Don't go in the light, no wait, go into the light! - The Last of the Great 70s Dads, First Bad 80s: Craig T. Nelson in POLTERGEIST (1982)

The year of 1982 was, as we cineastes know, the great year of American science fiction and fantasy. Not only did we get enduring faves like THE ROAD WARRIOR, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, BLADE RUNNER and THE THING, there were two movies from the Spielberg camp, ET, and POLTERGEIST. Like a capstone to the great 70s, 1982 was a time to regroup on issues of masculinity, fatherhood and the outsider relation to the social order. A dad was notoriously absent from the ET family unit, and figures like Mad Max and Conan (and the entire cast of THE THING) stood firmly on the outside of any sort of social order or role model status, avoiding even feral kids as passengers; Deckard in BLADE RUNNER was a part of the order, a cop, but over the course of the film began to become more and more the bad guy, shooting 'replicants' guilty of little more than self-defense as they searched for a home on a planet beyond saving. In other '82 offerings, like FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, there were no parents of any sort. So what happened to the 70s dads?

One was left: POLTERGEIST, a rare glimpse into a 'cool' family with a hip, playful, relaxed good provider father, one brilliantly played by Craig T. Nelson, a more domesticated version of Harrison Ford in his dry, knowing delivery and ability to seem fun and employable at the same time. During the opening 20 minutes of POLTERGEIST we get to know him and his family, including hip wife JoBeth Williams and we like them. Dad crashes out to the family room TV sign-off and there is, among other things, a whole great early scene with them smoking dope after the kids are in their beds.

The scenes show the dad the master of his domain, his arms or body stretching to the edges of the frame, at ease, a master of his domain yet not a tyrant. He jumps on the bed to demonstrate a high dive to soothe wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) over concerns about their daughter drowning in their under-construction pool. Rambling about air pockets, when Diane mocks him saying "Your diving days are over," he gets all serious, arms outstretched, demonstrating form on the high dive, noting with great mock solemnity, "we're talking about the Olympics here, Diane."

Imagine such a scene today in a horror film and you can't - imagine Tom Cruise playing a dad this mellow, or Nicolas Cage a dad this unencumbered by free-floating anxiety. The wife would never let him jump up on the bed - those are 400 thread count sheets!

And when the son, Robbie, comes in unannounced, they don't treat him with condescension, or anger he's intruded on their quiet time; they're not ashamed or embarrassed to be caught smoking weed; they don't fall on some stock response like 'there is no bogey man go back to bed!" or some snide lecture about growing up, some excuse why it smells funny in their room.  They merely deftly put it away, and look at him with some concern, but not sappily. "Hey, sport," they say in greeting. They wait for him to tell them what's going on.... they treat him like a person, like a guest, deserving of a straight response rather than some rote, borderline hysteric bid at perfect parenting.

Spielberg's first big breakout film, JAWS had the premiero uno great 70s dad, so it's only natural this guy should close out the series. Instead of "gimme a kiss... I need it," we have him inviting the son to jump on his back, noting "I am the wind and you are the feather," clearly this is some kind of inside joke between them stretching back to his infanthood. There's no sickly warm strings like there would be if John Williams was scoring. He's not, thankfully. Jerry Goldsmith is, so there is no score in this part, just the crash of the thunder outside, people talking in inside voices. Unlike Williams, Goldsmith has always known when to hold back, and even if he gets overwrought in a few places, overall it's properly invisible, conjuring a 'safe' kind of menace where applicable, but hanging back in other parts to let the horror build on its own.

Dad Steve also has an appreciation for nature and the mysteries of the beyond. Robbie is freaked about the tree outside the window, feeling as if it's spying on him. "It knows about us, doesn't it?" he asks.

"It knows everything about us," replies his dad with utmost whispered seriousness. "That's why I built this house right next to it, Rob, so it could protect us. .. you and Carol Ann, and Dana and you're mom and me. It's a very wise old tree." This is superlative parenting because Steve's not diminishing Robbie's concerns, not admonishing him for an overactive imagination. He's taking his son's worry seriously and elevating the sense of magical thinking into the proper pronoiac direction.

But all is not well for long. He's humbled and at wit's end over ghosties when he recruits the paranormal research group, and during their at-home investigation, Steve's sense of powerlessness over the events begins to diminish his sense of confidence and self-worth.

A subtle moment of this draining of power occurs when JoBeth Williams reaches over to him at the family table, telling the team, "He's been wonderful, really," as if boasting of some reformed wayward child to his parole officer. JoBeth's tone carries just the hint of condescension, like Dad tries really hard, but he just can't protect them from this thing. Steve is very rude, like a sullen, jealous child. When the dwarf psychic medium (Zelda Rubenstein) comes over, he makes cracks, referencing THE WIZARD OF OZ and snickering under his breath, even 'mentally' signaling to Zelda, refusing to answer her verbally since he reasons she should be able to pick up his answers if she's so damned psychic. Very insulting, Steven!

 Losing his daughter to the void clearly throws Steve for a loop. He's seldom seen standing. He broods, seated, in shadows, his masculine force is drained. The ghost hunting is in the realm of the feminine here. The older drinker lady first, and then the psychic dwarf. We see many shots of him sitting in shadow while the women stand above him, indicating his reduced status as an authority. Not even a promotion from his boss, worried he's missed so much work because he's looking for a better job, can allay his surliness. When he sees the graveyard that will have to be moved to make room for the new developments he's uneasy. Earlier when his boss was inside Steve's house he'd made clear attempts to hide the paranormal activity going on (such as an organ flying across the room), in other words he's attempting to create a facade of normality. He doesn't tell his neighbors, once they initially deny anything's going wrong in their houses. He's isolated in these events for reasons never fully explained. (Maybe it's that they fall asleep with their TV on a lot, enabling the ghosts to come through easier? Or that their kids aren't fat and ugly like the neigbor's?)

Steve ends the movie homeless and unemployed... presumably neither for long, but also a whole lot wiser. The issue is, is that a good thing? What has he lost, this reader of books about Reagan, and survivor of poltergeist attacks, this real estate man of the living dead, aside from his innocence? Are he and his wife still going to smoke pot to relax after the kids are asleep, or will drug hysteria from Nancy Reagan convince one of the kids to report their pot use to their teacher and have the kids taken away to social services? Will the disaster of the house be blamed on him, for illegal building of a pool or something?

He's certainly treading a thin line, paying a stiff price for this disillusionment. The threat of invisible ghosts, Russians, terrorists, drug dealers, you name it-- was keeping the Reagan-Bush dynasty in business; the fun freewheeling 70s were over. Ghosts, slashers, and bogeymen were making their way to every home in America via the arrival of cable TV. Meanwhile everywhere huge lawsuits and civil actions erupted: hysteria over child molestations at day care centers led to massive firings of male childcare workers just to be 'safe' - moms were thrown to the ground in handcuffs when they went to the Fotomat to pick up pictures of their daughters in bathing suits. MADD boosted laws and public awareness. Suddenly no one wanted to drive to any party even at a friends house a few blocks away, unless their spouse was going to be the designated driver, which itself was a total buzzkill --who wants to drink in front of a judgmental, sober spouse? And god forbid you had a joint in your purse or something when they pulled you over on the way home: you might still be in jail even now.

 Oh yeah, and hysteria over AIDS leaving it open season on firing anyone who happened to be gay, or even sound gay, lest they somehow contaminate our children. Plastic gloves, condoms, fear of inappropriate touching, all led to a great turning away from the social sphere.

The withdrawal of Steve Freeling into an embittered dad, prone to panic, sulking and defensively snickering is implicitly linked to this national parenting sea change. It's emblematic in the way he pulls the rope too early during the rescue of Carol Ann because his myopic dismissiveness misinterprets what Zelda is saying. The psychic is continually reversing whether or not Diane and Carol-Ann should go into the light, and it's too loud to hear well, but he panics at the moment she's talking to the trapped spirits who are caught in the crossfire between the demon and the Freelings. She's telling them--the innocent, trapped ghosts-- to go into the light, but Steve thinks he's telling Diane to go into the light and so freaks out, pulling the rope too early. For me, this misinterpreting indicates the way myopia becomes paranoia, and how America's Most Wanted made us all suspicious of our neighbors. People bunkered down for the long haul, drinking at home so they didn't get arrested by MADD, cheering the draconian drug laws that trapped innocent pot and acidheads like fish in a net meant for coke heads and at-risk youth. No one could go into the light anymore, period. And spirits had to just stay trapped in the plowed-over graveyard maze called suburbia.

These sorts of drastic measures seem very sane, comforting even, to someone who is very, very afraid of what's happening to their neighborhood. Maybe it was Indian immigrants, or blacks or hispanics, instead of ghosts moving in, but the resulting drive to retreat and fortify defenses was the same. The bad 80s dad had replaced the carefree 70s version, and for no clear reason other than media suggestion. It was just our time to withdraw, the hangover for the 70s boondoggle was bad enough that swearing off having any kind of fun, at least in public, seemed at least some small comfort. Beaten down and emasculated by supernatural forces, Steve's final act of defiance, kicking the TV out of the hotel room, seems foolish and short-sighted. You can't shoot the messenger, and more than likely that TV would be stolen before morning and he'd get charged on his bill. One just doesn't do that.

But Steve is right in one thing, the TV is the 70s dad's mortal enemy --it defeated his good vibes, defied and destroyed his sense of self, made all men who played with their kids seem like pedophiles, and all men who ignored them bad parents; it made hostile strangers of neighbors and turned children against their parents and parents against themselves.  Dad's only consolation was that 'sign off' national anthem flag shots and subsequent white noise static in the wee wee hours were gone. As if quietly correcting the problem for future families, now the screens would never go blank. Now channels were always, always running programs. There was nothing to do now but wait it out, alone, unemployed, entertained, and shattered to the core by TV's endlessly rerun phantom menace.

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Flo, the Great and Powerful: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936) and the Ludovico Flu

I've been sick all week with a terrible flu--hallucinating, vomiting, sleeping round the clock-- and it all comes to a head and makes sense with THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936). I was raging with fever, sleeping in torrid bursts of super dreamy weirdness.  I wound up at the movies, of course, in 'the Martha Graham Dance Cinema Annex,' with girls smoking Virginia Slims everywhere while calling their moms and using the rail up to the aisle seats as a balance bar while collections of experimental dance shorts played in endless rotation over their heads, ignored by all but me, my influenza virus remembering, through my tortured brain, its journey to me along the smudgy railings and student handshakes, like the passage of a Chilean joint through the harbor of a thousand hands and mouths, and my own mind barely noticing the difference having spent so many hours lost in screens. Maybe that's why I didn't turn away in saccharine-phobic horror from THE GREAT ZIEGFELD when it showed up on TCM yesterday and I was for the first time all week able to even sit on the couch and turn the TV on and there it was, by special unconscious request, as if I had dreamt a perfect halfway point between real cinema and the cloudy diamond-facet fractured dance hall unconsciousness, clinging to the balance bar railings with the tenacity of a flu germ barnacle as nymphets in a torrent of Degas-esque Village Voice articles spout-pounced in my head.

The two main things the serious flu bug going around does: a) lift you up and away from all abilities or concerns regarding sexual desire and vices --you can't inhale smoke, you can't drink anything but room temperature ginger ale mixed with water without gagging and dry heaving--And b) make you humble. You can't stand up so you keep yourself buckled over as if bowed under the heel of some unseen titan, and all other trivialities except not soiling yourself or passing out in public are jettisoned.

Such a basic core of conscience is the ideal putty for theatrical drill instructors like Busby Berkeley and Oscar Jaffee (as well as torturers like Abu Nazir and the Symbionese Liberation Front). Such exhausted psyches are explosions from which new stars are born. The heat of the flu, or of systematic physical abuse at the hands of an authority figure, liquidate once frozen notions of self, of loyalty, allegiance, and identity. Me, I forgot my original prejudices against long, dull MGM musical biopics and so whatever kept me from watching THE GREAT ZIEGFELD in the past was now liquid draining from the ice sculpture sink of my personal tastes.

I once worked for a rich crazy person like Flo Ziegfeld, so I know the way they depend on an indulgent, super-rich backer's foreclosure threats as motivation for genius. They spend beyond their limits and never pay back debts, all while buying bigger and more opulent gifts for everyone around them. They built this whole country by trying to mortgage their way out of poverty, to become too big to collect from. A rich person by definition amasses wealth, stores and saves it, builds on it; the Flo Z-type merely spends it, regardless of if he has it or not. Without such men, alas, capitalism can't succeed. And with such men, stock market crashes are inevitable, like the end of a game of hot potato that leaves everyone badly burned.

The Native Americans had a thing called the potlatch: at the end of each year, the richest person in the tribe gave away all their possessions to other tribe members. It was a great honor but at the same time it encouraged a constant flow of generosity in the tribe. No one wanted to get too rich lest they have to give up something they wanted, so they gave everything away they didn't actually need or use as they went. Indeed, what is opulence for if not to dazzle the public eye, rather than one's own? To create magic for others instead of 'security' for oneself? And when a man's ego transcends his sense of security, and his drive to create show-stopping brilliance overrides self-preservation? Baby, that's entertainment. And the wheel of capitalism moves one spoke on your ticket blood. Doo Do Doo Do Dooo Dooo.

That's a Ray Bolger down there

But Flo-Z is always working to bring it higher, to outdo all past versions of his Jenga-style opulent towering, and that's why MGM gives him a 3 1/2 hour bio. He personified the age of indulgence and is now--especially in NYC--is so ingrained in the texture of the city. He's a giant sugar daddy mountebank link across the generations of the depression back to the bigger, higher, wider school of Americana. He's one of a Mount Rushmore of salty icons including Walt Disney, Cecil B. De Mille, and D.W. Griffith. And like them he understood you could get away with anything as long as you wrapped it in so much lace and fashion show piety that the old ladies were too awash in sentimental sighs to complain when the bare thighs flashed. So the crazy headdresses went wider and wider in some pagan mummery glorification of grandiosity, all to keep the world rolling forward and trailing clouds of glory "for anybody willing to climb." A whole style of opulence became synonymous with his name, putting him in the same ranks as presidents, kings, Martha Graham, Rockefeller and, at the same time, carny shadiness, ala P.T. Barnum, Madame Tussaud's, and Ripley.

"Make mine Spud" 

So why praise him in an Acidemic post? Well, I love William Powell but the real psychedelic gold comes in the centerpiece musical number, as surreal and strange as anything by Busby Berkeley. David Lynch taught us that if you push normality to its extreme it becomes more surreal than your wildest imagination, and the "Pretty Girl is Like a Melody" sequence of this film finally illuminates the appeal of frills and fancy MGM foppery to a jaded, faded, junky nurse like myself by pushing it to an impossible extreme. The cumulative effect is beyond the usual sense of claustrophobia, of being like Sullivan sandwiched between the portly matrons at the movies during the first of his travels, and instead breaking through the roof and achieving a mythopoetic splume of transcendental connection, something even Willie Wonka as a child, trapped by his mom at a 1906 fashion show and looking up the skirts of the passing models could never imagine. He'd have to be reading Little Nemo at the same time, and strung out on Demerol.

Consider this revolving cake tableau: we start with the singer and his girl and revolve slowly to see:18th century noblemen, Chinese rural moon beam guitar pixies; Pagliachi belting out his pain before a giant drum; a beautiful flame goddess mocking him from above; a row of pianists working out Rhapsody in Blue, a sea of vampire women in black shimmering Dragon Lady dresses; a giant mummer sun crown headgear crown angel, and a magic femme fatale to crown the cake. best of all is the crazy spiral curtain, the slowly rolls up as the cake turns and then lowers back down. It's a very psychedelic center to the film, with billowing ruffles and angelic choirs that for the first time help me to understand the mindset that led to all the ruffles and bows of turn of the century theater and costumery. This number alone shows what all the others were aiming at, and just coming off stuffy and overbaked. Of course there's some of that, too, such as the ungratifying sight of an imitation Eddie Cantor in black face and popeye glasses square-prancing around like a politically incorrect robot singing "If you Knew Suzie" in front of a giant shower curtain. Oh! Oh! Oh what a gal and now I understand the big Carnegie Hall performance of Andy Kaufman in MAN ON THE MOON with the Santa Claus tower.

Like Kaufman's comedy, the follies predate sexuality and embrace a fully non-gender-specific humanism, a dreamy pillowy magic, a pre-Edenic gorgeous flowing white river of energy, where women are done up like beautiful Weird Tales covers brought to life and the men are all in tuxes and standing very still. Peter Max, Bouguereau, and Christian Anderson and The Yellow Submarine artistic designer Heinz Edelmann are all the heirs of this man. In another surreal number, we see legions of white and silver balloons flying out towards the screen, towards the camera eye, opening a middle field of depth that leads us farther and farther back, what Flo basically does is attempt to duplicate the effects of 3-D decades before it was invented. You can't help but be transported through the looking glass into a Little Nemo of Berkley wünderland, the kind that the Wall Street crash of 1929 would put an end to. That's the thing, when we watch a Busby Berkeley musical number we move inside the stage and the camera swirls and eddies and snakes around the dancers to form geometric kaleidoscope perfection; Ziegfeld didn't have the cameras so he uses each audience member's eye and proceeds to aim his balloons and ostrich feathers right at it, trailing big confetti streamers behind them.

In the era between 3-D and Ziegfeld's balloons, tapping into the limits of the eye as a way to change viewer mindsets was forgotten in favor of the recognized patina of cinema fantasy as we know it today - the 2-D proscenium arch style of middle range shot, the 'you are there' but-not-there ghost presence amidst the action we're used to today, i.e. we've become the invisible spectator. No one looks us in the eye anymore. It used to be that we could take our infantile delight in the cloud mobile above our crib and bring it into the adult world if we had the right guide. Ziegfeld is seen as the one who dares dream the biggest, to bankrupt the world to reach new heights in revolving stage staircases, all just so the stage can reach out like two pairs of big mommy hands into our infant crib of an orchestra seat.

Maybe back at the time audiences knew what those hands were reaching for, but in 2013 it's pretty clear we need to be half-dead from killer flus just to see what all the billowing dreamscape eye seduction fuss is about. Maybe it's all merely an appeasement, a Nazca line offering to the giant Kathy Bates in the sky--sledge-hammer in one hand, Vicodin in the other--the Kali of the flu-wracked MISERY arts. It's how She wants it, so Flo Z gave it to her, just so he could have his row of beautiful naked thighs... zzzz

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Language! Drinks! Cake! Oppression!

Watching Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS for the sixth time recently all I could do was absorb the language barriers; all those dinner parties I sat through in Buenos Aires while intellectual friends of my ex-wife talked in rapid fire Argentinian Spanish suddenly came into clarity. Quentin's whole film is about being at one of those dinner parties. Is he dating an Argentinian? Or wait, no, Che! Che es claro! C'est un chick francais.

Either way, when one is in a situation like that, one can't really do anything except smile politely, look at the speaker like you understand a word they say, and muse along BABEL-ish lines. After all, small children and animals feel bored and left out by adult conversation all the time... if you multiply that factor by Nazis in France speaking German, now you can start to get super mad. When Americans go to Paris on vacation and expect the waiter to know English, that's bad, but at least he doesn't have to know it. The tourists can't have him shot; they should take his rudeness as a sign of solidarity --he's free to be rude.

It might help to understand the feeling of being at the mercy of someone with whom you are having a 'civil' interaction if you've been either a drug dealer during the Reagan administration, though now just going through airport security should be enough for you to savor some of that long-term slow burn paranoia when one bunch of people has absolute power over another,  and each side pretends--one for their own vanity, the other for basic survival--that everything is copacetic. These moments are when Tarantino shines. In his world, every meal, every round of drinks, is pregnant with these sublimated maskings. One side pretends to not be a cat about to pounce, the other side pretends to not be a mouse about to bolt for the exit. Anything can go wrong and over drinks, deserts, and changing table guests, waiting for a check, the suspense can become almost unbearable.

The Cinematic Mountain of Leni Riefenstahl

These scenes work so effectively on the nerves because they tap into a deep, unresolved response of infantile rage at the bullying ignorance of adults. We all remember being a child and having no say in our life's direction. Parents decide when our bedtime is and what TV shows we can watch and if we can have ice cream. They can spank, whip, imprison, strip-search etc. rummage through out drawers looking for drugs they heard about on Fox, and we can't do a thing about it. All we can do is count the hours and months and years until we're out of there.

But that's the thing, most of us don't have to submit to this once we are 21 and/or out of our parent's house. But the poor devils in Tarantino's last two films each have to contend with whole dinner times going past, or lengthy conversations, with people trying to be their parents, with laws that remove rights already instated and strip classes and races of social equity. A parallel might be trying to get through a whole dinner with strict parents as a ten year-old trying to hide the fact that you're stoned and drunk out of your gourd, and by dessert you think you've got them won over so your mask starts to slip a little, and you keep hitting the wine even though your mom glowers at the water level. And your friend who stayed for dinner is like dude, ixnay on the ineway tilunway erway outway the oordway

This is how the Jewish heroine of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS has to live most of her life, such as tense moments like the luncheon (above), where she's unceremoniously dragged. She's expected to be charming as people talk in rapid German (which she does not speak, as we learn indirectly in the beginning) about her theater, never even asking if she wants to host their big film night, all but forcing the "honor" on her, with blithe unconcern about her personal desires. They must certainly know it's hardly an 'honor' for the oppressed French to host any Nazi event, but to mangle a line from THE MALTESE FALCON, "for her sake I let her pretend." Or another line, from a 1931 favorite of mine,
"it's only old Svengali, talking to himself again."

That's Tarantino's genius, level one -- the power of lengthy dinner conversations to with utmost fluidity chronicle not just the dynamics of power and deception, but of the way lengths of time work to change those dynamics, wearing down some positions and strengthening others, and the power of the words we absorb in their seemingly casual use when they later come into play, into action.

Even as early as PULP FICTION, QT buries valuable intel in the rambling opener with Jules telling Vincent about Tony Rocky Horror, a big Samoan guy getting thrown out of a window for giving Marcellus Wallace's wife a foot massage. This bit of knowledge adds great depth to our apprehension at the very thought of Vincent--who weighs far less than the average Samoan drug dealer--going on a date with the very same Mrs. Wallace, and when she almost ODs on his watch, well, now we're really scared for him in ways we would never be without the saga of Tony Rocky Horror.

 We would need also to have absorbed the dialogue back at Eric Stoltz's dealer pad about 'the Madman' and 'Panda' to appreciate the strength of said smack... in other words a whole day and night of seemingly random pop culture referenced-infused dialogue is needed, every last word, to finally snap shut an elaborate trap that is never clearly spoken or delineated. And then that apprehension over Wallace's capability for wrath continues when we learn Bruce Willis needs to go back for his watch; and we needed the full flashback of Christopher Walken's monologue about the history of the  watch to make us invested in Willis' need to go back and get it, even when the full brunt of Wallace's wrath is going to be waiting.

QT never feels the need to underline his overlapping brilliance, which is why his films reward close study - they are created for the DVD generation and so I don't feel ashamed that it wasn't until this fifth viewing of BASTERDS that I realized Soshana can't understand what Goebbels and friends are laughing about at the lunch since she doesn't speak German. Her blank cutesy expression as the men talk around her can throw you off if you're just following their subtitles instead of listening to them in the polite way we listen to a table of people talking very fast in another language who are presumably thinking we understand what they are saying. In America we have such a deep embarrassment about our knowing only 'American' that we automatically assume every European speaks all European languages. And in BASTERDS we would certainly think Shoshana knows English if not for her failure to bolt while hiding under the dairy farmer's floorboards in the opening scene. But that whole scene seems so apart from the later ones that it takes awhile to connect them - it's as if QT wants us to keep watching and digging, so buries new chunks of realization deep in the fabric of his rapid-fire dialogue.

So in that first lengthy dinner scene -- the Paris bistro with Goebbels -- we get a sense of constant on-edgeness that must accompany life under occupation. A good analogy in the US would be if the NSA extended their authority to include random house searches of all its citizens and if NSA agents wanted to invite themselves over for dinner, search our bedrooms, and sleep with our daughters, and if we ever complain wind up at GTMO with a plastic green bag over our heads. The price of freedom from this is eternal vigilance, yadda yadda ---BUT even if we didn't grow up under German occupation or deep south segregation, even if we're lucky enough that we're more or less protected from such invasions (presuming we're not Native Americans, of course), most of us remember the hopeless rage we felt towards our parents as children who never got to do anything ever and it's not fair and Waah Waah I hate you I hate you and the plotting to one day destroy them. Quentin goes back deep to that universal childhood rage as well. He understands that it's the job of great exploitation cinema to act as a catharsis to these deep-seated unresolved rages, on the personal, psychic, historical, social, and viral level.

And that's why every demeaning expletive and subjugation and atrocity is necessary in Tarantino's last two films--INGLOURIOUS and DJANGO UNCHAINED. Because no amount of vengeance, of cathartic destruction can be truly cathartic without it; if it sickens you beyond measure than the film is only doing it's job and this bloody catharsis is for you. This is the kind of trauma we should be getting from our movies, not the casual torture of films like HOSTEL and WOLF CREEK. Serial killers and psychopaths are frightening but they're isolated individuals or groups whose actions are against the law. In Nazi Germany and the Antebellum South, casual torture, subjugation and atrocity are law; extreme racist barbarism is the societal norm. The idea of what's 'right' as far as bloody vengeance is muddied by our inability to see the forest for the trees as far as the social order we're living in, and that's the Quentin difference.

The second example of time elapsing is the sheer length of the basement drinking game scene in BASTERDS; audiences generally complain that it's too long and claustrophobic which is the point. Perhaps in some ways the film never quite recovers from its show-stopper aspect. But here's the thing -- it shows the gradual erosion of nerves over a lengthy session of drinking and chit-chat, the length between thinking you're getting away with your ruse and feeling like you finally have, your enemy is about to leave or give you what you want, only to have a last minute prolonged moment of suspense as suddenly everything reverses and you're caught but by then that's it - you don't give a shit about getting away with it anymore or even getting out of there alive. You've been stifled so long under the garb of your false identity and the other's ranting egotism that your rage overrides your sense of self-preservation and BAM! Say good-bye to your nuts.

DJANGO and INGLORIOUS each have one of these scenes, and these two films are separated by these scenes from the rest of QT's oeuvre. While gangsters, thugs and assassins from his earlier films are outlaws in a world in moral twilight, the pre-Civil War South and Nazi-occupied France are worlds beyond moral twilight because the morality of the prevailing social structure is evil and violent. Slavery and subjugation is moral according to the Confederate South, and Hitler's Germany. They use modern democratic social structures  to obscure the evil, but in these two films undisguised evil gloats from its established position of power via even the smallest of presumably friendly gestures. In a sense the Nazi's openness with their evil is almost more noble than the red state congressman who preaches family values and wants to ban gay marriage and sodomy, but then goes and picks up a male hustler at a bus stop; who wants to ban free speech but would never ban the right of rednecks to fly confederate flags outside their courthouses (imagine if the Germans wanted to keep Nazi flags in their court rooms, why is it any different?)

In being open with their oppression, the Nazis also set themselves up as an easy target, of course, and in doing so they--as with the slave owners in DJANGO--remind us that the power of cathartic violence lurks under the surface of any violently imposed social order. As the recent psychopathic gun violence in our country indicates, our citizens are hopping mad but aren't sure who is oppressing them, so they don't know who to shoot at. So thank your oppressors for letting you see their face up close, should they ever do that, because when you kill them finally in a moment of explosive release it will be so worth the wait.

ONE LAST THING -

Drugs are also Tarantino's sinthom magnifique - most tellingly in a seemingly plot-advancing scene in a vet's office after the basement shooting. It begins with a morphine needle to the thigh of Brigit Von Hammersmock. The Basterds have commandeered the office of a veterinarian, and are in his operating room - while he stands by in a robe. A bullet has shattered some bone in her leg. Aldo Raine presses on the wound in a bit of torture to force the truth out of her, angry at losing three men in what he perceives as a possible ambush. He relents when starting to believe her but his manner never changes -- as the morphine hits her system though Brigit slowly morphs from defeated to intrigued to almost excited, especially once the idea of pumping her full of more morphine is discussed. It's a subliminal melange of addictive trigger motions I haven't seen so subtly played since that of Juliane Moore hearing about all the delicious drops she can pilfer from her dying husband's scrips in MAGNOLIA. In fact there might be so much crazy subtle acting going on in these moments that these things I see might not even be in the actors or director's minds at all, not even unconsciously, that it might be just my own addictive, paranoid personality...BUT... that Tarantino can start me thinking like that, in these great self-deconstructing paranoid loops speaks to his startling genius.

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