Rise, SORCERER! The lost masterpiece of 1977 comes to blu-ray.

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed in staggeringly beautiful shots: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like Travis Bickels through a Kubrick rainstorm; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; an assortment of hard-looking Catholic priests counting money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife as a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Egyptology opener in EXORCIST); when they wind up in the surreal and savage beauty of some unnamed Central American jungle one horse town depending on nearby oil pipe for survival, the jungle adventure comprising the bulk of the film, and being the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency; he perhaps lqacks the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. We all know the horror anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew in the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s, but my friend. It was worth it.

What's most interesting is the contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality - human as in 'true' human, bestial, full of long-standing grudges, fears, greed and guts - and sometimes fear, greed and guts is enough). Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only characters tough enough to handle an almost suicidal task - hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles in the middle of Bolivia, Ecuador or some such remote rain forest outpost.

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As an ironic commentary to Clouzot's original, an elderly barkeep who never speaks but who earns a soft spot in the mens' hearts, like an unofficial den mother (contrasted by Clouzot's firey temptress played by Clouszot's then-wife Véra). It works because this is a movie that is not about desire, but survival. No time for soft stuff.  It's like THE THING or THE GREY. This is not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original because the jungle is realer. Clouzot has no interest in capturing the vivid textures of nature, of wheels and dashboards and the rumbling of trucks full of soldiers sent in to quell a riot.

The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been some of my favorite soundtrack for awhile and in the blu-ray mix it pulses and throbs like if John Carpenter and Klaus Schulze got together for the score of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, like the best synth scores of the era it never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, rather the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood. Don't forget Carpenter's groundbreaking HALLOWEEN score was a year or so away. As far as great scores in America we only knew Ennio Morricone through the handful of films that wound up on TV or the drive-in. The movie scores we kids talked about on the playground (excluding those of GREASE and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were strictly micro-managerial and orchestral - Nino Rota's melancholic GODFATHER, and above all the pompous thunder majesty of John Williams' scores for JAWS (sure he has the famous shark approach music but he also sticks in pirate jauntiness that deflates all the suspense when the Orca sets out to sea) and STAR WARS (much of it ripped from Holst the way JAWS was ripped from Stravinsky). Tangerine Dream's SORCERER score by contrast never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to feel it, a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into an atmospheric alien buzz.

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, being intrigued by the title of this film when it came out around the same time as STAR WARS, thinking it might involve wizards and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. Victory is thine, you crazy coked-up sonofabitch! So drive!

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Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 

 BAD DREAMS

1988 - directed by Andrew Fleming - ***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office receipts and said me too, even going so far as to cast the same final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of a Freddie there's Harris, a scarred cult leader played by real life burn victim Richard Lynch. In the 70s prologue he coaxes his hippie flock, "Unity Field" to burn themselves alive in order to unify their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens its 13 years later and she's stuck in a mental ward and, in the 80s. Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce us to a rapidly bumped-off set of characters. A stressed Rubin sees Harris before each murder. The unified soul thing apparently worked, and he's recruiting new acolytes from the therapy group, but try explaining that to hospital staff, and cops who just think they all committed suicide 'cuz they're crazy.

The creepiest aspect here is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to (and his real life burns). This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a greet creepy villain, but he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture above, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic figure of menace like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on the Shout blu-ray companion film Visiting Hours) in the role. No offense to Lynch meant. Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field!

The rest of the cast is also very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will feel strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Repo Man) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his amok basement leaping high in the air and punching out light bulbs. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes his way through a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout blu-ray reveals how good the DP is at capturing the glisten in her eyes So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed.

THE ROOST

2005 - directed by Ti West - ***

Ti West's first film, hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness, The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable, thanks to their low-key dialogue delivery, their voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking mid shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget. Which means of course that I loved it.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) It's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work, doing as little as possible: his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away and rewrite some of what does. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) and for some reason is scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's not answering it. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, droning ambient score, remote location (the same barn used in Marnie!), diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light that makes the swallowing all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable, and when the score's not overburdened with overdone cello music there's great, Avant Carpenter atonal drones. That doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so 'found art.' Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with Tom Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

1990 - Directed by John Harrison - **1/2

Michael "Ajax" Remar is a struggling artist whose life is spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964), so never puts two and two together; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); Deborah Harryis a Hansel-baking Martha Stewart in the framing device; David Johansen is a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero. It all comes together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except Kwaidan), too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! The script's loaded with that kind of thing, but there's so many essential cult actor favorites (I always imagine how great James Remar would have been in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, even if only while drunk, half-asleep, stoned out of your gourd, and/or in a half-distracted haze.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

1995 - dir. the Wheat Brothers - ***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally) and later breaks in to the teacher's house to kill him. But Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest student because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement...

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack a riveting centerpiece. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a stalker goes after a celebrity's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre conclusion of Ramy Zada's framing device round robin, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator.  It's all just more proof that less is more when it comes to horror: Darkside (above)has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ****)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, but the film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your parents in that cool armored cruiser (above) and set out across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except giant scorpions, massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, psychotic rednecks, and cool shit to jump over on the attached motor bike. After the bombs fall there shall be no driving or drinking ages, no need for money, no homework, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an easygoing French Hawksian rather than a bossy, overprotective Fordian). It's a boy's life fantasy of being taught to fire rooftop rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column.

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting before going out back to light fireworks and shoot bb guns. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, eaten early as was, and sadly still is, the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a handful, who take to the road in two big armored party vans (the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror).

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - mostly driving through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and across endless deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.

I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon streaming instant video version, wherein the sky is a sark almost psychedelic green-blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

Otherwise I can't complain; and having it on blu-ray is a 70s boyhood dream come true for a once-lost generation.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray

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Leslie of the Heretics: DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1977)

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. " - Ahab

But to paraphrase Slim in To Have and Have Not, "what happens if it slaps you back?" The answer is that the undying savage beneath the hotty toddy veneer of Leslie Nielsen emerges, an Ahab born anew for a Moby Dick spread across ozone-depleted sunshine into the minds of the beasts of the American mountains. The entirety, the Beast with a Million Eyes, slaps him back. But first, a little background:

There was another leviathan that splashed the nation in the mid-70s: Jaws, which itself came initially as part of a seventies eco-awareness trend, i.e. whaling was out, and even sharks could only be killed in self-defense. The ozone layer hole had been discovered, aerosol cans were banned; a Native American was crying by the side of the highway; the tab on soda and beer cans was changed to stay attached rather than be tossed into the bay to cut up the feet of pelicans. We kids were keen on Cub Scouts and 'Indian Guides;' TV had Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Grizzly Adams and The Waltons, Apple's Way, and Little House on the Prarie; in school we read My Side of the Mountain; at home a magazine called Ranger Rick. Mom took us to see matinees like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family. We were in the wilderness. All we needed was a beast to fear, a bad grizzly, to make the good grizzly seem even nicer.

This was still before VHS or cable, so if an exploitation pioneer wanted to get funding from the major networks in advance of production, he had to entertain the entire family, all at once, in the same room, looking at the same screen. PG didn't just mean kids can come with the adults, it meant grandparents too. And Hollywood was dealing with a surplus of stars who had drawn huge salaries 30-50 years earlier and would now work for scale in just about anything ---so ensemble cast disaster films sprang up, with casts of older stars, younger newcomers, and Charlton Heston or some other granite jaw bringing up the rear. Meanwhile, the American western outdoors beckoned as a cheap, union-free locale for monster movies. The great west spoke: "Hell, we got dozens of unemployed western stuntmen and character actors out here all ready, and hell you don't even need a fake monster on account of we got trainers with grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions." And if you want vermin (Kingdom of the Spiders, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Damnation Alley, Night of the Lepus) which could be rear projected to look freakishly large, that was easy too. We kids never ratted out the fakeness of the effects and there was no way to rewind or repeat play since DVRs and VHS were still a ways off. As long as it was attacking folks of all ages, and it was big, nothing else really mattered. It was the seventies, man, even the monsters were au naturale. 

There was nothing else to worry about --no blue state / red state divide, we were all purple, like the mountain majesties. And into these mountains strode an eagle-eyed copycat director named William Girdler, a mountain man whose monster films were mountain man-made. He saw there was a way to make a PG monster movie that could combine the children's nature film craze's fondness for grizzly attacks and the monster craze's fondness for shark attacks, and he made that movie. And it was Grizzly (1976), a huge hit. He could now afford an ensemble cast and to empty the cages at the Hollywood animal trainer park, for 1977's Day of the Animals.

Up until the blu-ray that just came out I thought Day of the Animals was a TV movie. Thanks to Scorpion Releasing though, a gorgeous 'Walden Filter' widescreen vista of an anamorphic aspect ratio has appeared, majestically dwarfing the relatively incompetent action we're used to on the small square screen of the earlier DVD. Did I mention I love this dumb movie? You want to know the plot? There's humans on a hike high in the mountains, and then there's animals and they fight each other. The end. There's one hawk, three vultures, a carload o' rattlesnakes, a tarantula, wuxia mice, a wolf, three panthers, a gang of German shepherds presumably fresh out of a hole in the K9 Academy fence, and Leslie Nielsen, shirtless, as nature intended. It's all because of the ozone hole. Can you prove it didn't happen?

Like all its devotees, I remember the night Day premiered on CBS' Friday Night Movie, but I missed their whole dog attack climax because it came after my bedtime. Sometimes I wonder if this blog's real origin story lies in my dad's declaration of kids' bedtimes, a strict law which he enforced regardless of how riveting the movie we were watching was. I missed the end of a horde of great films that way: The Poseidon Adventure, Telefon, Day of the Dolphin, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing --I still don't know how some of them end. I would be in bed furious and crushed, but I dreamt my own wilder crazier endings. For Day of the Animals when I heard at next Monday's recess that the humans had survived by riding a raft down the rapids with rabid dogs snapping at their hands every yard of the way I envisioned a pretty wild ride.

Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors, one foot in front of the other, and the key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals for his movie in which case fuck you, Ruggero! Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the juice is. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of  baring teeth, pink foamy blood, actors and stunt men yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his hawk cry like a gym coach's whistle. Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.

Girdler was the Seventies.

With smaller animals this mellow mood can be undercut, as when mice on fishing wires come flying across the rooms backwards onto the head of the fat old sheriff, or hordes of snakes sun themselves inside of cars. Dogs try to mute an instinctive wag of their tales as they snarl, as if afraid of breaking character and losing a biscuit. I don't consider these negatives. In fact if this were an Italian or Japanese film every animal in the film would probably be dead by the end of each scene. Why waste money on a trained cinnamon bear for a wrestling match when you can just stab and drug a real, and let him bleed out like Joaquin did to poor Comodius in Gladiator? Sic transit gloria mundi! But film is forever... and no animal murder will ever be forgotten, Ruggero! And if William Girldler hurt any of these critters, he paid the ultimate price, dying in a helicopter accident scouting locations in Indonesia after making The Manitou.

If you're too young enough to remember Airport you may not have the same giddy rapture for the Poesidon Adventure-Grand Hotel-Stagecoach type ensemble cast trapped in a bad situation films that were all the rage in the seventies, as parodied in Airplane! (1980). But either way let me give you some background on this too:

Once upon a primetime,  The Love Boat and Fantasy Island ruled the weekends. They had a steady cast of hosts and a sea of b-list celebrities of all ages wandering aboard the boat or onto the island for their mundane adventures. Some people managed to become celebs by doing nothing but showing up on these shows, like Charo! Girdler rides this zeitgeist too, so on this hike in Day of the Animals we have the disaster movie cross section:

CHECKLIST OF 70s ENSEMBLE DISASTER CASTING

1. The Shelly Winters
Check ("She KNOWS what she's doing!"- only this one doesn't - to the point of dressing for an overnight hike in her Sunday best).
2. A tiny 25 year-old stunt man posing as her 12 year-old son (BONUS!)
3. 70s bombshell career woman contemplating her lack of a love life and children while eyeing the hero's ring finger - check -70s mainstay Linda Day George
4. Christopher George or David Jansen? Former
5. A Richard Dreyfus in Jaws-style dweeb? check
6. Famous athlete considering retirement / disillusioned preacher? - Former
7. Native American or black sidekick - Check
8. The insane challenger of the rugged hero's leadership? Check Mate!
 9. The Newt or little girl alone and wandering the wasteland ala Sandy Desche in Them. - check
10. Attractive young couple dealing with recently learning about her unplanned pregnancy - Check
11. Fat sheriff roused out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate? 
Yes (Bleeding Skull, I defer to you)

It's a glorious "Girdler Dozen" i.e. one donut short.

A midnight evacuations of the towns above 5,000 feet is given a few shots, hazmat suits, you know, it's The Crazies but for animals... humans slow on the uptake that they are in danger; you'll have deeper resonance to the phrase "Watch you like a hawk" cuz there are some shots of hawks watching stuff on here and honey you are glad what they watchin' ain't you. Hawks' cries signal the start and stop of attacks and Nielsen going shirtless signals his de-evolution into a Putin-like celebrant of masculine power. He pokes a big stick into the belly of a young man so he can make caveman gruntings at the cowering girlfriend: "I killed for you! You're mine now!" and to the 25 year-old widdle boy, "Shaddup you little cockroach or I'll shove you off the cliff!"

But that's not even his most memorable line, it's this:

"If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jack ass out of me for years. Melville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!"

And by it, you know he means that girlie...

It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. But take a knee and let me tell you one last story:

There was this townie up in Syracuse in the 80s who stole all my Tom Waits albums but he had the best dog in the world. This dog, a mutt of yay height, was super smart and sweet, a brilliant actor. When I was filthy drunk in the Syracuse snow, this dog and I would roll around and I'd scream like he was tearing me apart while he jumped all over me making these terrifying growls. We'd go on and on, rolling around growling and screaming, the dog managing to seem like he was tearing my arm off while barely even getting fang marks on my coat. We sounded, I thought, like someone was being mauled to death. One night, someone finally yelled out a window "hey, you and the dog - please keep it down!" and I was like how the hell can that guy tell I'm not really being hurt? Why isn't he calling an ambulance? How can we as humans just instinctively tell when someone is really being hurt vs. just pretending? I remember we stopped in mid-attack, both looked up at the window, looked at each other, and resumed the attack quieter. How that damn dog knew to go quiet, that really floored me. Some great dog. I miss him the way I love Day of the Animals because even kids can tell the animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, and it's comforting to pretend, its like an exorcism of interspecies animosity. To paraphrase John Lennon in Yellow Submarine, "if you must roar, roar quietly!" Girdler, the mountain man monster maker in the era of Carter and Grizzly Adams, roars quietly. Melville's behemoth bedtime god demands no less. 

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A Girl must have her Ghost: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: "Smoldering Children" & Lana Del Rey: "Video Games"

 "Me...love 'dead'." -- Monster (Bride of Frankenstein, 1933)

If the rest of the media universe is playing it safe and cuddly there's at least two chunks of media that strike a deep unnerving chord of the 'real' in the last few weeks of 2011: Fx's American Horor Story and that found-Americana video for Lana Del Rey's one song, "Video Games."



Passing the 10 million hit mark, inspiring the usual countless remixes, the song+video+singer taps into a nerve of sadness and loss that has the authentic feel of a drunk night IM-ing friends you never hooked up with while you thumb through stashed photos of exes. Watch the video ten times in a row and you can get that feel even at work, sober, IM-ing no one. A lot of people seem to think she has no right to be sad, though, and there's a huge internet bloglash (read Awl's "Who's Afraid of Lana Del Rey"). Lana Del Rey's hot lost little girl from 1965 look -- the thick hair, Julia Roberts lips, black eyeshadow, vintage dresses and paisley headbands-- make her come off like Evan Rachel Wood in THIRTEEN now grown backwards into her own grandmother, dating a hot young rocker incubus who's always on tour, leaving her alone but 'safe' in our care, we being the ghost of a lover long dead (so she'll only see us smoldering, never old or charred). We don't have to worry about Lana's deep sadness overwhelming us via a real relationship because we're just ears. She's just a hot mess friend, and she doesn't even exist... she's a ghost in the machine, like Samara in THE RING. She even looks like Hayden, Ben's 19 year-old ghost ex-mistress in American Horror Story!

So what does this broad have to do with American Horror Story, specifically this week's episode, "Smoldering Children," where (Spoiler Alert!) we find out Violet, the lost little daughter has been dead since a few episodes ago when she overdosed on pills?

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

Look at Lana's photo above, with the cigarette and white dress. She could step right into any David Lynch film and be either in the flashback to the early 60s or a current retro hipster with ironic collagen, either way she's an American ghost story ready to haunt your iPod. The photo above is the kind of thing you find when cleaning out your deceased grandparent's room. Who is that beauty? And suddenly you realized you swooned, just a little bit, for your own mother. Lana Del Rey may just be playing dress-up but she nonetheless radiates a sadness that's not fixed in any one generation. It's not even sexual. The sexier she tries to be the older she becomes, creeping through decades like vintage clothing and DNA, and the flag outside a semi-abandoned post office. America strong!

For comparison, let's look at another pretty, lost, augmented little girl who is talented, driven, and also trying to be re-born, in this case as a sitcom star, Whitney Cummings. Her self-titled show comes on after The Office (read Meghan Wright's solid recap here), the key time slot for any current sitcom, which is how it's drawn my indignant attention. Am I the only one who is suspicious? No. In "Understanding Screenwriting," Tom Stempel writes:

In Whitney, Cummings plays the title character. She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex. They make jokes. They are afraid of marriage. They go to a wedding and make jokes with their friends. Whitney dresses up as a nurse to seduce Alex and he ends up in the hospital. They make jokes. Most of the jokes are variations on material from Cummings' stand-up act, and so the show falls into the trap of a lot of sitcoms based on a comedian's act: all jokes, no story, no characters. Half an hour of this just gets tiresome. 

Part of why this show is doomed can be summed up right in the above paragraph, particularly one sentence "She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex." - what kind of dumb idea is that? Has anyone ever done such a thing? Be wary of Whitney and her conspicuous displays of enjoyment. She misunderstands the fundamental basics of romantic comedy. "Tiresome," indeed!

The most fundamental comedy truth is that a couple is only cute when they are not quite together - either always about to hook up--the will they or won't they of Sam and Diane (Cheers) or Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd (Moonlighting) or Fox and Scully (X-Files), or Ross and Rachel (Friends)-- or already hooked up before the show began and are now just friends (Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld).  All but Seinfeld gave in to audience's demands of seeing the leads hook up and get married or live happily in congress, and viewers dropped off like flies once they got their wish and the wish didn't make them feel how they thought it would. Smart shows know in advance this is doomed to happen.

As I've written before, the original 1970s Charlie's Angels was ingenious in this regard. Aaron Spelling wrote the book, which we now open to examine the reverse case of guys like Ashton Kucher and Howard Stern. As long as he was married to older Demi, Ashton had some gravitas --his flirty douche bag qualities were tolerable, even amusing. He's in the process of now of realizing the extent Demi's presence kept him from getting Sheen-level skeevy. And as long as Howard Stern was married and unable to 'do anything' with his strippers he was funny and edgy. Once the chains were off, that edge was lost, he was just another skeevy guy trying to drag all his smelly buddies into the bedroom with him. As long as Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned he was terrifying; escaped and free and he's suddenly just another dude trying to get a piece of the action. The tortured misery of Ben and his crazy wife in AHS made all his yields to temptation exciting. Once the wife is gone, however, giving into those temptations would become mere softcore boredom, Hannibal instead of Silence of the Lambs --hence his heroic resistance, as I wrote about last week. This week he got his reward: he even got to vent his rage on the tormentor of his wife, the evil Tate!

Tate is an ideal representation of the 'absent lover'--the animus, the incubus -- in that he is actually dead - and his grisly past makes him a 'bad boy' in ways we never want to compete with - he's like Lana Del Rey's lost rockabilly guitarist come back from the dead to demand beer and fidelity. If you listen to the lyrics of Rey's songs they're like the dream girl words bound to have any video game playing bad-girl loving boy blushing at the thought he just might be able to hook up with this doomed, sweetly tragic, DSM-IV type of lost little girl: 

"Open up a beer / 
and say get over here / 
and play a video game."

Dude, she likes beer and video games and guys in fast cars! She's not singing "Come meet my family  / earn a six figure salary / your stupid game can wait." In short --Lana del Rey is the type of girl Whitney is trying to be, but as Yoda says, there is no try, especially when you bring your boyfriend with you to Dagoba so he can shout encouragement like a fan in the bleachers and spy on you with your handsome ski instructor and not do anything about it except feel he didn't cheer loud enough.

And as for' bad' boys who encourage you to skip school, drink beer and play video games, they don't come any badder than Tate, and so in a way we can respect him because he is evil and yet he still loves Violet and protects her and that's what makes his loving relationship work on TV, a loving relationship that would creep us out otherwise. It's only because he is truly evil that he can be sympathetic. We identify with Tate as viewers because like us, he is dead - like Edward in Twilight is dead, or Spike on Buffy. Our perspective as viewers (we can move through walls and time and infiltrate up close even the most intimate moments of characters without them ever seeing us) mirrors that of the watching dead, for who else but the dead and the viewer have such omniscience?

Lance Kerwin, 1977

And so are we not all in love with ghosts one way or the other, just as we are in love with the movies or music, which are all just ghostly traces of sound and image? I remember being ten years-old and dreaming of holding hands and walking around my old Lansdale PA neighborhood with Kate Jackson, and all my friends seeing us and being super jealous. Jackson appeared on this show James at 15 as a woman who befriends runaway James (The Tate-ish Lance Kerwin, left) thus enabling huge fantasies for boys my age of running away to live on the street with this cool older woman... to escape, as it were, from the terrible onslaught of adult responsibility and social castration that only the city, or death, can bring. I still grieve over Kate. That shit never goes away. Fuck Lance Kerwin.

In AMH, Violet will never have to go back to school now that she's dead, but at the same time she's not entirely sure a life playing cards with Tate is the answer to all death's prayers, or so it seems by her coldly bemused response towards his devotion. In a way she's already 'cooler' than Tate just from knowing him. Perhaps what is happening to Violet now that she's just as dead as Tate is the same thing that happens to us watching Whitney: without obstacles and uncertainty the ultimate emptiness of our coveted prize comes into focus. The only reward for our struggles was temporarily forgetting what a disappointment the prize is. Violet's love was wild and Brontë-esque when it was forbidden by her father but now that she literally can't escape Tate's devotion, her love is like a fenced-in cowboy. Jessica Lang's character understands this and her final bit of cruel torment to the disfigured burning man shows her Dietrich-like insight into his masochistic condition. She's giving him what he needs, knowing anything less than torment and heartbreak would be destroy him.  It doesn't matter if she really loves him or not, as long as she denies it he'll keep going...

Frances Farmer, 1891

What does matter is that, like Lana Del Rey and very few others, Violet has chosen darkness. Now she dwells within it, nevermore to return to school or write a resume or sit, bored, on the bus.  We can hope the same thing won't happen to Del Rey in 'real life' but the other options are grim as well. Based on the hot young musical prodigies that have come before her--Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Bjork, and Alanis M.- there's a very real danger she will get 'quirky' or slick or try too hard to cram in as many jarring chord and tempo changes as possible to every song in her next album, and eventually even become a surgery addicted gargoyle or a seducer of hot young boys half her age, like Jessica Lange's eternally sexy Constance.

At least we'll always have that first album, song, or movie. We'll always be able to marvel at JL's youthful sexy sizzle in 1981's POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. We don't want to lose our Violets or Lanas, or let them grow up or let them die or even keep them just how they are for that matter, but we have no choice. We can only watch and listen to them from our Lazyboy graves, aging and decaying while they stay eternally young, even if it's just for that one damned haunted song.

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