Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. -- Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt.” (Vigilante Citizen)

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of, old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom reach the skeletal hands of grandparents reaching up from the tar pit of fundamentalism to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. From these waters crawl real life abominations like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom,  and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at the fundamentalist Muslim market. At a certain depth, Christianity and Satanism become indistinguishable, especially once Asherah, Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, is banned from the Christian bible and patriarchy squashes women's rights like a bug underfoot. A million witch burnings later and who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye, or so resentful of Christianity? To the persecuted Asherah-worshipping earth mother witch, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, or modern conservatives towards everyone outside their race, religion, gender and age.

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

Rise out from that murky water gazing with me now, into modern 1968 and we have the fall-out of all the persecution and secrecy around Asherah, Gaia, Saturn, Pan, the Angel Lucifer, in that Christianity is left to its own devices and so slowly becomes its opposite. In Polanski's best films, like RB, come the paranoid angle of feeling left out of some shared secret, tapping into the unconscious memory of when we were children and any "sh-the adults are talking" moments seemed fraught with mystery and dread as our future and bedtime were out of our hands, and it wasn't fair. And we could sense evil around us always, and empathy had yet to kick in (all children are born sociopaths).

We see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view we're never privy to what's going on, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where she in a sense finds out where babies come from, or rather where her baby's father is. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary and Guy first come to visit). Strangely enough, that paranoid angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. The imitators got the surface iconography right but missed the paranoiac angle, 1974's The Exorcist included. .

Polanski knew to never show such iconography, or if one must, to do it in surreal dream sequences, or in paintings on the Castavet's walls. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We never see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the molesting devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes, and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system or a flock of naked old folks around your bed while your writhing in a drugged stupor. If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe in them, to a certain extent. I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp.  For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them; I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamen, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamen sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant/thought just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. It didn't happen but man were my neck hairs standing up.

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls of even non-devil babies have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film, and he wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. It had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and by 1968, Castle's patented gimmicks like skeletons on strings and tingling seats were passe. So I'm not saying right off he made up a Macbeth curse-style paranoid linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies. But did he link them all together so it sounded like the devil had woken up and took notice his unholy name was being invoked? Castle's creative drive in this case might be said to have come true - the unconscious trickster shamen noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus for Rosemary's ballyhoo --and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings.

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and he and composer Krystof Komeda being struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, as well as the later murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil in 1966 (see: The Blonde Devils of '66) and who Polanski wanted in the part of Roesemary) and their unborn baby; he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges, to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of the tale surely tapped into both the paranoia, as well as a kind of Stockholm syndrome flip side of being constantly in danger. Part of the Nazi's rationale was that Jews had a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal themselves, and just as devil worshippers had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake. In America we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for our heritage. But for Polanski this is a formative year reality. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' is only the tip of a deep ink black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters still dwell?

In 1930s America, the Nazi-fleeing Jews, gays, artists, geniuses, flew our way, bringing their strange customs, and after the war, America turned to atomic age anxiety and away from the occult, with giant bugs and rockets instead of ghosts and demons. America became a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and old people with rakes smiled from cross the street. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy and above all, babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil. A few exceptions came and went, there was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen before their brains developed an empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either." Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line; he might add "and please don't vote, get a job, or wear pants." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, which Guy thinks is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon.

But what really makes it all work is the way Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, and to see the link between paranoia and pregnancy, and how the patriarchal condescension in the big city can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, her story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by hormonal surges due to pregnancy) and the physical arrival after passing through from the subconscious realm, of a devil ("Hail Satan!"), in other words, Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is a dream lover incarnated into living tissue.

When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative interdimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's optic nerves. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in; it's an ocean really, the Satanist sail on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a navy man, a mirror to Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control)  while the dreamers bob in the waves and the schizophrenics drown. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes." And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. . 

It's interesting to note that in both this film and Friedkin's The Exorcist, there is a woman with her child / innocence and an absentee father for her child (since the devil only shows up in her vision) dealing with another man and his older mentor - in Exorcist they are two priests, one young and one old, in Baby, the worthless husband and the older Roman Castavet. There's nary a Christian in the place. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the enlightening scientist, or in the Hammer films, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history. "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all one - the same old man in the painting above the mantle in the Castavet home. The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year, but compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film it seems to be from years earlier, Rides is a fun, goofy deadpan classic, but Rosemary's Baby is still ahead of its time. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s.

Mocata, Marcata

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he's wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings, when we see him talk he's off by himself a very far distance away it seems because he seems very small. Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together on the couch by contrast and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth makes him seem ageless, omnipresent; his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought in to their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if as a paltry actor he has some say in media buying. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He would almost be forgiven just because he's so bad at hiding things, he can't even act the part of a concerned doting husband convincingly, though a part of him thinks he can - because he's so vain. It's a part that also shows Cassavettes limits as an artist and actor - he was always better playing a charmless swine who genuinely thought we were awed by his charm. I personally can't stand his own improvisational, misogynistic movies. I find them painful and self-indulgent and amateurish - and Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's not charmed into submission by his patronizing grin.

Coming as it does so buried within the more 'normal' surfaces of Polanski's mise-en-scene, the lengthy dream sequence centerpiece to the film is a revelation as to how such sequences can enhance the story rather than diminish it. Most of the time in films dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Directors can do whatever they want in a dream sequence, get full weird, but it doesn't 'matter' - there are no consequences - the dream isn't 'real' - just an artsy diversion. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the artsy diversion. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that 'this is really happening' it's terrifying, because we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which reality. Polanski's film knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time - and in these areas lurk real horrors; the blue laser eyes and telekenetic devil children of later films are the opposite - in externalizing and literalizing the threat, it is actually less frightening. With no monster in sight, no 'seen murders' (Tony Curtis is only blinded after all, not beheaded by stray sheet glass), there's actually a crisper sense of dread. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project understood this power. 

"This is no dream..." 

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, works on a similar level. Irregardless of its authenticity, it's a vibrant, fascinating myth. There is no insurmountable line between truth and fiction once one enters these worlds, only a series of stages, mirror reflections, - "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." And this is the power and importance of ritual initiation ceremonies in indigenous tribes (and why Satanists and CIA programmers allegedly use inflicted trauma to create dissociative states and split personalities in their subjects, one might also add Lamaze to this list). I myself noticed this with unbearable pain in my life, like when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split distance, on the one side me in agony on the other me standing slightly back, impassive, the white hot pain in a sense knocking me into a contemplative serenity; the later shot of morphine at the hospital brought me deeper into this calm detachment.

Theories about giving birth and Stockholm Syndrome align with this; the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of a mother, the pain of ritual initiation for boys, of menstruation for girls, all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization to of the five senses in a recoil motion, vomiting of the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being an honored child guest kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp unaccompanied.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, etc.) which is why the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry. There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down, safely contained in oils on the wall of the devil's domicile. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. The party Rosemary bursts  in on is, after all, hardly the typical cliched evil power mongers - they're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle. They're bizarros. In finally solving the mystery Rosemary doesn't trigger the inferno that burns down the house - the house was God's and it's been burned down for years, just she didn't know it. Rosemary's enlightenment isn't a matter of  restoring patriarchal supremacy or conquering evil on behalf of good, or even the power of maternal instinct to trump Christian values, it's about solving the mystery at the core of 20th century existence, finally telling your husband to fuck off, gluing that Asherah pole back together and birthing your way into the know. 

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The Satanic Blondes of '66: INCUBUS, EYE OF THE DEVIL

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for human sacrifice. Still two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are twin heralds to Polanski's masterpiece: one co-stars Polanski's wife and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is like her crazy Esperanto dream. I can only imagine how much better each would be had they been made in 1969 instead, when the fangs were properly installed in the balls of horror cinema. Of course by then the ingenue of EYE couldn't have been in it, and she's the only thing worth watching for. There are those who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via Manson. But they're crazy, right?

There's a rumor that the many weird rumors of strange accidents and Satanic coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in ballyhoo maestro William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, too far, perhaps, because when the subject is Satan, our mostly Christian nation's water cooler gossip heats to boiling. As John Ford or Sutter Kane would say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate it.

That's where it gets super tricky. These pagan devil cultures offer a much more fatalistic world view than the sacrifice-free Christianity. With Satan there's a gruesome payoff where the subject learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar. It's always you, doing both the killing and the being killed.

Is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be and then lashing out at those who dare let their freak flag fly... or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's magnet pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny.  If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, Tate is doomed the moment husband Polanski helps her get the part in EYE, just the way Rosemary is doomed when Roman (!) Castavet helps Rosemary's husband get his part. And Polanski is doomed the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. And we're doomed to have the resurgence of the Salem mindset, ala The 'Satanic panic' of the early 80s.

Even if for the moment we believe all this 'nonsense.' That's fuzzy logic, what Stephen Colbert would call "truthiness" but anyone who denies it completely, is 100% sure it's not true, is just asking for trouble. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls like a flag to a bull.

I mention all this because without Sharon Tate EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. It draws you in tight like that beetle tied to a string in the middle of a Summers Isle school desk, but then lets you go home restless and unsatisfied. Set mostly at an un-devilish vineyard in the south of France, for most of the movie we're stuck with Deborah Kerr's nosey parker chasing after her pale husband, played like a half-asleep nonentity by David Niven, whose being prepared for some diabolical festival. Following him like a stalker mom worried he's skateboarding without a helmet, she's a real buzzkill. He says please, babe, stop crowding me! Tate and David Hemming's as a pair of magical blonde twins have mere supporting role, and though Niven's angry flogging of an all-dressed-in-black Tate makes the poster, it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr begng outraged over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. When she spies on him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Sharon Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property, like she's Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here), going into weird backwaters uninvited to harass the locals, a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order without really examining the extent in which her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness. As a kind of unwittingly dosed Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS, Kerr was amazing. She carried that horror film on her shoulders; DEVIL might be the film if those two weird kids grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking the ample grounds like Warhol superstars. But Kerr doesn't carry EYE, she spills it on the floor and starts lecturing anyone who tries to clean it up. The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white, upstanding Buddha' in THE INNOCENTS, driving her like a hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her husband and bring him back to her tedious harp performances. We have no choice but to wish we could ditch her and ride with the Rochesters, but our director follows her everywhere, visiting Niven as he lurches around like a post-bones-tossed Queequeg, wicked blondes Sharon Tate and Hemmings loiter in black turtlenecks, turning toads into doves, and Flora Robson chokes back tears because oh not, it's all happening again, and we in the audience are forced to spend the bulk of the film with the boring mom as she runs about doing all in her power to stop the one interesting thing that might happen in this nowhere town.And she's like my mom forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays, because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. Or why I need to just sleep the day away. And stay up all night....

Luckily that old devil stretching through into the future via this movie's cold womb foreshadows future classics. The music played during the 13 Days Festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY might be like if Rosemary started the film far too old to be the parent of her two shockingly young children --only one of whom seems possessed by a Damien Thorn. If not for Tate's real life fate-and-sorrow drenched story lending EYE the same eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity of ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST it would be worthless. But it's like her version of James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She is the Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast.

If this were somehow true then the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence, a kind of inter-active Tarot deck, wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Mansons.

Even with all that, is there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archery teacher? Nein! It's too cold and impersonal, it lacks the fears we harbor for the knife.
And we come to hate Kerr for dragging us away from the action, like IMITATION OF LIFE's Annie Johnson trying to grab her Sarah Jane from trying to pass for white in death's cold marble nightclub. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr swamp the fire. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!

If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost!

It's hard to believe that this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least one person who's got a dashing air of wit and sparkle: Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter (Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think). It understands, the way few devil movies do, that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help your roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!

Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mike jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style timeless psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single weekend out at Big Sur, INCBUS would make a good double bill with NIGHT TIDE. The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, driving infirm men to their deaths for big daddy Satan. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the perverse and corrupted, but her older sister advises against it. She's right. But they have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!

This would actually make a netter double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low budget concoction from the "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Ingmar Bergman" Leslie Stevens. But INCUBUS has everything: blondes in black turtlenecks under peasant girl smocks; William Shatner as a variation of Jack Nicholson's Napoleonic solider sick of war and wandering the Big Sur coast in THE TERROR, refracted through the love of Richard Burton's priest in SANDPIPER if he was played by Eva Marie Saint. Sure it sounds overbaked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her to church while she was asleep? Senpreza!

In the end, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL have a lot in common, fault-wise: EYE is way too dry; INCUBUS way too singleminded and didactic, but they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough, and the evil men--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we're rooting for the right team. But we're rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE, as their plan seems in jeopardy because of Kerr's imperialist meddling, and why else would we be watching if not to see Tate do evil stuff? And thanks to Kerr's tired grandstanding, Tate has barely any time to really radiate. And ditto INCUBUS: do we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Jesu, set my people iri....

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Waiting for Katelbach, Dorleac: CUL-DE-SAC

Long unavailable on DVD in the US, Roman Polanski's awe-inspiring CUL-DE-SAC (1966) is now on Netflix streaming, in a not-bad-looking transfer. So go there! I did and can now appreciate the wobbly genius of Catherine Deneuve's sister, Francois Dorleac, and the way this amazing film links the male posturing of KNIFE IN THE WATER with the cold-eyed sexual hysterics of REPULSION, and even connects with other films of the era, like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, SPIDER BABY, and L'AVENTURA, PERFORMANCE, and plays like Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT meets Strindberg's DANCE OF DEATH.

The plot line is more like a series of events that spiral in and out of control, making 'plot' per se merely something to confuse and bait the viewer with: Donald Pleasance is George, an artist who's had an apparent mid-life crisis, sold everything to buy an isolated castle fortress (where Sir Walter wrote: "Look there's his original quill!") and stock it with a much younger French bride, Teresa (Francois Dorleac). Depending on which one of them you ask, everything is fine until a desperate, wounded criminal, Richard (Lional Stander) breaks in to steal eggs and demand their help in rescuing his gut-shot partner, Albie (the able and Joyce-ish Jack McGowran).

Though the stage seems set for tense DESPERATE HOURS, KEY LARGO, HE RAN ALL THE WAY, or PETRIFIED FOREST-style tension, Polanski deliberately skews it, pretending like he's about to fall into gangster-noir cliche, then righting himself back up, and winking at us like we're nosy fellas. After dealing with endless unwelcome drop-in guests--including a very rotten child (the closest thing the film has to a true villain) and an aloof Jacquelin Bissett--George finds the relative humanity and grounded 'realness' of Brooklyn-accented yank thug Richard and pill-bottle glassed intellectual Albie almost a relief. By the end of the night, Richard has bonded, kinda, with both Teresa and George over over homemade vodka and it all begins to seem like a weird metaphor for western-allied relations in WW2 and one of those unhinged lower class invigorating the ennui-ridden jet set kind of thing, ala PERFORMANCE, THE CABLE GUY, RULES OF THE GAME, SWEPT AWAY...., or even BARTON FINK. the keen observations and brute good-nature of Richard make him less threatening, which only makes his outbursts of violence that much more traumatic and scary.

As with so many of his 60's films, Polanski seems to draw on his experiences as a Jewish child struggling for survival in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation. He makes use of his first-hand witnessing of true inhumanity to man, and where other directors would speed up and simplify -- good guys vs. bad, winning vs. losing--as the narrative coheres, Polanski slows down and muddies the water. At which point do hostages become complicit? Can contact with gangsters help a 'civilized' man finally shed his veneer and start throwing out unwanted guests like a rabid maniac? Mmmmaybe.

With its groovy Ronald Stein-ish score (attributed to Komeda), the CUL DE SAC vibe recalls the uneasy luncheon centerpiece in Russ Meyer's masterpiece, FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL! or the arrival of unwanted guests in Jack Hill's 1968 cult classic SPIDER BABY. KNIFE IN THE WATER devotees will recognize, as will REPULSION fans, the ease with which Polanski dispenses with a singular point of view or any 'reliable' perspective of reality, removing any indication that any one character is 'right' in the perception of events over any other, no matter how warped.

Then there's the tale of two sisters: As opposed to Catherine Deneuve, who allows us to gaze lengthily at her spider-watching-the-fly features in Polanski's REPULSION, her sister Dorleac is always in motion, long lovely Francois Hardy hair in face, dark rings around her eyes hinting at little sleep, less sanity, probably drugs, to the point where it's hard to get a full beam on her features. This is not meant as a critique, merely an observation that puts her in the same warper class as Anita Pallenberg in PERFORMANCE, who also plays a crazy cross-dressing hermit's companion and nutball butterfly of shifting allegiances and facial features. (Check here for my 'many faces of Pallenberg' post)

Though both Dorleac and Pleasance are fine and even have subtle but real rapport, the true stand-out in the film is gangster character actor Lionel Stander. His big pug-ugly mug and gravely voice belie a great charm (he was the kindly bartender in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) and its heartwarming to see him get to 'steal' a whole movie. Stander was one of those unlucky victims of the blacklist, which probably explains his presence in so many European films in the 1950's through 70's (such as this one). Luckily he came back to the U.S. once the hysteria died down, and became memorable for his role in the long-lived Hart to Hart TV series.  Huge and menacing but comic and jovial in a salt-of-the-earth fashion, with that awesome gravel truck voice, Stander is heavy as a chunk of lead but light on his feet as a feather, able to go from menacing to sweet and good-natured on 1/19 of a dime.

As the film progresses, Richard develops a fine, borderline respectful rapport/borderline misogynist rapport with the equally mercurial Teresa: she brings him a vodka after his partner dies, but then later a hotfoot while he's napping in the sun ("that's called a bicycle!") and he responds by whipping her with his belt (!) then punching her in the side of the head ("that's called a 'klomp'!) Clearly, such kinky discipline is not something George would ever muster, so, like the love triangle of KNIFE and the real and imagined rapist/suitors that come to call and get dispatched in REPULSION, it becomes very difficult (intentionally one presumes) to chalk out a line between what goes 'too far' in trying to appease the contrary aspects of feminine sexual desire: women want to be dominated, possessed utterly, ravished, but only when, where and with whom their whim dictates.

Men struggle with this all the time: when does Fabio-style ravishing become sexual assault? Do women really 'need' to get slapped or choked once in awhile or is it just the fantasy, some genetic memory going back thousands of years into the past, grappling the same slippery slope by which Stockholm syndrome helped ensure the survival of her DNA, via her ancient relative becoming wife to the man who's tribe overrode her village and killed her previous husband? Does this all stem (for Polanski) from the Nazis, the way, say, 95% of pedophiles were themselves abused as children? Or is that just Polanski's deep-seated (as some claim, re: his rape charges) misogyny and ambivalence? To that, of course, it's wise to defer to Paglia-versed female film critics, like Kim Morgan:

...stuck in the house like a more spirited, extra primal Virgin Suicide sister, (Teresa) engages in childlike activities to amuse herself. She tears around the house barefoot, applies exaggerated eyeliner (or helps her husband with his), messes with rifles and, the best, most hilarious, lights a sleeping Stander's feet on fire with burning pieces of newspaper between his toes ("It's called a bicycle" she taunts). Oh...you just don't do that to Lionel Stander. Or perhaps, you do. Between these two mismatched misfits, it's disarmingly sexy. These characters don't establish things like "safe" words nor do they understand the concept of such a thing, so the perversity, stark beauty, the isolation, the bleakness, the menacing sexuality and the insanity make the whole experience a strangely good time.

In addition to raising chickens for their eggs, Teresa makes her own vodka, and proceeds to get both men drunk later that night and into the morning. This very strong alcohol serves to utterly confound all sense of allegiance and purpose (just like real life!) and soon George and Richard are bonding, then fighting again, then rambling off in their own directions. The feeling that this is all happening in real, linear time over the course of a night and into the dawn is awesome. A true genius in both extending and collapsing linear time, Polanski scores big on CUL-DE-SAC, or maybe I just love films where characters drink and party past sunrise, or that the photography is black and white and the music slinky jazz with lots of bass and funky sax. Oh and there's smoking! How retro! Who in 1966 could have imagined that in just 40 years booze, blonde ambivalence, psychosexual sadism, and cigarettes would one day be considered 'old-timey'?

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Hallowed be thy Shakes: The 3 Macbeths

Shakespeare's Macbeth is super psychedelic Halloweenish expat hallucidoses. It's got witches! It's got real Hunter S. Thompson-esque fear and loathing. It's the thriller from Scotland's Hillas and there's three great film versions by three titans of cinema - Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Akira Kurosawa.

A tale of woe, blind ambition, remorse, hallucinations, drinking, wife-on-husband nagging, archetypal psychology (Lady Macbeth is a great paranoid/inner critic anima), ghosts, floating daggers, cold-blooded regicide, Macbeth captures the 'wait until your dad gets home' dread, that feeling of coming out of two day black-out alone in bed with one shoe still on, and your girl asleep on the fold-out in the living room and there's magic marker all over your face, and, consumed by bottomless regret, you reach for the one friend still with you in the universe, that half-empty whiskey bottle under the bed. And yeah, and the play itself is cursed! Norotious for wreaking havoc on its cast and crew, Macbeth carries a RING-style meta aftershock. Those damned witches all but call you on the phone after the final curtain and let you know it's time to meet your Banquo.

Lady Macbeth and Mr. Macbeth also happen to have one of the most fucked up yet strangely beautiful romances in all Shakespeare, the one perhaps most like the real evil parents we all know, the dysfunctional libertines who flicker to life only when pondering murder on behalf of corporate advancement. Macbeth sends a message on ahead to his lady, alerting her to the the witches' freaky prophecy and he barely gets off his horse and kisses her hello before they're conspiring in hushed whispers like kids on Christmas eve. Maybe their sex life isn't so hot. That would explain her cold insistence that she'd smash her own baby against a rock before letting her man chicken out.

Say what you will about that kind of attitude, it beats mopey Hamlet's, or self-loathing Othello's. From evil to guilt to tumbling madly into the abyss, Lady Macbeth and her man never waiver in their devotion to each other, even if they may hesitate before their nasty deed or regret it after. Wracked by guilt, paranoia and regret as they both are, they never rat each other out, nor blame each other, but when the jig is up, each face their own demise with brave and wild-eyed willingness.  In short, they're the UK's first Syd and Nancy!

There's three really stellar Macbeths in cinema thus far: Orson Welles' Republic studio-bound western-on-acid watching IVAN THE TERRIBLE version from 1948, which is my favorite, even though it's nowhere near as good as the other two: Polanski's 1971 naturalistic sex and gore and pretty people version and Akira Kurosawas's heavy yet delightfully weird THRONE OF BLOOD (1957).


Even if  the whole butoh theater thing is not new to you, BLOOD's sheer ghostly otherness puts you in a high art trance, occurring mostly in wooden box rooms and across terrifyingly strange landscapes of volcanic ash, it's Kurosawa's great triumph that his windblown images resonate straight through all their age and culture barriers like a sword through a paper walls. Toshiro Mifune in Satanic beard and crazy black hat, was born to look stricken by ghosts and guilt. I love how he stands there in these wacky butoh poses, his eyes bugging out, his crazy mascara eyes alight with that 'holy shit' waking up from a three-day black-out expression.  We can read every thought that passes across his brow from 30 yards away. Meanwhile, Kurosawa is artfully arranging his shot like a moody, foggy, rock garden.

Derek Malcom at the Guardian on THRONE OF BLOOD: 

"It was, for what it's worth, TS Eliot's favourite film. The drama is presented with stark economy, its words subservient to the slow exposition of its plot, and the characterization admittedly less subtle than Shakespeare's. But I doubt the Bard would have turned in his grave. Kurosawa's parallel eloquence matches Shakespeare's so completely that it even outshines that of Verdi's musical version."

So I love THRONE OF BLOOD, but wish the English version had kept the original title "Spiderweb Castle." I probably would have seen it sooner, imagining spider rampages. As it is I've grown comfortable with Orson Welles version and that's surely my favorite. I dream of being able to go back in time and see his Voodoo stage version of the 1930s that made him a star in Harlem. But he didn't star in that production, and if e'er an Illinois ham war born to play Macbeth, drunkenly unspooling vast gusts of Shakespearean wind, Welles war.

The main set for Welles' version, a mishmash of found objects from Republic's western scenery department, consists of the side of a rocky cliff with trails for the horses propped up by columns,  like some Escheresque mind trap. Welles' sweaty face foregrounded against the processionals of horses makes them drip like ghost cops from a SHOCK CORRIDOR dream sequence drainpipe. Dig this perceptive piece from a professor named KJ:

Part of its mastery is its use of voiceover for most of the speech. That, combined with Welles' magnificent camera work (including angles, shadows, and focus—or out-of-focus—effects) give us a Macbeth who is more disoriented than evil. Welles seems to have taken Macbeth's inability to sleep and extended it into all aspects of the character. At first, he appears to be playing Macbeth drunk. Upon consideration, he's playing Macbeth as sleep-deprived. As a college teacher, I recognize this as method acting worth of Stanislavski himself!

Polanski's is great but I need to see it again. I've seen Orson's version probably twenty times. Over and over again once while convulsing alone in my apartment in November 1998 after an alcoholic relapse. It's also the closest Orson got to making a horror movie. But Polanski made a horror movie or two before doing his Macbeth, so there's a kind of crossroads of Polanski themes a lurking: the madness of beautiful women (Repulsion); the meta connection to brutal, sudden violence ala Manson and the Nazis; and the all-consuming horror... of the elderly. (Rosemary's Baby).

Suffice it to say, Lady MacBeth (Francesca Annis) in the Polanski is a hottie, unlike the Macbeth of either of the other films, and the witches number in the dozens and are naked and kinky and only about half are old like a Castavet. Everyone else is young and pretty and the bloodlust that wells up in the breast of our MacBeth (Jon Finch) seems more a madness born of Apollonian narcissism and flipside paranoia rather than sleep deprivation or, in the Kurosawa case, supernatural fatalism and schizophrenia. Take your pick, or pick 'em all, you can't go wrong. Just kill the king... when I draw the Queen of Hearts, my dear breast-nursed serpent. There is no cooler name to say while drunk than... Banquo.

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