Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And he's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed, two steps forward and in 1968 we were yet to start stumbling back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race to 1967:. LSD was still legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, changing an entire age demographic from self-absorbed mopes into free-spirited truth seekers (Twitter would be perhaps vice versa). And not only the young kids but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-minded spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; LSD was everywhere--in clinical psychiatrist offices, research, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' from which "Purple Haze" gets its name as free samples at Monterey Pop.

Radical new paradigms could be soaked up very easily on acid. Evolution sped up on psychedelics. It was pretty 'hip' to at least have tried LSD even if just so you might have some actual insight into the hippie movement before you condemned their lifestyle. Having tried it made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping in the 1980s, or ecstasy in he 90s.

The always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? Backed by music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. The crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade  of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. Pupils dilated in the mirror. 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who done stepped out her shell like... a girl named... Today.

No man, that's like her name. She changed her name to Today, because that's all we have, that's everything there is. Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: she begs for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho; she climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth; there's more squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's roseless, untinted glasses you can feel her whole body sigh with relief as socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and good set and setting.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued REVOLUTION was--at least on some level--pitched less at the kids themselves and more at adults curious about all the free love, as in the lengthy naked dance light show to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below), but prurience is addressed too: hippies interviewed include a girl from the Sexual Freedom League who explains how only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't capsize the boat). Ah the logistics of orgy-mongering!

As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a resolved hatred for male sexual aggression. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like over-eating - dude, once you have some sex, move on. But America's trained men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! But that doesn't make it any less of an issue.  No one wants to sleep with these ugly raincoat pervs, so the pervy aspect remains.

The peak moment in all this is the writhing naked theater group dancing in front of the wild psychedelic light show to Country Joe's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 42." With one eye to the bush shots, the long takes with the light show definitely have a certain magic Kenneth Anger-style power. You can feel the amount of LSD that surged through the audience, as if the black magick strength of their lysergic gaze is captured in the celluloid itself! Hey, acid is grooovy.

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. The counterculture failed, or maybe it didn't. I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, but now of course I'm in AA and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go.

REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping, interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the pre-trip adult opinion, cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can--power to the flower!--but damn get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so those bathrooms can stay clean --that's the adult's message. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine, it's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it can't happen.

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who many not have had such a 'trip,' - it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and now I white knuckle in an antisocial rapture like Max Von Sydow in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. The revolution never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took. "But we have the music," and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves even if the adults tell them its dangerous.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the scum out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a gate-keeper, what kind of utopia is that? It may look a lot like 2012.

There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see where those hippies are now, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



Not available on DVD but 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't been co-opted by the media to sell shows. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy, and strung out. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

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The Girl who Fingered the Frenchman

The 32-year-old maid told authorities that when she entered his spacious, $3,000-a-night suite early Saturday afternoon, she thought it was unoccupied. Instead, Strauss-Kahn emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway and pulled her into a bedroom, where he sexually assaulted her, New York Police Department spokesman Paul J. Browne said. (HP)

Ah  France, the big scandal erupting with Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a reminder that where there's liberty et fraternite' there are also sleazebag rapists in high places. The attack (ED NOTE: It's since been downgraded to prostitute-blackmail scam) happened in a New York hotel, and maybe its my city pride that makes this story resonate as a great David and Goliath style upset, something the Millennium Trilogy could be proud of, and might even be a little bit indirectly responsible for: the word of a rattled immigrant hotel maid was enough for our cops to pull this high roller Frenchman off a first class plane and throw him in the clink. Word is finally out: clergymen and politicians are the sex maniacs of our age - believing the word of the victim is the new black!

To see more? Cinema, naturalmente. The above attack sounds very plausible, in fact I've seen it in at least two films, and recently: Asia Argneto's SCARLET DIVA (with a crazy producer played by artist Joe Coleman chasing Asia down the hotel hallway in Paris, naked but for cowboy boots, ah, Cannes! - my in-depth discussion here) and Vince Gallo attacking a Paris hotel maid in TROUBLE EVERY DAY (above, here). The evil men of power in GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO and the Millennium Trilogy are apparently in France now that said girl made it too hot for them in Sweden (see my piece on Bright Lights, 'The New Lurid: Cinema's Rape Disavowal Fantasy').

But what of other locales in France, outside Paris, ala the French countryside? This seems to be a pretty terrible place, where vast stretches of emptiness allow slavering mutant sexuality to flourish. A group of normally upstanding males commit a horrific gang rape when they realize a woman is living alone in a stone house by a remote stretch of French country road in ONE DEADLY SUMMER (1983), with the victim's daughter (Isabelle Adjani) enacting an elaborate revenge. One of the most infamous onscreen rapes ever occurs in the French film IRREVERSIBLE, though that's in the city, and for the purposes here, let's focus on the countryside and its role as a space outside normal societal norms. Indeed, in this array of films, the French countryside is a place where no one can hear you scream, and no law can come to your rescue with any quickness. Men must stand on their own good conscience, and many do not. Remote areas are a creep's power source as much as above-the-law titles like politician and priest, but the ambiguity and self-reliance goes both ways. All is not always what it seems.

Take the 1970 British film about two birds cycling on holiday through rural France, AND SOON THE DARKNESS. Over at Britmovie, Drew Shimon cogently discusses the film's ability to create suspense without much overt violence or even actual dark:

Ironic, really, for a film bearing the title And Soon The Darkness, that practically no darkness is actually seen throughout, but such things are part of the strange fascination of British horror: in Die Screaming, Marianne for instance, Marianne neither dies nor screams, and in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo, the identity of the slayers is in no way a mystery to the audience. What it doesn’t deliver in honour of its title, though, it makes up for by exceeding every other possible expectation.

I was led to expect this film would be really disturbing, ala THE VANISHING, which is why I steered clear for so long, but it's actually just suspenseful, sexy and awesome. Also, if you know any French at all, you get an inkling of the identity of the rapist-killer early on, and the savagery of rape as depicted in GIRL or something like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (see my 'Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings') is absent, replaced by the gross caricatures of lust you get in Japanese pinku films: the eyes of the rapist bugging, lips snarling in deformed adolescent exaggeration, tongue wagging obscenely... what's to get traumatized by? Especially as these are more symbolic renderings, you never get the sense these guys getting very far, mostly humping air like a dog-- but it leaves one confused. If it's not meant to be harsh and repulsive ala SPIT or GIRL than what? A chance for a woodsman to ride to the rescue? A moment of kinky objectification? Or a moment to have the ugliness of base id-lust rubbed in our face as a cautionary tale? I muse on this at length in my cogent 2010 celebration of FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41, Stung by the Belle. 

DARKNESS gets a lot of mileage out of short skirts and dried patches of grass, a spooky bunch of woods (hedgerows?) in the middle of vast empty fields, the gradual setting of the sun (it all occurs over the matter of a few hours), the onset of clouds and rain, and the vast language barrier between a holidaying Brit girl and old French gas station workers. In such a tranquil setting, the sexual violence seems almost quaint, a mere flaring up of an old forgotten splotch of vile repressed desires left too long untended in the fields. Because the film works, as Shimon says, without the darkness promised (and soon, like CCR's someday, never comes), it escapes our condemnation, but there's an aftertaste of sleaze that lingers on. But hey, it's on Netflix streaming! So is the remake! Avoid the latter!

Also on Netflix streaming, all of a sudden!-- is a bunch of Jean Rollin films, including REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1973) Read Ethan Spigland's essay on the film in Acidemic #6, here to get the lowdown on the film's use of the uncanny and Georges Bataille. Using what looks a lot like the same road from DARKNESS, this film follows to young naifs in clown costumes who wind up lost in the wilderness, eventually abducted by a castle full of old debauched vampires and their slavering rapist underlings. The girls are sexually attacked, briefly, and then forced to watch, hypnotized, as various girls chained in the dungeon are raped in the usual slavering, grotesque but bloodless, bruiseless, Sadean, in a very abstract and philosophically relevant... way.

Intellectual S/M still boils down to the most sleazy of crimes against empathy, and if anti-pornography advocates are right, there's nowhere else left to go but to that wretched basement. Once the consumer of the image has let himself become dehumanized via the suffocating access to so many images, the image suffocates as much as the proximity of the other. Rape fantasies are actually common in both sexes, but as I noted in my BL piece defending the Twilight films from anti-feminism charges, "Someone to Fight Over Me,"

Rape is not called rape when it's in romantic fiction; it's "ravishment" and shouldn't be compared with actual physical rape, which is by definition not "desired" by the victim. The erotic charge of setting a romance in a past era lies with the straitjacket moral code: the only way a woman can keep her honor is by resisting both the man and her own desire. She indirectly invites the overpowering on herself as a means of sidestepping issues of her feminine integrity and honor, and the uncertainty of responsibility over one's actions. This is not weakness on her part, but an intrinsic understanding of what's truly erotic about societal loopholes. She has the strength it takes to surrender and go limp in a man's overpowering arms, and she gets exactly what she wants out of it and nothing more.(more)

Another interesting French film dealing with slavering maniac males in the countryside is DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL (1971), loosely based around the same real life case as HEAVENLY CREATURES, but with a lot more teasing of leering male strangers. where the two lead girls are having a holiday. The pair delight in flirting with and teasing passing travelers, but every man they lure into the brush has only two speeds: sexual assault and lusty looking. The men never try to tease back or engage in the girls' weird head games. Instead they remain still, let themselves be teased to a certain point and then snap, becoming insane slavering rapists in a flash. As Kim Morgan notes on her Sunset Gun:

 On Summer break, the girls stick together, staying at Anne's parents home while her family is conveniently away. They ride bikes and flit around in those short cotton summer dresses every guy wishes for when the sun comes out and they laugh -- they laugh a lot. Considering that they're Satanists, the girls are a lovely pair of Beelzebub buddies. Thank goodness they lived in the early 1970s. No manic panic hair, no PVC mini-skirts, no cheap fetish boots and tired, sullen expressions for these best friends. These girls are enjoying their evil. So much that they put together a crafty, dainty black mass in an abandoned chapel (you can feel fellow bad girl Martha Stewart heartily nodding her head in approval). With the dim groundskeeper serving as "Priest," they seal their Satanic deal and drive the man nuts while sitting in the rowboat in the thick of night -- he can see through their cotton Communion gear. (more) 

The key thread I'm fumbling for through all this is the ultimate emptiness of sexual gratification as the be all and end all of power. All that smoke and perfume and grinding strip show razzle dazzle leads to nothing more than an expensive feeling of emptiness behind the wizard's peepshow curtain. It's culture's job to make you forget that post-orgasmic depression, but just as rich women like Winona Ryder may shoplift for a weird thrill, trying to recapture a time when acquiring possessions brought them joy, so the oversexed rich French politician may accost a hotel maid because all else has failed him, and he figures himself above the law, and maybe still thinks he's in some role-play brothel from the night before. Who knows? His world is akin to the one Kim Morgan describes, of "tired, sullen expressions, cheap fetish boots and PVC mini-skirts." But rather than be hypnotized into the world of surfaces and possessions like the men who want to consume them, the girls in the equation are coming from a different place, trying to harness real power--to master their own chthonic sexuality-- to surf rather than dutifully drown, to dare live beyond social roles, mores and the tedious fumblings that pass for modern rebellion. Rather than settle for the $500 they want to try for curtain number trois.

For these sleazy rural Frenchmen, however, all the curtains have long since been open, and they have no more control over their desires than a diabetic smashing his fist through a candy shop window.  It's fascinating to contemplate how a man with so much to lose as Strauss-Kahn would be so careless and crazed. Of course it could be a set-up, created to depose him by his enemies. On the other hand, even if it's true, isn't it still a set up, a trick of desire, of the devil, who rewards the debauched with all the riches of the world at the cost of their ability to enjoy them? Aren't those creepy noblemen in Sade, Huysmans, and Bataille really just depressed from having to constantly up the ante of sadomasochistic sensation, just to feel any thrill at all? Pity them...  jail them and denounce them and even castrate them but pity them, for they are dumb enough to believe the lies of their own dictator hard-ons. They have become dupes of the genetic con and are destined for incarcération... ou paternité. And for what? The sociopath, the narcissist, the sexaholic... who made them what they are? The answer is just the soft sound of French countryside crickets... and the flutter of pages from an old, discarded Maxim. 

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Acid's Greatest #19: Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972)

In 1968 one of the key films of the budding counterculture was Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. Featuring genuinely hot young actors--as opposed to established stars like the 1936 Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer version. In Zeffirelli's '68 edition, the tale of love destroyed by violent family feuding proved a zeitgeist-snatching analogy for our Vietnam state of mind, one filled with beautiful photography and beautiful people. The film was a huge hit and Zeffirelli decided to follow it up with a similar period hippie piece, BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON in 1972. Based on the early life of Saint Francis it was a film specifically designed to click with the counterculture youth market.  But the hippie wave had crested by 1972 and kids had become suspicious of anyone intentionally trying to click with their demographic, especially if they were old and Italian and thought we'd dig hearing a whole soundtrack full of Donovan singing medieval folk tunes with nary a trace of insincerity or heaviness.

Vibrant and full of amore' as Zeffirelli's style naturally was, SISTER MOON made committed the sin of trying too hard, becoming so flower-power guileless that the counterculture could only laugh from their aloof new vantage points. Peace and love? no thanks man! Jimi dead, Janis dead, Altamont, Kent State, the Democratic National Convention, Vietnam, our hippie powers of flowers are like totally useless against their lock step minds. Better just climb up the mountain and watch it burn. Watch anything, in fact, except another goddamned scene of smiling youths running towards each other in slow mo dissolves through fields of flowers. By then slow mo flower fields running was cliched beyond all reason, having been run aground by endless repetitions of antiperspirant commercials. The danger of trying to compete for a different country's youth market is thus illuminated: you have a different swath of TV commercials so you don't always know what images and plots have become cliche).

So the Free Love garden's once-open flowers were now curled back tight for the long night of unrest. No one even wanted to be seen in the theater where BROTHER SUN was showing, lest they be spotted, mocked, and crucified by their conformistly unconformist hipster friends.


I had to cover all Zeffirelli's films for Muze back in 1999, so I saw BROTHER SUN and the nine hour-cut of JESUS OF NAZARETH over a long weekend. I was newly sober and on a "pink cloud" so the spiritual stuff was coming through loud and clear; moved me to tears even. I was a Christian for a good five days, like a serious one, like almost went to church even. Then I wrote about it again for popmatters a few years later, and re-screened it and the giddy pink cloud had rained down into a gray socialist subtext sea:

The analogies to the Vietnam era and the anti-war movement are all too apparent . Zeffirelli's previous film, Romeo and Juliet (1968) was canonized as a counter-cultural touchstone three years previously: the tale of two attractive young hedonists being driven to suicide by their war-crazed elders was a perfect metaphor for the times. The story of Saint Francis -- paralleling those of Vietnam vets turned war protesters (à la Ron Kovic, whose autobiography was the basis for Oliver Stone's 1989 film, Born on the Fourth of July) -- must have seemed a perfect follow-up. Francis' bedridden hallucinations resemble a heavy acid trip, and his rejection of his father's plastic fantastic Madison Avenue gig for a communal church evokes images of so many young panhandlers in the Haight.

In other words, get a haircut, hippie! Oh wait he did, and a rather terrible one. Recently I saw it a third time and thought that the imagery was beautiful and full of typically dusky Zeffirelli touches, but all the "Throw away your money! All you need is love" pleading didn't even penetrate my outer layers (as effectively as, say, Heath Ledger's maniac bizarro world Saint Francis Joker in BATMAN RETURNS).

Graham Faulkner is fine and gorgeous as the solar brother, Saint Francis. His bright-eyed face contorts with spiritual ecstasy like Harpo Marx crossed with Sam Rockwell. As the lunar sister, Judi Bowker is a wispy knockout. She's so frail and beautiful with such long gorgeous blond hair that for me the biggest tragedy of Christendom is when they decide to cut it all off so she can join their muddy little holy order without having to do all that washing and combing. That's where my Christianity draws the line. Would you pick the lilies of the field right in fullest flower just to cut the heads off?  Still, if I came across this nut Francis in the fields outside Assisi, what would I do? Probably join him; lord knows I've joined up with magnetic hippies far dirtier, and for far less noble reasons. Going after God is never a mistake, people! Following your heart takes guts, and the best Christians are the ones who bow their heads to lions daily. The rest of us forget and run, and are ripped to shreds, lifetime after lifetime.

I'm sorry I badmouthed Donovan before. He's very good, in his way. But the Age of Irony bideth not his naive frailty. He's like the guy who always gets shot first because he can't keep his head down below the sunflower line (like Lee Marvin's less stoic cronies in PRIME CUT). The question is, are you ever going to get tired and stand back up and dare to look across the field, snipers and shrapnel be damned? Am I? Not me, man, but I looked once, in '87, man. Far-out!

I never really lost my love of this movie, just pretended otherwise to look cool.

And I'm ashamed.

Hallowed be thy name Frankie, but you ain't cuttin' off no more cute girls' long straight blond hair, not on my beat. And I do mean that metaphorically as well as literally. It's time to let compassion fuel our opiated veins and to open them up to our scuzzy neighbor! We are the church and the church is under a rock. Somewhere. Jesus said the church can be found under any rock. But which rock? Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we will seek that rock. Who among you would take off their clothes and follow me into the sun like Frankie did?  The church, like the song, is you so take a chance. Love thy neighbor as thyself, just don't let her corner you in the vestibule.

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