How TUCKER & DALE and Rikidōzan can Save America... from STRAW DOGS

America has become so ugly, violent, and bitter over its president, its policies, and its blue/red state divide we need an intervention. You can hear it in the catcalls at the Republican debates and read it in the reviews of the STRAW DOGS remake, and like everyone else in this country, I know I am right and all those other people are idiots --but has anyone turned hate to love through their hate of love? No. It's only ever worked en verso when you've learned to forgive, and then to kill and destroy one another WITH love. It's a neat trick, but most people don't even know it's possible. We could use a man like FDR again...

Blue states and red should work together so we don't fall out of 1st place in the world's most awesome list. It's imperative we stop fidgeting and fighting in the backseat before our fed-up parents turn the car around and we never get to go to Disneyland. Never thought I'd say it, but we deserve not to go to Disneyland. We're supposed to be this super power but we can't stop bickering even as our distracted dad is about to go off a cliff. If both sides of our political divide would rather run the country into the ground than give an inch to the other, Civil War 2 is inevitable, and it's all in an awesome new movie coming out called TUCKER & DAVE VS. EVIL.

 In this film a pair of redneck hillbilly cannibals turn out to be just two lovable decent dudes whose well-meaning interaction with a camping group of college brats turns deadly. But they're not really creepy redneck cannibals, this is all a huge misunderstanding! It's pretty funny. Actually, it's hilarious... and actually, it might be the one film that can heal the rift of misunderstanding between our great semi-nations. Because in the end, redneck and bourgeois douchebags need each other. We're like stars and stripes, stupid-looking apart, but together --flaggish.

Why the anger? We're not kids any more, after all. Well, some of the conservative tea party reds think sex before marriage is a sin, and masturbation is as well... so good lord, no wonder these fundamentalist Christians are so violent and confused! Deadly sperm backup or DSB is not a joke! It may in fact have been the cause of both world wars as well as our current ones. (Hitler was all into that sexual denial stuff --for Germany! - He had one testicle --maybe!)

Thus - those red state voters should all make an effort to masturbate every day, to find a safe comfortable private sanctum and 'git'ir done'. This is their patriotic duty! Semen retentum venom est! 

Aint seen this yet... looks mighty innirrestin'.

The blue states don't think they have issues--they masturbate often--but there's a more insidious impetus that keeps them just as fidgety and self-righteous as DSB... and that's denial of their violent natures. They want equality and justice for all, but they want 'someone else' to go bring this justice over across the tracks to the 'all' because the 'all' reek of the lamb. These blues recoil in horror over slaughterhouses, poverty, ignorance, and bad dentistry. These blue staters would never invite a man who kills his own pigs and cows to their Sunday barbecue, because that's cruel, and gross! Pass the pulled pork. End! End of discussion. No irony permitted. They ride their bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain rather than ever take the subway--even the subway's too un-eco for them; they get their food at the Park Slope co-op (I do support their Wall Street occupation, that's a whole different thing). There's something these kids need to do, too, and it's not masturbation. They need to learn to admit they love violence... and the smell of the lamb...assssisssiassss.

As it is, the blue state person is like the beautiful Yvette Mimeux (above, left) as the eloi in THE TIME MACHINE (1960),  totally dependent on the blue collar morlock for her plumbing, defense, and cable installing needs. This is why Obama doesn't get anything done --he needs a red state Joe the Plumber to fix the White House bathroom. He's constipated from waiting for change. Clinton had enough red in his blood to just go ahead and pee in the oval office vase. Obama thinks 'rationality' will work and that common best interest will prevail over irrational venom --since when has it ever?

But can you blame the red states for being resentful? Ain't you ever seen DELIVERANCE, son? How would you like it if squealin' Ned Beatty came a-paddlin' through your land hoping to get one last freakshow gawk before your house and still were washed away so he could get hydro-electric power for his central AC and 'lectric terlet? You would love it? Yer a sick freak.

This brings us to Dustin Hoffman in the original STRAW DOGS (1972), wherein he was not the hero defending his home from redneck invaders, as has been commonly summarized by critics (who didn't see it or don't 'get' ambiguity, and dismiss it as a standard anti-hillbilly home defense yarn). Dustin's character never even learns about his wife's rape. He defends his home against invasion because he won't turn over a child murderer to them (for lynching). When the rabble try to storm in, Peckinpah reverses the normal blue state rape-revenge thriller model - graying every area he can and forcing a complex emotional response from any alert viewer. The real violent monster in the film turns out to be Dustin. He's not Dirty Harry, but the snide liberal police chief who'd rather set murders free than let Callahan rough up a perp. Simply put, Dustin's character is a dumb busybody, enforcing his smug liberal intervention on the locals who've done things their own way for centuries, and there's no getting around that unless signifiers (glasses = good, shoddy dentistry = bad)  blind you to what's really going on. It's these signifiers that DALE AND TUCKER play off of to such hilarious and genuinely touching effect. Katrina Bowden (30 ROCK) is even in it. So relax! Men of all genders shall swoon at her celestial midriff.

Most entries in the hillbilly rapist genre today are patterned not after STRAW DOGS, but after THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which brings in cannibalism and the usual meat hook and bone sculpture decor and the unspoken moral that if the blue states could access some of that red state killer instinct they'd kick the red stater mutants from here to Macon. That ain't true, Bubba will whup your ass no matter how broke your glasses get. Thus, both sides need to own up to their faults if we're to ever move forward as a nation and share the wine and cuir de visage. Or as Grace Slick said at Altamont, "People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line. But the Angels also — you know, you don't go around busting people in the head."

 

Until then, thanks to our bickering backseat, America will continue to be one of those couples that fight in public. Why are they even together? They had a trial separation back in the 1850s; they had a real bloody row over the kids, until finally there was a joint settlement. But now our red states want to go out for a pack of smokes and never come back; they want to put up a big wall to keep Mexicans out; they want to start making liquor again in the hills--smoking at the bowling alley-- and who can blame them? Every day some new blue state health nut decides the red staters should have more tax placed on whiskey and tobacco, that this and that should be done to their land and that Christianity is stupid and lacks logic. Huh. Like science really knows what it's doing. Half the time the hillbilly cannibals the blue state prigs encounter got that way 'cuz a radiation poisoning!

The Hills have Eyes / with the Sound of Music

As a blue stater with a red state little brother out in Arizona who collects cars and guns and has two dawgs, I say we either let the south secede, or embrace them for the crazed thugs they are. One or the other. The shadowy elite who run things wont let us get a divorce, so succession is out. Why not try what worked for my brother Fred and me -- Hell, we made it to Disneyland and we fought the whole way down. But we had a secret. We knew the fighting would never end, so we pulled our punches, we 'fake-fought' - that's where you have to honor every fake punch and throw. So even if a little kid just tags you in the solar plexus, you have to double over like you got a shot from Mike Tyson. If you pick the kid up to throw him, you have to kind of hold lightly onto him as you throw him for a soft landing. You'd be surprised how much aggression you can expunge through this avenue.

 

In the red states, though, they're hip to that irony. That is their strength over the blue states, who seem to think of cops and politicians as 'in charge' and that things are fundamentally all right. Red staters know better. You can decry lynch mobs as evil, but then don't get mad when murders walk free on technicalities. Adherence to the letter of the law is just fear of making executive decisions. Red staters know that law and order can collapse any time. When the zombies come, it's to my redneck brother's door I shall run, knowing his windows are barred and his gun locker is always oiled and accessible. My fellow blue staters will all still be waiting for the official word on what's going on, assuming someone's going to come by and rescue them.

Someone ain't!

I lost some of my faith in my blue state people during the last time the Republican convention was held in NYC, when massive demonstrations and so forth went on, the protestors never getting the irony that they were validating every paranoid fear of the right wing, assuring the spooked white folks they were right to want to put the hippies in jail, to close up their borders and turn their backs on their fellow men. The protesters should have met the Republicans with love and welcome, brought so much love that they overturned the whole thing, made it so the Republicans couldn't even get onstage because so many hippies were hugging them, and they couldn't even think of war let alone talk about it with all that love around them. Gandhi knew this. As much as he makes your skin crawl, you have to show your enemy love if you want true victory. 

That's how America won the hearts and minds of the devastated Japanese population after WW2. Around 1950 and the dawn of TV, they brought in all these huge American wrestlers to fight the Japanese wrestling star, Rikidozan, and after long violent matches--sometimes going on for hours--Rikidozan won and the entire nation rose up in ecstatic cheering. The Americans were cool enough to not say, 'hey man, this time American should win.' It wasn't like that. Americans had heart and soul back then because we were united - we had to be united to win that war. The wrestling matches helped ease the pain of the beaten Japanese - and I love this example because it perfectly encapsulates my message of the fighting brotherhood, of wrestling (or fight clubs) wherein the winner or loser is irrelevant, only the pain and spectacle matter. And that there are no hard feelings but rather a bond of brotherhood afterwards.
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This is the guy who was the star in Japan:

Japan - Rikidōzan
Known as the "Father of Puroresu", Rikidōzan was a sumo wrestler before turning his hand to professional wrestling in the early 1950's. He rapidly became a star in Japan by defeating American wrestlers, boosting the morale of a nation devastated after World War 2. NWA title reigns and an international fame boosting win over Lou Thesz cemented his popularity before he began training two more legends of Japanese wrestling, Antonio Inoki and Shohei "Giant" Baba. He then went on to develop his business empire, acquiring hotels, nightclubs and boxing promotions before he ran afoul of the Yakuza in a Tokyo nightclub in 1963. (from Onwards to the Horror Show)

Imagine if every night there was a big wrestling match televised between Israel and Palestine--Hymen "The Golem" Roth Vs. the Palestine Monster or between Red state and Blue: the Iron Yuppie vs.  Johnny Reb (that last one's from The Simpsons). We wouldn't be solving any of our problems, but we would be at least showing that we 'get it' - we'll never agree, and we can still fight, but like brothers who get out their animosity and rage in a pulled punches kind of way that lets them both walk away winners.  It's a world away from watching old men talk our country into the grave, which is also a kind of theater, for are not these issues are long since decided by our shadowy Masonic elite?

We can't keep denying both our reptilian killer natures and our dueling head-butting mammal ones; if we're not going to actually kill, then, well, we need a fight. If we don't see a fight in a long enough span of time we end up going to war for no reason. Also, we need to give each other a private space to take care of our sexual onanistic needs, so the DSB doesn't make us too venomous, and to keep the anger managed, so we may as well set up some ground rules... for the good of all America! Let Tucker and Dale show us the way... to Canada!

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The First Lebowski: CUTTER'S WAY (1981)

Every once in awhile a man has to pause. Every once in awhile a man has peer into the decades behind him, take a cursory flip through Leonard Maltin and wonder... is John Heard really a good actor? I mean, is he awesome? Or is he too much too late?

The question is answered the same time as you ask: do all 1970s movies involve grizzled vet loners going after corrupt power father figures like they're lone wolves growling valiantly but for naught against the machine?

As Robert Evans would say, you bet all 1970's movies involved grizzled loners growling for naught against the machine. And they all must have a big crowd scene parade, or a wedding, or a political rally, or some place where they can see some figure in a white dress representing old world innocence now reduced to a symbolic lamb sacrifice against the coming storm of dread and draconian soul-eating.

Perhaps a bit shaggy, CUTTER'S WAY can't make up its mind about itself: is it called CUTTER'S WAY or CUTTER AND BONE? Is it a Elmore Leonard-ish beach bum crime drama, a Vietnam vet character study; a buddy-buddy California corruption tale or an elegy to the American dream in a small California town where everybody knows your name and you can drink right out in the open and not be arrested? ("Hey man! I have a beverage here!") Is it CHINATOWN meets MIDNIGHT COWBOY? BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA meets NIGHT MOVES? SHAMPOO divided by THE DEER HUNTER? It's got a little of a lot and sure it's brilliant but by 1981 these tropes read like quirk by the numbers. Why shoehorn the whole evil murder plot in there at all? And Heard overplays so much, and acts so drunk, that a murder case seems way too much for him to handle, or care about. He should be using some of that voracious animal intellect to not piss his pants, like the rest of us!

Those pants really tied the room together.

In short, this movie could have been a prequel to THE BIG LIE-BOWSKI, wherein the very same Jeff Bridges deals with a similarly massive conspiracy by the much saner approach of going bowling, and this time his Vietnam vet wreck of a buddy isn't a little scrawny fucker with only one leg and an eye patch but John Fucking Goodman! Goodman would have shaken the shit up in CUTTER'S WAY, but Heard can't do much more than ride a horse through a window. As Sam Eliot once said: "Take her easy, dude... and I know you will, too."

CUTTER took it too easy, way too easy, never get out of the boa. It started as a project back in 1971 and if it had been released in 1972 instead of 1981 it would probably have been a hit and a modern classic like your DEER HUNTER and your CHINATOWN, but studio regime changes as well as trend shifts delayed its completion and release, and by 1981 people had grown a little weary of the traumatized vet loner solving a rich man's crime thing. I remember reading some good reviews in the local newspaper when CUTTER finally did come out, but I knew even then, at 14, that the 1970s were over. We'd all had a good laugh at the HEAVEN'S GATE debacle, and grown tired of the undignified posturing--chronicled in PEOPLE magazine--between the stars of DEER HUNTER and COMING HOME over the 1978 Oscars, and Jane Fonda bashing the former over its 'demonic' portrayal of the Viet Cong. One more film about a Vietnam vet disillusioned and seeking to overturn the turtle of American politics wasn't going to make us leave our sofa. We craved fantasy, escape, ET!! And lo, ET he was on his way, to trade us our innocence for some magic candy--like a safety class stranger--just one year after this last gasp of 1970s corruption-venting.

And for some of us, John Heard was just too... Kevin Bacon-ish? No denying he's ferocious here and gives it 111%, but seeing the film now, long past any due date, I honestly don't know how I feel about him, or the film. All the ingredients are there and maybe that's the problem. It's like the film was given an unlimited shopping spree at the seventies' paranoia cliche' store and just had to clean the place out.

But hey, it's worth seeing some time when you're high on 1970s 'Nam-gate cinema, and what a double bill it would make with LEBOWSKI! May I recommend an angle on which to view them, for political meta-purposes? Just have Bridges = Blue States / right brain (blue for Bridges, peace, man!) and the vets (Goodman and Heard) = Red states / left brain (guns break class barriers!) The corrupt power elite figure equals the 'real' corporate shadow puppet (Halliburton, Enron) figures that capitalize on the dissonance between the colors/hemispheres to steal everyone's IRA and soul. Keep this in mind and let the bowling balls and cocktails fall where they may.

The fine and trenchant blog OUT 1 reviews CUTTER here, and draws a similar Lebowski conclusion while dealing more with the plot and production of the film itself. It makes a fine double bill with this post! Tell them the Dude sentchye.

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MADE IN USA: Someone left a Maoist in the Rain

AKA: BITCHES OF '66
"We were in a political movie, which means Walt Disney with blood."

It's exciting times for Godard lovers as two of his 1966 films: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Made in the USA make their way to the few remaining stores next week. Set in "Year Zero" at some Alphaville-esque locale called "Atlantic City," (apparently Suburban France), Made in USA is a great little road marker connecting the dots of Godard's earlier and later pop cinematic narrative deconstructions like Pierrot Le Fou (1965) and First Name: Carmen (1983), the stuff before and after his anti-entertainment unionist phase, providing surrealist wordplay, collage, satire, intellectual critique of the right/left dichotomy, a eulogy for countercultural idealism almost before it starts (May '68 was still a couple years off), and a last waltz for his crumbling marriage to the leading lady, the heavenly Anna Karina (she looks weary, as if she's been screaming at him between takes).

If you've ever basked in the primary pop glow of Pierrot Le Fou and wished Godard had made a whole slew of movies in widescreen color with Karina, guns and anti-American sloganeering, then Made in USA is your film. It delivers the goods while showing you just how much less good such goods are a second time. Made just one year after Fou, it seems as if it's the end of a twenty year run of sequels. Karina's femme fatale is still beautiful but less fresh, less gaminesque. There's no trickster male of Jean Paul Belmondo's manly charisma to balance her star wattage and sex appeal (Jean Pierre-Leaud tries hard to be manic, and maybe that's the problem) and so she has only the mirror to work with. In this noirscape of bright primary colors Paula Nelson (Karina) is all alone with a sea of bit players, trying to find the one guy she liked from earlier films, a raving commie intellectual believed dead, named Richard P. Though hard to find, we get to hear him ranting away in the form of shrill tape recordings (of Godard reading Maoist obtuse ideology with the terseness of Milenay and pomp of Renfraux).

Paula is a possible spy for either side of the left/right divide but her true motives for wanting to find Richard P. remain unclear; we assume he's an on-again/off-again boyfriend and/or symbol for Godard's own lost idealism, a Maoist Rosebud. As she hunts this invisible, presumed murdered communist through Raoul Coutard's impressionistic landscape (at one point Karina name checks Monet while standing in the foreground of a backyard full of beautiful trees out of focus behind her -- was Impressionism a symptom of weak eyesight?) we get the notion that this is just one of those films that masters make when they're off their a-game, like Dial M for Murder or Testament of Orpheus.

I don't mean to disrespect it, because many a master's b-game is still fascinating and worship-worthy, maybe even more so than their A game (I like Made in USA much more than the dreary industrial landscape of 2 or 3 Things, which most critics consider superior) so long as they include deconstruction of B gameishness into the film itself, as in riding right along with audience expectations and observations, tweaking or thwarting them at every turn (without turning them off) and yet delivering what is promised in such a way that our own desire for it is called into question.

What Godard is chronicling here, then, perhaps, maybe, probably not, is the evolution of B-movie convention from The Big Sleep to Easy Rider. The exact second you realize that the hot blond waif sitting in the background at the bar looks a bit like a really young Marianne Faithful (above), she suddenly starts singing "As Tears Go By" - not lip syncing, but singing right there, a capella, trilling her voice gently and feeling every word of the song, expressing some longing we have no idea about but the mood of wistful sadness overwhelms the film in a summer of love tsunami, before it's even begun, only to resume its dry sand babbling even before she finishes the song. Compared to this bit of subdued emotionalism from a rising starlet of British rock royalty, the ensuing G. Marxist wordplay between Leaud and the bartender suddenly seems tired, yesterday's model. There's a new sincerity in town and it's cool to have feelings, or at any rate it's cool if you're Marianne Faithfull. Karina, instead, is trying on the outfit of a bitchy too-cool-for-modernism contemporary diva (the host instead of the contestant on Europe's Next Top Model) for size. She's not about to pick up a flower and take off her shoes just because the other kids are doing it. So instead she just freezes from the knees down and looks at the floral arrangements like a penniless, starving lotus eater.

No wonder in the next scene Karina visits a health spa beauty parlor, where-- fittingly--any possibility for tranquility amidst the clients is destroyed by shrill announcements over a crackly PA system. When she tells the resident doctor Ludwig during her interrogation to stop "dicking around," you feel her weary rage, that she's indirectly talking to Godard, wishing he'd just write a script and stick to it so she could go home on time and put her feet up. She must have been full sick of his 'dicking around' by then, of waiting around on a hot set for his little direction notes, film after film. It shows. Only when she gets to be mean does she light up with the synthesis of truth and illusion.

The counterculture was beginning to catch fire in 1966, and Faithfull still looks like she was recently conjured out of a magic cloud of smoke, or pulled out of a junior high school gym class before she bruised her complexion in dodgeball, but Godard and Karina were already burning out on decadence and freedom. Even if that's not true, it shows. This isn't complaint, just observation, since Godard naturally ties in this weariness to the film itself, the way for example, Tippi Hedren's bitchiness about working with an obsessive like Hitchcock two films in a row may have led to the audience-alienating (but great!) outbursts of castrating rage in MARNIE.

What saves MADE from being just a misfire, in the end, is the way Godard accommodates his ingenue's hostility by linking it to the shocking effect of watching people get casually and suddenly shot--or seduced--without all the usual booming orchestral music of Hollywood that gives each romance or death such magnified resonance. MADE teaches us that in real life people don't have to brandish their gun and make speeches before firing- it can be so random and sudden that you never know what hit you. During a philosophical discussion with a suspect, for example, she asks, "Would you prefer a long slow old age death or a short exciting death in the moment?" and when he answers the latter, she shoots him on the spot. No fanfare, no warning. Crack!

In addition to the violence, there's some welcome cultural intolerance: When Paula meets a guy who does an impersonation of a typical American--a lobotomized hick Jerry Lewis--Karina ups the ante by making slanty eyes to indicate it's "all Chinese to her." In addition the usual disruptions appear: random silences, the roar of passing planes or honking cars, and many stabs of Ludwig Van's 5th keep interrupting the dialogue, making full grasp of the plot impossible, though oblique interview sequences help, as do peculiar conversations overhead in front of comic book splashes, movie stills and mentions of streets with names like Preminger and Ben Hecht, and of course a pinball machine, though every bell and ping seems to hurt Karina's hangover.

More than most of the films that would follow in Godard's cannon, MADE actually struggles to maintain just enough plot to flirt with your attention span, luring you close enough to the amniotic wall between alienation and narrative immersion that you feel like your whole movie-going life is flashing before your eyes, as in the slim gap between watching a film and reading its back cover synopsis at the video store. Godard's idea of a mystery film is to have a character read Dashiell Hammett aloud in front of a gas station, but for MADE, though the characters may read a bit, they at least still shoot each other.

The shooting is key, since it fits the anti-American ruthless amorality on display (i.e. our production code wherein femme fatales must never go unpunished). Paula is a lethal combination of unpunished femme fatale and Chandleresque gumshoe. Her blase attitude towards being arrested and/or murdering people in cold blood is charming and alienating at the same time. Dario Argento could have spun her into three separate characters, but Godard is too political to divide a fractured psyche for the purpose of mere suspense; even the climactic showdowns are filtered through rhetoric and suffused with ennui, as when Paula--almost apologetic for the film's inertness--remarks:

We live in a part of the universe that's already old, nothing much happens, while elsewhere new galaxies are exploding into action.

A fatal mistake of many lesser filmmakers is the idea that mid-career crises make good cinema. You just tie a film up with past tricks and successful ideas like a greatest hits collection, it wont work on either front, unless you keep the energy high (as in Scorsese's Casino, which moves too fast and vicious to let you realize it's not that great). Godard is too frenetic and hip to let the acres of sadness between Karina and himself sink the movie's energy level, so he focuses his rage on Madison Avenue, which has dared to co-opt Brechtian "full disclosure" (recuperation!) and metatextual self-mockery. Godard wants Brechtian cut-up techniques to be sole domain of the French Communist Party, but Madison Avenue wants to use Godard's methods so they can appear to enjoy their own intellectual self-loathing. For example, if Godard says "Down with Kelloggs!" then Kelloggs' says "Godard says 'down with delicious Kelloggs!'" to which Godard can only get redder in face and party, trying to end the game by saying "Down with advertising that co-opts the tactics of Debord and detournement, to infinity squared!


To a Brechtian post-modernist who loves quotations as much as Godard does, this is the ultimate defeat: you can't critique a power system that incorporates its own critique--Todd McGowan wrote about this in his Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment:

The insight into the functioning of power... has the effect of cementing power's hold over us rather than relaxing it. It does this by cutting off all lines of critique prior to their articulation. (54)

In the end, none of it matters, because we have Anna Karina. Young and gorgeous, she's preserved for all time in vibrant, colorful dresses against the same color scheme of Pierrot Le Fou, which is probably the movie to see first if you're new to the game. After Made in the USA and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (shot at the same time, with Godard originally wanting to show them in alternating reels), Godard would begin his descent into nihilistic ranting (Weekend) and post-modern Commie pedagogy (La Chinoise, Tout Va Bien). Still witty, but sullen and sanctimonious as well, enraged that his rage hasn't made a discernible difference. His became for awhile a fate that I've watched subsume many a Cultural Studies professor who gets mad at contemporary culture the way an impatient gardener might get mad at a reticent flower.

Luckily, old Godard got his Baudrillard-esque groove back as a mid-life crisis 80s reward, finding a vein of poetry deep under absurdity's skin and he's been popping it ever since. And even now, 40 years later, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull are paragons of cool, still appearing regularly on TV and in movies, acting and singing with their beautifully smoke-ravaged voices. In an era when our own president is harassed by the media for occasionally having a cigarette, these two ladies are reminders that you can all just take a fucking walk / and I guess that I just don't know / and I guess that you've come a long way... baby.

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