Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.
I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you won't play it?) Then there's Herzog's titles, which are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? That's the title of your film? Why assume they wouldn't?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old PAL VHS of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. Nothing personal. I was just a dumb Yankee at the time, and knew for example, nothing of the rest of the world and the little creatures in it.
But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced, and more tolerant of my naturalistic German side, I'm perhaps better equipped to recognize my own issues tainting the clarity of Herzog's hallucinatory nature-phobic naturalism. I am growing up/into appreciating his mix of German sturm und drang and lysergi-bucolic mysticism and how his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness turn his narrative into a static panorama. I can't help but admire and love Herzog's willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same. Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out emptied.
Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a theater production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline, and brings Peru into it. Of course. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was born to preach the gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub plays the face. Brad Dourif is a dead-on Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle with a Samurai sword stashed in his shed. Chloe Sevigny is the girlfriend who tries to channel Brad's madness by bringing him into her theater group.. but you can't shrug off holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Arsenic and Old Lace or Bye Bye Birdy.
Lynch regular Piper Laurie plays the mom, dead even before she dies-- she's the middle-aged version of Mary in ERASERHEAD. An inner voice warns Brad not to go kayaking with his hippie friends in Peru (they all drown, offscreen). Awakened and chastened, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception; loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront, gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his meds into the broken-glass covered street of messianic schizophrenia. Back at home his clinging mom won't stop feeding him jello. And so what can a poor man do once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries? As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"
In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, period, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy; he's a charismatic actor doing a fine job of capturing the full spectrum of the manic-messianic complex, but there's no charm to his insanity, no reason we can think of -- aside from his attractive bearing -- for anyone to put up with his tantrum-esque ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him into the holy light.
Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog wanted to anyway: Kinski is a wild man, archetypal and one-of-a-kind. He's a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE. I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness, which is, as Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, the 'only performance that truly makes it." Good as Michael Shannon is, he just doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg?
Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe plays the homicide detective who tracks Brad back from the crime scene to where he's holed up with hostages, demands for pizza, etc. Udo Kier shows up as the theater director who was putting on Elektra with Shannon as the star. Since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior.' And that's the problem, a) why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care, and b) if they weren't going to help him, why endure his holy madness if it's not fun or fascinating to be around? c) Wasn't he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.
As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with a mix of the resignation of an old queen indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy and the genuine fascination artists feel around those rare souls more fucked-up than themselves, and the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to try and make a film with someone who's completely delusional. But as with Shannon, Kier doesn't project the maniacal charisma that would possibly ground a loose wire like Brad. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a champion! And vice backacha!
Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own baggage, he gets whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And you sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part (he's great)--that Kinski is there, working ghostlike machinations, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows to give Lynch and Herzog time to become Kinski with each other. The issue at work here may as well be too much respect and not enough spittle.
In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's auteur-like motifs? He's either crazy himself, super enlightened, has done psychedelics, or--most likely--all three, in addition to hanging out with a lot of messianic schizophrenics, otherwise he'd never get so many details of the horror of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess other so very exactly right. There wouldn't be the terrible realization that the hallucination of a giant mantis alien sucking the psionic marrow out of your third eye isn't actually a hallucination but the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of aching skin walking down dangerous streets and hurtling in steely cars towards crushed oblivion is no easy thing to bear.
Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, generally, an order which has no way to process the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place... coherence through artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper and he's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.
Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? Here's what else I learned from MY SON MY SON:
1. The only way to channel holy madness without causing destruction and misery is art but that has its own problems, as a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out, ala Michael Shannon's Greek tragedian. Don't think it doesn't happen! MACBETH has made plenty of actors into mounds of raving jello, and they say the Joker killed Heath Ledger, and mom's jello kills them all... served while Jack Benny smiles from afar...
2. No matter how bad things get, the old country blues and/or gospel can make it okay. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery, I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips' (seen at left, with his double zither) who's "What a friend We have in Jee-ee-sus" has made it onto dozens of my mix tapes. For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD Frisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster than the songs of an old, dead, black, blind singing preacher. What a friend we have in Jesus!
3. There comes a special moment when even artists realize they need to break away from their urge to write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge, but unless we let go of the rope, we'll never see the bottom... never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners.
Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with our full vision, or instead of silently watching a movie or taking in a vista in rapture, find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and speech/writing rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak.Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to feel because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will never come back, but it does, a new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip.
4. Shannon in a Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table: a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted, all else gone to shadow.
The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of god, try not announcing how spiritual you are to your horrified other, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.
The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity. The longer you ignore it the sweeter its songs. But your ego's sitting on a cupboard full of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows. The person who is deemed mad is the person who who surrenders and silences the ego in a sudden snuffing so the cupboards can open and light pour out. He is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge responsibility to keep this holy state going as long as possible, rather than knowing to surrender even that goal he runs about shaking the lapels of those still asleep, but maybe they don't want to wake up, and why should they, just 'cuz you say so?
A few incarnations later, he learns that unless he's cared for by a dozen attendants and speaking daily at the ashram, he better keep the ego around, and he can balance all that in art. Within art you can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. We dismiss ideas that challenge our egos outright, but we'll always stop for a good movie, one that stealthily addresses ideas of madness and artistry and newly minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Where are the damned lepers in San Diego?
MY SON MY SON has a lot of that kind of inner problem, the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn you into a raving lunatic. When the House is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all; roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away, unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? Whohin bist du, meinen rattemessias!? Ich liebe, Ich liebe dich so...
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