Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 SHADES OF GREY, 9 1/2 WEEKS, EXIT TO EDEN, SECRETARY + SHE DEMONS, Franco, Bunuel, Josef von Sternberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Most fans of 50 Shades of Grey--the kinky BDSM bestseller by E.L. James--were wincing (and not in a good way) at last week's debut of the forthcoming film adaptation's conventional, fashion mag-slick trailer - "I didn't like it the the sixth time, when it was called 9 1/2 Weeks!" But no one asked the big question: What's wrong with cinema that it can't seem to capture the sickly turn-ons of a good bondage book? When I saw and heard the conventional sounding Edward of the piece, Mr. Grey (Jamie Dornan), the "masterful" captain of industry and 'wealthy, spontaneous, travel-minded' gentleman (the kind of man every girl with an online personal ad pines for --take it from me, who's lazy, poor, hates travel, and is too cheap to shop anywhere but H&M and Kohl's). I was glad to see he had one of those freaky reptilian-bird-alien-CGI-hybrid faces like old Bob Pattinson's, but his hair, suits, and voice, not to mention age, are as ROTM as a lawyer-cum-porn star in a 90s direct-to-cable office thriller.

There, there. There's always Wild Orchids 2.

Maybe no one now working today could have filled the Mr. Grey part with any degree of affect, except Harvey Keitel (the latter a prospect too odious for the producers to consider seriously, which is exactly why it would have been awesome). It also may have worked if Dornan kept his Irish accent, or wore his hair in a crazed Irish tousle to give himself the air of a coked-up Caligula, but there are just too many  young male models with nothing but gym muscles and hair gel by way of 'gravitas' pretending to be high-powered executives on network TV.  Dornan is beautiful but would he ever make it as a dom outside of a Westworld-style robo-fantasy? I know some girls who are or were dominatrixes for a living. They are terrifying.

And that's the problem with adaptations of bondage books in a nutshell. Shit's Freudian, it runs deep. Anger over one actor playing a character already cast in the mind of every turned-on broad in America is normal but sadomasochistic stuff is doubly difficult because what's so very erotic on the page becomes either too goofy, i.e. tame (Secretary) or too genuinely violent and disturbing (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).  Too much visual information (facial cues) lead us right out of the sadomasochistic spectator pleasure position, which short-circuits our higher mammalian complexes, recapturing the the age when we tattled constantly on our fellow children in hopes of witnessing their humiliation via their mom's wooden spoon or dad's belt (1). Ideally we evolve past this stage by around third or fourth grade. But on the printed page we can easily override the empathic response (as long as we know it's fiction and not some true crime novel) whereas onscreen our mammalian higher functioning kicks in --presuming we're not sociopaths or high on cocaine (2). Masochism may survive onto the big screen without much damage (as in the films of Josef von Sternberg or Luis Bunuel), but not in the form of traditional leather and lace scenes as books might describe.

According to Gaylyn Studlar, true masochism can only exist in dreams, conjured more out of a need to safely experience the abyss, or to trick out the satisfactory endorphin rush that surges to accommodate sudden pain (or the heroic measure of wasabi or hot sauce); it must be done person or in the mind where we can imagine a transformational ecstasy that ordinary movie watching doesn't accommodate. That's why for example the shocking Times Square marquee or the film capsule review might get our desire fired up but the actual film will never measure up; it's the difference between remembering your own crazy, erotic dream and hearing about someone else's.

There was a small, velvet-lined restaurant in NYC called La Nouvelle Justine (in the late 1990s) that offered a menu that included spanking hot young slaves or being spanked, and an overpriced chocolate mousse cake in shape of a spike heeled boot for parties of five or more. While tourists and bachelorettes snapped pictures and laughed in embarrassment, tame bondage rituals were enacted and pretty slaves marched back and forth, pretending to be thrilled at the prospect of their future lucrative punishments by the diners. We were there for my roommate's orgymongering sister's birthday, so we bought her a hot boy of her choosing to spank, knowing she was no slouch in this department. One light (for her) slap and he jumped up and ran away with a yelp; the bouncers came over to warn her to be gentle. Fuckin' midtown, man.

Hearing is believing (from top): Weekend, Persona

I was into bondage myself, off and on, for years, always more in theory than practice (losing my virginity to "Venus in Furs" helped), and generally turned off by any evidence of it onscreen (see above uncanny valley illus.) why, for example, so many Nerve profiles cite as their favorite sex scene Persona (1966), which has no sex scene at all. What it has a monologue, delivered in a flat, slightly ashamed voice.

As our French correspondent Severine notes: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic literature." But then the book sells, gets passed around at private working mom book clubs, and boom, best-seller, so then someone has to make a movie of it. The problem should have already been apparent to us back in the era of 9 1/2 Weeks (see top image), a 1986 film that had a lot of buzz, a bit like 50 Shades has now, and fooled people who saw it into forgetting they hated it. Part of a post-American Gigolo cocaine-modernist penthouse spandex-and wool socks aerobics sexual aesthetic that has not aged well except as camp (see also: The Hunger, Flashdance, Shiver, Last Seduction, Disclosure, Basic Instinct), 9 1/2 Weeks with hot young Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke (back when he was still pretty) engaged in all sorts of kinky shit with ice cubes and candle wax; it never drew much of a response other than titters at the college Quad when I saw it. Sure I was drunk at the time, and drunk college students in a large group are apt to jeer a terrible film like 9 1/2 Weeks, especially since there's always one or two girls (and Roger Ebert) who loooove it.

mens in black, blondes to the right: 9 1/2 Weeks (1986); Dangerous Game (1993)

Similarly, all that 'R' erotica stuff in the back row of Netflix and Amazon Prime, like Emmanuelle, Justine, or The Story of O is never sexy except in rare instances of almost incidental hotness and of worth only for their non-'erotic' elements --the zooms, the terrible fashions, the hilariously stilted artsy blocking; and sometimes we 'remember' them as hot, since remembering brings eventually us into the same zone as literature, or the dream. We live in an age of STDs like no one in the ancient 60s and 70s could have e'er envisioned; free love has been hidden away so that the jovial bacchanal of 70s XXX is replaced by condoms on gym-muscled dudes pumped with Viagara so a girl doesn't get a break; and stuff that moves off the lip of the familiar and seems genuinely dangerous-- such as the borderline misogynistic mental pummeling of Madonna in Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game (1993)--stirs our preliminary superegoic shock troops into inner-censorial unsexy PC knee-jerking.

While the trailer reminded me of Adran Lynne's 9 1/2 Weeks and its subsequent deluge of big budget late 80s-early 90s sex thrillers, the uproar reminded me of the last big author of sexy bondage and vampire love stories, Anne Rice, had a surprise S/M novel breakthrough akin to that of 50 Shades with her kinky 1985 novel, Exit to Eden. It was of course picked up by Hollywood, but for some reason they balked at its original conception and cast Dan Akroyd and Rosie O'Donnell in the leads as buddy cops, which made the book's fans feel like Jimmy Stewart when Midge shows him her self-portrait in Vertigo (1958)

Another entry in the mainstream bondage category on the camp side of the valley, Secretary (2002), fails in ways not quite as extreme: seeing Maggie Gyllenhaal walk around an office doing paperwork clamped into a black leather stock is funny, not sexy, but at least she herself is cute and her masochism properly recognized as preferable to self-cutting; her getting spanked for the first time by boss James Spader during office hours is the film's only sexy moment because it's unplanned (could easily win her a harassment lawsuit), dangerous (no safe word), and functional (he's correcting her typo); there is no safe word. But soon the typos are framed along the office corridors, and quirky paint schemes turn the legal office into some madcap Urban Outfitters showroom.

Succubus (1967)

In other words, mainstream directors can't do this stuff with a straight face, so they either have to sink into the softcore sanctimony or look farther, across the pond and back in time, and onto the Blue Underground and Severin DVD labels. and maverick auteurs like Jean Rollin, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jess Franco. The latter's Succubus (1967) is a fine example, for here the whole twice removed 'someone else's dream' nonstarter vibe is made active again through a triple reversal - an S/M performance in a film is tepid by nature but if she's killing them for real and no one in the audience knows, then a kind of mecha-medusa-mirroring occurs and the whole Antonioni signifier collapse thing leads us out of the Platonic cave altogether, like the jolt when Samara crawls out of the TV in The Ring.

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BUNUEL, VON STERNBERG

From top: She Demons; Bunuel directing La Belle du Jour

There are rare directors who manage to understand the 'someone else's dream' dilution and reverse it yet again, to take us all the way out of the dream within the movie and out of even our dream of reality and back into their 'privatized' space, like falling asleep and waking up as your own mother and finally knowing what she really thinks about us. Bunuel and von Sternberg bring us into our own psyches as viewers via recreations of the Freudian primal scene, and a grasp of the longing to return to the pre-Oedipal total reunion with the mother, with total and complete annihilation of self and free will, a submission and surrender that overloads the superego with feedback loops until it shatters, freeing our recessive psychic blocks, opening the cellar doors on our subconscious basement prisons and letting all the long-repressed memories and desires escape into the open air. Where of course, they vanish, over credits. But no one ever called them sexy.

This is where French theory comes into play, ala the concepts of masquerade and Deleuze's 'Becoming-Animal' - as in She Demons (1957, above), where castaways wander into a scene of beautiful blonde savages being whipped by Nazis. Our natural desire to help is tempered by the gun (phallic authority of the father) of the Nazi whipper and our possible misunderstanding of what's behind it all (as a child would misunderstand the primal scene as 'mother being hurt by father, the slap of body on thrusting body as spanking etc). In sum, when it is not 'supposed' to be erotic, not built up by smutty directors with kinky sex toys, the woman moaning in dubbed in pleasure or laughter or infantile squeals of pleasure, then and only then is it arousing --because it is so very wrong to be aroused. Because soon after the punishment, the woman reveals herself to have devolved into a gibbering devil, ala the Island of Lost Souls animal men.

Venus in furs 

It's to Von Sternberg and his Dietrich collaborations in the final analysis, though, to be seductive as well as masochistic. Bunuel is great but I never really feel the need to see most of his movies more than once whereas the JvS-Dietrichs improve and beguile more and more with each successive viewing. If the collective 'we' are to understand why the Grey book is so popular yet the film will suck so hard, it might be wise to join me IN THE REALMS OF PLEASURE: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic by Garylyn Studlar (Columbia Press, 1988):

"The fatalism of Von Sternberg's films is not simply an acceptance of death as an externally imposed inevitability but the expression of the masochistic urge toward death as a self-willed liberation. In choosing death, an illusionary triumph is created: the illusion of choice,"(48)

...masochisms obsession with death may be interpreted either as the expression of a universal instinctual urge or as the result of the masochistic wish for complete symbiosis with the mother and a return to nothingness,.... Eros is desexualized and resexualized; death becomes the ultimate fetish that fascinates with the promise of a mystical unity." (p. 123)

Only Bunuel and Von Sternberg every seemed to grasp this concept, and it's not for nothing for example that both adapted the same masochistic text, Pierre Louÿs "La femme et le pantin," or that two different actresses play the same character in Bunuel's version, That Obscure Object of Desire, the cocktease girl who continually manipulates the lead and denies him any form of sexual release, a bond she instinctively understands he needs and appreciates. As the rapper Scarface once said, "I'm done as soon as I bust me a nut," - well, some characters never want to be 'done' - it spoils the game, turns a long elaborate twisted ritual into a disappointingly short-lived gratification followed by shame and emptiness. The whole trick to getting what you want is to deliberately want to want rather than have and still want for wanting. Most tricks are part sleight-of-hand and part misdirection, but here misdirection is the whole trick. The slighted hands of the clock are frozen at bedtime, right before mom comes in to kiss you goodnight and turn out the lights. Maybe you never get the kiss, but the lights stay on forever. 

From top: Blonde Venus, That Obscure Object of Desire

FINALE:

 Don Pasquale hits closest to home...

I've never been a fan of The Devil is a Woman or the Bunuel version, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) but I respect them and I question my own hostile reaction, for the main character, an exploited masochist named Don Pasquale hits closest to home, reminding me of how a girl I loved as a ten year-old exploited my devotion by cheating at Monopoly, borrowing quarters, batting first in wiffle ball and then quitting when it was my turn, over and over. I learned my frickin' lesson, man. And I've always shied away from movies where everyone is money-grubbing like a third world tourist trapper, such as in von Sternberg's version. All the money and gifts are what Atwill stresses in his re-telling of his relationship with Concha (Marlene Dietrich), but plays down any sexual contact (this being the only post-code Dietrich/von Sternberg collaboration) that might or been not made, leaving us with a series of bilking, check-writing, cataloguing of goods, birds, food, baskets of goodies for the mother, and Dietrich with her hair up in baroque headdresses, even singing a merry peasant song about sons of bakers, and florists, 'and other things that aren't so sweet,' as if all attraction was measured in men lavishing gifts on her, and nothing else. It's dispiriting, and gradually we must question whether Atwill is emphasizing these things to Romero to ward him off because the Severin slot is taken and he'd rather not have his friend play 'The Greek' (or in this case, 'the cousin').

For the masochist in the end, the velvet cage is not reminiscent of prison but of infancy, the crib bars past which one cannot crawl in vain search for the mother. In both versions, Don Pasquale watches Carmela make love to the younger bullfighter through a cage which Studlar makes the point is a ground zero witness to a recreated primal scene, the bars ala the bars of the crib that prevents unobstructed maternal access and so triggers the primal scene's return in all its superego smashing, Thanatos-resurrecting glory. This obstruction is duplicated in the filmgoing experience, the frustration of the masochistic (as opposed to the sadistic male gaze described by Laura Mulvey)

oral phase cinema (boys to the left): from top: Blonde Venus, Obscure Object of Desire, Persona

Devil is a Woman

True masochism pre-dates the Oedipal complex, it moves towards total reunion or separation, peek-a-boo, as it were, of delayed polymorphous orgasm of the oral phase, the return to a total reunification with the mother and the annihilation of the self, Eros and Thanatos conjoined. Even without ruining a BDSM fantasy with comedians there's already something faintly ridiculous and sad about it onscreen, ala that night at La Nouvelle Justine, just bondage gear onscreen is kind of a joke. Play bondage in film is like fiction within fiction, a double negative, which may have some value as metatextual abstraction or intellectual discourse, which is why it's so beloved of French intellectuals like novelist/theorist Georges Bataille (Story of the Eye) and filmmaker/novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (or Lacan and Deleuze), but no matter how arty the lighting and fractured the text, the bondage and discipline stuff in Robbe-Grillet's films always looks a little sex shop goofy.

Gradiva (2006)

When we get similar themes in the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet, many of which are now on DVD, wherein rustic barns, thrift store period costumes, and brand spanking new spankers mix uneasily together to no real affect. Robbe's is an intellectual, take his word for it, and gets the whole Georges Bataille-Deleuze-Lacan thing, but in the end, it boils down to the same goofy handcuffs, provoking little more than boredom and vague feminist ire. Read a book, Alain! And ideally make that book Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm of Pleasure. You're probably smart enough to understand it. That's called flattery, you craven dog!

NOTES:

1. Though I hear that's not done these days by parents, kids certainly can imagine being abducted thanks to nonstop media hysteria. And I'd add that when the 'child is being beaten' frisson is taken out of the parental sphere, dad loses 90% of his authority (a good dad shouldn't need to punish, but without the threat what power does he have? Now the power is reversed, rather than the kid scared of the dad spanking, the dad is scared of the kid saying he was spanked, leading to arrests and child services). This accounts, in my mind, for the at least part of the shift of the father's role in the house from authoritarian top dog to low dog whipping boy. 
2. When I was studying to be a drug counselor I learned it's common for cocaine abusers to order S/M porn and bondage gear online in the middle of the night during a coke binge, forget all about, then be appalled when it comes in the mail. It's often a factor in what compels them to seek treatment.

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Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young Austrian noble (Dietrich, in curls) is contrasted with the DeMille-level lurid tortures of the Proletariat at the hands of the Cossacks. The handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge suddenly materializes like a tall shadow person with sable highlights in the stuffy Prussian parlor of Catherine's mother, and things start looking up, but the pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies and airless claustrophobia is a long time going. One unbearable matriarch after another pokes and prods Dietrich like a piece of meat at the butcher's until your feminist blood is curdling, and it's only after Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow that we feel we can start to soak up the glories of the snow and the richly photographed sable wraps. But Moscow is just more poking, at the hands of the reigning queen in Russia, a perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser overplaying to near Shelly Winters-ish levels), and her no-good nephew Peter (Sam Jaffe), the half-wit prince and Catherine's betrothed, prefers prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland rather than bedding his young wife. She's fine with that, but the dowager is ranting about needing a male offspring out of her, in a way that makes Bette Davis' mom in Now Voyager seem a model of compassion.

Well, if Peter won't bed her, she better find someone who can, fast, and keep it on the DL. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds past the camera (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras"),  intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit"), drab nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, interminable liturgies droned in candle-lit churches, endless ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, stuffy, boring film that ever included shots of topless women being flogged and branded.

That said, if you're in the right frame of mind (the kind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin) you can forgive Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and dig how Peter's drilling holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky reflects  JVS' own predilection for the peeping camera, and sponge up the aesthetic gloom overkill and be able to just lean back and watch Dietrich age quicker than her character does over the course of the film thanks to (based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry) the cruelty inflicted on his icy star.

LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigar-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed sewing circle ringleader Mercedes De Acosta (lover of Garbo). It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives new inmate Barbara Stanwyck and though she never came out of the closet it's interesting to find Babs semi-mocking a (possible) fellow sewing circle sister onscreen. But at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors and stern masseuses (such as a recently restored scene of one taking Cagney's measurements in PUBLIC ENEMY) were winked at but never bullied, which is at least more than they'd get after the code, when they'd have to just disappear, deep back into the closet.

Mercedes De Acosta - right / Dyke in LADIES - left

The bulk of the film deals with a love affair between gang moll Babs and moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster), the kind where each has to continually top the other in sacrifice and honesty. He gets her off after she's busted as a bank job accessory, so she confesses she was really guilty. He sends her to the joint, so she gets even by tearing up all his pleas to help her. Dan's terminal earnestness is all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters, but they give Stanwyck full license for two-fisted feminine shots at chin of the status quo, the kind of target Sharon Stone aimed for in Basic Instinct but never really shattered like Babs does here. The huge gaggle of female convicts are (a few exceptions aside) all friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave; hell, this women's jail seem almost like Vassar except. When Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.

THE BARBARIAN

1933 - **1/2
It’s one of those films that could only have been made in the pre-code era at MGM, the studio who had the hardest time being truly subversive and often wound up just kinky and deeply racist instead. Egyptian guide Emil (Ramon Navarro) begins the film saying a tearful good-bye to a rich white European tourist lady on the outgoing Cairo train, and afterwards affixes himself to a striking British socialite played by Myrna Loy. Naturally, it being MGM, miscegenation would be out of the question, except that --like all British socialites visiting Egypt who catch the eye of skulking Arabs--she has an Egyptian mother (or rather 'had' - they're always dead before the film starts, saving any alleged social discomfort with the all-white side of the family). In Egypt to visit her indefatigably British fiancee (Reginald Denny) and his unbearably controlling mater, she's blessed with the king of 'harrumph' - C. Aubrey Smith (lower left) as a more understanding pater. Clearly MGM is pointing towards two 1932 hits for its box office hopes ---Universal's THE MUMMY and Columbia's BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN. But it's still MGM and therefore falls woefully short of Paramount's surreal charms or Universal's lurid expressionism, even Columbia's humanist handball, even if the pyramids are superbly evoked and the whole scene mad with magic.

 Emil first worms his way into her flower-choked hotel room via offers of service as a guide, enduring the casual cruelties he's subjected to at the hands of the lordly British and then turning the tables. If you imagine what it would be like if MUMMY star Zita Johan went off into the MOROCCO desert to endure SWEPT AWAY-style whipping and dominance head games at the hands of General Yen, well you'll find the erotic Myrna Loy bathing scene to be approximately sexier than Claudette Colbert’s milk bath in SIGN OF THE CROSS, which if these things matter to you, is nowhere near as awesome as Maureen O’Sullivan's nude swimming in TARZAN AND HIS MATE. Frankly I’m ashamed of myself for knowing all this, and so is Ramon Navarro, or will be, once he’s caught by Myrna’s coterie of harrumphing Enlganders.

Erich taunts his wife with Adolphe's love letters

FRIENDS AND LOVERS

1931 - **

British officer Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as the other man who loves nymphomaniac Lily Damita in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga set partly in London, partly in Paris, partly in.... India, and always squarely on the MGM stage. The best parts are in the beginning with porcelain collector Erich Von Stroheim (as Damita's aesthete husband) lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort as one of his wife's lover caught with a lame alibi. It turns out Erich's habit is to blackmail his errant wife's many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence. She can be charming, but when she's not 'on' she radiates a restless peevishness, like she's been kept waiting all day and is tired of being prodded and mussed by the make-up lady. Nice legs, though. Too bad that fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier later tries to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings).

This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps everyone out on the curb after weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh wot? his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot familiar (for the era) triangle business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips and alleged sex appeal. Better we should have followed Erich von Stroheim's porcelain, to the floor in shards if needed!

THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

1932 - **1/2

Divorce, scandalous, risque and o-so progressive in and of itself, was still enough of a subject for a films back in 1932, even at the already risque and progressive Warner Brothers, so here's novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage. She wants to have a little fun in Paris first but secretly wants him to come out and pester her, presumably but Brent always presumes that is the case, which is one reason I dislike him. His whole attitude reflects the gateway rationalization of rapists. Meanwhile, as Chatterton talks on the phone from Paris, her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis tries to steal Julian away, but in a Midge kind of semi-joking manner that never works, until maybe the very end, (unless the man you're stealing is Frank Sinatra).

What's so fascinating this time around is the idea that ex-married couples can still be friends and look out for each other. Ruth's investment broker ex-husband starts losing his clients once he's seen snoozing the night away at ritzy clubs with his new, younger Paris Hilton-esque wife. So Chatterton comes home and throws her weight around to keep him afloat, rather than marrying the sappy and sacharine Brent, who's fond of purring bad lines like, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette?" like it's the cleverest string of words ever uttered.  Davis' dialogue is, on the other hand, pretty smart, and the issues of marriage and divorce are rather adultly presented. Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE) directs with plenty of that old WB pepper but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. No sooner has the bitchy new young wife announced on the drive home that she's pregnant but doesn't want to have the baby since it would ruin her figure and tie her down to some squawling brat, for example, she's instantly killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936), and I mean that as a compliment.

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Suspended Imagination: WAXWORKS and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER

Ernest Hemingway once defined cowardice as "the lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."  Ernest would have surely made it to the final round of any teenage horror movie, but in two post-modern miracles that came out in 1988, WAXWORK and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER, he would have maybe kicked ass via remembering that little adage. The lynch pin the Nightmare films hinges on the same return of the repressed--the unendurable imagination of what dying or unendurable pain might be like-- that causes cowardice, nightmares, and whether or not you can remain cool and control your reactions to an upsetting dream environment. Even when we 'wake up' inside our nightmare and try to fly or transpose the scene to a sunny beach we're not always successful at escaping our inner demon. It's a matter of admitting, perhaps, that the 'we' who is awake in the dream, the conscious ego, might not be the strongest 'voice' in the whole of our soul, which, after all, encompasses our waking, sleeping, even life-after-death personas. The real dude/dudette in charge may be someone else, some thing darker. We may be monsters dreaming we're final girls, or alcoholic writers .

The best line in The Dream Master exemplifies this: when Alice tries to deny Freddy is real, telling him defiantly: "I don't believe in you." "But I believe in you," Freddie counters, with guidance counselor seriousness. Yeah, maybe he doesn't even have to. Maybe he can just close his eyes and you dissolve.

A lot of directors of bad teenage horror films should study the moves and colors and music of the films of Argento, Fulci and Lenzi, i.e. be more Italian. It doesn't cost much more than the shitty American style. And that's what Renny Harlin clearly does for The Dream Master -goes Argento with grand bold reds, greens and blacks, 'fuck the dots' pacing, an Italian synthesizer Goblin-ish score, endless clever tracking shots that weave in and out of waking and dreams within a single take, surrealist disregard for gravity and the time/space continuum, a refusal to demarcate the line between the 'reality' of the waking moments and the 'fantasmatic' of their nightmares (see my piece on Italian dream logic here).

4 is also the last of the Nightmare films wherein Freddy is still scary, and endeavors to keeps his quips to a minimum, and we're not expected to root for him even a little bit. In all future installments he's all self-aware and hammy but for The Dream Master, even though he wears hipster shades when crashing Alice's happy place he has very few actual lines, and more moments such as the one wherein he turns a girl into a giant roach, and we get a truly disturbing face down in a giant glue trap close-up, with Freddie's face peering in like the cat in INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN. It's a nightmare that is pretty disturbing, in a good social conscience return-of-the-repressed sort of way. Most all of us have killed roaches, or mice at one time or another, after all, and maybe we had a flash of compassion but shut it out of our conscious in order to get on with our day; suddenly we're seeing ourselves from the glued-down perspective, the terror and horror of being trapped with other dying and dead insect souls all around you, and the callous deformed monster slowly crushing the box down from above you, reminding us that instead of being the good shepherd as Jesus intended, humans are the Freddy Krueger of the animal kingdom.

Alas, hardcore horror fans don't like 4 so much because it sacrifices real bloody, traumatic scares and gore for grotty sci fi special effects but I like that there's a refreshing shortage of trite explanations and unnecessary roughing and instead Sarah Connor / Karate Kid 3 levels of soul energy transference and sudden nunchaku know-how (a precursor of Neo's Kung Fu implants in The Matrix), trigonometry exams with slithering numbers (been there, bro), and Japanese dojos, with Freddie attacking and killing most of the b-list survivors from Elm Street 3--the original Dream Warriors--and moving onto a girl named Alice (Lisa Wilcox) suffering from a dysfunctional (drunk embittered dad) home life, but supported by some well-etched casual friends and future Freddy casualties: the black girl brainiac asthmatic; the 'only in the 80s' big perm, spandex work-out queen; and a protective brother who knows karate (his girlfriend is the main 'Dream Warrior' of the previous film). There's none of the usual sleazy snickering of the jocks and backstabbing of the girls and brooding of the Depps. No time for it, really, so everyone is pretty nice to each other. And how often do you get to see that in a high school film? They're usually all either BFFs or mortal enemies, and so I love the ambiguity here, the support and kindness without having to sing into hairbrushes or make a big deal.

 The first and only time I saw NOES4:TDM before catching it yesterday on Syfy was at a very rainy and near-deserted, crumbling drive-in on a rain-streaked screen in the year of its release, with the soundtrack coming in through weird static on the radio (speakerboxes were long gone by then) me terrified leaving the radio would drain the battery and we'd get stuck in this creepy place after dark, and needing to request a jump in the rain from a toothless crank dealer. I was still too young to appreciate the metatextual richness of the wind tearing through the trees around the screen. and through it all I was trying to break up with my clingy girlfriend in between steaming the windows. Nightmare was pretty scary even so, and I had a dream a few months later where I was the girl by the fountain, and Freddy was proving his love as a boyfriend by showing me his manicure --he'd cut the blades down to modest fingernails. I saw their shadow in the fountain waters. I was touched.

And the first NOES had truly terrified me--in the best of ways--my pal Alan, his girlfriend Germaine and third-wheel me were bugging out for weeks! I've only seen it once since then. But now, with teenagerdom far behind me, I have actually had the DTs and lost weekends and been terrified to fall asleep and then have the dreams actually roar up and get me. I've suffered from the delusions and lived that weird trippy netherworld of too much of anything, where you can no longer get a clear bead on where safe 'reality' ends and the surreal anything-goes realm of dream begins. It's these 'when exactly did we fall asleep?' moments that make the NOES movies ingenious, and there's real meth madness in lines like "I can't sleep, someone might die. "

Long live the new flesh, Boom Boom

Consider in comparison, wanting someone to die, going to the the movies for that expressed purpose. Consider the South Park episode called "Britney's New Look" wherein poor Ms. Spears is hounded to death by the paparazzi, and the medical establishment keep her alive even after she shoots off the top of her head, all just so they cam gleefully point out the breast augmentation scars visible in the hospital photos. The end reveals all of humanity is a variation on the enclosed communities of Dark Secret of Harvest Home and The Wicker Man, wherein each year a beautiful blonde girl is showered in jewels and affection that increases exponentially until she is driven to suicide, which is the sacrifice that ensures a good corn harvest, and photo souvenirs.  These suicides of bullied kids across the nation carry a similar resonance (see also my entry on the sacrificial offering archetype) with recent anti-gay marriage vote in North Carolina a sad sign on just how close we always are to devolving into fear and suspicion-based group activity, i.e. bullying and sacrificing to ensure good corn harvests. Murderous social rituals like those in the Hunger Games or Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" or what happened to some of my relatives in Salem in 1698 (1)  can't be far behind; they never are. (See also my piece on Dogville Vs. Monster from Acidemic #2!)

After all, sacrifice of one sort or another is inevitable, and at least if they're killing you that means they're showing you some attention. Too much is fatal but too little is worse. Adults tend to not take kids' concerns at all seriously, at least not in my day... unless we went ahead and committed suicide. Once you commit suicide, apparently, then your parents and the adult world in general are forced to admit that maybe your issue needed to be addressed. The terror associated with not being able to prevent the clock from making you grow up, get a job and become a miserable failure can be so wearying that just bowing out now before you fill out your first temp agency time card can seem like the smart thing to do, like deciding you don't want to go on the trip BEFORE you get on the bus rather than later when it will be much harder to get home.

That said, the issue of suicide is creepier than most other deaths since it occurs usually alone and with time to think about what you are doing. And what if, for example, most of the deaths by suicide are really dream murders, like the way Johnny Depp was hung in his prison cell while trying to sleep in the first film? Parents have no clue, think everything is your fault anyway, so naturally a dream murderer would escape judgment and you'd be blamed for your own death even though you never considered suicide ever in your life.

And that, my friends, is what Salvia Divinorum feels like.

WAXWORKS is another 'great' teenage horror film from 1988, and like NOES4:TDM it understands the concept of 'lucid viewing' and the way courage hinges on 'suspended imagination.'

One day a weird Tudor suburban building in upscale suburbia appears with a sign on the lawn: 'Waxworks.' David Warner skulks by the sidewalk, inviting loitering high schoolers over at midnight for a stroll through the displays. After some routine drinking, smoking, and unrequited romantic longing, the clique heads over to check it out. A midget greets them and offers them drinks which they're dumb enough to refuse. A high school kid passing up a free drink deserves what's coming.

Each of the teens is sucked into a tableaux adventure, often from familiar 'barely concealed for trademark reasons' monster movies, including: Curse of the Werewolf, with Flash Gordon-fan favorite Brian Blessed in the Oliver Reed role; Night of the Living Dead, in black and white; De Sade with his whip and drunken attendant lords and lashed ladies; and a very Anne Rice-ish bunch of sexy vampires brooding over their strawberry jello. The unentered displays, include the usual Aurora monster model dozen, but also: Freaks, Little Shop of Horrors, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jayne Mansfield's car accident, ... I'm sure I'm forgetting some and it's very impressive, a lot more work put into these things than really necessary. Somebody loved them, fed them all but Nightshade (Lambs was still three years on and if it wasn't you can bet there'd be a Lambs exhibit). 

As for the cast, Zach Galligan as the lead isn't my type but there's an aristo nympho (Michelle Johnson) and a virginal one (Deborah Foreman) who gets her first orgasm being flogged in the De Sade exhibit, and right there I would have loved this film as a kid who was cultivating a chaste S/M philosophy (see my McSweeny's high school memoir piece on the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" here). So Galligan's punchable face aside, the Waxwork kids are pretty cool. Most of them smoke and don't give a shit about your petty morality (there was no minimum age for smoking back then and most high schools had smoking areas) and neither does the cop who winds up entombed in the mummy exhibit. Ooops! But I guess telling you counts as a spoiler but not really, since the whole film is about the joys of the spoiler process, like an early predecessor, along with the Nightmare series, of the Scream films, wherein the terror isn't abated but actually enhanced by the characters already knowing the plot, and aware they're stuck inside a simulacrum (see Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child)

Some of them are just campy (the werewolf beginning makes you think we're headed in a goofball Monster Squad direction) but there's a scene of eating flesh and drinking blood under the rule of a brooding vampire who looks eerily like Tom Cruise as Lestat--though that movie was years away--and another dashing hunk-type could be the Gerard Butler Phantom of the Opera--so the waxworks hold future horror icons as well as past. The big climax is an all-out brawl between the locals and all the released monsters: Zach duels with the pleasantly jaded marquis like he's Robin Hood, tosses the midget from Freaks into Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors, encounters a vague version of H.R. Geiger's alien and a pod person coming out of their pod, and a black voodoo guy right out of Banana Splits' Danger Island comes roaring up for a fistfight. Dirty Harry shoots off the head of a bat. Those are just the ones I wrote down!

The trick to survival inside any film is to realize that you're just a character, an archetype inside the bigger picture, so play your part well and if you die, deliver a first class death scene (see my piece on Scream 4 here). We all have the ability to be cool in a crisis; as Tura Santana as Varla once quipped "you don't have to believe it, just act it!" But if you keep doing that for too long you become like the kid who can't uncross his eyes. Suddenly the script is flipped and you can no longer return to the safety of the seats because there's no longer a 'real' you at all, and so the tabloids denounce you as a sell-out, a has-been / never was. You disappear back behind the veil of the image within the image, a sad clown poster in the dorm room of a college kid in a movie being watched on tape by a dude being filmed for a reality show that will one day wind up on the internet, where it will be used in a multimedia collage, seen later by you, clown. Zap! A clown on a post-modern mirrored hamster wheel, that's you! So suspended imagination is key not just to courage but to immortality.

Though there's no escape you can still make a move to escape the abstract distance you've set up in yourself, to suspend imagination and shuffle off the mortal coil of fear, and come to grasp your true power as one who has seen these movies before and knows how to anticipate danger and make sure that at the very least you're not dying without a close-up. Deborah Johnson's masochistic awakening at the hands of the marquis in Waxworks shows she's got a fine grasp of this idea, for the S/M pleasure is derived from complete surrender, and surrender comes with many bonuses, not least the ability to transmute pain and fear into ecstasy and submission (the other ladies in attendance can only wince in jealousy). She knows where her desire is leading her, and it's a trap built just for herself, so why shouldn't she dive right in? It's Stockholm syndrome writ so large upon the soul it becomes a perverse new kind of spiritual transcendence. Each lash cuts through the veils and layers of image until the whip comes right out of the screen and kisses your soul.

This De Sade thing is clearly my favorite part. I love his good sportsmanship in the final duel; his casual mention that he's given Deborah her first orgasm, and his departing line "don't look so smug, boy!" Deborah Johnson gives it her all in these scenes, and her subsequent transformation from virgin to orgasmic submissive and struggle back from the dark side is richly felt and makes her a true 'lived-in' heroine, from a stereotype in bad 80s hair to a more fully-developed character with sexy wet hair.

I  kept trying to imagine what would happen if Johnson's character, post-orgasm, was summoned from the Waxwork tableaux and across the multiplex and into the dreams of Elm Street 4. What if she submitted to Freddy's claws the way she submits to De Sade's lash, with open arms and heroic disregard for her own life and death? Would that destroy him? Would he get that manicure? Isn't that the only way to really ensure you don't get reincarnated, in the Buddhist sense, to not tremble or wince or waver from your death, to love your demons even as they rend you limb from limb, until all that remains is just the witness, the viewer, the mad I AM at the center of all centerlessness?
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A similar transfiguration occurs with Debby Harry in Videodrome (1983), where she's drawn into the simulacrum by the promise of masochistic sensation and desire, and ends up incorporated into the media itself. What a fine double bill it would make with Waxworks.

The masochistic response is an innate part of horror film viewing (you are strapped into your chair and powerless to change the events unfolding before you), as discussed in the works of Steven Shaviro (see his awesome book The Cinematic Body), so you might as well roll with it and, like Slim Pickens on an A-Bomb rather than Dan O'Herlihy in Fail Safe.  The whole idea of 'control' is an illusion anyway, so why not embrace the inevitable and dive into the abyss that yawns for thee? When all the rats are swarming into the lifeboats, jump out of one instead, just to spend a few more moments with Leo Di Caprio. Ride out to meet Blue Nose to offer him life or death with perfect cool like you're The Outlaw Josey Wales. Move towards death, unafraid, and death shall be shocked and take a step back, and maybe realize he's at last found a partner in the darkness, someone to make the blood brothers' peace with, to race with purple lips towards icy kiss, like Frederic March and Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday (1934), or Kristen Stewart in Twilight.

Others in Death Takes a Holiday disapprove of Evelyn's choice of lovers

Until that rare love manifests, kids will be afraid of the dark, of someone infiltrating their frail suburban home, of finding themselves stuck inside a slasher movie unable to wake up or get out of their contract. It's one thing to be master of your mise en scene--like Sherlock Jr. or the girls in Daisies-- it's another to not have any control over it even as you realize it's just a movie. So next time someone's texting in your peripheral vision, don't be afraid to strike, dear mistress. Just make sure you know which side of the screen you're on first, while it's still possible to tell.

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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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