Tick-Tock Momentum: PHANTASM (1979)

Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing, originally created in westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours to the late afternoon before the climactic anticipatory moment that night, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness. (Named from the Silence of the Lambs quote, "Pity about poor Catherine, though. Tick-Tock")

Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the age of drive-in 70s-80s to resonate to the setting sun's weird power, the anticipation of scares, and of being able to say you'd seen it. Parents opening their coolers of beer and lawn chairs as the sun's last rays streaked away over head; shaky summaries of other horror movies whispered about by the swing set; the unsurmountable escape wall of white screen overhead, a magnet for the white of our eyes; the booming dim echo of the speakerboxes. A child's imagination can be more real, more vivid, than an adult's reality, especially if that child grows up before cell phones or VCRs. The films of the drive-in era seemed to understand this, to know their stories would be embellished a thousandfold as recess gossip, so the special effects needed only suggest things. We filled in the blanks and in the process merged them into our own nightmares. Such a movie was Phantasm; no one had seen it, but none of us could stop talking about how scary it was.

Ruscha gets it

Anyway, we had seen the trailer.


I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci fi fan reproabates -- the ones like me, who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at E.T. 

Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli made his own tale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace and garage lab goo and gore than either. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. Here children run, hide, and fire shotguns through the sun roof of their older brother's Barracuda, and wonder about where the adults are. The weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement makes a fine metaphor for not just where people go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. We dread having to get a job out there in that mysterious void, the way an old person dreads death, a slow but inexorable escalator into the abyss. And in its way, death is no more or less permanent or terrifying in its uncertainty than the first day of employment.

In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility and being faced with inescapable due dates with destiny. But in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, and felt exposed to the dangers around us, but it made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns the way priests clutch crosses in the thick of an exorcism. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares! Kids are already scared, if they have any brains. Shit is scary out there. Spooky movies just remind them to stay on their guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick them into slackening their grip.  Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details, and we knew nothing was ever as safe as it seems.

Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air.

In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states. 

A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does achieve all on his own is the way he removes any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' He's not just sticking this references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments; Coscarelli's mythos is more paranormally cohesive than any of his predecessors' and more brave. They don't dare answer the big, final curtain question, the one children ask and adults never answer.

Coscarelli answers it, and he goes all the way.

Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after kills foes of various sizes. Quips were stale by the later films, but Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

Phantasm would be too wild and weird to truly scare like Halloween were it not for Coscarelli's absorption of Carpenter's method as opposed to his madness. They both are auteurs able to understand what 95% of horror filmmakers never do, how to create the sense of something being at stake, which most filmmakers presume means flashbacks, boring breakfasts with the cliche collection of family, etc. Coscarelli and Carpenter know that we need to see whole uninterrupted minutes elapse in their presence, to synchronize ourselves with their rhythms, rather than jumping around in eight different directions like so many horror movies today. No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens. Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house once it's free free of parents (with Hill taking the time to provide accurate, real life girl dialogue) at which time, checking in on the phone with each other-- that's the tick-tock momentum. Imagine how much less scary it would be if they showed other random people getting knocked off, stressing the blood and body count over character... then you'd have crap like Halloweens 2-21.

Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need one since nature has menstruation to traumatize them with, tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, hazing. But in the 70s our archaic need for initiation was gratified by the dread associated with our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Nowadays nothing can scare kids except absence.

But in the window right before then, just knowing  hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop dread in our spines.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much and our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange, and seeing the violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])

So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism to the arrival of video rentals. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation need that's stifling your soul; there's no ceremony to mark your courage. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of.

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 

Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars.

To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any John Williams-ish overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything adulthood has to offer.

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NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up. 
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)

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"I'm not afraid to die..." Tony Scott and Dangerous Women

The news of Tony Scott's unfortunate death, which floored all fans of ballsy film, came this Monday afternoon when I was already moping to my saddest Spotfiy mix at work, mulling over the last full season of our old Mayan calendar existence... to this I easily added morning for the first fallen soldier in the first day of fall, Awash with all the sad chicks in my headphones, I knew I needed to revisit DOMINO (2003) when I got home. It may seem an odd choice from his impressive repertoire, but I think it's his most personal film, almost a righting of the wrongs of one of his first films, THE HUNGER, from 20 years prior (1).

Scott's films tended to be both overrated and underrated in equal measure, at the same time. Like his older brother Ridley, he's a master of light and sound who'll go the extra distance for just the right shot, and that's not always a good thing.  Often self-hamstrung by second-guessing and over-editing, each has a style that indicates roots of insecurity and the sinking feeling they get lost in possibilities and completely lose sight of what their original vision was in the first place. That said, Tony's films deliver consistently and he leaves behind a legacy of beautiful and true moments in film even if the films around them didn't completely hang together. He was a courtier of reckless abandon in life and in cinema, like John Huston, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, and almost no one else. It's rarefied company, and he deserves his place among them.

Perhaps he's right now up in the crazy clouds, carousing with the real-life Domino Harvey, who died at 35 of a possible drug overdose (ruled as heart attack) the year their film was released. Maybe she's waiting at the bottom of the ocean (in my conception of the afterlife, the bottom of the ocean and the highest clouds are on the same level), with a devil's bounty hunter badge for him. If you ever see him in the DVD extras to his films he always seems like he's got one eye on the exit or the horizon, half-fully engaged (if it's possible, and with him I think it was), half recoiling from the acres of hangers-on and crew and cast all wanting something from him all the time, always talking about, and filming films about, ducking off into the sunrise with nothing but a gun, a suitcase of money, and a Hawksian woman. If you have the gun and the Hawksian girl, why do you even need to make a movie? Because he still can't get away from himself, except by working.

It's important the girl is the right girl and is not afraid to wear lots of black eyeliner or kill a man execution-style. They mustn't preach anti-gun violence / non-smoking / condom-conscious moral reform code or credo as so many A-list stars do in their smoke-free films. Scott never bowed to the PC reformers: in his films everyone smoked, because he liked to film the way sunlight through half-open blinds and cigarette smoke intermingle, and he knew the profound bond created by sharing cigarettes, and that they're cool regardless of killing people, and if you thought it was wrong to smoke indoors on a film set, for the health of the crew and the easily influenced kids watching at home, then go fuck yourself. Art with Scott bowed not to PC thuggery. Words can't express how rare or wondrous that attitude is in a land where everyone talks about being bad and subversive while having fainting spells and calling their lawyers if the road takes them even remotely close something like a genuine edge.

A small insufficient tribute, here are three of Scott's dangerous women, in reverse chronological order:

Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey - DOMINO (2003)
You can badmouth Tony Scott but if you do, and someone bashes a high contrast emerald beer bottle over your head, DOMINO is the proof you had it coming and that a lot of punchy fashion models might be healthier mentally if able to work bounty hunter jobs instead of just drug habits. Knightley is in good company with Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez as bounty hunters scrounging around L.A. All three have no problem being balls-to-the-wall badass and Tony Scott takes every opportunity to bash and savage the whinin' boys of the Hollywood industry when these bounty hunters get their option picked up. Knightley is so good that when she says "I'm not afraid to die," you believe her. It's not just idle MTV boasting.

Even if you've seen it and it just gave you a headache, watch it again, and then again, and you'll still be soaking up the details. Maybe Domino doesn't actually kill anyone (that I recall) but she does break an actor's nose just 'cuz he's a douche and deserves it and maybe the big mob stand-off climax seems like cliched overkill and much too similar to Scott's earlier TRUE ROMANCE but you can bet he tried the script and plot a dozen different ways before realizing this was the best and most cinematic way to go, and was full well aware of its derivative Hong Kong-ishness and it being ultimately unlike the real Domino, but as she says in the film, if she told us the full truth it would have to be sanitized so she wouldn't go to jail or have mobsters on her ass, and Scott knew it would be better to just lie bigger than truth smaller.

And anyway, they do way too much mescaline very convincingly. That forgives a lot, in the Acidemic lawbook.

Plus, Knightley's white satin beauty and adamantium razor cheekbone toughness is backed up by a strange and effective roster of side players: Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Tom Waits, Mena Suvari, Macy Gray, Jacqueline Bissett, Dabney Coleman and Lucy Liu. Even against all these hard hitters, Kierra kills it.

Patricia Arquette as Alabama - TRUE ROMANCE (1993)
It's both hard and too easy to dig up misogynistic subtext in Tony Scott's films, but he loves showing super strong women who love their man and aren't disgusted if he still reads comic books, stays indoors watching kung fu on a sunny day, and kills people.

An example would be the way Alabama finds Christian Slater's murder of her pimp incredibly romantic... when we in the audience and Slater, like any PC-era antihero, are expecting a long moral harangue about the wrongness of violence, like Liz Hurley might lecture Austin Powers on safe sex, or John Connor his Terminator about "you can't just go around killing people." And we love the way Alabama faces off against hulking mob goon (the future Tony Soprano) in a fearless deadpan. Letting her bag of womanly tricks and feints run empty with a chuckle; mixing coy laughter and sudden, brutal, outside-the-box retaliations; it's a triumphant bit of acting and a ballsy move on the part of the director to film it so artfully and savagely.

I personally like TRUE a lot better than QT's directorial debut, RESERVOIR DOGS, which gets better as it goes along but has a painfully overwrought beginning (after the awesome diner scene) with much too much of Tim Roth yelling in pain like a little punter and fake blood and monotonous grey concrete decor. Alabama is ten times tougher than the whole damn lot of those dudes, save, naturally Lawrence Tierney; you can imagine her getting gut shot and just laughing about it while never trying to deny her mortal terror. That sort of chutzpah we really don't see again until Daniel Craig finds a way to laugh uproariously through his ball torture in CASINO ROYALE. Scott saw that women had to be tougher and stronger than men every day, and loved them for it, as we love them always now through his eyes.

NOTES:
1. The Hunger- a postscript, 8-13 - this was just on TCM - it's pretty upsetting because parts are amazing, especially everything with David Bowie, who modulates his rapid aging so superbly you forget what age he even is. Deneuve is also superb but Scott's vision really fails him, not least because the next lover Deneuve chooses is Susan Sarandon, a bad choice as she is in full moral piety mode, sabotaging the whole damn thing because she objects to killing people three times a week for the next 300 years, and as if the whole 'bad faith' angle wasn't bad enough (it's sunk better films than this: Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys) Scott cranks up the jump cuts back and forth across time and space so now you can't even kill a person without intercutting ceiling fans, Bauhaus videos, and a crazy baboon. Good lord Tony, why make a lesbian vampire film just suck the fun out? 

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DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) Twilight of the Betamax

Halloween is heating up down at Acidemic. As our mangy staff prepares to move to Park Slope Brooklyn before the zombies reach 14th St., now, more than ever, we need to hold onto the classics. If you had to take only one horror DVD with you to your new pad, leaving the rest to fall into the hands of the undead hordes, would there be any other logical choice than DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)?

An artistic peak in the midnight movie genre, it's the crossroads of horror cinema, the end of ends, a work of superb apocalyptic acumen that just gets better and better with repeat viewings. Not only does it metatextually foreshadow the death knell of the small town art houses and drive-ins (where such a film was meant to be be seen), it announces the rise of mall multiplex and the end of 'live' entertainment altogether. 

Zombies have become the cultural touchstone of the 21st century, just as, thanks to expired copyrights, anyone can make a film based on Poe, Shelly or Stoker, or Romero -- anyone with a pint of Ben Nye's mint flavored stage blood can make a movie about the rising of the dead from their graves to eat the flesh of the living. This, as it turns out, is a very good thing. The undead seem to bring out the best in us. They remind us that life is a day-to-day struggle; they force us to remember our countless previous lifetimes as hunted prey-- gazelles, rabbits, little fishes--forever on the run from hungry predators; they force us to confront our mortality by removing "the dubious comforts that a funeral service may provide."

Unlike other threats, such as sharks, the cool thing with zombies is they cannot be escaped --they are the social order with its mask off, as inseparable from our bodies as our own organs. Sooner or later you're bound to slip, get careless, get bitten, die, come back. You can let go of the idea of reaching old age, no worries about retirement, and providing for future generations, and taxes. Freed from the restraints and castrations of the now obliterated social order, citizens are forced to prioritize and move fully into the moment.

We all have that 'desert island disc' fantasy if we're the collector types, and the terrors of the undead help us to 'let go' of our burdensome collections. As I pack box after box of books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, VHS, ETC., for my Brooklyn move, I dream of civilization collapsing so I can just grab my laptop, DAWN and of course, Electric Ladyland, oh wait, and... no way, I need to bring all this... and that.. and then CHOMP you hesitated at the shelf of favorites, and now you are no more.

The opening scene with Gaylen Ross holding her head against a beautiful dark reddish orange soundproofing studio wall carpet (top) is my favorite opening of all horror - she looks like she's wrapped up in a Dario Argento wall blanket, waking up from SUSPIRIA and already thinking about the hands coming out of the wall in Romero's third entry, DAY OF THE DEAD (1984). I love how civilization's collapse is so neatly depicted in the way the TV crew on the local live 'black' talk show she's producing gradually abandon ship and flip off their progressively more annoying and frenzied station manager. I love the way the host tries to accuse the white government representative of racism in association with mandates about disposing of dead bodies. We see all the kernels of what's going to bring us down and its okay because we realize maybe there was no 'us' to begin with. The ones who survive are those who can look out for themselves and maybe the ones around them--those who aren't panicking and acting like brats--and can let go of all the rest of the 'humanitarian' concerns, can abandon all hope of any reliable bastion of military protection, as each sanctuary falls before the name of the town even finishes scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

William S. Burroughs had an analogy for it, that of holding onto the string of a helium balloon that suddenly starts lifting you in the air. Are you the type to let go of the string right away--while it's 'hot' so to speak--or are you the type to instinctively hang on until you're so high up in the air you can no longer let go without falling to your death? Some people can't let go of their identity within the social order, can't drop their whole worldview and social position on a dime and just flee to the hills, and those are the ones that get eaten.  It's all summed up in the way the distraught girlfriend can't accept her man is a zombie (below) during the projects section, even as he's biting her shoulder off. That's America! Its shoulder being chewed off by corporate-controlled government, still munching even as the whole shithouse goes up in oily flames... all right!

When the four essential cast members get off the ground and away, the film becomes a consumerist fantasia, depicting conspicuous consumption not unlike pre-revolutionary France, with the humans standing in as royalty, enjoying all the luxuries suburban America has to offer, while outside, the unwashed (or in this case, undead) masses clamor hungrily at the gates.

While this sociological statement was intentional, the film’s equally trenchant relevance to film history could not have been, for Romero couldn’t have guessed the extent to which secular iconoclasm and religious/cultural disparity (as reflected in the opening SWAT scenes) would be ground down to suburban mush, made tasteless to as not offend the masses’ palate. In other words, movies like DAWN OF THE DEAD would soon no longer be able to operate like carny sideshows, moving from town to town, outside the constraints of standard cinema distribution patterns, unhindered by television's sitcom groupthink censor rulebook, but would now be bound to 'up the ante,' bidden find ever-new way to shock, to cater to the deadening of the senses brought about by the sudden surge of sex and violence coming into the American household with the arrival of cable and home video.

To flashback, 1979 was a time when cities like Pittsburgh or Philadelphia and especially New York City, housed specialty theaters--often full of great old landmark-style 20's art deco theaters gone to crumling, with moldy red velvet curtains, listing balconies, drafts and sticky, warped floors--that would show independently-made genre films. Outside the city limits, the small town residents would flock to the drive ins to see triple bills that might start with something new and studio-backed, then gradually lean back into the really out-there independents. A film like DAWN or THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE could play for years this way on a handful of constantly circulating prints, starting as the first film on the bill and gradually working its way back to the third, in a now-tattered version with scenes missing and thick splices.  In their spinning round film cans, the movies rolled across the country, gradually getting chewed up by backwoods projectors.

Nowadays it’s impossible to imagine zombies ever not eating the flesh of the living, yet this trait originated with Romero’s first in the series, shot in areas outside Pittsburgh, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, in 1967. That film put Romero on the map and helped DAWN gain a decent budget, courtesy producer Dario Argento, who was a big fan of the film and used the bundle he made with SUSPIRIA (1977) to back DAWN, even loaning out his SUSPIRIA house band, Goblin, for the score.

But suddenly and significantly, just as NIGHT began it, DAWN came along and symbolically ended it. VCRs and cable TV took over and suddenly you could get "the little somethin' that ya can't get at home" (1)... at home.

Before the VCR/cable revolution, DAWN, which was rated X, had been almost impossible for anyone under 18 to see in the theaters, but two years later and all you needed was your parent's membership card and you were good to go. Parental ratings concerns were shunted aside by the sheer novelty of it all, the mad headlong stampede by teens and adults on all the lurid stuff they never wanted to risk getting their car stolen to see on the big screen in the bad neighborhood crumbling theater. Cannibalism, zombies and violence were suddenly spilling into family living rooms. Frankly, the 1970s permissiveness was still enough in effect that no one thought twice about watching X-rated films with the whole family and if we were traumatized it seemed un-hip to admit it. The first movie I ever rented at 13 or 14 or so: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971, below), it was my first rated X.

I was cured, all right!

 

The problem was, of course, that in the original exploitative use of it all, gore and sex was meant more as an enticement to the theater, a scary sell -- something you'd never seen before and was bound to traumatize the hell out of you -- it took some courage to attend, like going on a roller coaster, or skydiving. And as you weren't able to pause and freeze frame on an exploding head or an alien bursting out of John Hurt's chest, and were out with an audience who were also wincing and gasping it became more frightening each time you remembered it or told your friends about it. Having gone to see CARRIE or SUSPIRIA or THE OMEN was a marker of bravery and we heard willingly of the tale. But with home video, 'forbidden violence' lost a lot of its terrifying mystique and mythological cachet. Now you didn't get to imagine the film in your head while being told the entire story by some kid at recess. Now the kid just tapes it for you, and rather than reeling with a brain ablaze from campfire ghost primordial goosebumps, you came away with a headache from the tracking issues of his second generation dupe.

It was a big fall from innocence, especially if you watched the wrong movie at the wrong time, unaware, unprepared, like I was when I saw the end of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977), one day on cable, thinking it was ANNIE HALL, when it showed up unannounced on the Movie Channel one Sunday afternoon, well, I watched it. By myself. At 13. If you can be molested through the movies, GOODBAR molested me that day. And of course, there's no one to arrest when it's only a movie. And as far as horror films go, GOODBAR has no mythical cachet, no warning for that traumatic, brutal, insane ending. It's too mature, too much a women's lib commentary singles bar adult anti-feminist moralizing-disguised-as-artsy drama picture to ever be considered a horror film. Most of it is a single's bar tale, there's no mention in most descriptions of the horrifying end. In short, its less an initiation into adulthood and more a violation, a rape of the soul which you can't tell anyone about because no one understands and so rather then kick you into adulthood like DAWN might, it freezes you in the amber of final girl sexophobia. The other kids are all going to get killed out there, and you'll be the last one left, clinging to your virginity like a thorny lifejacket. Meanwhile Tom Berenger is still free. But I'm still locked up in the strobe light hell that Richard Brooks and the Movie Channel put me in all those years ago.

 

Cable eventually reigned itself in, realized its soft-focus "aerobics" videos weren't helping anyone get fit, and the video rental outlets became stricter about renting hardcore XXX videos to minors, but before that all was put in place, in the early, early 1980s, things got really, really crazy on the TVs of America. And I can't help feeling this little bloody spike in the average American family's movie diet helped usher in the backlash of the Reagan era. It's as if all America suddenly realized its mid-life crisis manic elation was just a middle-aged country's foolishness, and thusly turned vindictive, disillusioned. We wanted to see all the sex and violence we had been missing, and suddenly we had seen enough, too much, and it kept coming.  It made us laugh at first, but slowly, over time and sequels, chilled us to the core, robbed our innocence and left us depressed and afraid to go outside at night, even to take the trash to the curb. 

We didn't learn the lesson the older countries like France and England had learned, which was that hot sex, gore, nudity and over-the-top violence lose their 'kick' very quickly; some things are better left unseen, imagined, and deferred, because sooner or later the zombie in the mirror beckons, and you start seeing monsters around every corner of your inner city eye. America's obsession with apocalypse is a mid-life crisis: cougars and Humberts desperate to shed their skin and start over, ageless, without all those ungrateful children to worry about, and provide for. Instead of carrying forth our glorious legacy, the little buggers stab moms and moms-to-be with trowels, and write "Piggies" on the wall in their blood, and watch movies like FACES OF DEATH and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. 

So in our haste to feign ambivalence, to ride the coaster of cine-trauma, we allowed our minds to be closed-off, faded, warped and jaded en masse. The country fell into a state of depressed, homogenized ennui. The only cure for this disaffection, naturally, was going to the mall. At least the mall gave you something to do, somewhere to go, and you didn't have to explain why you came there. All that mattered was that you needed... something... anything. Moms got outfits and fabric just to return later, just to have a reason to go back, to get out of the house and exchange a receipt with an information desk worker's sympathetic ear.

Thus it came to pass that 25 years or so later I saw the fourth in Romero's series, LAND OF THE DEAD (2005) at a Myrtle Beach mall multiplex on a rainy Sunday matinee. The theater was about half full, with glazed-eyed popcorn eaters age eight to eighty. When the gore and the ripping and the flesh eating began in earnest onscreen, the families around me flinched here and there, but no one emerged after the film looking shaken to the core. The old man in front of us, for example, was already complaining about missing the start of 60 Minutes as he and his wife shambled slowly toward the Exit. 

Twenty years ago and those same people would have freaked out, thrown up, been refused admittance due to being underage (no one under 18 was admitted to an X like DAWN, or even an X like CLOCKWORK or MIDNIGHT COWBOY). We were scared of even seeing gore, scared of watching bodies being ripped apart. It's not that the films bothered us so much, but we imagined the sick audiences who must 'get off' on them, the guy in a raincoat sitting behind us, staring at the back of our head like its a melon they very much want to explode and we locked our doors tight to keep out the misogynists and monsters who we were sure watched these films all the time and cheering the violation and suffering of women. Anyone who watches such trash and likes it must be evil. And since people liked them enough that so many of these films existed... we needed to hide.
 

If today we seem to be rapidly approaching capitalism’s zero saturation point, if man’s devouring of man seems soon to hand, perhaps we will know exactly whom to blame; and when we’re ready to wreak our vengeance we will all march on foot towards that giant box-like building that has destroyed our once free spirit, sucked every last drop of mystery out of life, made even old-fashioned malls outdated, devoured Main Street and now the world, and so down the endless parking lot plains to Wal-Mart we will shamble to eat the flesh of our oppressors and loot the stereo section for expensive blu-ray players that won't work since the electricity is long gone, the grid destroyed, the banks toppled. Until then, we can watch DAWN OF THE DEAD in any of its myriad fine versions, and see how it all began, in a single shopping mall at the beginning of the end of the world, when a few hearty souls took control, and fought the onslaught of American sameness... and lost. Go now, while you still can. Take only what you can handle, and leave only footprints... and place your shoes, your brains, and your tender, still-beating heart in the trash receptacles at each side of the doorway as you exit the theater. Wait for me on that bench while I return this scarf and then we're going home, to dinner, and Mike Wallace.. on 60 Minutes. And be grateful. There are starving children in India, and even some obese ones from Jersey, and they're right outside the door--clamoring, knocking and moaning like the damned--and asking if you want to come over and play Resident Evil. Don't go. 

NOTES
1) Tom Waits lyric from "Pasties and a G-String" - Small Change (Island Records)

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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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