America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton

The new Lana Del Rey album is out this week, like the dark ebb of the Stygian tide, and with it "controversy" so perfectly-pitch that Del Rey and her salivate-on-cue detractors must be in on some cosmic PR joke. Take it from one who didn't, from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned hipster who missed all his chances, it is cool to die young, whatever Frances Bean may say. The only freedom from irrelevance lies in the obsidian wind that whistles up through gratings along that other sewer's shore. In death, in dreams, comes the realization--coveted by all damaged artists--one has really 'made it.' Once past life, one's art is past time, and a great pastime art the movies. There is no difference between living through the movies and living through death. If you're writing for the edification of your future selves rest assured, in peace, they will pretend to have read it. But first, your death is needed. Lana Del Rey knows. When the artist pursues fame only after he or she's dead, one is free from the need for validation. Surrender is the only true courage, which does not mean being a pussy about it.

And from Lana Del Rey's perfectly framed early 60s car crashes we can stagger down an off-road shortcut through the fifties, and all the way to the WW2 graveyard of Val Lewton.

It was no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started around yesterday-ish while simultaneously TCM played Val Lewton's acclaimed low-key masterwork THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943) as part of an apparent devil day, shoe-"horned" between THE DEVIL'S BRIDE (AK THE DEVIL RIDES OUT 1968) and TO THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942), which I mention only to tie in WWII, as Val Lewton's best work was made in 1942-43, suffused with a deep paranoia about being left back in the States, so far from the action no bombs could reach him, and so needing to dredge the war back up from the ground like collective unconscious crude, like a modern art exhibit after the public has drifted home and the main lights are off and a half-blind janitor slowly mops up, pausing at strange noises, the crumpled up invites and provenance lists rustling like stage tumbleweeds.

from top: "Summertime Sadness," I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, "Tropico"

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both understand the ebb tide of abandonment and death, and how when it washes through the land, the crap's washed away and all that remains are the immovable immortal icons are revealed: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus, all loom on Lana's heavenly plane like death coaches (in her video "Tropico," the Wayne impersonator babbles on with banal advice). On Val Lewton's plane, there's no need for living pop culture icons --instead all that remains after the death tide are immortal archetype statuses from Greek and Egyptian myth: statues of Cerberus, Set, and San Sebastian (above): heaven, hell, and the dark doorway between them motionless and waiting in crevices of the stone stairways abd rustling canefields and even in a calypso song. His idols are literally etched from rock; all-seeing through blank eyes, demons that are only vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat. Until they materialize into a sudden stray light.

So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy of Del Rey's I say hey, man, be grateful her death drive is there, in your sights, because all she has to do is pout, turn slowly away, and take a backwards slow mo dive off the Hollywood sign and through Diane Selwyn's pale blue skylight and it's YOU who die, not her. Once you can't see her you'll know she's behind you, with a gun or sharp sword. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium, or Visa Platinum. You can follow her around like Boris Karloff obsessing over the hottie Greek peasant maybe-vampire in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945), you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs reigning down torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on her; you can drip a whole nation of self-appointed sanity over her sun roof... it does not slow your rush to death one hourglass grain. And it's probably just what she wants.

Del Rey knows, like the Shadow, and she knows that memories and film are the same thing and that every home movie of happier times must speed up as you approach the black hole realizations that love has flown and death is rushing forward in its absence. She even casts herself as the bad guy most of the time, as in "Summertime Sadness" --driving her lesbian ex-lover to jump off a bridge ("kiss me once before you go" - don't mean she's gettin' on a plane, sister) while she pouts in fog machine student films and home movies that repeat faster around certain points as the weeping lover falls, finally impressing Lana Del Rey enough to fall after her, the doubling inherent in an L.A. lesbian affair fully embraced- - drowning in each other's reflections in each other's eyes, their lashes a thousand penitent memories striping inescapable facts onto Hollywood's naked back; they come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece MULHOLLAND DR. (below); hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942); Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring/sacrifice deferral in LEOPARD MAN (1943) and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

It's fate, baby. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool: there's a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal, ever so briefly. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize), she wears a fur coat that when she changes tightens in around her and, if you look close at her body lying on the ground outside the panther cage, she looks like a bearskin rug with a teddy bear's head sewn to the side, but we only see it from far off, in the shadows. In ISLE OF THE DEAD we can see, if we look very close, the way the undead Mrs. Aubyn seems to materialize out of the moonlit reflections on a stone wall, like she's only semi-corporeal but never in that common special effects way that would make it obvious.

Lewton has a Russian's love of great literature that extends deeper down than the average bourgeois tenure track, deeper even than the blood (his real name is Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon), deeper than the cauldron from which are dredged all our hopes and fears, and our tomorrows are like a thousand yesterdays. And great literature is always about death. It's where we go to prepare, to remember that a vast elevator full of blood is always a skinsuit away, and the only freedom comes in whether to ignore it out of fear, or embrace it out of courage, love, and rock and roll who-gives-a-fuck-it. This is where she's coming from with her comments about being a feminist and thinking it's cool to die young. Would you get mad at David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Hemingway for saying those things?

Now, if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. That would be different. But my dad was killed by doctors (he died, after all, in the hospital). At home with an ocean of bourbon and ginger ale he was immortal. He kept death close; it couldn't sneak up on him. But that hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirit. It opened the door right up and coasted him through while his back was turned. When we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only those for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us the only cure-all is music, literature and films. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood because she embraces the theatrical aspects of emotional anguish, with her not as the sufferer but the object of the longing; her faux-period home movies painstaking in their iconic recreations, like the accident fetishists in CRASH, and she's the car.

From top: CRASH, LEOPARD MAN

I love Lana because of her pro-death chanteuse-rock fuckitness and have no problem with it all being a persona put on by a failed pop star named Lizzy Grant. If it didn't resonate we wouldn't be talking about her, and if her story is really a confession, then so is mine, though not, apparently, Rolling Stone's and Jezebel's -- who were both once edgy in their ways, I hear. Now they're both 'institutions' successful enough to feel they have something to lose, or even kill to protect (see CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice). Lana Del Rey is a persona that has nothing whatsoever to protect, so can engage in a kind of high wire free-form self-immolation theater. Animas with respectable DSM-IV counts are plentiful but then they have kids; the persona is replaced, even grown out of --but is it really growing or just doubling and diluting? How many great sexy young actresses have we lost to their children? Even when these starlets come back to us they're not the same: their dangerous heart--that thrilling gleam in their eye--now exists off camera, transferred to vessels still into the mewling and puking into nurse's arms stage.

It shoulda been me, puking. I had to quit her, my whiskey... sweet whiskey. My sober life, that's my cross to bear, my LSD Albert Hoffman problem child, the thing that robbed me of the gleam. My lost Lenore. But I'm not a star. No one even notices.

But I notice, and I still haven't forgiven Angelina Jolie, or Liz Phair. Ladies, you broke my heart!

Never stop smoking, or drinking - even knowing both are poisons,
for you've spilled more than secrets (bottom: SEVENTH VICTIM)

Now you love your children the way you used to love the camera.
Now your love is funneled to some off-camera cradle.
Which makes you worthless to the camera! Love the camera, o favored image!
We love you back through it.
But we can't love you through your kids' eyes,
for we are not John Cusak in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.
Then again, what else would you do with yourself once we eventually moved on?
You'd have to leap off the edge.
Like Lana Del Rey does, but she does it in advance of your gaze, and so
you will never move on
from her.
-----
In a semi-deserted Bijou n 1943
a nervous young assembly line worker uses her sick day,
watches SEVENTH VICTIM or THE LEOPARD MAN
and the shadows around her, where a boyfriend or husband would be,
 onscreen in the shadows she sees him, beckoning...

Lana Del Rey is the eyes that discern changing shapes in that darkness, and the darkness.
On digital nothing escapes notice, even the void hidden within the void.

This is the girls

That's why Val Letwon's morbid preoccupation with death is so relevant. Using deep black shadows he reveals that the thing wartime America most fears isn't death but loneliness, abandonment, being entombed --all of which is brilliantly realized by the cheap B-movie sets where even the sky seems indoors (and is)--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country with only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the bookending oceans.

And then... Frank Sinatra's voice like a phantom echo; his mastery of mic technique giving his programs an almost unworldly amniotic sound markedly different from the rest, welcoming you to join him in the pulsing warm fog between two shores: "if our romance should break up / I hope I never wake up /if you are but a dream." You are. Hardly even born yet. There in the unrealized amniotic slumber of the Stygian crossing, as Sinatra's songs coast overhead in ceaseless tachyons towards the past, you can hear your father's conception, buried in the sunken space between the words. 

The way Lana keeps her expression blank --she does it for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes --they accept our shadow's projection, just as the country as a whole during the war years became, in some smaller areas, a ghost town ripe for metaphor: the younger healthier men all drained away by old Europe's vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left are German expat directors (and actors to play Nazis) and, as stars in the B's are the tenderfoots, the old men, the crippled, the meek, the short and reedy. And everywhere, in the air wafting from Europe, the smell of death --the inevitability of it--in ways we can't imagine with our current wars and their paltry kill levels (we might lose a few dozen thousand but nothing close to Europe and Asia's combined sixty million in World War Two). Only a full scale nuclear war would even put a dent in us now. There could be a dozen earthquakes hundred of million dead, and that would still only be the same % as we lost in WW2, a spit in the bucket. Half of us could die and we'd only be where we were in the seventies, when we first started to worry about overpopulation. It's not death that dooms our planet, but life. Our blind clinging to health like panicked survivors swamping the lifeboat. If we could all just die like gentlemen, like the great Solomon Guggenheim, if Lana Del Rey can lead us by power of bad example, and if we leave right now, we just might make it.

We won't. In the words of young John Connor, "we're not gonna make it...are we?"

Echo of my undead soldier (from top) Del Rey, DEATHDREAM

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton know, too, we're not going to make it, and they see the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema, echoing like a ghost to let us know that even after our future death, the movies shall survive. Del Rey makes music for our ghost to haunt the wasteland with, but she's all alone, like any phantom. As Pitchfork notes she's "an utterly distinctive figure in popular music, not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely." There are a few artists over the years who have explored similar ghost transmissions: Miles Davis' trumpet echoing through the primordial pre-ears-to-hear-it howling of an uncooled earth in Agharta; Kubrick's "Midnight, the Stars and You"; Lynch's Roy Orbison songs and Julee Cruise... but none live and breathe within that ghost transmission - none play on the idea that even if you weren't alive to hear them sing, the sound is encoded in  the crystal receivers at the core of your DNA.  

Lana Del Rey--her "self" as persona, her videos, her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage--returns Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, down Route 66. Her music is ideal for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, long drives with tearful anorexic cutters who you love but cannot save, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dean. Without Morissey-moping but rather with hair done up and radio playing Elvis with JFK convertible top down, smoking, hovering over Marilyn's lifeless body like a wraith, hiring an actor to dress like Elvis and sneer while rubbing against the microphone stand in front of the John Wayne's rawhide coffin before falling backwards off the Hollywood sign in slow motion, falling, but never landing, to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's SEVENTH VICTIM, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway. And death + death = life.

"National Anthem" - note vivid attention to period detail and home movie posing 

while at the same time revising JFK into a contemporary-ish sexy rapper, and 

gaggle of cute biracial children. It's got nothing to do with the video narrative, which 

like so many of her best stuffkind of recalls the big final 'bells' montage 

moments of DON'T LOOK NOW, or the last seconds of 

THE BLACK SWAN spread to five minutes. 

What Del Rey has done is to embrace the sacrificial phoenix icon of the damaged hottie in ways Lindsay Lohan (who instead let Oprah set her chronically bouncing back from relevance) never understood well enough to capitalize on. When it comes right down to it, Lohan is sharp, talented, and ballsy, but not smart, one of those people mystified why they always land in jail. Lana Del Rey avoids the trap of co-dependence or prison or rehab by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, the Baby New Year of New Death Drive. She is her own exploiter, the manager of her singular vision --where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers by promising to get help, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles, but it's an act, man. She acts it so she doesn't have to be it, whereas Lindsay be's it but can't figure out that she should act it (rather than vainly trying to act "normal." If you get angry at Del Rey and think she's fake, or are worried it's real, well - all your rants and raves will do is boost her hit count --as the boost in album sales she got after her hostilely-received 2012 performance on SNL (see "Kiss Me Del Rey"). 

The Leopard Man

Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave - so he doesn't have to go for real. He has to prove himself somehow, feeling the terrible guilt reported by so many stay-at-home men during World War Two. The best you can do if you're Lewton is try to capture death's lightning spirit in a statue watching over lost souls, understanding in this the entire primal purpose behind art, a totemic sacrifice to the elder gods, a proxy, a giant burning man made of straw. And so the true artist never hides the skull in the ice cubes because when the death wish is externalized for posterity one achieves immortality, Death is pleased that you've honored him and so spares you for another year, the living ghost retina burn outline of his long ago flown-free Firebird cohering from the flames.

"Summertime Sadness" 

Del Rey trusts we're not going to kill ourselves just because she says it would a sweet gesture, would show her we really care, that we've played her lyrics backwards and prepared our pyres. That's her whole secret. How many films other than Lewton's and Lana's with this level of guts? I mean aside from THE BLACK SWAN? I sympathize with Kurt's daughter but really, Rolling Stone, it's you should be ashamed soliciting angry responses from a girl who never got to know her father any better than we did --to me that doesn't reflect badly on LDR's statement, or FBC's retort, only on your journalistic 'ethics,' RS. You who were a once mighty countercultural institution (even smart enough to be aware of the paradox in that phrase) but are now reduced to running back and forth passing gossip like some tattletale angling to be ground zero of a viral thread, leaping down the throat of anyone speaking out against the principles of bland nanny state life-for-life's-sake-PG-tedium, of rock as sanitized of genuine rebellion. Maybe you should go run another cover piece about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together again! Like all the other fallen giants, you've let 'trending' become the new version of stock market panics, all genuine rebellion trampled underfoot. Well let me tell you about another bunch of tramplers, and the shit they've come to trample is the flimsy wool over your own eyes! 

"National Anthem," ISLE OF THE DEAD

Most filmmakers and artists and musicians think largely of themselves, of their fortune and fame or lack thereof. But some of us know well that every film, post, or album we make will survive our own death, and therefore we know black magic's promise of eternal youth, of the ghost in the machine, the threading projector beam light measuring death out in still image ribbons that give the projected the only immortality there is, the phantom echo, the Sinatra ghost broadcasts still flying out into space. Compared to this eventual unearthing, any reward of fame in this lifetime is paltry. Some of us know we're dead already, some like Val Lewton and Lana Del Rey. They will not pretend that what the camera records was ever alive. They will not pretend life is just death at 24 frames per second. They know it's also the reverse, that the unafraid to die must enact rituals of death and transfiguration --for these rituals endure like the Zapruder footage will endure any memory of a living JFK. Watch THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN and a few Lana Del Rey videos in the same night (preferably the older ones--"National Anthem," "Video Games," "Born to Die," and "Summertime Sadness") and before you die, you shall see the America of ghosts. 

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Wes Anderson vs. the Trust Fund Marxists + 10 Classic films for fans of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)

If you're as keen as I am for romantic pre-code Lubitsch--The Love Parade, Trouble in Paradise, The Smiling Lieutenant, Monte Carlo, and The Merry Widow (this Tues on TCM!)--and love Wes Anderson's previous films then you surely can/have/will appreciate the icy frosting splendor over-melancholy birthday cake of their combined flavor in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), released this week on DVD. Those enthralled by Renoir will appreciate oblique references to Grand Illusion; there are also the McGuffins of Hitchcock to be found; clues and puzzles like the protagonists like The Riddler on Batman; the gorgeous colors of Powell-Cardiff-Pressburger; the candy coatings of Jean Eustache; the epic swirls of Cy McGurknikov all swirled together like an excited boy using his sister's dollhouse and tea set to relay a tale within a tale to his agog younger siblings. The dollhouse hotel us run like clockwork by assiduous major domo Ralph Fiennes, and his deadpan Muslim lobby boy (Tony Revolori), who gets the one girl in the film (the ubiquitous Saoirse Ronan) and grows up to be F. Murray Abraham, narrating the tale to Jude Law in the now gone to communist bloc grey hotel. Law's making a book out of it, which in turn is read by a bright young Slav girl in the final, outer layer.

Anderson's previous film, Moonrise Kingdom (see my best of 2012 list) surged with young outlaw lovers' momentum detached cool and fervent devotion it marked real progress forward for Anderson, whose past films all focused more on male friendship compromised by rivalry over girls generally too mature or damaged for either of them to handle. Moonrise was like if Max in Rushmore hooked up with Gweneth Paltrow in Royal Tenenbaums - and neither was tongue-tied or awkward around the other, but pre-possessed with the refreshing eerie confidence that the first flush of mutual attraction can bring, almost Hawksian in their cool.

the coolest romance since Bogie and Bacall in To Have and Have Not? Maybe

But the relationships at the heart of Budapest indicate a racing away from the palm sweat stress of first love back to the safety of the Dungeons and Dragons kids you left behind, back to the younger Indian kid neighbor who always wants to hang out and does whatever dangerous things you tell him (in my childhood, his name was Sinul and the girl who made my palms sweat was Tracy). But the return to the boy's club makes the capering and gamboling less vital, doomed as are all quests to recapture innocence, to climb inside the tattered remains of your old coccoon. The word on the street is you need to see this film a few times to get all the little details, but the thing is, I don't want to. I'm not even sure I want to see Moonrise Kingdom again, at least not at the moment. What if a second viewing dims my love? Better the safety of one more viewing of The Expendables 2. Stallone, now that's a man's man.

That said, the critical and financial box office success of Grand Budapest is a good sign for future auteur "quirk" art, which isn't necessarily great for art, especially folk art, the last bastion of hardscrabble art world outsiders. With its lovingly ornate tracking shots, quaint train set miniatures, impeccable 30s costumery and decor (bright pinks and deep purples), wistful rainy day isolation hinting of some deep meaning, about loss, perhaps, there's so much rich detail, such macro/micro fullness in the historical period--the last gasps of innocence before fascism, communism, and nazism destroyed humanity's confidence in itself, and cakes stopped being decadent--that The Grand Budapest seems to risk trivializing it with its endearing little sister's toys-style playfulness. It left me wondering if it had anything to say other than that Anderson wishes he could go back in time and live in a grand hotel before the war, or a nice empty safe place where no one knows your name and cavernous steam bath facilities and snowy mountain tops give you hot and cold extremes for maximum coziness. This Hotel is self-aware, which makes some of it inexcusable. Just because it's a self-reflexive fractal inward spiral narrative doesn't mean it can avoid the cumbersome duty of meaning something. As it is, it's just a reverie imagining how nice it would have been to be around opulence in the days before the Nazis destroyed most of fancy Europe; it's all dressed up and has a few worthy places to go, so why does it feel still lost?

Putting one's own private nostalgic wistfulness on the big screen, we know, is the purview of the rich who can afford to create their pet time travel realities, ala Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (see: Oscar Picks of the Bourgeoisie - in Salieri Shades). These dreamers can afford to create their own past worlds to vanish into. So while a state-funded auteur like Bergman could create vast worlds of resonance out of two women's faces in black and white close-up, he couldn't afford to build an escape past; he had to hide out on a desolate island for most of his life, where, as we know from The Most Dangerous Game, there's no place to hide or run for long. For Bergman, stripping down his style only deepened his resonance, proving that where art cinema is concerned, more is less. Unlimited freedom allows for laziness; excessive details undermine resonance. Anderson can only create a few chuckles out from the vast quantity of faces, vast painted flea-markets of sets, miniatures, and cameras at his disposal so it seems only fair that the fascist uprisings that bookend portions of this film should occur, indication of both the iron curtain evening the playing field, confiscating the cakes and artwork to enforce a strictly drab color code, and the intrusion on the Anderson fantasia by bubble-bursting bombs. As for Communism, Anderson never shows us the starving, huddled masses who aren't willing or able to work 24 hours a day for rich tourists, the types who realize it's their right to be equal to any rich punter. It's them he should be scared of!

Viva La Revolution! 

That said, I'm on congressional record railing against the Trust Fund Marxist movement re: Godard (see: Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema) as much as Anderson seems to be railing against spoiled rich kid collaborators in Budapest, which is one of the reasons I respect his frivolous whims. Recalling the big split during Great Depression pre-codes between harsh reality films like Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale, and musicals and escapism, comedies and stories of the wealthy enjoying their wealth, the Sullivans and Andersons often don't factor in that their glorification of the poor is actually a rich kid fantasia, the imagination of a lonely Lord Fauntleroy whose only friends are the household servants and so fantasizes about how much joy and fullness he brings to their lives, justifying the one-way flow of attention.

For the middle class, the fantasy of being rich never includes having servants, but they're an inescapable part of real wealth, and as Hegel knows, never having to ever have to fend for oneself gradually leaves the rich so vulnerable--so dependent on hoteliers, bellhops, maids, and consierges when abroad--that it's critical to their sense of self to believe there's a means other than money by which these supplicants are bound to them, that the servants and hoteliers love serving them hand and foot, for service's own sake, and that they would never abandon their rich clientele to starve or have to pack their own bags.

Reality is surely different but in Anderson's world these usually tertiary characters all work their fingers to the bone, 24 hours a day, to make the Grand Budapest and its ilk excellent --why? Because they love to serve the jet set? Non, monsieur, because Wes Anderson's camera transcends both the trust fund 'present of liberty' Kane-ism and socialist hand-wringing of some of his peers without careening into the life-is-a-circus Fellini-ism. So what else is left in its stead?

Let us recall that quote from William Powell as Godfrey Parks, the rich scion who finds his mojo by becoming first a forgotten man and then a butler for a spoiled dingbat family in My Man Godfrey. "You're proud of being a butler?" asks a bewildered Eugene Pallette. "I'm proud of being a good butler, sir," Godfrey answers. "And  if I may so, sir, one has to be good to put up with this family." In other words, excellence of service is its own reward, even when those being served are undeserving, setting vast karmic chains in motion wherein even labeling someone as undeserving of special service is forgotten, as all judgment is suspended, creating humility, grace, and good fortune. There's not even a sense of class resentment in the effeminate reedy voice of the prefect of police (a slumbering Ed Norton), as ineffectual a depiction of law enforcement as Casey Affleck in The Killer Inside Me.

But like the 'glorious' martyrdom offered unwed mothers in soaps of the 1930s-50s after they work their fingers to the bone for undeserving illegitimate D.A. sons, there's the dubious aftertaste that this martyrdom is really in the service of some nefarious purpose. The 1% patriarchy plays up the grace and nobility of being a second-class citizen in this, the greatest of all possible worlds.

On the flipside of that there's also the trust fund Marxist, who blames "the rich" (i.e. his dad) for sucking the blood of the proletariat in parent-funded films. He's glamorizing the poor - but must I reach for my frothy tome of 'wise old sayings by butlers?' to find out what Burrows said to Sullivan in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (above) in order to dissuade him from playing amateur mendicant, that "only the morbid rich would find the subject glamorous?"

Godard is my boiler plate for this theory, but I still love Godard because he remains hilarious despite and even because of his leftist propaganda; he's trying something new with cinema, to connect the New Wave with Eisenstein, but no matter how didactic and naive, his playful cinematic wit endures. And the more Jean Pierre Leaud tries to look politically serious, the funnier he is. He's like Harpo Marx crossed with Young Trotsky in Love (below)

Godard's La Chinoise 

That's the strange rich kid cinema angle that is both transcended and indulged by Anderson's film. The leads of Grand Budapest (like William Powell) become rich because they are tireless, loyal, fearless servers of the rich. They reject the communist ideal of equality by force, due perhaps to proximity to the wealthy (and ample leftovers back in the kitchen). Their jobs are frivolous - bellhopping and major domoing aren't necessary as we all know from carrying our own duffel into a Ramada-- and so their indispensability must be underwritten by adoring old lady residents; meanwhile the unwavering subservience of the hard-working baker (Saoirse Ronan) laboring under the callous gaze of the bakery owner seems a bit strange - a girl this hot and fearless wouldn't need to sweat her days away in a bakery making ornate sugar-coated little cakes for the rich and imprisoned! She'd be a first rate government agent or high-end prostitute. And is there a difference? Not according to Hitchcock... or Lacan!

TEN CLASSIC FILM RECOMMENDATIONS 

FOR FANS OF THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1943 - Dir. Powell and Pressburger 

****

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's tale covers a similar old Europe canvas in its chronicle of of a spy in pre-War Vienna, a duel with a German who will become his best friend, and two world wars, all as recalled in the mind of an old general while wrestling with his younger secretary's fiancee in a Turkish bath. Jack Cardiff's eye-popping colors and the superlative set design make even the war ravaged countryside beautiful and shares Budapest's melancholy air as the onrush of mechanized warfare slowly obliterates the sporting codes and artistic splendor, the colors, elaborate customs, flavors, and decency of old-world class system Europe. (also second pic from top)

2. The Love Parade

1929 - dir. Ernst Lubitsch

 ***1/2

One of Lubitsch's less-revered works, this has Maurice Chevalier as a romantic soldier who winds up marrying the queen of his small country (the sort that would cease to exist when the map was redrawn at the end of WWI).

3. Shanghai Express

1932 - dir. Josef Von Sternberg

****

What better place to ride from Peking to Shanghai than in a first class train compartment with two cultured high fashion courtesans like Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong, especially if they take such languid pleasure in shocking an MGM-style fussbudget boarding house matron. Dietrich is at her most luminous and morally ambivalent, and incredibly cool; her crazy black feather outfit fulfills the promise of the slinky black feathered collar. There's great fuck yous to the censors with Dietrich turning the tables on the old Professor Henry Davidson type and counter-snubbing an old lady with a dog, but even better is her teasing treatment of brooding British military doctor whom she loved long ago. When he tells her he tried to forget her she replies, eyes wide like a child's, "Did you try very hard?"  See: 1933, not 1939 was the greatest year for Hollywood Movies...

4. Trouble in Paradise

1932- dir. Ernst Lubitsch

****

It took awhile for this pre-code Paramount to resonate with me, but now I dig that it doesn't 'Americanize' the dialogue like so many lazier Hollywood films, instead playing up the linguistic difficulties where everyone in Europe is constantly searching for the one language each of them knows just a little bit of, as in the excited way the Italian hotelier translates EE Horton's story of how he got robbed in his room. Like BUDAPEST, a great fuss is made of getting the first class hotel experience exactly right, and there's the issue of an unscrupulous charmer butting heads with an evil conglomerate in order to fleece rich perfumer Kay Francis. While Herbert Marshall isn't Cary Grant, or even Ronald Coleman, but he's also not George Brent. He swoons well and convinces you through two layers of subterfuge that he's genuinely in love with the moon (he wants to see it reflected in champagne) and the women around him, each more beautiful than the last. (See: Pre-Code Capsules 9)

5. Grand Hotel

1932- dir. Edmund Goulding

***1/2

Greta Garbo is the melancholy ballerina who finds a reason to dance again after she falls for the down-and-out baron (John Barrymore). In another room a ravishing young secretary (Joan Crawford) succumbs joylessly to the advances of an arrogant industrialist (Wallace Beery, with a terrible buzz cut). In yet another thread, a fatally ill office clerk (Lionel Barrymore) drains his life savings in a desperate effort to derive some first class pleasure from this bleak and brief existence. Downstairs at the bar, a disfigured doctor (Lewis Stone) dispenses wry commentary as people come and go. (MUZE) 

6. The Saragossa Manuscript

1965- dir. Wojciech Has

***

Like the narrative framework of an Eastern European girl reading a novel at the graveside of  an author whom we meet in flashback who in turn hears the story from one of its participants, this film is told via an ever-more-innate story within a story within a story structure and set in a colorful past that may never have existed but at any rate is now certainly gone (and the film was made in Eastern Europe!)

7. Secret Agent

1936 - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

Set in the Alps (via Gaumont's finest painted backdrops), this tale of intrigue is a fine companion to Hitchcock's original version of The Man who Knew too Much. John Gielgud doesn't make much of an impression in the lead but he looks a bit like Ralph Fiennes and hey! Peter Lorre. The ever- saucy Madeleine Carroll makes a fine femme fatale and there's a memorable chase through a Swiss chocolate factory. One of my favorite $10 public domain titles I got as a kid, from Waldenbooks at the mall, in the early years of VHS.

8. On Her Majesty's Secret Service

1969 - dir. Peter R. Hunt

***1/2

Bond in the Alps, and a great skiing downhill chase, slalom, ski jumping, cable car rides, as well as the cool vibe of having to take long cable cars to visit the evil Telly Savalas' lair. He hypnotizes a bevy of socialite debs as they sleep using colored lights and his own grinning, cigarette-congested voice uttering instant mix CD-worthy lines like "You love chickens..." That part has no bearing on Budapest, but the Alpine adventures and clues and skulking is all on point.

9. Torn Curtain

(1966) - dir. Alfred Hitchcock

***

This later period Hitchcock film doesn't get the love it deserves, but Wes Anderson is beholden to it for the flavor of Eastern European intrigue and the near-silent museum chase scene (just the sound of footsteps for suspense, etc.), and the anxiety of being asked to present your papers and/or discovered on some communist bloc public conveyance. It's worth revisiting, and I wrote about it way back in '04 here

10. Million Dollar Legs

(1932) - dir. Edward F. Cline

***1/2

Co-written by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with uncredited touch-ups by the great Ben Hecht, Million Dollar Legs is the nationalism-satirizing predecessor of Marx Bros' Duck Soup, which makes sense since the heroine in Legs was married to Harpo Marx. Cockeyed Caravan's Matt Bird calls her "absurdly deadpan." Centering around the fictional nation of Klopstockia with its majordomo who can run faster than a speeding car, the president (W.C. Fields) stays on top of his plotting cabinet through games of toss wrestling, and there's a Mata Hari-style hottie spy (doing a great Garbo impression, "I'm wery fond of yumpers!"). Budapest fans will dig the colorful cast and pre-WWII fictionalized little mountain nation vibe.

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