I'm glad I saw HORSES for the first time around four in the morning after I couldn't sleep, alone in my apartment, on a big projector, and hallucinating on fever and cold medicine. The idea of a group of people all forced to live, eat, sleep and occasionally die together while dancing forever in circles always fascinated me as an alternative to the nuclear family. Here under impresario Gig Young's purview it's both a nightmare and a strange kind of paradise, a grueling metaphor for humanity at its most withered and crushed where at least they give you free meals, and live music.
Pollack doesn't much care about the over-arching metaphor for humanity involved in this reality show-meets-ensemble drama (the players slowly drop out... who will be the next sent home?). Instead he finds everything he needs right in the eyes of the actors - the way the world-weary disgust that infuses Jane Fonda's as they meet Gig Young's during a late night rest break leads to a whole dialogue of seduction, refusal and weary acceptance takes place without a word. Or how the heart attack that grips Red Buttons and seems to lift his skinny sweaty old body (they've been forced to run laps to speed up the eliminations.) like a condor then sends him shattering to the floor in a pale skin spastic heave, but his eyes are still on the prize, twisted and widened with pain and exhausted terror, but you can feel his soul still running through his wild eyed desperate stare.
It's the idea of all these people being awake for such huge lengths of time, getting only a few hour breaks scattered around the day, driven to exhaustion for the amusement of the rubes, like King Kong spread out over 40 people, until the illusions of sleep and waking being separate are smashed like the above ground subway car in Kong's capable ape hands. Gig Young earned his Oscar not for any sparkle or Satanic gravitas, but because he so brilliantly conveys the duplicitous way humans have of maintaining a vein of compassion even as they torture those around them. They're balanced - all their evil is spoken for -- so they can be nice and calm, and Young is. And it's awesome. Though frankly I don't think I can ever see the film again, I appreciate that a friend of mine once watched it over and over for 48 hours straight. In a way, she did it so I don't have to. It is a movie that should be watched over and over for that long, but how many of us are brave enough, or tragic and tender enough to endure such a withering grind?
Pollack knew how to create a space for Fonda to be sexual in ways she just never was while trying to be sexual under Vadim for BARBARELLA or SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. Under a good director like Pollack's or Pakula's wing, like HORSES or KLUTE (1971), Fonda transcends sex, becomes post-sexual, beyond passion's fleeting orgasms and the sense of druggy stupor that sometimes bubbles up in the war against eternal loneliness. In these films if love does find her she fights it. She rears back against it like, well, a horse with a broken leg. Pollack loved her like that healing bullet to the mare's wild-eyed head, like a scalpel in the sickness of the 20th century. Together they cut your heart out through a hole in the screen and the stale venom of the early 20th century at last begin to purge outwards. .There will be no refund.
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