Caretaker Sparkle and the Selfie Side: ROOM 237

from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head; all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious; two because the film is terrifying in and of itself; three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective.

In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of ci madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with too much time on their hands and a good education who've read too much of the world. Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time with their paranoiac collage that Kubrick did with the source material, and so the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, especially when far too crazy to take seriously (and the editing makes even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, his getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.

Hey, if Kubrick did put that little touch in there intentionally, how nice that it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe silver fox shawl)-- will also be recognized. Artists do these odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal touches we leave in our art or writing will be recognized by someone, or something, and that they will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see.

But the really trippy moments come when one fan plays the film backwards over the film moving forward simultaneously, so they overlap over one another (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows, it might be, as we learn here Kubrick had a 200 IQ and was very well read on all sorts of horrors and sought to encode a lot of subliminal information. At any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, so I did too, as in the many collages on here (only the below is from the film).

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

Even if it's not intentional, does it really matter? In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots for Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

"Pull it Togetherless"  (note phallus fingers)

The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite."  I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer on some level to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconsious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use tools, not to build bridges but to crush their enemies skulls.  so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. We as humans are evil murderers, it is who we are, our genes, the mighty procreate and endure, the weak die on the roadside. We can discuss the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' is that we did what they did and got away with it.  We were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN.

"We're going to make a new rule" 

That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us those trees and mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar.

In Kubrick this 'help' is revealed in all its terrifying ambivalence, the behavioral modification techniques as in CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are about a dehumanizing conditioning process that has backfired; and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. But better blind than to be able to 'see' and not be afraid (the last words of JACKET's narration) at the cost of... what? Of blood-free hands? Through evil parents a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward into the unknown (such as going to space, or writing a novel). Where would our moon landing be without the Russians for example (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russian science writers in 2001) or war without a divided self? Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (while Jack has made contact with the 'inside party'), in other words, the boy has 'talked' to those socialist science writers; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  

"Maisie Squared" 

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

Even ROOM 237 seems to be snickering at some of thsee more loco ideas, such as, the singing of The 3 Little Pigs wolf call as a link to the Holocaust. The Onion in its snarky surmise spoke to Kubrick's assistant on the film to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct:'

"the suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 

This is of course imbecilic When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery... in the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, ONION!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

 Call the lunatic critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenics on some level, but at least they know how to look properly, and the lunatic is, in the end, merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface at every given moment. He goes crazy because he can't shut it out of his mind, it doesn't go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts... stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day. It's only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's stretchy face used to really bother me as Wendy, I'll confess, until ROOM 237 'corrected' my perceptions. Now I know why their mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure when they're confronted with the horrors and that this isn't a film about fighting back and acting logically and shouting at the screen hey don't do that, it's 'the mind' or 'the Munch' ---the sheer overwhelming horror that is the only 'sane' response to an insane world. Apparently one of his quickest shoots was CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001, happened largely because of Malcolm McDowell, who once answered the question what was it like to work with Kubrick that it was great, "if he trusted you." If he doesn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, it is a living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way or maybe to just be a sadist or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot. Are the great artists of our time all just naturally screwed up bully sociopaths? Is that all art is?

Hitchcock certainly got his insanity out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by film's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy fear. Malcolm seems to tap into that madness no problem for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, both of whom  apparently got favorite treatment. No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that Jack's Jack starts out crazy so has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always farther to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. 

In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy, the 'caretaker sparkle' is Nicole Kidman. Kubrick's first genuine female character. She likes to have sex and Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, so he can ogle his own perfect body; Cruise is a cipher trying to break into a dimension that sees through his facility in ways he cannot. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the 'selfie side' of the camera app; he's trying to see, rather than be seen seeing himself seeing.

The actor with the shine in his eyes is the one who can do both: they can 'see' all right. Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the one that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims for, for there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. If it's not there, maybe 40 straight takes of the same scene will help the actor find it. 

The gold room in The Shining is where Jack experiences his relative distance even from the majority of ghosts, who ignore him as he wanders around with his drink (which he doesn't ever sip from), and has the advocaat spilled on him. Nicole Kidman's immanent desirability in Eyes Wide Shut means that she is never safe from being hit on the very minute she is alone and seems bored in the (same) gold room. This smooth talking yet vaguely sinister figure she dances with is her own private Lloyd the bartender, an animus of sexual mystery, providing the direct connection to the unconscious core of sexuality the Cruise's character lacks (i.e. her bourbon is named sex; his is named Tom Cruise).

 Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic; all of his films are about the cold break of time when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality and the inner and outer merge. Even BARRY LYNDON focuses on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after winning a duel and being robbed by a highwayman. PATHS OF GLORY in the transitions between men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves --each side clueless about the other. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the Highwayman's cold, terrifying instructions in LYNDON, and the execution of the three soldiers in PATHS. Kubrick brings this cold, clinical reason deep into the murky homicidal core of man's decision-making skills, the unconscious self-sabotaging remainder. Jack continually lets his family get away, the troops refuse to charge, HAL refuses to admit his mistake, Lyndon refuses the call to bravery, and only our isolated flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see they're all just ants.

Gearing up for some lashings of the old Wendy. Gimme the bat!

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. The stress of 'faking the moon landings' and the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.

Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between four AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and camels have all gone to bed, as it were, and the tiresome curtain of tedious convention, the collective guise of sanity, or decency and normality, at last may part. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They all vainly struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For we who are truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction. The sane are now the insane ones, and oh how they danced... at Stonhenge.

NOTES:
1. As one of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes: most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact

ALSO ON ACIDEMIC:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

ON BRIGHT LIGHTS:

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA

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SHINING Examples: The Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror

Caught THE SHINING (1980) for the 18th time Tuesday (!) and noticed the vast disconnect between the members of the Torrance family, how badly each is trapped in their own nightmare head space and how the Overlook's trans-dimensional gravity widens that space into uncrossable gulfs. I also realized how a post-structuralist malaise hangs over the Overlook, making even normal job interview blather cryptic and enriched with mantra-like repetitions which I have to assume are a meant as vain buffer against the madness of irrational experience. Of the entire cast, only Shelly Duvall's perky mom uses words in a direct, emotional manner and everyone but Danny thinks she's a rube because of it. I also gleaned new insight into cabin fever and the archetypal meaning of the bathroom. So come with me, neighbor, I don't want to be alone.

Cabin Fever is something we know very little about since scientific inquiries into its nature are difficult. Just knocking on an isolated subject's door with a questionare in hand can lessen the insanity, or put the knocker at serious risk. This is because the condition infers a complete collapse of the social sphere. Without anyone to bring him back to a consensual reality, the sufferer soon can't tell the real from his imagination.

Because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrance family each falls into a separate madness. With no direct link to the social order present to keep them anchored--whether to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds who are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing!) Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack goes off the deep end; in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy' he's compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can escape into the past. Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' response from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase.

Consider their example in light of the quintessential cabin fever victims, the bedraggled survivors of the Donner party (mentioned by Jack during the family's car ride). The Donners spent months starving and shivering in clumsy brush sheds, buried under mountains of snow, weakened by frostbite and starvation, with only some human remains for snacking. Several of them lost any semblance of 'sanity' simply because the situation itself was without any 'anchor' of space/time and social strata. In such a situation, sanity becomes a burden, an anachronism. We can read the accounts of the survivors, but it was not a time wherein people waxed on about their mental states unless they were novelists. 

In a way the relationship between Bowman and Hal in 2001 is reflected in THE SHINING with its random markers "Tuesday" and "8:00 AM" indicating the complete breakdown and meaninglessness of time. There are no weekends in space, or at the Overlook, no intruding signifiers of social order for your madness to wriggle against. No alarm clocks. No recourse in a battle of wits except to kill any person whose reality might contradict your own.

Post-Structuralism - The second thing that stuck out this nth viewing of THE SHINING was the constant repetition of 'tour guide' language: Jack and hotel staff (and later law enforcement via short wave radio) hide behind repetitive phrases ("sure looks like a lot of snow, over") and Jack especially clings to this repetition in his avoidance of any real commitment to his writing - his mantra of All Work and No Play make jack a dull boy functions as the endgame of a long string of repetitions heard throughout the film. Avoiding any genuine emotional connection to his family, Jack 'hides' in language, depending on his post-structuralist 'wit' for melting away the terror of any unsignified remainder that may come his way. But eventually the mantras all fall by the wayside; they are feeble tools compared to the vast arsenal of symbolic language employed by the unconscious.



Note that the ghost bartender Lloyd (right) appears at Jack's big moment of crisis - when Shelly Duvall accuses him of hurting his son and he goes a little mad in outrage. Here he's wasted five months not having a single drink, out of some dorky fatherly guilt, and all for nothing as he's accused of hurting Danny anyway. His language finally breaks up a bit from the mantras and he mutters he'd sell his soul for a drink. Bingo. Salvation and destruction all tied up in a single bargain. His statement "I would sell my soul for a drink," is perhaps the only 'true' thing he says, and as such constitutes a deal-done bargain. The devil springs right up with full bottle service. Jack's eyes widen and bug out as he talks with Lloyd and the other ghosts, but he never dares ask anything like "are you real?" for that would risk sounding as square as his wife.

The Bathroom - Ground zero when it comes to realizing the drugs are kicking in. Check your dilated pupils in the mirror; freak out when you close the medicine cabinet and see a figure standing behind you or a different background; the toilet looms alien with its gaping porcelain maw of porcelain and swirling reflective light-off-the-small-square-tiles serpent scale vortices. This is the place of hair combing and judgment and bereavement, vows made to never drink tequila after wine, and last looks before you return to the merciless world of co-ed living. It is the place where coke moves from the tip of someone's car key into your nose, or you sneak cigarettes, or find the gun taped to the back of the old-fashioned toilet. We all surely know the 'boost' we may get when we break from our navigation of precarious social situations and retreat to the mirror of the bathroom to check our hair and psych ourselves up. Here we are able to reconstitute our ego, a little mini-resurrection. The bathroom is where we go to delude and denude. We are allowed 'privacy' there, so can be naked without shame. And, as the hotel Overlook is so immensely private, the bathrooms in the film (there are two) are therefore double private, the haunted bath nook in room 237 is even a room within a room within a room, so triple private, and the tub is even in a nook at the infinite point, for yet another layer. Time and language drift away in the solace of the gleaming fixtures and tiles, which correspond perfectly with our visualizations of the the drainage portal that lurks at the bottom of our souls, between our own unconscious and that of the universal collective, which is always waiting to back up the pipes and flood the room.

OTHER TRIPPY BATHROOMS:

From top: 2001, The Holy Mountain, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Which came first, after all, the way bathroom tiles glisten in the light when you're tripping at 3:30 AM, or the reflection of your mind's eye temple and its sparking lights, each as large as the eye can wish to make out through the constantly rearranging serpentine points of definition? Small wonder that the bathroom is where all the scary business goes down in THE SHINING. For most Kubrick films, it is always, as it were, the same bathroom; the bathroom behind your eyes, or its eyes.  The black of your pupils in the mirror is the black of the 2001 obelisk and the blackness of the sink's drain, or Janet Leigh's dead eyes. It is the bathroom at the end of 2001 where Bowman hides from his older self; it's where Pyle shoots the sarge and himself in FULL METAL JACKET; it's where we see Nicole Kidman on the toilet while Tom adores his reflection in EYES WIDE SHUT. The colors in the Kubrick bathroom are always melting, the tiles always glistening like the skin of a giant slumbering serpent from the warped perspective of a fish-eye lens.

I've always felt if therapy wants to be truly effective it should take place in the bathroom. The room wherein the dancing dwarf speaks backwards in David Lynch's Twin Peaks is 'kind' of like this bathroom, a little less functional--like the outer lounge antechamber in swanky hotel ballroom bathrooms where you adjust your bow-tie at weddings and the dancing dwarf brushes your shoes and has a basket for tips and speaks in some indecipherable language. The beginning of Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN takes place in a similar kind of bathroom/ tiled space, as the shaman shaves the heads of two women acolytes. This latter example evinces a superb understanding of the fantasmatic - with the hair shaving representing a complete identity melt (see also Kubrick's opening haircut sequence in FULL METAL JACKET) as an essential rite of passage when undertaking the trek to total self actualization and surrender.

In a Jungian analysis Jack's room 237 bathroom scene is something straight out of Hansel and Gretel - with the bathroom as the gingerbread house. Jack is a nervous but horny Hansel, the initial stern leggy sexiness of the female apparition is his candy. The breadcrumb trail in this case is the maze-like paths of the carpet and hallways that seem to pull him, like a magnet in slow dream time motion, towards the the woman, who is old witch and leggy candy rolled into a one-two switch. In Jung's lexicon, this old witch is the undernourished and most cranky shadow/anima, the 'wrathful deity' in the first bardo, the flip side of the peaceful deity / sexy young woman. Jack should have read the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

To get back to cabin fever, anyone who's been to the psychedelic mountain will surely have some chills of recognition in 237, for the room itself has cabin fever-- everything is slowed like clockwork and, without a 'majority' rule of perception to block the infinite with their tunnel vision reality, it's as if the Overlook is a galaxy and 237 bathroom is a black hole, through which one is drained into the pipes of Aboriginal 'dream-time.' One moves through the pipe and comes out of Marian Crane's open dilated pupil in PSYCHO, or out of the pistol barrel fired into the camera of Mick Jagger's brain at the end of PERFORMANCE. This small black hole slows down the world around it in an inescapable clockwork pentameter; hypnotic in its steady unwavering mechanical rhythm; it is the earth, the sun, and the wheels within wheels revolving in 2001's spaceships or Ezekiel's wheels in the sky. The drones on the soundtrack work to achieve this revolving sense of hypnosis, as does the slow, dreamlike movement of the camera and actors, the repetition of certain words over and over as a tool of hypnosis - "gimme the bat!" for example, becomes a mantra, as does 'redrum' and 'my responsibilities' and "Danny! Danny boy!"

Post-Post Structuralism - In my past viewings I've found her unbearable, but I came to respect and like Shelly Duvall's character this time around. After all, she does knock her husband out with a bat and then lock him in the pantry. She defends herself with a knife and eventually triumphs over him in every respect. She fucking kicks his ass! Her kid may be a nutcase and her husband a smartass but Shelly manages to keep some kind of grip on things even as she herself begins to see the apparitions. I was particularly aware of the wincing of the men over her gushing naivete during their initial tour, and it's that which clued me into the post-structuralist aspect: "This may be the biggest, most beautiful place I've ever been in!" she beams. The men wince at her guilelessness.  Jack would never admit the Overlook was the biggest place he'd ever seen, lest he look like a rube whose never left Denver--and in part that's why he got the job. But its Shelly's kind of uncomplicated normality that survives cabin fever, not Jack's cynical melting clock-style evasiveness.


You see, you see Jack plays the game wherein all language is double filtered, repeated and used as a distancing tool, a way of negotiating one's way through matters too vast and complex to adequately sum up. For those who operate in this 'adult code' any gushing or exclamatory phrase pollutes the bond that acknowledges the power of the unspoken and is therefore evidence of immaturity --the domain of the squares, i.e. the wives who don't get invited out to drinks or the kid who knows you're tripping at the art opening and has to tell everyone so you can't 'pass' for sane as you would like. "You know he's tripping, right?" - "Shut up Max, I don't want them to know," -- "why, are you ashamed?" But tripping you can't even process the word ashamed, it's only that your enhanced depth perception has now been pinned down to a mere drug signifier to which most people have only one response, to rapidly move their hands back and forth on either side of your head and say "you're going down a tunnel whoosh whooosh!"

For speech to be 'successful' as indicative of one's adult insider status -- too cool to care, as it were-- said speech must circumvent and sidestep and 'double-time' its actual meaning, and protect the sublime in fields of repetition and banality. (Max should have said "Did you know he's not tripping? Isn't that wild!") The words Ullman speaks to Jack during the interview, for example, he's clearly spoken before, but he trots them out like a favorite old horse around a familiar well-worn track. The past murders are mentioned with the 'customary' tact and Jack reacts in just the way one would ideally react, without real thought or emotional surplus. Compare his reactions to someone who attempts to be 'earnest' when faced with a similar situation, and you know I'm thinking here of the meetings between Barton Fink and Lipnick (read my thing on that thing here)

This strategy is also what enables Jack later to talk with Lloyd and later the bathroom attendant, Grady. Jack confronts these speechful specters with, if anything, a greater connection and directness than he has with his own family but basically the connection is the same in that it is deliberately clouded by 'hip' language. Ghost bartenders are much more sympathetic than hysterical wives or disturbed sons, at least in Jack's eyes. Effortlessly moving into a racist, classicist mode of thinking, Jack becomes the gentleman who is served, i.e. the upper class, of which until now he--like us--has obviously regarded with anxiety, since (unless we're part of this 'old money' class) most of us never 'see' this reality in our normal life, yet feel we deserve to live in it. When we're suddenly presented with the opportunity we balk. We want to go home and change, to buy a new dress, we start to panic. But in his delusional state Jack feels more than ready and clearly views his wife and son as the disposable dregs of his present, like Shelly Winters in A PLACE IN THE SUN, the sort of albatross of a broad who can't let a minute go by at Disneyland without having to say "isn't this fun, honey?" or "are you having a good time?," laboring under the idea that language will somehow encompass and exceed the event, will adequately mirror the vastness of direct experience. But Jack knows that by saying it she in effect robs it of the qualities she ascribes to it. Moms do this all the time, don't they? Honey? Don't they? Honey?

The only way saying something is great without making it less great is if the great thing has moved safely into the past - which is part of why the bourgeoisie prefers their artists long dead before they honor them. The artist was great but can never be great in that moment. (Jack is finally happy when he is 'already dead' and appears bottom center in the 1921 photo (above) his arms contorted like a Satanic puppet.

Jack triumphs because he never weakens in his mastery of repetition in language, he's like a horror icon version of Warhol. In repetition only does language prove an equal to direct experience, and only repetition can actually 'enhance' direct experience by hypnotizing the conscious mind into a state of strictly observational stasis. Approached via mantra, by removing one's focus from the realm of the symbolic, by repeating a single word over and over until it loses all meaning, the obscene dimensions of the real are suddenly exposed. Say it enough times in a row and even the word 'beauty' becomes a hideous, trumpet-like mass of snouts and tentacles. Better just wait in the bathroom until these tentacled noises have passed into rusty memory and silence removes your last few senses like barnacles and all tomorrow's parties are safe in the distant now of the past. .

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Great Acid Movies #7: HEAD (1968)

Jack Nicholson wrote the script, shortly after writing THE TRIP, so you know drugs inspired the brilliant disconnects and loose-footed free association of HEAD, the Monkee's "no one cares about as anymore so fuck-it" masterpiece. This ain't your parent's Monkees, it ain't even their kids' Monkees, and this kind of seemingly on-the-spot improv is easy to do wrong and hard to get right if you're not on the button - and Nicholson and company were clearly on the (Peyote?) button. The movie was undoubtedly meant as a post-contract nose-tweak at the TV producers of the Monkees' hit TV show for dubbing their instruments, but years later it's still a cult classic and the Monkees TV show is... well, less... of one.

There are film clips from several of my favorite movies, including THE BLACK CAT and GILDA in HEAD, and there are great talking head interviews that lead nowhere ("If someone laughs at you, that's a violation of your civil rights!") and cameos galore: Terri Garr, Victor Mature, Frank Zappa ("I see you've been working on your dancing, though."), and of course Jack, before he was anyone. Zappa later tried to do something similar to HEAD with his 200 MOTELS, but as I recall it didn't quite get there. This stuff is harder to pull off than director Bob Rafelson makes it look.

My favorite of the four lads here is Mike Nesmith, who takes up the exaggeratedly dry and humorlessly hilarious cool leader position, the kind of role I generally assumed when I was "acting guide" in college "acid tests." I saw this as the back half of a student union double feature with YELLOW SUBMARINE the first time I ever took any sort of psychedelic (it was a $5 envelope of psiclocybe cubensis) as a freshman (back when movies were shown from actual film reels at colleges). The experience changed my life forever.

The production company behind HEAD, AIP (American International Pictures) also made the BEACH PARTY movies, DR. GOLDFOOT and THE BIKINI MACHINE and the Corman Poe series. Rafelson's film raids seemingly every prop and backdrop from AIP studio storage,  with western vignettes, cobwebbed castle corridors, World War Two foxholes, factories manned by a Tor Johnson-style gorilla... and, yes, Anette Funicello.


That all said, there are some draggy song moments, such as Peter Tork wandering through the snow and Davey Jones reviving tacky British music hall. Luckily however, there are no sped up comical chase sequences, which The MONKEES were so fond of on TV. Wait, come to think of it, there are... at the very end. Well... that's show biz!

The acid 'peak' for me would be the great Timothy Carey (as "Lord High'N'Low"), running up to boys and shouting "Where ya been? I been lookin' all over the world for ya!" he later shows up again at Mike's birthday party - a Warhol factory-like surprise party scene in which Mike crankily berates the crowd: "Maybe I was better off where I was. You jump out me, scare me half to death," then adds the coup de grace: "The same thing goes for Christmas!"

Then, the crowd parts as Timothy Carey, deformed with some kind of bizarre facial paralysis, dressed from AIP wardrobe in cowboy mining attire with a noose around his neck, stalking through from the back of the crowd, meandering, shambling, slouching towards Nesmith, going "Attaboy, Mike... atta... boy... Mike," over and over again, progressively more hysterical and menacing, which--if you've ever been tripping or a schizophrenic--is hilarious, because that's how it "really" is... any little phrase or word can echo in the head until you go insane. All your filters are off and the world comes in bright and crazy, it's all too much!

Looking into Carey's insane eyes is to glimpse the primordial eternal power of art to transmute this existential terror into dark black comedy. If you can laugh even as you're being ripped apart by the demonic lurkers at the threshold, you're doing all right. In the words of Jesus, a rich man can't enter the gates of heaven any more than a camel through the eye of a needle. What the demons do is rip you to small enough shreds they can fit you through that little eye...so you can walk like Groucho Marx into the flames and not even sweat.


I've only literally fallen out of my seat laughing (in public anyway) twice, and seeing HEAD at that midnight campus screening was the first time. People around me thought I might have to be carried away. I laughed until my stomach hurt and tears streamed down on the auditorium floor. I had been reborn. When I went into the theater that night I was just a frightened nerd with dandruff and clammy hands, but when I emerged from the theater I looked this (left), a Dionysian representative of crazy Mike Nesmithian absurdist-confidence radiating psychedelic light. How do you thank a film for doing that? If it wanted the sun, I would write it down in letters that would burn a thousand feet high, "to Sir High'n'Low... with love"

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Great Acid Cinema 13: PSYCH-OUT (1968)

This non-Corman AIP classic has awesome doc footage of the Haight-Asbury scene while it was at its zenith, with shocked squares rubbernecking by like a parade in reverse. As for the characters, they're pretty damn authentic, if my own memories of playing in psychedelic rock band are correct, which is doubtful. There's the Dean Stockwell pseudo-shaman (that was totally me), carrying STP-laced fruit punch around like its just another drink and arguing with the band's smarmy lead singer and guitarist, Jack Nicholson, while simultaneously stealing his girl--that's just for starters, I could go down matching the cast list with my photo album but you probably would just skip over it. (Or go here), but! Ask yourself why the similarity, only one reason - acid makes you tarot-myth tribal, it assigns you a role in your group - the clown, the king, the shaman/wizard, princess, Morganna, Lancelot, it's all there waiting to play out amongst your friends; it's in your DNA... the man can't burn that out of you, but you can't even reach it without a little boost from our machine elf friends behind the curtain, so tip them well!


Point is the movie strikes a rare and right note of genuine people engaging in cautious lysergic idealism, like HAIR: the psychedelic love bead and budding branch pull focus magic of Lazlo Kovacs make deaf mute tourist Susan Strasberg into a love child overnight, and we're contact high and beside her all the way. But then the film also shows the dirty morning after, when one tin soldier rides away without doing his share of the dishes!

Once Vietnam got rid of patriotism, countercultural "freedom" became the ad hoc refuge of a scoundrel, and then the CHUDS came, and you may as well move to Los Angeles. At the end, when Stockwell is dying he says "I hope this next trip is a good one!" It was, man it was WOODSTOCK, And it wasn't man, it was GIMME SHELTER, and yet we rode on, man, until the times they are a changing back. Now take him away for re-grooving!

PEAK: The scene when a STP-addled Warren is found "Freaking out in the gallery" and hallucinates all his friends are undead Vietnam vets. They advance towards him, trying to get him to cool it and put down the power saw. And it's not long before he's trying to cut off his own hand! It's funny because it's true.

In short, this film is the shit - a personal favorite. A must-own. If you want to get a start in the LSD cinema canon, get the MGM double dose of PSYCH-OUT and THE TRIP. It's in the "essentials" widget at right!

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