Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 SHADES OF GREY, 9 1/2 WEEKS, EXIT TO EDEN, SECRETARY + SHE DEMONS, Franco, Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.

There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2.

Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many  young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV.  Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.

And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.

According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.

There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.

Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona

I was into bondage myself, off and on, for years, always more in theory than practice (losing my virginity to "Venus in Furs" helped), and generally turned off by any evidence of it onscreen (see above uncanny valley illus.) why, for example, so many Nerve profiles cite as their favorite sex scene Persona (1966), which has no sex scene at all. What it has a monologue, delivered in a flat, slightly ashamed voice.

As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.

mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993)

Similarly, all that 'R' erotica stuff in the back row of Netflix and Amazon Prime, like Emmanuelle, Justine, or The Story of O is never sexy except in rare instances of almost incidental hotness and of worth only for their non-'erotic' elements --the zooms, the terrible fashions, the hilariously stilted artsy blocking; and sometimes we 'remember' them as hot, since remembering brings eventually us into the same zone as literature, or the dream. We live in an age of STDs like no one in the ancient 60s and 70s could have e'er envisioned; free love has been hidden away so that the jovial bacchanal of 70s XXX is replaced by condoms on gym-muscled dudes pumped with Viagara so a girl doesn't get a break; and stuff that moves off the lip of the familiar and seems genuinely dangerous-- such as the borderline misogynistic mental pummeling of Madonna in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993)--stirs our preliminary superegoic shock troops into inner-censorial unsexy PC knee-jerking.

While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)

Another entry in the mainstream bondage category on the camp side of the valley, Secretary (2002), fails in ways not quite as extreme: seeing Maggie Gyllenhaal walk around an office doing paperwork clamped into a black leather stock is funny, not sexy, but at least she herself is cute and her masochism properly recognized as preferable to self-cutting; her getting spanked for the first time by boss James Spader during office hours is the film's only sexy moment because it's unplanned (could easily win her a harassment lawsuit), dangerous (no safe word), and functional (he's correcting her typo); there is no safe word. But soon the typos are framed along the office corridors, and quirky paint schemes turn the legal office into some madcap Urban Outfitters showroom.

Succubus (1967)

In other words, mainstream directors can't do this stuff with a straight face, so they either have to sink into the softcore sanctimony or look farther, across the pond and back in time, and onto the Blue Underground and Severin DVD labels. and maverick auteurs like Jean Rollin, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jess Franco. The latter's Succubus (1967) is a fine example, for here the whole twice removed 'someone else's dream' nonstarter vibe is made active again through a triple reversal - an S/M performance in a film is tepid by nature but if she's killing them for real and no one in the audience knows, then a kind of mecha-medusa-mirroring occurs and the whole Antonioni signifier collapse thing leads us out of the Platonic cave altogether, like the jolt when Samara crawls out of the TV in The Ring.

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BUNUEL, VON STERNBERG

From top: She Demons; Bunuel directing La Belle du Jour

There are rare directors who manage to understand the 'someone else's dream' dilution and reverse it yet again, to take us all the way out of the dream within the movie and out of even our dream of reality and back into their 'privatized' space, like falling asleep and waking up as your own mother and finally knowing what she really thinks about us. Bunuel and von Sternberg bring us into our own psyches as viewers via recreations of the Freudian primal scene, and a grasp of the longing to return to the pre-Oedipal total reunion with the mother, with total and complete annihilation of self and free will, a submission and surrender that overloads the superego with feedback loops until it shatters, freeing our recessive psychic blocks, opening the cellar doors on our subconscious basement prisons and letting all the long-repressed memories and desires escape into the open air. Where of course, they vanish, over credits. But no one ever called them sexy.

This is where French theory comes into play, ala the concepts of masquerade and Deleuze's 'Becoming-Animal' - as in She Demons (1957, above), where castaways wander into a scene of beautiful blonde savages being whipped by Nazis. Our natural desire to help is tempered by the gun (phallic authority of the father) of the Nazi whipper and our possible misunderstanding of what's behind it all (as a child would misunderstand the primal scene as 'mother being hurt by father, the slap of body on thrusting body as spanking etc). In sum, when it is not 'supposed' to be erotic, not built up by smutty directors with kinky sex toys, the woman moaning in dubbed in pleasure or laughter or infantile squeals of pleasure, then and only then is it arousing --because it is so very wrong to be aroused. Because soon after the punishment, the woman reveals herself to have devolved into a gibbering devil, ala the Island of Lost Souls animal men.

Venus in furs 

It's to Von Sternberg and his Dietrich collaborations in the final analysis, though, to be seductive as well as masochistic. Bunuel is great but I never really feel the need to see most of his movies more than once whereas the JvS-Dietrichs improve and beguile more and more with each successive viewing. If the collective 'we' are to understand why the Grey book is so popular yet the film will suck so hard, it might be wise to join me IN THE REALMS OF PLEASURE: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic by Garylyn Studlar (Columbia Press, 1988):

"The fatalism of Von Sternberg's films is not simply an acceptance of death as an externally imposed inevitability but the expression of the masochistic urge toward death as a self-willed liberation. In choosing death, an illusionary triumph is created: the illusion of choice,"(48)

...masochisms obsession with death may be interpreted either as the expression of a universal instinctual urge or as the result of the masochistic wish for complete symbiosis with the mother and a return to nothingness,.... Eros is desexualized and resexualized; death becomes the ultimate fetish that fascinates with the promise of a mystical unity." (p. 123)

Only Bunuel and Von Sternberg every seemed to grasp this concept, and it's not for nothing for example that both adapted the same masochistic text, Pierre Louÿs "La femme et le pantin," or that two different actresses play the same character in Bunuel's version, That Obscure Object of Desire, the cocktease girl who continually manipulates the lead and denies him any form of sexual release, a bond she instinctively understands he needs and appreciates. As the rapper Scarface once said, "I'm done as soon as I bust me a nut," - well, some characters never want to be 'done' - it spoils the game, turns a long elaborate twisted ritual into a disappointingly short-lived gratification followed by shame and emptiness. The whole trick to getting what you want is to deliberately want to want rather than have and still want for wanting. Most tricks are part sleight-of-hand and part misdirection, but here misdirection is the whole trick. The slighted hands of the clock are frozen at bedtime, right before mom comes in to kiss you goodnight and turn out the lights. Maybe you never get the kiss, but the lights stay on forever. 

From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire

FINALE:

 Don Pasquale hits closest to home...

I've never been a fan of The Devil is a Woman or the Bunuel version, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) but I respect them and I question my own hostile reaction, for the main character, an exploited masochist named Don Pasquale hits closest to home, reminding me of how a girl I loved as a ten year-old exploited my devotion by cheating at Monopoly, borrowing quarters, batting first in wiffle ball and then quitting when it was my turn, over and over. I learned my frickin' lesson, man. And I've always shied away from movies where everyone is money-grubbing like a third world tourist trapper, such as in von Sternberg's version. All the money and gifts are what Atwill stresses in his re-telling of his relationship with Concha (Marlene Dietrich), but plays down any sexual contact (this being the only post-code Dietrich/von Sternberg collaboration) that might or been not made, leaving us with a series of bilking, check-writing, cataloguing of goods, birds, food, baskets of goodies for the mother, and Dietrich with her hair up in baroque headdresses, even singing a merry peasant song about sons of bakers, and florists, 'and other things that aren't so sweet,' as if all attraction was measured in men lavishing gifts on her, and nothing else. It's dispiriting, and gradually we must question whether Atwill is emphasizing these things to Romero to ward him off because the Severin slot is taken and he'd rather not have his friend play 'The Greek' (or in this case, 'the cousin').

For the masochist in the end, the velvet cage is not reminiscent of prison but of infancy, the crib bars past which one cannot crawl in vain search for the mother. In both versions, Don Pasquale watches Carmela make love to the younger bullfighter through a cage which Studlar makes the point is a ground zero witness to a recreated primal scene, the bars ala the bars of the crib that prevents unobstructed maternal access and so triggers the primal scene's return in all its superego smashing, Thanatos-resurrecting glory. This obstruction is duplicated in the filmgoing experience, the frustration of the masochistic (as opposed to the sadistic male gaze described by Laura Mulvey)

oral phase cinema (boys to the left): from top: Blonde Venus, Obscure Object of Desire, Persona

Devil is a Woman

True masochism pre-dates the Oedipal complex, it moves towards total reunion or separation, peek-a-boo, as it were, of delayed polymorphous orgasm of the oral phase, the return to a total reunification with the mother and the annihilation of the self, Eros and Thanatos conjoined. Even without ruining a BDSM fantasy with comedians there's already something faintly ridiculous and sad about it onscreen, ala that night at La Nouvelle Justine, just bondage gear onscreen is kind of a joke. Play bondage in film is like fiction within fiction, a double negative, which may have some value as metatextual abstraction or intellectual discourse, which is why it's so beloved of French intellectuals like novelist/theorist Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye) and filmmaker/novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Lacan and Deleuze), but no matter how arty the lighting and fractured the text, the bondage and discipline stuff in Robbe-Grillet's films always looks a little sex shop goofy.

Gradiva (2006)

When we get similar themes in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, many of which are now on DVD, wherein rustic barns, thrift store period costumes, and brand spanking new spankers mix uneasily together to no real affect. Robbe's is an intellectual, take his word for it, and gets the whole Georges Bataille-Deleuze-Lacan thing, but in the end, it boils down to the same goofy handcuffs, provoking little more than boredom and vague feminist ire. Read a book, Alain! And ideally make that book Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure. You're probably smart enough to understand it. That's called flattery, you craven dog!

NOTES:

1. Though I hear that's not done these days by parents, kids certainly can imagine being abducted thanks to nonstop media hysteria. And I'd add that when the 'child is being beaten' frisson is taken out of the parental sphere, dad loses 90% of his authority (a good dad shouldn't need to punish, but without the threat what power does he have? Now the power is reversed, rather than the kid scared of the dad spanking, the dad is scared of the kid saying he was spanked, leading to arrests and child services). This accounts, in my mind, for the at least part of the shift of the father's role in the house from authoritarian top dog to low dog whipping boy. 
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.

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OBVIOUS CHILD, GINGER SNAPS and Your Reproductive Lunar Cycle

Even in our modern age of 'chick-flicks' and 'rom-coms' that allegedly delves deep into women's sexual trials and truths, there are some issues which never get treated 'openly,' i.e. brazenly and even-keeled, like: female orgasms, menstruation, and unplanned pregnancies that end not in hasty marriage or adoption but abortion, done without guilt or shaming yet not making light of it either. The censorship codes of our grandparents post-code film die hard. Raunchiness is strictly for teenage boys, or hot girls like Emma Stone, Cameron Diaz or Katherine Heigl trapped in bromantic comedies with dudes well below their stature. That's why films like OBVIOUS CHILD (2014) and GINGER SNAPS (2000) are so shocking, and instantly relevant, like needed feminine mystique injections into a cinema choked with hormonal boy's gym clothes rankness and squeamish back of the bus tittering.

Slate at Cross's.

The first great abortion comedy, Obvious Child is hilarious down to it's fertile core. SNL alum Jenny Slate stars as Donna, a struggling comedian in Williamsburg who "would like an abortion, please," and respectfully declines hearing the other options from the PP counselor. She likes the one night stand guy she met, Max (Jake Lacy, from The Office) who was too drunk to get the condom on, but even if they keep seeing each other it's the smart decision, right? Credit a beautiful script by director Gillain Robespierre (based on her short film of the same name) that we never doubt Donna's sensitivity even as the jokes fly furious, or that her mind is made up and that she's smart and has considered her options and is neither martyr nor lost soul, checking her own tendency to leaven her inner tension while dealing with the issue, yet never presuming that tension is somehow 'valid' because of the surrounding controversy.

There's such a perfect flow between Slate and the material it's hard to believe it's all not happening in the moment with special attention to the way people actually talk --not 'normal' people, the kind of banal life-affirming doltishness Hollywood jadedly associates with the 'true America'--but real young Williamsburg-dweller college-educated witty individuals -they are not normal dudes and dudettes, or even rote hipsters. Instead there is the same kind of keenly-observed, brilliantly modulated comedic interaction I've seen only in the best 'ensemble' female comedy teams--Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in BRIDESMAIDS (2007) or Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in BROAD CITY (Comedy Central, season two coming soon!) for example--women who've done enough improv and rehearsal to make their characters breathe and roll rather than submitting to some half-assed plot twists thrust on them by some clueless male or self-hating female screenwriter whose low opinion of young women is masked by feminist lip service (the grating dimwittedness 'hipster' girls in JUNO and FRANCES HA for example).

Broad City

Escorted by a solid batch of actors: Polly Draper as Donna's domineering business school professor mother; Richard Kind as her puppeteer dad; David Cross as a skeevy comedian chum; Gabe Liedman as the bitchy gay emcee buddy (with none of the usual cliches thereto forthwith), and Gaby Hoffmann (see: The Little Mescalito that Couldn't) as the roommate, Slate and Robespierre usher in brave scenes of free-flowing actorly relations transcending all the usual chick flick malarkey. When Donna busts the tale of her abortion out on stage we cringe and hold tight to the arm rests, teeth gritted, expecting yet another long, sad bombing like her previous performance, or alienation of this new man's affection. I won't spoil the endings but I wouldn't even be writing this post had OBVIOUS CHILD tread familiar ground.

Robespierre and Slate...

OBVIOUS instead takes the first shot at turning abortion into legitimate material for a stand-up routine, busting long-held vow of silence, denial, and the drabness so many filmmakers confuse with 'importance'. I can see this becoming the film women watch while on the couch recovering from their Planned Parenthood journeys, something that won't make them feel bad about their decision while never making light of it either, with no need for self-hatred or permanent emotional scarring. May this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship and collaboration: Slate and Robespierre, the Tina Fey and Amy Poehler of a new child-free generation!

Speak of menstrual cycles, and the female orgasm, and female duos fighting the Broseph Patriarchy, GINGER SNAPS (2000) arrives on a stunning blu-ray/DVD combo from Shout Factory this week. As usual the Shout's stepped up to the plate with a fan's loving attention to little details. A classic piece in the history of feminine hygiene horror, GINGER has a deserved cult, genuine badass attitude, humor, existential morbidity, and a blood-drenched yet touching finish all sans cliche. Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) is the older sister, the bitten one, and younger introvert Brigitte (Emily Perkins) her faithful and similarly Thanatos-obsessed sister. They hate everyone in their nowhere Canadian high school and live in their own world, taking pictures of themselves in various death scenarios for a ghastly school art project under the opening credits. When a popular girl overhears their bitter remarks about her during field hockey practice, an escalating series of fights leads to Ginger being attacked by a werewolf. As the full moon of her menstrual cycle lycanthropy turns her from HEAVENLY CREATURE into a strutting JENNIFER'S BODY-style maneater, Ginger becomes first hot, then kind of overbaked with a lame chest piece and cute button poodle nose, then an outright animal puppet, both carnal and charnel.

Younger Brigitte, meanwhile, has to begin the scary task of trying not only to help her sister by finding a cure and then cooking it up and injecting it, but by pulling away from their sacred death pact and passing judgment against the 'right' of might, i.e. killing humans is not a moral problem for werewolves, anymore than steak for most 'normal' eaters, but Brigitte isn't ready to make that moral jump in reality instead of art.  There's a few boys and meals to the side, including a helpful chemist/horticulturist/pot dealer who seems partially inspired Josh Hartnett's character in THE FACULTY (1998), but more than anything, this is a girl's horror movie, bloody like the menses-minded wolf.

There's still a few problems like the less-than-stellar werewolf effects (there's no real transformation money shot ala HOWLING or AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which is fine), the kinds of problems which could have been covered by CGI, but digital effects were still, as we learn in the extras, too expensive at the time, and now that CGI is so pervasive, GINGER's reliance on analog latex is retro-cool and adorable anyway, but the fact that it's still scary and touching, that this latex head is believably Ginger, is all due to Emily Perkins, who makes scenes with the transformed Ginger come alive in ways the monster on its own could not. Like Slate in OBVIOUS CHILD we can read all sorts of inferences in Perkins' eyes--her understanding of the impassive rubber wolf mask's little gestures makes the mask come alive for us as well. She brings home the real sadness of being stalked by your own sister, the only soul in the world you trusted, who know wants you to kill your new and only other friend to prove your devotion. With her sullen long face hidden in a deep foxhole of long protective hair, Perkins is so great and her rapport with Isabelle so solid, the minor problems all melt away and only beautifully framed horror film tableaux. The only work closest to it I can think of is Geena Davis in THE FLY (1986).

The wealth of extras include a somewhat rambling making-of documentary, deleted scenes, previews, and two separate commentary tracks. In these the director John Fawcett makes sure we know he's the feminist behind this, not all the women who worked on it, like co-writer Karen Walton (though she does get her own commentary track and surely had a hand in the rightness of the dialog, the way Debra Hill did on HALLOWEEN). They're currently working on the hit BBC show ORPHAN BLACK together so they must still be tight -- but he'd be a lot better off letting Walton take more credit; hell, Jack Hill even invented a woman author for his SWINGING CHEERLEADERS script (Fawcett does have some slyly deprecating things to say about the final monster, and how they had to keep it in shadow a lot to keep up the scariness --a nice way of saying it sucked - though he was the one who insisted it be hairless and albino, terrible choice, John!) There's also some insight into the tax-funded Canadian film industry (there was a backlash when the script was sent around to casting agencies because Columbine had just occurred), audition tapes from the early part of the process, and what the actors look like now (or Emily Perkins anyway, who seems like a completely different person, above)

But the real juicy extra is a panel of female horror writers and filmmakers discussing menstrual horror films that deal with women's sexuality and how drastically apart films like GINGER SNAPS are from the bulk of slasher films and how that imbalance is an expression of man's horror of gynecology and the female orgasm, the scariness and pain for the girl of her first period being something a man can't quite face, and the way females can only achieve orgasm in movies if they also kill their lover immediately (or else are killed, for their sin). They give some love to the underrated JENNIFER'S BODY (see my praiseful post Dead Jennifers), CARRIE (of course), and VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS, a film that could really use a blu-ray itself. And they seem to agree with me that TEETH is a nice idea that totally fails as a film, its makers second-guessing and sewing members back on right up to the time I turned it off (see here).

The sum of their discussion is never voiced, but you can read it here: GINGER SNAPS is badass. It dares to never even approach the idea of a 'normal' life being worth a shit. We don't end the film with Brigitte cutting her hair and finding a nice boy her own age and all that garbage usually force-fed audiences by an out-of-touch Hollywood. And it's for that reason that both GINGER and OBVIOUS CHILD are worth repeat viewings. GINGER has already gone on to have quite a cult for itself, and even two pretty good sequels. I hope OBVIOUS CHILD gets the same lasting love, and that it blows Zach Braff's facile WISH I WAS HERE (which includes "Obvious Child" on its golden indie oldies soundtrack - as if snooping over Gillian Robespierre's shoulder) out of the water, and that more female writers and directors and actors have the balls, if you'll forgive the expression, to openly convey the bizarre terrors of their menstrual and reproductive cycles rather than leaving it to men for whom the vagina is still a disturbing void ever ready to swallow them up, but over which they presume control once they have successfully entered and planted their flag. Fuck them and their flags. If every abused suffering wife and daughter in a fundamentalist or abusive home just slit her husband's, father's or oldest son's throat in the dead of night, we'd wake up to a world free of violence. Am I the only one who thinks like this? Fuck the irony! Wake the Venusian Flytrap kraken, a screaming jock or frat boy bleeding from its every anemone tendril orifice! Asherah, rise! Kali! Kali! Frances Farmer! Awake! Or at the very least, ladies, keep up the good work.

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Medusae of Asia: THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941), RAIN (1932)

Pre-code neo-Jacobean Tragedy's final venomous wheeze, THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) sinks its cobra fangs deep into the mongoose of censorship, self-abasement, and social taboo, to levels only Josef Von Sternberg dared go, Josef, wrangler of Marlene! Bunuel and Chaney but coarse brutes by comparison. Exploring an array of sins that the Breen Office demanded over 30 script revisions to obscure, it stars Dietrich's old 'sewing circle' pal, Ona Munsen (1) as a dragon lady named Mother  Gin-Sling, owner and operator of a Shanghai casino structured like the rings of Dante's Inferno: as the wheel spins and a Russian threatens to kill himself there's also gigolo-ing, gold-digging, murder, drug addiction, alcohol, white slavery, elaborate revenge, smoking, and Super Masochist Sublimation Power, though by then that power was reduced in wattage. Based on a play by John Colton, GESTURE bid 1941 America pretend Shanghai wasn't then locked in a death struggle with the Japanese. What are you going to do? Pearl Harbor was drawing near.

We've always needed a slinky broad for these Pacific fantasias to sizzle properly: TERRY AND THE PIRATES would be nowhere without the Dragon Lady; RAIN would be a mere drizzle without Joan Crawford; KONGO (1932) would be pure misery without Lupe Velez; RED DUST (1932) lost without Jean Harlow; MANDALAY (1934) an empty shell without Kay Francis shimmering as Spot White; THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1934) a lot of bluster and skulking without the celestial and unworthy daughter Fah Lo Suee (Myrna Loy) and Josef von's whole oeuvre just chiaroscuro exotica if not for the enigmatic Marlene. THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) would have been perfect for her. She was even the right age. Where was she? Munson has charm, and is commanding and regal, but so was Helen Gahagan in the 1935 SHE.


Munson, her headgear wild enough to play an 'Oriental' Medusa in Flo Ziegfeld's Mythology Revue, is certainly commanding but can't infuse a single glance or wave with enigmatic playfulness and subversive innuendo, or radiate hypnotized cobra calm like Dietrich could. Gale Sondergaard's relaxed but stiff-upper-back regality instead infuses her aura. Munson has great things going, like a cokehead's way of caging her formal dialogue with nasally enhanced sonorous jubilance and no accent whatsoever. She's great in all respects but, in the end, her headgear is what we remember no matter how sublimely her balance of camp and dramaturgy. There's a splash of Norma Desmond in there, too... claws bared.

Munson split our mortal plane in '55 with a note that read "This is the only way I know to be free again...Please don't follow me." Classic Munson.

The other players, meanwhile, seethe and stagger about the casino's few sets but never quite find a frequency they can all share: Gene Tierney pouts and sulks so much Poppy, an obnoxious daddy's girl gone wild, we wonder why Victor Mature (as Mother's perennially fezzed gigolo-pimp-procurer, Dr. Omar) is so interested. Seducing her with Song of Solomon quotes and lines like: "My mother was half-French and the other half was lost in the dust of time, related to all the earth, and nothing that's human is foreign to me," he's actually a perfect match. Then there's Walter Huston as a tycoon buying up her block and planning to evict her (at least it has nothing to do with morals). Maria Ouspenskaya hovers below decks as Mother's pint-sized Mongolian assistant; Eric Blore provides a welcome breeze as the casino's accountant and political connection forger; Mike Mazurki is a 'coolie' rickshaw spy (there's no real Chinese stars in the film, as far as I could see); Michael Dalmatoff the Russian expat bartender; Ivan Lebedeff about to blow his own brains out as an unlucky Russian expat gambler, and of course, looming on the horizon... Walter Huston. With eyes calmly alight, Mother Gin-Sling encourages our confidence that she has a plan, but it all depends on fate's fickle finger dialing her New Years dinner party into a third act denouement of MADAME BUTTERFLY self-immolation with Huston as the prize goose. Bad drugs, drink, gambling, and sex only worsen Poppy's abrasive moods make up the difference. Tierney here is more than a bit like Tippi Hedren in parts of MARNIE, i.e. so busy trying to act bratty and deranged they forget to still be charming (Marlene never forgot!)

It's not up to his Dietrich collaborations at Paramount, but part of this could be the relative blurriness of the 'they did what they could' restoration. Part is also the attempt to have myriad threads instead of focusing on one character, the way Marlene was the focus in his earlier work. In those we had a very vivid feeling of the street or train in relation to the interiors, to each room. We entered Dietrich's domiciles via slow moving crane shots through rainy exterior street windows. In GESTURE, we have to take Von Sternberg's word for it that the bar and upstairs of the multi-tiered casino are even in the same building. There are some good crowded Shanghai street scenes early on and towards the end, during the big Chinese New Year celebration, shot in the same writhing cacophony of Chinese hustle and bustle (lots of rickshaws) that made the opening of SHANGHAI EXPRESS so effective, but again, they never feel connected to the casino nor the casino connected to its adjacent rooms and bars. Von Sternberg's ornate mise en scene surrounds Munson in exotic murals. Turns out they painted by Keye Luke, who--though Chinese--doesn't appear. The not-adding up things keep adding up. But Tierney is beautiful enough that disinterest seems a small price to pay. Even as you come to hate her character, you just know you'd jump off a bridge if she asked you to.

That said, slowness and pointless bits of business are the side effects of JVS's style--where every character is always moving towards or away from sex or death.  Here, unlike many of his later films there's no feeling this was ever taken out of Von Sternberg's fussy hands by anxious producers (i.e. Howard Hughes with the leaden MACAO or the genuinely sexy JET PILOT).

As per JVS' usual tricks, there's very few daytime exterior shots and only one bit of Shnaghai stock footage letting us know that it might seem like midnight in the casino ("Never Closes" is their motto) but it's actually a weekday morning. I love the idea of coming out of what seems like only a few hours of nightclubbing at a busy casino, drinks and decadence in full flower, to find the sun is up and fresh-scrubbed bright-eyed people are going to work etc. It brings back a lot of memories.

That would seem to conclude the tour, so what of the antagonist? What of the... Huston?

Maybe it's his clipped delivery and rigid military posture, dart-like rapid sudden movements, the way he kind of leans back as if ready to hurl himself across a table at his quarry as his vowels shorten, but Huston always excelled as inflexible moralist captains of industry, those never hip to their own flaws. He was a cop fond of beating the truth out of suspects in BEAST OF THE CITY, a tough-ass warden in CRIMINAL CODE, a King Lear-ish rancher in THE FURIES, and he bullied and cajoled threatened witnesses to testify. The rafters shook at his inflexible (but blind to its own prejudice) moral indignation. He was like the Old Testament of male authority, just as the New would become embodied by Spencer Tracy. I know it's a side note, but Tracy never worked with Howard Hawks, and I can see why: Hawks had a code, and it had nothing whatever to do with the following the letter of the law. Tracy's characters were law fetishists, treating the strict rules of conduct like Jimmy Stewart treats his flag. At his worst, Huston would use his moral weight to ruthlessly intimidate tribes of Congolese with juju magic tricks; Spencer might do similar things, but would think he was the good guy doing it, because he'd have a bible. He would do with a dopey smirk meant to win a Hepburn heart. Huston had no interest in being seen as good or attractive, only in achieving his grand design. Surely his son John drew on that persona for his own quintessential titan of industry in CHINATOWN.

So it's this paragon who goes up against Mother Gin-Sling. At a climactic "Chinee New Year" she tells him the lurid portrait of her grim early life feigning happiness after being abducted and sold to a 'pleasure boat,' and having pebbles sewn into the bottoms of her feet after she tried to run away (and these grim details survived the 30 rewrites!) And Mother Gin Sling even gives a New Years' eve floorshow out in the street in front of the casino, of girls being hauled up in cages as a reminder of the old white slave auctions. And that survived the rewrites too!

Chinese New Year, celebrating five thousand years of white slavery.

For Huston, it turns out, all this slavery and oppression hits close to home, especially as Poppy's his daughter and she's in debt to the casino, hooked on gambling, drinking, and presumably opium, and it's up to dad to pay her tab, like he's Colonel Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP. And Huston's tycoon is his own worst enemy, as doomed to confront his past crimes the general in UGETSU. Alas, UGETSU this ain't, and the total of its parts adds up to a shocking denouement that leads inevitably to tragedy. Walter Huston always realizes sooner or later he's his own worst enemy, and that's a sad, crazy day. He's like the censor finally realizing he's cutting off his own genitals every time he cuts a film. He forgot he had a whole other world below his own belt and when he saw that thing rising up from the bedsheet depths in the morning he thought it was a cobra.

RAIN (1931) finds Huston trying to do the reverse, to get a very young Joan Crawford out of tropical prostitution but you know how it is. Once she learns he's arranged to haul her back from the tropics to stand trial (these expat prostitutes are always on the lam after murdering either a violent john or pimp, but it was in self-defense!) she gets religion and he finds her, finally, attractive. Turns out he re-baptizes slutty Christians only so he can corrupt them anew.

There's a great scene in RAIN I was lucky enough to see by chance while tripping one afternoon, wherein Joan's angry as hell, trying to escape up a set of stairs while he stands at the bottom, reciting the lord's prayer over and over again while she screams and yells and then starts moaning and sobbing in despair at the thought of going back to the states and certain execution. I never liked Joan until I saw this scene, on shrooms, watching as she went slowly in perfect modulation during the long single take, moving expertly from demanding him to leave her alone, to begging for mercy, to pleading for her life, to sobbing in despair, to finally joining him in his prayer. Somewhere along the line their two voices entwine, entrain, and she starts reciting the prayer too, stands up, super calm, walks down the stairs, ready to go; in her darkest hour, she finds the lord. Maybe it was the mushrooms that afternoon but I've felt ever since that RAIN is a horror movie. With her thick make-up, Crawford's Sadie Thomson has a ghoulish obscene demeanor; Dr. Mirakle in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE or Irving Pichel in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER could borrow her lipstick; and Huston is her Van Helsing, but thanks to being swamped into a remote midway station on his way to the interior to convert missionaries, he takes it as his duty to convert her back from vampirism, only to turn bloodsucker himself. Naturally because of the code (though it was still weak in '32) there has to be a redemption possible in the form of a Marine who just wants to marry her and lead her into a bright light of avoidance, ala Dorothy Mackaill in DOORWAY TO HELL.

As Marlene said in MOROCCO, "there's a Foreign Legion of women, too."

Kongo (1932)

But that's the thing, if there's an entrainment of the lord, there's an entrainment of the jungle, too. And it entrains Huston's Henry Davidson just as the lord's doctrine entrains Sadie. Huston who clearly doesn't have her interest at heart, but is just a sadist, adhering to the letter of the law out of a kind of continual self-denial, the way senators campaign against gay rights and then go have a men's room tryst.

Just how many movies had women of adventure expatriating in some remote tropical outpost, either servicing the local sailors, or just drinking with the other refugees? Oh, countless. But it all stemmed from two things:

1. Miscegenation -  It's important to remember that censors weren't just patriarchal prudes, they were racist: pre-code never meant no censorship, just less 'clear' rules of conduct: sex outside wedlock between two white people could occur if the woman was a divorcee or widow, or if it occurred in the land of savages--Africa, the tropics, Asia-- where they're more or less the only 'civilized' people around, and the jungle entrainment rules; usually the only thing remotely like a white authority figure is a drunk or junkie priest or doctor or ship's captain under some sort of fever or addiction, to further break down the veneer of modern civilization so that morality can't help but buckle. MGM was the worst, in films like RED DUST: being around 'the coolies' with only a small number of white people around, well the censors were so nervous about miscegenation breaking out that the white-on-white adultery and call girl-trysting was overlooked. A trick still used on racist parents by manipulative white high school girls to this day!

2. Maugham -Just advertising your film as about some hottie who thinks she killed a man taking it on the lam to the tropics where she hooks up with a junkie doctor means you want the public to associate it W. Somerset Maugham, the E.L. James of the 30s. Any film that wanted to have 'steam' just cherry picked plot points from his RAIN, SEVENTH VEIL, and THE LETTER.

2. Prohibition - Only America could be crazy enough to try to enforce such a law, so voyaging abroad where liquor didn't taste like Turpentine became double sexy. Also in the Post-WWI economy, the dollar went farther than most, so one could live the high life in Europe on a pittance, and the kingly life in the tropics. It was on everyone's mind. .

3. Exotica - There would still be flak from minority groups, but the Great War had forced us to get social; we came back interested in the art and cultures, keeping and even further weirding up the aesthetics, creating a picture of the 'other' as kinky, lurid, savage, totally class-conscious, but with exquisite and bizarre taste.

And the Brits always loved Egypt.

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Two hearts stab as one: Brian De Palma + Dario Argento (a Reptile Dysfunction)

The critics say they're indebted to Hitchcock for their tropes, obsessions and subjects, but what I really see in Italian horror director Dario Argento and Italian-American suspense director Brian De Palma is a bizarre psychic twin connection, a shared reptile dysfunction that springs from Catholicism, ancient Rome, and the kind of scopophilia-driven sexual obsession (a good genre director must be obsessive, otherwise why bother?), all mingled into a love story linking across the oceans and continents from Rome to the USA, a round trippy immigrant passage between the mammalian higher brain's compassion and the cold cortex of unsocialized pre-empathic killer in all of us. De Palma has made a few films exploring this sort of split-subject connection (SISTERS, THE FURY, and RAISING CAIN) while Argento leans back on it for his dark fairy tale sensationalism, but he cast Jessica Harper for SUSPIRIA after seeing her in De Palma's PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.

from top: Jessica Harper w/mic in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (De Palma);
Jessica Harper w/knife in SUSPIRIA (Argento)

And I didn't even know this when I started this post, but they were born the same month (September) of the same world war-ridden year (1940), six days apart. They are both Virgo, sign of the virgin, sign of obsession, poring over film strips and sound boards with the repressed energy of a thousand unreached orgasms!

Clara Calamai, Jacopo Mariani - DEEP RED

Both have been accused of objectification and misogyny due to their detailed gruesome violence against the female body. I used to agree with that diagnosis, but now I blame their reptile killer instincts on intense Italian mother-love and Catholic guilt ( Hitchcock, too, was Catholic), wherein Mom's giant hydra apron strings cling to their minds no matter how much their onscreen avatars hack at them, each new woman's body a tendril-tentacle. I've come to feel my own feminist ire is founded in my discomfort, the unbearable level of anxious dread and soggy liberal arts guilt that is what being a man is all about --the compulsory mammalian need to protect the women and children. When a camera doesn't look away from the horror wrought by our helpless positions as observers on the opposite side of the screen, feminists like myself blame the camera, the director for our discomfort seeing it. Better we should have our eyes gouged out than see such traumatic butchery! Rather than examine this response, we lash out, labeling the directors misogynist in a vain attempt to scrub the horror from our eyes.

But Argento and De Palma stare long and hard. Even if we gouged our eyes out they'd find a way to reach us with these images.

from top: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA (see Mater Testiculorum)

They use similar post-modern effects, deconstructing their own misogyny and their audience's demands for blood; each goes deep into the human eye, ever searching for what lies past the inscrutable inky black roundness of the eye. Cameras, mirrors, photographs, film sets, stage sets, plays, taxidermy, and elements of performance abound. I generally don't like dream sequences, they're like vents in which to dump cheap manipulations and sudden shocks without the burden of context. That said, De Palma entrenches the two together so completely that one must allow it and in SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, Argento does away with waking life altogether. Occasionally a character comes up for air, drops by an outdoor parapsychology conference for some exposition, then its back down into the candy-Freudian murk.

from top: De Palma - CARRIE, Argento - INFERNO, De Palma -
DRESSED TO KILL, Argento - 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET

Interesting too is that Argento's work has by critical consensus really sucked since 2001's SLEEPLESS, while at the same time De Palma's been pulling out of a sucky period (with 2002's FEMME FATALE), as if these aging auteurs sharing a pair of traveling genius pants. De Palma's been returning to his old haunts, where cheap raincoats, razors, masks, split screens, double cross media-blackmail-stalk-and-snap PEEPING TOM's media theory is coupled to a PSYCHO-style cross examination, and a psychiatrist's explanatory monologue wrapping the catalog of kinks back up in its brown wrapper before a final gotcha which often ends up being a dream within a dream, or was it (as in his recent PASSION). Argento's simply lost his rudder in the meantime, he's like he's just another late night Cinemax director with more attention to disturbing gore and less to the tropes, post-modern insights, and tricks for which we love him. Maybe it's because De Palma is making smaller movies that suit his fancies, while Argento seems laboring under the pressure of his name. Either way, and as an aside, this does not betray my grand theory that they are twins linked by some strange telepathy, like Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens in THE FURY (1977). 

Top: THE FURY (De Palma), botom: PHENOMENA (Argento)

None of this is to accuse either Argento or De Palma of being a mama's boy, a misogynist, or potential murderer (or worse, derivative of Hitchcock and each other to the point of near-identity theft), though in a way the critical backlash against the slasher movies, teen sex comedies of the early 80s helped usher in the PC-era. With feminist ire building in nearly everyone the blatantly phallic drill, endless softcore strutting and groping in De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (1984) was like an affront, the drill scene being exhibit A in the case he's a misogynist. In Argento's similar films, sexual fetishizing is never an issue, except as far as elaborating on the madness of the mother or father fixation which then (usually) triggers a schizophrenic break with reality.

Now that I'm older though, I see the misogynistic violence of De Palma and Argento through this same schizophrenic break prism, and realize only by expressing these wormy fantasies can we expel them. How many hydra apron strings were severed or unstuck or untangled thanks to PSYCHO (1960)? It made such a splash on its initial release that the ripples haven't ceased in 50 years - it changed the way America went to the movies and gave armchair psychologists now had a gold standard for the dangers of maternal suffocation. Who knows how many closeted or overprotected men would still be living at home and doing their mothers' toenails on a Saturday night if not for PSYCHO? It kicked them loose. Who knows where De Palma or Argento would be without it? PSYCHO snapped the 60s off at the shower curtain 50s root, and tossed it into the inky black pupil drain, where emaciated 20 year-olds like De Palma and Argento at the time, were waiting with their celluloid nets. 

Color-coded patterns from top (alternating De Palma/Argento):
 FURY, SUSPIRIA, RAISING CAIN, INFERNO,
UNTOUCHABLES, SUSPIRIA, PASSION, DEEP RED, FURY, 4 FLIES

MUSIC:

Naturally these psychic twins are not identical: Argento's psychoanalysis is perhaps deeper while De Palma is more into politics (Italy wasn't mired in Vietnam so Argento couldn't find his horror there). Argento's connection to music is more wryly contrapuntal than De Palma's, making innovative use of children's songs, whispering, percussion and even electric bass-driven funk from Goblin and Ennio Morricone. In DEEP RED, particularly a real break with convention is begun: swooning pop balladry as heads get slow motion sliced by shattered windshields--the glass a pop art snowstorm--and rattling nerve-grating, plastic cup echo-drenched percussion leaping into life and then stopping just as suddenly all just because David Hemmings steps on a bottle, then resuming just as abruptly when a shade falls--or accompanying an impromptu Daria Nicolodi vamp. This approach is the total opposite of the usual emotional-telegraphing of Hollywood, though De Palma gets great mileage out of Bernard Herrmann.

From top: NORTH BY NORTHWEST, DR. NO, the full ambiguity of
casual sex at its most chilling, and therefore truest.

Both both Argento and De Palma use romantic music in a subversive manner, riffing on the lovers-on-the-run style of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959) by having romantic comedy tropes tossed nervously in with the suspense, sifting through the queasy mix of dread and attraction that occur during a casual hook-up, when the other person's hot but it's all happening a bit too fast to not seem suspicious (where only Connery era-Bond or Cary Grant can safely tread). Is that what happens when a charming sociopath puts their moves on you? The winding up in bed with them is carefully crafted to make you think it's chance and fate, the night conspiring to bring you together, but already they're allying you away from your old life with surgical expertise. Even if she doesn't end up boiling your rabbit, or he doesn't have someone's head in a box, it can still be dangerous.  It's like a romantic comedy is coming true and you think somehow you deserve it, that you make the mistake of rising above your class and habit, or lower than it --and the top and bottom are far closer than the middle. What would mother think? Something's not right. A grown man shouldn't be sitting down to martinis with executives at the 21 Club and then exclaim aloud, "I forgot to phone mother!"

from top: De Palma (DRESSED), Argento (BIRD), De Palma, Argento - etc.
BIRD, DRESSED

Over in the U.S, De Palma had Bernard Herrmann scoring a few of his last and De Palma's earlier films (SISTERS, OBSESSION), which cemented the Hitchcock connection, but genius of creating undulating nervous tension died with him, OBSESSION was his last. Even geniuses like Herrmann doesn't get how sweet romantic songs should accompany murders and suspense music play over romantic parts or that electric guitars and percolating Moogs are awesome under any scene; I've never been too crazy about the jazz music in TAXI DRIVER for that reason, it's like Herrmann doesn't get the ambivalence and Herzogian inscrutable stone face of the natural gods thing the way, say, Tangerine Dream got it for SORCERER. It takes a madness and the ability to convey the full breadth of that madness to another person so immediately they don't have time to pull away like you're crazy person. Wasn't that the genius of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, that it opened us up to genuine madness at such an advanced level we didn't have time to formulate a defense?

It's only when De Palma hooks up with an Italian composer (Pino Donaggio, Giorgio Moroder, Ennio) that he captures the full potential of music in a film as more than just telling the audience what they should feel from moment-to-moment. When Frankie Goes to Hollywood wedge their "Relax" video into the middle of BODY DOUBLE (1987) it's audacious but sensationalistic and gaudy, the love child of the porn world in that film and the T&A-filled killer POV horror film John Travolta works on in BLOW-OUT (1981).

They see you (from top: DRESSED, DEEP RED)

MISOGYNY

Lest we forget, BODY made its starlet, Melanie Griffiths (Tippi Hedren's daughter), an overnight star and that Nancy Allen in DRESSED TO KILL uses her sexy body as a weapon to overwhelm the killers gaze. It's this idea of feeling exposed as the viewer that activates the killer hiding in plain sight within the viewer's "normal" psyche-- such as when the psychic 'sees' the murderer while on stage at the psychic conference in Argento's DEEP RED. 

In point of fact, part of the feminist arousal of ire stems from the anger at being forced to feel what the murders are depicting, not just from the stabbed side but the stabber, the horror and savagery of the murders leave their mark our murkiest reptilian recesses. But they are meant to be disturbing, to heighten our senses through fear. That is the correct reaction to these violent depictions and to presume it's not is to presume a vast nation of rain-coated social drop-outs who get off on seeing sexy women terrorized. The response of feminist outrage is connected to the same repressive mechanisms that motivate the killers in De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL and Argento's DEEP RED. Seeing themselves being seen, they freak out - like Argento and De Palma are doctors who touch these viewers in places within themselves they don't want to admit exist, so the urge is to sue for malpractice, to accuse of chicanery and no-goodnicks-ism. And brother, I know because I was one of those, as a sullen 13 year-old hearing with shock as my Sunday school teacher and his kids gleefully recounted the details of every murder in FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980), which they'd seen with his kids the previous night. 

The stuff that really traumatizes me now is the unconscious, casual violence of other films (like VACANCY or WOLF CREEK), that aren't necessarily good or scary but leave me damaged for days. Argento and De Palma are more compassionate in that the very idea of film violence obsesses them to the point that they can target and exorcise it through a double blind mirror-to-the-audience gaze reflector, such as the movie screen-shaped white art gallery entrance in THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (below), or the (wider) screened window of De Palma's BODY DOUBLE (below that). We're given a profound and very arty illustration of the perverse appeal of such violence on the big screen, and the reason for our sometimes violent offense over it -- our urge to rush the screen and pull it down before the unthinkable happens. When I was young in the 70s-early 80s, seeing an R-rated murder like in SUSPIRIA or DRESSED TO KILL was the equivalent of a scary roller coaster, a rite of passage, something you needed friends to go to with (at the drive-in or dangerous downtown theater). But if the audience laughs and cheers the murder (as they would going down a roller coaster hill) and someone is there alone and sulky to review the film for the Times, would they not worry that these films are mere pornography for vicious misogynist freaks? I know that's what I would have felt. Because these murders also tap into our mammalian protective instincts, disrupting the thread of narrative immersion as best we can, causing us to scream at characters onscreen in helpless frustration. But our anger over their counterintuitive behavior is our attempt to shirk our responsibility as men, we want desperately to feel like the endangered woman brought it on herself for making so many counterintuitive decisions, to absolve us of the guilt that we couldn't be there, that her death onscreen is the result of our real-life absence from our own lives.

traversable screens - from top: Argento, De Palma, Hitchcock

METATEXTUALITY

But it's really the powerlessness of being tied (more or less) to our chair and unable to be heard through the screen (often represented in De Palma like a shower stall or rainy window), and guilty at our own bloodlust, the deep dark reptilian-dysfunctional part of our viewing brains (the type that eats their young and has no empathy), but it's simplistic to call that misogynist, because if we didn't feel that way, if we relished her weakness and bad choices as chances to strike then we have no mammalian brain. Do this and we reduce ourselves to the lonesome status of the reptile, rather than a mammal-reptile hybrid. As so often in Argento films, we shudder enough watching the stalkings and killings that we need our own avatar for that shuddering, someone similarly trapped outside the screen - unable to save and unable to look away - the reptile mind holding our eyes on the blood as well as the Ludovico Technique.

from top: CLOCKWORK ORANGE, OPERA

It's also true that when other artists tries to mix media theory and sex and violence, then giallo tropes can't help but appear--as in Irvin Kirshner's John Carpenter-scripted EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978), which somehow manages to be very Italian just by being into fashion and photography (via Helmet Newton) in New York. To incorporate cameras and films within films and musicians and sound engineers hearing something they shouldn't or seeing something they can't quite remember, is to enter a realm where De Palma and Argento can ace you in their sleep. And they understand something those other films don't that even Fulci and Bava don't mess with, (though I'd say the recent BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2013) does, and Michel Soavi's 1987 STAGE FRIGHT ), the meta-framing of the performance of horror as a rite, an ancient re-enactment of pagan sacrifice older than modern civilization can even grasp but ever present in our DNA just waiting to come out.

children of meta giallo: BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, STAGEFRIGHT:
AQUARIUS, EYES OF LAURA MARS

SHARED MOTIFS:

AVENGING ANGELS and DEMONESSES: They might be scared and a victim but they shall rise, oh they shall.

from top: Argento, De Palma, Argento, De Palm -etc.

ART: art galleries and artist studios represent art as the crucial outlet to legitimize scopophiliac expression, allowing for more a broader palette of associative symbolism. Via headless statues and statue-less heads, Bosch and Bruegel, Escher and surrealists. Through art, Laura Mulvey's concept of the male gaze is equalized, or at least - broadened. It's where pornography goes legitimate or even further, into the realm I call the gaze of Mecha-Medusa (wherein the object looks back, freezing us with the uncanny, skeevy horror of our own initially lewd stare). See also: subliminal screens, metaphors for the immersive film viewing-experience, the mass hypnosis of the theater where for awhile we merge into a group mind caught in the grip of a crazy person.

 frpm top: STENDAHL SYNDROM, DRESSED TO KILL
Associative and literal misogynistic devouring / dismemberment / triggers

from top: Artento, De Palma, Argento, De Palma, Argento, etc.

There are other tangents and shared motifs:

BLINDNESS: blindness allows for heightened variations on the HVR or helpless viewer response (we can't help them across the street); fetish objects for objectifying scopophiliacs (they can't look back); seeing eyes are ever threatened by what they see (as in the blind men other matriarchal coven-ruled social order in the 1978 TVM, THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME --blindness as symbolic castration).

Argento x 2, De Palma x2

MIRRORS / DOUBLES: They fog, and when something or someone looks in them and freezes stock still, they become their own objects. DOUBLING is related to that --evil twins, and the inherent split of actors and characters (as in the split between the woman playing a terrified woman in a horror film, or literally split in the case of the body doubles in De Palma's BLOW OUT and BODY DOUBLE, figuratively in the separated twins of SISTERS or RAISING CAIN or the eerie similarity romances (someone looks just like someone else the protagonist was in love with and saw die-- stemming from VERTIGO - -Geneveive Bujold in OBSESSION, Melanie Griffith in BODY DOUBLE, Margot Kidder in SISTERS, the two raincoats in DRESSED TO KILL, and so forth.

PRIMARY COLOR SYMBOLISM: Deep Red is the color of menstruation, child birth, the link to sex and excitement, flushed cheeks, heat / dark blue the color of swollen wounds, the chill of the deep, dark death, etc.

DREAMS / DREAMLIKE FLASHBACKS: De Palma relies on them but drags them really slow and methodical and dream-like, without any dialogue and often backwards; Argento flashes to them now and then, more out of stories told or childhood memories of the asylum or before or after (where everyone acts like automatons). De Palma links dreams with horror movies worked on by characters of his movie (John Travolta in BLOW-OUT), or wordless operas, or the clockworkiness of Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES or Dali's dream clocks in SPELLBOUND and MOONTIDE.

CIRCULAR STAIRWAYS: Great for chase sequences and as symbolic of the 'descent' into the unknowable squirmy recesses of the subconscious.

frop top: Godard, Coppola, Argento, Argemto,  De Palma, De Palma

SOUND RECORDING: The visual screen is just part of it, of course. Coppola's THE CONVERSATION was hugely influential on both De Palma and Argento (the scopophilia kink extends to eavesdropping); eavesdrops through a listening device while the 'screen' of the detective's office is visible to the left. They both similarly took notice of Godard and Truffaut (as in the DON'T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER-style arc of BLOW OUT) whose incorporation of the recording studios and screening rooms they were using into the films themselves indicated an unhesitating post-modern bent. Godard, especially, began to show the workings of recording machines obsessively in his films, even if they were eventually spouting communist rhetoric.

From top: PEEPING TOM, REAR WINDOW, BLOW-UP, TAXI DRIVER

PHOTOGRAPHY: Antonioni's BLOW UP, Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and Powell's PEEPING TOM are huge (obviously) influences to both directors. To a lesser extent, TAXI DRIVER (if Travis had a 16mm movie camera to point at the mirror and the pimps, imagine the movie he would make! It would look exactly like TAXI DRIVER!)

from top: DEEP RED, BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, INFERNO

SUBLIMINAL SCREENS: De Palma is more obsessed with the hot female body threatened by the gaze (and threatening to it as well) while Argento is obsessed with childhood dreams, fairy tales elaborated into operatic tableaux (the automaton movements of the characters in the DEEP RED flashbacks, etc.) Argento's is more centered directly on metaphors for media viewing itself (note the way the shadows in the picture above makes the childhood drawing look like its projected on the wall or the radiated light from a TV, or a window (into the primal scene of a killer's squirmy mind); below that is the image from BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMAGE: a theatrical screen-shaped door that the anxious writer can't cross to rescue the bloodied damsel (his desire to enter eventually results in a different screen toppling down on him like a slab); in INFERNO, the screen defenestrates the PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO-style traverser.

For De Palma it's not the art house he recreates but the drive-in, the NASHVILLE or TARGETS or PATTON-style backdrop, such as the flag behind the climax of BLOW OUT or the blue behind Carrie at THE PROM (just as in SCREAM or THE RING it's not the theater or drive-in but the TV), like a kind of multi-media breakdown (the intern introducing the film festival is stabbed onstage right as she's announcing the after-screening Q&A).

I don't see anybody else here.
(from top: CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, TAXI DRIVER)
(for DRESSED witness two lights like eyes with Allen's sexy back the nose
and the phone the mouth, that's the Other!)

THE GONE-DEAD GAZE: De Palma's films are never, to my mind, as focused on art, instead dwelling more on politics and on the curvy flesh of hot girls and how the act of sex leaves one vulnerable; the orgasm as last rites; and the terror of that objectifying being reversed, of the woman desired returning the gaze, provoking a response which is always in direct relation to the viewer's fear of being viewed, of being judged by the image with the same ferocity with which we view it. Feminist critics attach too much power to the male gaze, seeing it as ownership, which is like wanting to arrest someone for looking at merchandise without buying it, for "owning it with his eyes" - the killer's look isn't the source of the homicide, it's power but only until the seen looks back, at which time the killer is as exposed as his intended victim, even if we in the audience don't see who it is, the person being attacked has seen As men we love to imagine what studs we'd be in the sack with some hottie we pass on the street. As long as she doesn't turn around and invite us upstairs for a tryst, we're safe in our delusion of male infallibility. But if she drops the pretense and offers or asks for sex, even the most courageous of studs will usually rear back like a startled mare --it's too sudden, too soon, we perceive it almost as a violent slap, we're like Medusa flashed by a mirror raincoat.

from top: 4 FLIES IN GREY VELVET, PSYCHO

And so it is that the ideal object that arouses or fascinates the killer is one that never looks back (portraits with the eyes cut out aside), allowing unchallenged staring. When the portrait of LAURA suddenly appears, in a raincoat and bad mood, the enchantment is instantly dispelled. The murderer's fantasy is to keep his prey from being able to return the gaze (by turning around, taking the killers' mask off, etc.) to becoming simply another object-- the vision of her killer reflected in her dead dilated pupils clears up like a post-PSYCHO shower bathroom mirror. Unless they scan the last image your eyeball saw and project it onto film (as in 4 FLIES ON GREY VELVET), or you come back from the grave, you'll never be able to make amends, divvy up your fortune, go through the seven stages of grief, hide your porn, or tell us who your murderer was. "Poof!" You are inanimate. God knows what strange pains and ecstasies such sudden death would bring as you soul wrenches loose from time, place, and space. I imagine it would depend a lot on your mood at the time whether there was a light to go into or not, and how many Ahmet-style demon dogs were waiting just off camera to devour your heathen soul the moment it pops free of our earthly plane. They sniffed out your soul's immanent arrival like a pack of bears plucking salmon from the river. God knows when, but the cinema of Argento and De Palma know those bears are coming, and prepared for the rending gnashing rip from the mortal coil to come.

Lastly, don't forget AMER (2009): perhaps so meta as to transcend narrative altogether, it presumes a certain familiarity with Argento and De Palma's oeuvre and their shared psycho-sexual roots as well as the distinctly Antonioni-esque experimental ambiguity where Jungian fairy tale subtexts go so deep down they come out the top like digging to China. One of the rare feature length films credited as being directed by a couple (she's French, he's Italian), the film is truly split, not just into three chapters but into experimental and narrative, not scene-by-scene but shot-by-shot, moment to moment, it's the ultimate - here the twins of fairy tale sexual psyche are united, the children of the giallo are born, and the unification of male and female halves make a unique whole, the fulfillment of the promise in Argento and De Palma's most dream-like works, distilled with all the plots and narrative weeded out. Glorious.

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