding to his incel cred. Not surprisingly, the film was supposed to feature more homoerotic content, including a scene where the killer is hit on by a flaming fagola and another where Bronson was supposed to wrestle a very naked Gene Davis (also, not surprisingly, Bronson was apparently not up for grappling with an unclad pretty boy). While the film is not quite as hyper homoerotic as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) as far as 1980s genre cinema goes, there is no doubt that the killer is an involuntary member of the pink team, hence his miserably misguided homo-cidal rage.

Maybe it is simply because he has a less than aesthetically pleasing Asiatic appearance (he had Lipka Tatar roots), overall lack of martial charisma, and/or hardly intimidating stature/physique, but I have never been particularly fond of Charles Bronson, even if I can superficially appreciate the sentiments of a film like Death Wish (1974). Since I can’t really back Bronson or the sort of philistine films he is best known for, I found it to the great benefit of 10 to Midnight that his shamelessly corrupt and callous cop character is fairly unlikable one. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the character is so intrinsically unlikable that, in the end, I found myself rooting for the psychotic serial killer in all of his ambiguously gay naked glory. In fact, it even somehow comes as a genuine great shock at the end of the film when Bronson gets so high on his own unhinged self-righteousness that he puts a bullet in the brain of the mad muscular twink when he is not threat after being apprehended shortly after he massacres some nurses à la Richard Speck. In short, 10 to Midnight is a surprisingly sick (not to mention simultaneously gritty yet aesthetically slick) flick that some lame spiritually castrated LGBT film theorist could fairly easily argue has an identifiable anti-sod subtext in a sort of subtly hysterical homo-hating fashion to the point where one might believe it inspired a brief trend of fag-bashing in Kentucky. As a film drenched in gratuitous violence and nudity—and, quite nicely, combines the two—it is also the sort of the movie that would entice Gaspar Noé, even if it does not go quite as far as Gerald Kargl’s endlessly entrancing serial killer fever dream Angst (1983) in terms of plunging the viewer's mind into the deep dark abyss that is the psyche of a raging renegade aberrosexual.

Warren Stacy (Gene Davis) is an undeniably handsome yet strikingly autistic young man that is an abject failure when it comes to the ladies and he knows it, but now he has decided to take revenge against the wanton whores, sidewalk slags, and conniving cum-dumps that will not even give him a meager crumb of pussy. Indeed, pathologically obsessed (as indicated by spastic fragmented flashbacks that are inter-spliced with shots of his very feminine grooming habits) with a bimbo bitch named Betty (June Gilbert) that dared to throw coffee in his face after some sort of failed romantic advance, wayward Warren carries out a revenge plan that involves murdering both the girl and her beau at a local park on a nice sunny day. In what is surely symbolic of his sexual perversion, Warren kills Betty while he is completely naked and—rather fittingly—she also happens to be completely unclad due to being interrupted while in the middle of fucking her boyfriend in a car. Due to leaving behind no forensic evidence due to being naked (hence his reasoning behind his completely bare butchery) and creating the perfect alibi by talking to some bitchy babes at a movie theater, escaping throw a bathroom window unnoticed to carry out the murders, and then making his way back to the movie theater before the movie ends so the same bitchy babes can testify that he was there that evening, Warren is a fairly clever unhinged chap and that really pisses off hardened cynical cop Leo Kessler (Charles Bronson) who knows a guilty pervert when he sees one. As a broody old bastard that is clearly approaching retirement, Kessler clearly has little time for bureaucratic bullshit and a whiny weirdo like Warren proves to really get his goat, thus inevitably leading to an intense showdown between the two quite different (yet arguably equally, if dissimilarly, socially obnoxious) loner types.

Indeed, when Warren comes under his radar, Kessler immediately knows that the agile autist is unequivocally guilty but he has to struggle with the annoying complication of working with a young idealistic cop named Paul McAnn (Andrew Stevens)—a handsome yet hopelessly normal young stud—that sincerely believes in law and order and does everything completely by the book as if his life depended on it. In fact, aside from catching bad dudes and bringing them to justice, Kessler doesn’t really seem to care about anything, including his own unconventionally beautiful student nurse daughter Laurie Kessler (Lisa Eilbacher) who, rather conveniently in terms of the film's plot, is acquainted with Warren’s victims. Needless to say, when his young partner Paul becomes romantically interested in his daughter Laurie, Kessler also does not seem to give a shit about that, but luckily wacko Warren eventually develops an obsessive interest with the police detective’s daughter due to being constantly hounded by him to an almost fetishistic degree, as if the crusty old cop also has his own set of subconscious perversions that he is attempting to compensate for. Needless to say, the film concludes with Warren attempting to butcher Laurie while Kessler and Paul try to save her while simultaneously trying to bring down the ambiguously gay naked killer. Thankfully, despite its flaws, 10 to Midnight is not a film that pussies out in the end and instead closes on a shockingly politically incorrect note that reminds one that a single bullet can do so much more for humanity than a Talmudic Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy where a sort of neo-Sanhedrin reigns that caters to criminals and debases victims.

While crazed closet-case Warren Stacy is indubitably a bad dude that indeed deserves the bullet that ruptures his gray matter, I find it hard to not be at least superficially sympathetic to the savagely psychotic little sod as he is not totally delusional as clearly depicted in the film's deplorable dystopian realm of intrinsically irrational gynocentric terror where any dumb cunt with a room temperature IQ feels free to shame and debase any unfortunate male that does something she might find even the slightest bit unfavorable. In that sense, the film is strangely prophetic for what amounts to a seemingly immaculately polished piece of celluloid trash. In fact, Warren is certainly more sympathetic than, say, hopelessly hapless hapa incel messiah Elliot Rodger—a spoiled yet seriously self-loathing victim of miscegenation that, on top of being autistic, resented the fact his mom was Asian—who, unlike the film’s protagonist, did not have enough testicular fortitude to even try ask a girl out yet felt he was somehow entitled to premium grade Europid pussy because his white daddy bought him a fancy Bimmer. Undoubtedly, if Warren simply started hanging out at the sort of savage gay clubs featured in Cruising, Jacques Scandelari's New York City Inferno (1978), or Fred Halsted's A Night at Halsted's (1982), all of his problems would be solved as he would have an outlet for his sadistic sexual violence and he would not even have to really deal with dreaded women again outside the dreary dames from his lame office job. In short, Warren is, not unlike many gay serial killers that include John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, among countless others, a pathetic victim of his own self-denial and self-deceptions. Despite being handsome and in good physical shape, Warren inspires horripilant in women because of his intrinsically repugnant personality traits and complete and utter lack of instinctual male heterosexual qualities. Of course, the irony of 10 to Midnight is that, despite the filmmaker’s best intent, Warren is no less repugnant than some of the women he kills, thus underscoring the all-around decidedly dysfunctional nature of the sexes in the post-sexual liberation America where many misguided young people feel completely obligated to embody some shallow (and oftentimes soul-destroying, especially for women) sexual (pseudo)ideal as if pornography and MTV are virtual guides to healthy living. After all, a fiercely fucked freak like Warren would probably feel less inclined to act homicidally as a closeted homo had he grown up in a pre-counterculture environment where there was less pressure on a man to prove his sexual prowess and penetrate as many worthless thots as possible, but I digress.

Undoubtedly, one of the most potent aspects of 10 to Midnight is the fact that the killer dispatches his victims whilst completely au naturel, which certainly has a particularly primal quality that transcends the sheer banality of serial killer genre convention. As to why unclad killing is interesting, degenerate Nietzschean anarchist Georges Bataille made the interesting argument in his text Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) that, “Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic art follows, consummating it. Stripping naked is seen in civilizations where the act has full significance if not as a simulacrum of the act of killing, at least as an equivalent shorn of gravity. In antiquity the destitution (or destruction) fundamental to eroticism was felt strongly and justified linking the act of love with sacrifice […] I must emphasize that the female partner in eroticism was seen as the victim, the male as the sacrifice, both during the consummation losing themselves in the continuity established by the first destructive act.” Undoubtedly, the way Bataille describes simple nakedness also makes it seem strangely comparable to the art of bullfighting which, rather fittingly, is an obsession of whacked-out Warren’s to the point where he has learned Spanish in tribute to his (assumedly second) favorite form of ritual slaughter. Indeed, Warren is the sort of guy that would probably jerk-off to Francesco Rosi’s artful documentary The Moment of Truth (1965). Bullfighting aside, Warren's acts of unclad killing certainly have a ritualistic quality and ultimately betray his reputation as an insufferably uptight autist, as if stark-naked slaughters act as the sole relief he has from a loser life of involuntary celibacy and latent homosexuality. Needless to say, such a fucked fellow would never stop killing, hence why he grisly end almost seems mandatory, if not overkill.

Being what is essentially a glorified exploitation film on sleekly stylized sleaze steroids, 10 to Midnight does suffer from its fair share of problems, namely its tasteless tacked-on ‘good guy badge/bad ass vigilante’ ending where Bronson pulls-off a degenerate Death Wish-esque dispatching of the villain so that the audience can feel self-satisfied that the closeted cocksucker killer is as dead as Jeffrey Epstein's infamous libido. Indeed, in the end, deranged broken boy killer Warren—naked and pulsating like a thoroughly aroused cock that is about to blow a load that is so massive that it would impregnate the entire world with visceral hatred for vaginas—goes on a bitchy mocking rant to Bronson boy about how he is going to evade justice by using his mental illness as an excuse, thereupon inspiring the already-quite-infuriated no-bullshit cop to unload copper in his brain. Seeing as that, by the end of the film, Warren has completely transformed into a virtual modern-day Berserker—high on his own visceral hatred and seemingly immune to all attacks via his unclad body—and lost all contact with rationality and reality, it would seem more likely that he would fight to the death instead of allowing himself to be apprehended by his arch-nemesis. After all, his freedom and, in turn, life is over and such an inherently insane and individualistic individual would not fare too well inside any sort of government institution—be it a prison, mental institution, or otherwise. After all, as Bronze Age Pervert—a curiously shadowy and ambiguously gay individual that loves buff unclad bros—wrote in his manifesto Bronze Age Mindset (2018), “A beautiful death at the right time is the only key to understanding a life, its only hidden ‘meaning.’ It is a beautiful death to die after accomplishing a great feat for the glory of one’s city, family and for the gods, but it’s greater still to die in one’s prime, at the height of your powers and at the acme of their discharge. A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur.” In short, Warren could have gone out like a sort of crazed killer cracker Mishima but instead he dies pathetically like a low-level negro gang-banger, but of course not many films tend to glorify the deaths of gay serial killers.

Notably, the life and death of the film’s first murder victim, Betty (June Gilbert), somewhat parallels that of failed tragic actress Christa Helm who, not unlike the fictional character, left behind a detailed personal love diary of sorts regarding her personal sexual and romantic consequences, hence why some believe she was murdered to cover up certain unsavory facts about sleazy bigwig Hollywood types. Despite dating powerful men like Joe Namath and Warren Beatty, Helm suffered a rather brief and forgettable acting career that included a small debut role in successful porn auteur Gerard Damiano’s non-porn horror turd Legacy of Satan (1974) and tiny cameos on tiresome hit TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Wonder Woman. Immersed in the darker side of Hollywood, Helm also lived with porn auteur Jonas Middleton (Through the Looking Glass) and even apparently co-wrote the script for his second fuck flick Illusions of a Lady (1974), but quit the production when the filmmaker opted to make it a full-on hardcore film. While all this might seem like barely-related frivolous trivia in relation to 10 to Midnight, it all ultimately adds further context to film’s overall malefic mystique and exceedingly evil essence, as if this virtual glorified exploitation film is really much more as a semi-esoteric expression of the post-counterculture zeitgeist and superlatively sick collective unconscious of Hollywood during that time. Of course, this explains the popularity of actors like Charles Bronson—a symbol of atavistic vengeance against such degeneracy—even if he physically resembled a sort of half-bourgeois Charles Manson. The fact that lead Gene Davis’ brother previously starred in Fassbinder’s S&M sod swansong Querelle (1982)—a film that, despite its certain camp qualities, is imbued with a sort of sexually apocalyptic essence that was clearly influenced by the Todestrieb-inclined spirit of its forsaken auteur—only a year before further confirms the hopelessly collectively necrotizing state of the Occident at that time.

Dubious ancestry aside, Bronson is ultimately a sad symbol of reactionary boomer impotence and nothing more, hence how Hollywood went from churning out films like Cruising and 10 to Midnight to Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Call Me by Your Name (2017) in a mere couple decades as homo-hating is no longer vogue and homos have been homogenized enough to make for sound subject matter in mid-brow films for sentimental grandmothers. In a dying civilization where even a fictional Warren Stacy seems more sympathetic to a real-life Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian—two misbegotten creatures that, unlike the film character, did not even exhibit a warped masculinity as they are both devoid of masculine qualities altogether—and their impotent perennially blue-balled “Beta Uprising” campaigns, the film is ultimately a delightfully dejecting reminder that things can always get worse and that—no matter the circumstances—there’s few things more patently loathsome than a man that cannot procure pussy of some sort. After all, Warren Stacy might have been a raging closest queen with insane standards, but there are always fat chicks with fat asses!

-Ty E