The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily the locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. To these beautiful people, enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, he's just another Yankee, which is to say, accepted by them despite his inability to accept them or himself. Over the course of two 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, Cera trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, and wakes with his face in the bush, so to speak. Brave, foolhardy, invincible, he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson, but he does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, Jack loucheness, Hopper dementia, and Fonda remoteness. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe only by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, his beady little eyes are in front so he can judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's paranoic-critical method' to pick at these films paisley scarabs:

According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially we can count Sebastián Silva part of the Darionioni Nuovo, which is an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, to 50s Hitchcock, in the process baking up a beast that has Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Robertson Davies' manticore "tail," and a single-first-person keyhole crystal ball eye passed amongst its three gorgon hydra heads: Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche (a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators): each young artist devoted in his and her fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores, the unsettling feeling of conspiracy that comes when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges like a strange, rotting fractal fruit that becomes, with a blink of the eye, a rotting parrot corpse.

Magic Magic taps into that Polanski mid-60s rotting-on-the-vine paranoid feminine, finding the dead pigeon under glass on Judy Berlin flatware in a Yellow Wallpapered room surrounded on all sides by Lynchian buzzing, fecund jungles and horny dogs, because while the Crystal Fairy film is, for all its mystic leanings, more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where you're so bound up in your own petty thoughts and sexual frustrations that maybe you're depending far too much on the trip to cure all your ills in a single flash. But the San Pedro cactus-derived mescaline (in this case) only forces you to experience the full feedback squall of your own DSB venom --no one surrenders to the mystic without first a great deal of terror as the bearings one has in reality dissolves and the horror, the horror, emerges as the wide-screaming abyss of the impermanent --and the ancient Mayan gods demand full existential dissolution before the rapture comes. The farther we are from this baseline awareness the less 'alive' we feel, so breaking out of the faerie bower has to be that much more violent, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun and superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark murky underside of the ship longed for like a Linus blanket.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy, compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if like me you've ever been stuck tripping with the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, hairiness, den mother need to treat everyone like kindergartners and so naive as to lecture South African black people on Apartheid because she 'once took a class') or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, "I'm getting off are you getting off yet?") you may wince, but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy progression; I can imagine freaking out grandly with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving George "Magnificent" Anderson of a psychedelic seeker just as I would hate to trip with him. Cera handles it all well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Magnificent Ambersons - a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a big cookie filled with delicious arsenic, but they forgot the sugar so why eat it? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes, and isn't that why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds, but rather the mind of Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, cuter, played by the great Juno Temple. She's upon a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation where instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and demons in your cozy London flat) it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. No sooner is Alicia is getting off her flight from L.A., in a foreign country for the very first time to visit her pal Sara (Emily Browning) then she finds only to find a car full of other people, including Sara's boyfriend Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American, speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable, picking her up for a spontaneous holiday to some remote island, not the kind of thing an exhausted probably bi-polar L.A. girl getting off a ten-hour flight wants to hear and it gets worse, suddenly Browning's nurturing pal is called away and there's no one to hide behind to avoid Michael Cera, the only one who can talk with her since she speaks no Spanish.

Things go downhill fast, for her, anyway, and we go from feeling her pain to theirs, because sometimes shit be America's fault. She can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I dig it - because I know well the feeling: tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people up to party all day and all night, at ease in their skins, seeming to be taunt you with their niceness, but sleeping on the couch means you have to get up with the early risers and stay up with the night owls and so the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in and you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse after I'd graduated; they all had cats and I'd be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely depressed and paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations: some girl in the kitchen says "can you pass me that Pepsi?" I'd hear it as "you can't sleep with Erich --he has hep-C."  Which I don't!  I totally would have slept with her, too. Bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi. Such great crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it, seek it out - dive into the madness rather than running from it, then the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared. She's free, hacked clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond time's Ulmer barrier.

But for the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film - then mix them up together in your mind - because the preview makes it seem like a Most Dangerous Game meets Svengali meets Funny Games horror movie but it's more a Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity, a hard thing to pull off really well but Silva pulls it off and the photography by the amazing DP Christopher Doyle only justifies his reputation as a leader in his field with his stunning lenses and uses of color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea) in a way you can imagine the mid-sixties Polanski trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac, would look like if in color. Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton both would love Magic Magic.

Not sure if I'd want to see either film again but I bet I would have been pretty happy on the shoot for these - there's a sense that vacation vision quests on the part of the actors are well incorporated. Then again, all their relaxed and spontaneous but higher educated bonding might have really got on my nerves if I didn't feel their nerves were worse. Vacations tend to fill me with an overall ennui that can't be shaken for several days, so I have to fake it. The addiction to language is like a thin rope hanging over what your ego tells you is a lake of fire but if you let go anyway and just fall down backwards, laughing at your own fear, it's really a warm, amniotic feather bed. Your fears are still waiting at the lip of the pit trying to tell you hey you're burning, get out of there, you'll die, you'll go insane, but you don't have to listen anymore; you can wander away, leave their voices fading in the distance, ignore the urge to run back up and apologize, ignore their tears and screams, and run towards that dizzy high you feel the first nights of waking up somewhere other than your own bed because if you have to go looking farther than your own backyard, well go! 

You can't run but you can hide, from at least the volume of your ego's pleading desperate din - if you couldn't, you'd still be stuck with your very first, second, or third girlfriend, the one who cried and demanded long twisted apologies when you tried to break up with her, and so you stuck around for six more miserable months until finally you let go of the ledge and landed that feather bed pit she'd convinced you was fire --you can still hear her cursing and threats and vile oaths from her window as you make it down to the street, and you're glad you had the good sense to bring your bass  and amp when you ran out of there and back to the party.  

At any rate, producer-star Cera and the writer-director co-star Silva make a good combination, and taken as loose sequels the two films progress almost of a piece, with one casual encounter leading to another, so if the drawback to feeling made up on the spot is not knowing when to end, that's a sacrifice I'm glad Silva and producer-star Cera are willing to make. In playing such a shitheel in these two films (and in This is the End), Cera earns my respect in ways he failed to do as the neurotic Bluth boy-- but at some point you can't just destroy your good graces, it's a movie, after all - we're stuck with you for over an hour. You got to do more than simper and snivel. What would Richard Widmark do? 

I've been the Cera character, desperately hoping a psychedelic trip will bring me out of my self-absorbed shell, wanting to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seems and not being able to get there no matter how high I get. The ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy and through self-expression, or you can have it flayed off you like skin. Drugs don't always work but writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the special-K I had snorted was working or not, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World; even with all that it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me-- but THEN some people from Britain or Germany or Ibiza or wherever would blow through town. The sun would come out and these cool, beautiful souls would brighten our scene. So it was a double bonus --my roommate would jet off to Ibiza all August leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death and then in September or October, when New York City is the best place to be on Earth, whomever he'd crashed with would come crashing over at our place and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous.

Then they'd be gone again... 

Well, it could have been worse, what if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.