To dream some impossible tree sloth: FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)

For a lot of the new kids, 1950s science fiction is stilted, and dull, and perhaps those words could describe FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) if you were expecting constant laser tag and monster attacks, but a hundred viewings later and PLANET, for all its 50's patriarchal solemnity, still kicks ass. It just gets better, and its subtextual critique of its own patriarchal solemnity grows clearer. Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, the film is uninhibitedly Freudian in a way few science fiction films of the time dared to be. The name itself holds all sorts of clues:

Forbidden! Planet!

And who is doing the forbidding? Merely one of the driest and most patronizing of all patriarchy's authoritative voices, Walter Pigeon as the elusive Dr. Morbius. In elaborate dialogue that runs counter to most natural speaking patterns, Morbius lectures paternally, patiently, Disney-like, at nearly everyone he meets and "cannot be responsible for the well-being" of Commander Leslie Nielsen (POLICE SQUAD!) and his party if they insist on landing at the doctor's private, remote, and most forbidden planet.

Inquiring after a colony set up by the Bolero Fund years before, he's come out to see how the settlers are faring.  It's rare to have a movie start out in deep space, odder still to have earthlings piloting a flying saucer instead of the usual phallic rocket. Odder even still that a 1950s film bears a cold suspicion that private organizations will be colonizing and privatizing outer space, shades of Haliburton! Shades of ALIEN... and more ALIEN shades to come!

For Morbius, it seems, has found a groovy stash of ancient alien technology and doesn't want to share, like the Area 51 crashed saucer-hiders, like an acid dealer during a bad trip who decides "you aint ready" for this shit. "But Morbius, with his artificially expanded intellect, he's ready," notes Commander Nielsen, sarcastically.

Morbius, blind to his own amok tenure'd prof-style egotism, agrees that yes, he is ready: he took the Krell "brain boost" and survived the shock, but was then in a coma for "a day and a night." Having survived, he's in charge (in his boosted mind) and notes, "such portions of the Krell science that I deem suitable and safe, I shall dispense to earth."

Language like "portions" and "dispensing" perks up the ears of any dozing pharmaceutical enthusiast. How many grams in a portion and when will you please dispense it and should I wait an hour after eating and drink plenty of orange juice? The Krell "brain booster" seems not too far from, say, an upstate ayahuasca weekend (the death in this latter case being of the ego, far more draining and terrifying than real physical death). 

Still, both the captain and his own doctor want to try it: "One of us must take that brain boost!" they tell each other. But it's the measurability-fetish that indicates this intelligence-enhancement is all left-brained denial, the butterfly pinned to the wall by science and expected to still be ephemeral. We know this because when the doc sneaks off and takes it the best he can come up with by way of explanation is "you oughta see my new mind, it's up there in lights." Is he speaking in the vernacular for the sake of his captain, or is this Bowery Boys-ish metonym the height of his new Krell-heightened eloquence?

Either way for the doctor at least the brain boost is shown to be a liberator from the curse of intellectual showing-off which makes Morbius's loyalty to his dry Wonderful World of Disney-style of speech be still struggling with patriarchally antiquated egotistical insecurity. Morbius may have "beheld the face of the gorgon and lived," but he's still a squaresville "philologist." Strictly nowhere, man. No grasp of the cosmic joke. That boost was wasted on him!

And yet, there is also in Morbius something of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition. He verbally forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go visit the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but no one listens. Morbius listens. He listens to his daughter swoon about these wondrous creatures called officers. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence  becomes patronizing:  "Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?" It's almost like he's posing as the 'anal father' when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute! Or, of course, the more obvious Prospero.

Coyly innocent, yet hilariously knowing, Anne Francis leavens Morbius' dullness with her lovely legs and sexual openness. If you've seen her in the Honey West TV shows (and you should) you know her voice dropped a smoker's octave not to long after this film was made, and she could make that other broad with the surname West look bashful, so it's great to see her here kind of knowingly sending up the role of an innocent 1950s virgin as she teases the nervous, sexually frustrated and rather prudish Leslie Nielsen with her nudity in an outdoor swimming scene, or asks him "Why don't you kiss me like everybody else does?"

Yet another key element in FORBIDDEN's hard to immediately appreciate weirdness is the soundtrack: the electronic tonalities of Louis and Bebe Barron are awesome, but totally unmusical. These tones are so random and abstract -- no orchestral swells or suspenseful string -- that when the invisible id monster approaches the tonalities merely swell up slowly and strangely, and merge with the sound of laser engines; when the danger sign is off and Robby and Alta are frolicking the music burbles like a fountain through a flanger.

This atonal bizzaro blend of tonalities both enhances and diffuses all tension as there's no  cliche-entrained expectations; there's no chintz or corn or bassoons or "paranoid" pizzicatos. The result is liberation,  a slowing down of expectations, allowing for an incredibly lyrical, relaxed quality in the home viewing experience. Crazy modern art sculptures and modular furniture enhance the experience of being over somewhere for drinks and gradually sliding from creeped out to enchanted as the whiskey takes effect. The movie is Acidemic in the way it illuminates the fundamental problem of western thinking in science and academia: the complete "blind side" to one's own inner demon, how all positions on issues are usually really only vain attempts to hide one's own warped desire from oneself. Our blind spots are synonymous with our inability to own up to them; the eye fills in gaps in sight and the brain covers its weak spots with camouflage and patriarchal bullying. Arguing with Morbius then becomes like trying to convince a Marxist professor... of anything. 

Adding to the spa-like fun is the leisurely goodwill and Bette Davis-ish sauce of Robby the Robot -- as he is voiced by a man who sounds just like, and is, one of the guys who do the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle -- but is not Paul Frees! His deep manly voice is both familiar, reassuring and completely cool. And yet the drunken cook comic relief has to ask of the robot - "Is it a male or a female" and we're supposed to infer that this cook is horny enough to give it a whirl. In the end--even better--the cook and Robby become drinking buddies, with Robby jovially making our visiting astro-lush a whole mountain of "Rocket Bourbon" pints.  Robby also makes dresses for Alta. When she asks for a long dress to please the prudish captain, he replies "Thick and heavy?" as if he's a wizened old Shakespearean housemaid teasing his beloved charge. Both Ariel and Caliban in one Michelin-esque frame, Robbie is the ultimate in fifth business. 

There's another coded gay character in Oscar Madison (ala his momma's boy in THE LONG HOT SUMMER!) as the brown-nosing chief spark-plugger-inner. The camera makes a point of showing his complete lack of interest in Anne Francis' devastating hemline, instead eagerly but low-voicedly informing the captain that "I borrowed some solanite from your gyro stabilizers." Spock, who cares? There's a chick here! He doesn't even try to fake it the way, say, Sal in MAD MEN used to!

Last bit of weird 'impossible tree sloth' quality I need to mention is the film's odd pedigree: MGM is known for delivering heavy bourgeois morality, but here the studio seems to have tapped into some alternate universe of cool, sexually liberated science fiction. FORBIDDEN PLANET appears suddenly out of nowhere, as if it traveled back in time from 1967, with lovely Star Trek-pastel sets of red leaf plants, alien handwriting and long triangular doors; laser beams that make no sound and shoot little dashes of light that seem ridiculously, comically/ineffectually phallic as they dissolve tigers into wavy Disney lines. It's the driest anti-authoritarian parable we got, and maybe still the sexiest as well. I'll leave you with these kinky words from Morbius: "Young man my daughter is planning a very foolish action and she'll be terribly punished for it." O words, where are thy talons?

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Prepare the amphibious squadron!

A heady compendium of fanboy history and Weird Tales cover tunes, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (2004) seems retro-actively retro-futuristic again after the art deco zeppelin action of Pixar's UP divided by AVATAR's use of CGI live action combo plattering. Kudos galore should be paid to SKY's writer-director Kevin Konran--a CGI art director by trade who got to make this feature after wowing the brass with a 12 minute short version.  He's a great collage maker, is what it boils down to, but he's no Brad Bird or Joss Whedon. In fact, he's more a Tim Burton with less box office mojo.

For SKY CAPTAIN, Konran melds lots of post-modern image collages into his rather non-existent story, about a crazy Nazi scientist who's plotting to blow up the earth, or something, and has armies of giant robots that fly and stuff, to get 'er done. This would all be well and good, except then in comes our hero, Sky Captain (Jude Law) to save the (yester)day. This bloke's a sort of David Manners pretending he's Clark Gable in TOO HOT TO HANDLE and smarmy. Law can do smarmy without being too offensive, you don't send a gigolo robot (in AI, below) to do a man's job, unless you forgot what a 1930s ubermensch is all about.

Now, I admire Jude Law as an actor, not cuz he's pretty and dates (dated?) Sienna Miller, but because he's fearless in the face of his acknowledged limitations--he's trapped in a room full of mirrors. Annette Bening is the same way, for example, and it doesn't make her a bad actress, because she too can be aware enough of it to bring some existential reflection as to her inability to existentially reflect into the mix. And like Bening going full harridan in AMERICAN BEAUTY, Law's not afraid to dig deep into his inner creep (he was the best thing in Mendes' BEAUTY-follow-up, ROAD TO PERDITION, below).  Thus we'd believe him as the villain (or as an ambiguous nebula of audience alienation/identification, as in ALFIE and CLOSER), but when Law wearily informs his bitchy reporter girlfriend Polly (Gwenyth Paltrow): "I spent six months in a Manchurian labor camp thanks to you!" we don't believe him, because his nails are too perfect.  This is not a Captain Midnight-esque hero whose flown against robots and almost died a thousand times; this is a man speaking to a blue screen.  His voice is too silky and full of breathing exercise-nuance to have the forceful "I could give a shit"-ativeness that comes with tru gravitas (check out the way Clive Owen outguns him in their dueling douchebag dialogue in CLOSER). For starters, this guy should be smoking a cigar at all times.

I blame Law's miscasting for the film's lagging stretches, since he just doesn't have that John Wayne / Bogart quality where you feel kind of in the thrall of their competence. If he had it, then maybe his leading lady wouldn't have grown so obnoxious and curt (Paltrow was pregnant during filming which may explain that as well) in his presence. Before Law shows up (about 15 minutes in) she's doing all right. Although a scene where she's running down Broadway chased by giant robots is soooo unconvincing. There's a cutaway shot to Paltrow ripping her skirt so she can run that seems spliced in from a different movie, but before that she intones lines from Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast like she's listened to that broadcast as many times as I have, which is a lot, and so she's a "hell of an actor." She and Michael Gambon (her paternal newspaper editor) get off some shadowy underplaying before the fireworks begin.

And then proving the movie could work with some gravitas, you have Angelina Jolie show up halfway through or so as "Freddie", a one-eyed hottie version of Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. A small part perhaps, but imdb.com informs us that "In preparation for her role, Angelina Jolie met with and interviewed dozens of British WWII veterans and pilots in order to adapt the proper mannerisms of her character. She also tweaked the script by adding bits of slang that were used during the era."

Hey Jude, why didn't you do that!? Jolie knows it's the little things mean a lot, Sky Captain. When she delivers a line like "Prepare the amphibious squadron!" you know what's up. You want to go prepare the amphibious squadron just for her, on your knees!

The music score is a bombastic piece of ripoffery, of course, and the sound effects and layered imagery are so over the top that at times it feels like there's an almost Brechtian disconnect, with nothing ever matching up. Still, the fractured nature of it all works to make us unable to focus on the actual story, which depending on the environment in which you see the film (it would be perfect at Radio City Music Hall or some Art Deco facsimile) can give it a meta-textual sense of breathing room. The result is like some Brechtian playwright being forced to write pulp fiction, or Godard reading smutty spy novels over the (non) action in SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL. Heavy use of words onscreen, oceans come with esoteric compasses layered above the waves, everything crashing around like a "Why We Fight" entry replete with Churchill-esque radio broadcasts about how only Sky Captain can get to the bottom of this "series of events."

The heavy (cost-effective?) use of black and blurry edge recalls the pages of Heavy Metal and the old Marvel rip-off of that title, Epic! Not that I didn't love both. Epic was a kind of tweener version, the last stop before the unapologetic R Rating of Heavy Metal. But it lacks the minimalist angst of the Frank Miller SIN CITY adaptation, or the comic book boisterousness of Peter Jackson's KING KONG remake.

But it's got the light and dark thing down pat. If you keep your expectations low it can be like reading Weird Tales while hiding from your parents in a dank basement, with two once-cool friends who are now a couple and just bicker all the time and think they're being amusing though you just want to give them both a bitch-slap. But then Angelina Jolie comes along and you forgive stuff, like how it all reminds you of having an interesting movie interrupted by a daft date going "Who? What? What remote island? What? Why" as you're trying to get lost in the narrative.  But it's a great movie to watch while your doing other things and though Konran is not quite as hilarious as Bruce McCall (below) when it comes to seeing through the cracks of rose-tinted nostalgia to the big emptiness of the Adobe photoshop real, I'd rather watch this again anytime than return to the smug wordiness of Pynchon's Against the Day. 

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Stung by the Belle: FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

No one "beats" the Japanese when it comes to sadomasochism in cinema: They whip each other right out in public; they rape everyone in sight while grunting and frothing at the mouth; they engage in uninhibited gang violence, glue-sniffing and arson. In American exploitation film we seem to be at a loss to "ahem" measure up, perhaps due to our (relative) lack of repression. Even our recent torture porn phase is really offshot/borrowed from 'J' (and 'K') in style and substance. We can do sleazy (the OLGAs and ILSAs) and we can do titillating (the Tweeds and Mundaes) and we can do violent, but but the Japanese know to turn over the apple cart and start humping it like a dog. like sleazy. Their films transcend words like 'transfigur-titiliation,' 'pop-arterial' and 'hypno-dermal.'

These films, of which the FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series remains a stellar example, leave you dazed, disturbed, clammy, depressed and worn out, even strangely exhilarated. Their sexual fever cruelty opens up your cranial shell and then the pop art color patterns come in and blows out the previous contents. And yet, the Japanese are often terrified of pubic hair. Hilarious!

With their over-the-top butoh style acting ever diffusing any sense of adult sexual reality, the Scorpion series becomes strangely cathartic, and undeniably artsy. The suffering of post-war prostitutes in 1950s Suzuki films merges with the Sergio Leone western's sense of surreal absurdism and subtextual anti-authority, with Scorpion's ability to "take it" so astounding that it becomes its own form of dishing it out.

I've always been in awe of Japan's Sadean way to wrap prurient transgression in candy-coated shells of guilt, feminism, deadpan drollery, and existential despair. When the French do S/M, you can tell they're clutching onto their copies of Bataille as defense against Catholic-school guilt, and as a result a creeping bourgeois airlessness sometimes suffocates the sleeping beast of voyeuristic-Gallic masochism in its cradle, but the Japanese crank the Masoch-volume down to minus-eleven and get you laughing in delight at the sheer absurdity of all human expression, from grimaces of ecstasy to grimaces of agony, showing that our deepest most profane desires, fears and unendurable pains all look the same from far away, and are as ridiculous as anything else when exposed to light--even fake pink cinema light-- and so the Japanese find their way to Bataille almost by accident, and that has made all the difference.

Nowhere in my experience is this more balls-out perfect than in FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (1972).  Alas, the DVD is out of print. It's the second in a series of four Scorpion films from the era, though, and the other three are available (from Media Blasters!)

JAILHOUSE takes the cake because Meiko Kaji has such a firm nail on her world-weary but mercilessly resolved "Girl with No Name" type of avenging dark angel. Her role is mostly nonspeaking and barely moving; she's just standing there, waiting to strike; a perennial victim of double crosses, sexual harassment and unjust incarceration. And her hair is perfect. No matter how much humiliation and brutality she endures, she never flinches or weeps, and her hair looks freshly washed and combed and--even better--blows from her own private offscreen fan.

Then there's the music! Kaji sings the theme song in that great bluesy lounge pop style of the moment and there's some great surreal interludes, including a  Japanese kind of "Biwa" (the ancient Japanese folk ballad tradition) version of "Cell Block Tango (He Had it Comin')" from Fosse's Chicago. The musical score itself is a constant Greek chorus-style counter-response of swelling, trombone-heavy crime jazz; Jew's harp "boing boing" western leitfmotifs; big bassoon and reed sustains over close-up staring contests all suggesting the Sino-Morricone-Leone connection courses throughout... or did Leone borrow the bold comic book style from the era's films or both from manga?

Thankfully, though it's certainly traumatic to watch, the sexual violence is highly symbolized. The way the Japanese filmmakers seem to placate their censors is with a huge dose of self-conscious satire, a complete capitulation of all sympathy and dignity on the parts of all males and most females-- both cops and prisoners--everyone in fact, but our protagonist antihero. She keeps her dignity to the bitter end.

If you've ever been an alienated self-conscious kid in school you know what it's like: feeling humiliated and horrified as you see all the kids and teachers talking and hugging as you try and find your home room and no one notices or cares about you, yet you feel them judging you anyway, and frankly they all look disgusting and animalistic, like pigs at the trough during lunch time and brutes in gym class. Japanese pinku films are your revenge. Just as "The final girl" survives the horrors of slasher-filled cabins and lakefronts by her rejection of sex and gender differentiation, so we as viewers in these films are encouraged to take a final girl approach, regarding human contact as inherently corrupting. We're better off without them, alone in our little tricophobic dojos.

The sexual violence in these films is shown as having the purpose of subjugating and demoralizing women in order to strengthen patriarchal rule--but in fact, it just hastens that rule's demise, as the more violence done the more karma weaves its spell and Matsu waits like the patient spider-scorpion for the karma wheel to slowly turn her way. 

There is only one pair of eyes whose gaze she seems to profit by: ours. She never addresses the camera directly, as, say, her 2009 British male counterpart, Bronson (from the 2009 film of the same name) does, but the effect is the same. As purely cinematic subjects, they each represent a distilled essence of masochistic cinema viewing. Without our gaze, their suffering would become unendurable.

It's good sometimes to remember "it's only a movie," and this comic over-doing it also does much to undercut any potential over-identification with either side, so we can realize that at the core of these films lurks a deep revulsion for one's secret shame/desire; a need to pull out at the last minute from over-identification; to avoid the grotesque pleading of instant regret even as the crime is being committed. Only in the later Scorpion films is the violence highly sexualized in a less academically applaudable state, as if the initial shock of seeing your most debased primal fantasies played out has worn down to a hollow numbness, requiring ever more dangerous dissolving of the boundary between the masochistic (ala Steven Shaviro) and sadistic (ala Laura Mulvey).

One's opinion is bound to be personal but these movies are pure masochistic fantasy, which makes them, in a way, pure cinema. If soap opera martyr movie emotions had their own pornography, this would be it, a protracted defiance of death, Antigone caught in a Fujicolor prism. The western Gallic-influenced torture porn of SAW and company tends more towards the fearful anticipation of pain/gore and self-conducted limb amputations, but the frisson in the Scorpion films comes more from existential weariness as garishly violent beatings--replete with amplified, echoed whacking noises--stretch into abstraction, and we begin to re-imagine our whole earthly existence as one long stretch of watching someone get fake whipped on TV. The Scorpion films project this as the ultimate reflection of a bad acid trip, where every event, color, action, word, gesture, even act of shifting weather patterns, seems geared to illustrate that modern life is a living Hell, all for the purpose of either breaking our spirits or turning us into cold-blooded scorpions. The only deciding factor is our ego -- the more we cling to ego the more the pain hurts, but if we release ego and surrender to our higher self, we can endure the suffering and wreak a vengeance made all the sweeter.

In other words, it's mythic: in a scene filmed atop and around a recently erupted volcano, our escaped female convicts run dressed in gray cape/shawls make us expect Macbeth and Banquo to come riding up for fortune telling advice, or a dinosaur to come roaring down from the sky. It's important to realize this innate sense of connection with primal, tribal forces is much more pervasive in the Japanese mindset than in, say, USA's melting pot blood splatter hurled-onto-fields-of-grain. With their insane eyes and gnashing teeth, the other women convicts are representations of a pure, undistilled animism, humanity without humanity. They are presocialized erotic apparitions pummeled by Apollonian logic into barely recognizable caricatures of longing and fear. They are the stain that endures no matter how much acid and electroshock beatings are poured onto it. Kill them and three more take their place. The volcano itself is a perfect metaphor for this Dinoysian chthonic real and while the female prisoners seem perfectly part of the landscape, the cops and dogs are out of their element, both menacing alien others and buffoons. These figures of law and order sense, on some deep unconscious level, that they've been led to a place where patriarchal law has no jurisdiction -- and that their whole purpose in the film is to be swallowed up by the unconquerable feminine force that Matsu embodies.

At any rate, SCORPION suffers from a very limited emotional palette including hysterical Satanic possession death throe squeak-speaking and screaming contests that drag on for minutes. I envy those who can watch these films on a regular basis and not become warped and misanthropic, or at least not get a headache. Color coordinated trash dump scenes are pretty awesome, at any rate, but man oh man, when she slashes at the bad guys, she tears the celluloid itself in half; it's artsy like that!

If there was a line between life and death, it's where Matsu, Sgt. James (HURT LOCKER) and Bronson all dwell. For some warriors it's bleached Iraqi deserts; for some it's dank prisons and heaps of volcanic ash and garbage; for some, even their own household has become a battleground. The question is, when will they, too, stop cringing in fear rise up as fearless, unfazable warriors beyond the illusions of life/death duality? Or as they die, die, die, die, when will they scream, in slow mo pitch shift squeakspeak: MATSUUUUUUUUUO!?!?!?!?!

(Thanks Aria at Muse's Garden, from whom I ripped some of the above beauteous screenshots - read her insightful and much more expositional review here)

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I got a home in that 'Raq

Similar to the possible future prison showdown between Manson and Polanski, it will be interesting tonight to see whether the Oscars go Cameron or his ex, Kathryn Bigelow.  Now I'll confess up front, I haven't seen AVATAR. I just can't work up any enthusiasm for it, but THE HURT LOCKER (2009) gives us a remake of something I do have enthusiasm for - the tough guy "group" movie of Howard Hawks, where brave lads face death daily without flinching or preaching or engaging in expository dialogue.

William James (Jeremy Renner) stars as a fearless bomb diffuser, and his fearlessness makes him a warrior out of his own time, like Patton in World War Two. His nonchalant courage would be right at home in Patton's third army, storming through occupied France or repelling wave after wave of Japanese banzai charges on Okinawa. But Iraq is a different beast-- more like an occupation force, ala the British in India or the British in Palestine, or the Israelis in Palestine, or the French in Algeria. In short, the bad guys, or at least we're compelled to realize how thin the line is between colonialism and the best intentions of queens and walruses. But while his comrades worry and wait, James goes right for the fuses, as focused and relentless as Mel Gibson in a world of Glovers.

While none of this is made didactic in the film, a soldier's anxiety about being killed is seen as more of a detriment than an asset to a soldier's sanity and skill development. I've never even been close to a war zone (aside from 9/11) but I've seen a lot of war documentaries, and I can tell you: those marines and GIs? They were badasses. In Bataan or Iwo Jima or Okinawa, the marines would lose 40,000 men on a single island and bend but not break. In that light, our Staff Sgt. William James would fit right in. But this Iraq war he finds himself in is so screwed up that soldiers can get all whiny about losing only a handful of men, say a dozen--in a bombing, as if it's not fair that wars should involve killing and maiming. It's like why Patton was so tough on his men - give them dirt to eat every day and eventually they get stomachs like iron, they can't even taste cake. Let them eat cake every day and they all whine like babies when it's time to eat even a spoonful of good old dirt.

Man, we have a saying in AA: If you go to a barbershop, sooner or later you come out with a haircut. Or the shock of realizing you have cancer after a lifetime of smoking... mmmm, but so worth it, you thought... at the time, or do you worry so much about staying alive you lose all joy of living? The most vehement "playing it safe" proponent, Sgt. Sanborne (Anthony Mackie) freaks out constantly as James tries to focus on his bombs, yet later Sanborne admits he's got nothing to live for... it's just fear for the sake of fear, a true indication of how consumerism has warped our concept of tribal loyalty.

Kathryn Bigelow winning might mean more stylized semi-deconstructed violence in cinema than ever before, which would be awesome. Bigelow's unflinching feminine eye for what war is shows how much damage the male psyche--man's need to prove himself against real physical danger--has suffered over the years trying to be "nice" in the long twisted, never-ending, ever-more draconian and litigious wake of early 80s PC thuggery and "bare life" fearmongering. No pain, no gain, goes the slogan --but while women are born into a cycle of menstruation and the agony of birth,  what do men get to do? No wonder they've grown anti-dirt. But our James here has passed this by; he's materialized from a breed of men that seem unfazed by the dubious comforts of peacetime (as brilliantly portrayed in a simple shot of James powerless in the face of a gigantic supermarket cereal aisle).

The key to living the charge of THE HURT LOCKER is to embrace the chaos and the way all the Arab faces in the street vibe possible suspects one second and merely local citizens checking things out from their windows the next, possibly on cell phones, possibly with guns... oh wait, a paint roller. Firefights take place sometimes miles away (the sort of thing a movie like BODY OF LIES tried to achieve while also adhering to outmoded rules of dramatic cohesion and liberal equality) and the natural leadership of our James makes you realize that what The Dog Whisperer says is so: the leader is the one who is most relaxed under fire. Renner strides boldly forward where Leos fear to tread. Hurt Locker, I'll be praying for you to win... Thanks Renner for looking a lot like my gun nut brother Fred and helping me understand him more, and to see that shrapnel-burn can look a lot like acne and have that be okay, to have a square nose like Reid, the World's Toughest Milkman and have that be okay, and to have a clean shaven guy show up all these wispy characters floating around the ABC sitcom promos with their exquisitely disheveled casual wear and perfectly mussed 11-o-clock shadow.

I am imagining Kathryn Bigelow (above) as the Evelyn Mulray to Howard Hawks' Noah Cross and I mean that in the best possible way because I revere Hawks uber alles and this would be perhaps a non-incestuous version, one with more fishing and hunting and target practice. I'm sure Hawks would have called HURT LOCKER "a damn good picture" and Bigelow "a damnned good-looking girl."

Dear Kathryn, let Oscar be the wings that lift you into the A-list auteur roster next to Paul Thomas Anderson and John Ford and make us all re-evaluate STRANGE DAYS or at the very least, struggle to fathom your age-defying hotness. Praise the Lord and pass the hollow point BLUE STEEL ammunition.

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Orphans of Jessieland

I like a movie that makes no bones about it's philosophical geekiness, even if that means we must endure the anal-retentive Michael Cera-clone, Jesse Eisenbeg as he nervously runs around rattling off do's and dont's in the post-apocalyptic American survival, noting: "You have to enjoy the little things," as if even we didn't know that from ED WOOD's rose-sniffing scene, and explaining why his Han Solo older brother asskicker guardian (Woody Harrelson) is hell-bent on finding twinkies in the post-apocalyptic Zombieland. They kind of represent to Woody what "home" is, i.e. civilization before the collapse, before America became Zombieland (that would have to be around 1982 or so), but of course this film could be aimed at folks younger than me, and if it steers them towards a better appreciation for the little things, and helps them gain deconstructive analytical skillz, then I guess I shouldn't curmudge. At least Jesse's voiceover spares us dot connecting as far as consumerism, slack-jawed troglydyciousness as seen in reality shows like the Kardashians, and computer game addiction. Or maybe, just maybe, no one remembers that those things are bad, and that they make Europe worry about our mental health.

For after all, the apocalypse has been floating over our heads since the days of Jesus "C" - a kind of mass suicidal ideation The apocalypse film appeals in general to the malcontents of all classes and creeds, cuz it makes us feel less caged to know there might come a time when our credit card debts are erased and we're free to loot and pillage and fight for survival like our DNA has programmed us to. In the meantime we sit around and do the best we can. We plot, and wait, and game.

Even back in the vulnerable pre-cellular/internet 1980s, we fantasized about the impending apocalypse. Back then however, zombies were confined to a few sequels and spinoffs from the Romero original.  For the real apocalypse fantasy we worried more about bikers, mutants and dwindling oil reserves, ala THE ROAD WARRIOR (aka MAD MAX 2, 1982). And we didn't much have to deal with babes like Kristen Stewart or Taliban Shire or whatever name is, in our Zombielands. If the girls showed up at all they were usually robots (CHERRY 2000, Pris in BLADERUNNER) or scouts for their underground breeding programs (A BOY AND HIS DOG). Alas, we find that in the zombieland of tomorrow, the feminists have stolen all our shit with the finesse of mutant biker older sisters.

In the 1980s--thanks to Pat Benatar--we knew love was a battlefield, but then came the 90s and it takes an army to raise a village and perhaps the second decade of the 21st century will be about how the army is overseas and the village has failed to raise itself, leaving boys with no way to turn 2 men other than leaving for the Middle East, or doing drugs and drinking... blood. And the beautiful Kristen Stewarts of the world will wither and die... or worse, go out with Jessie Eisenberg before he's passed his initiation tests, before he's actually stood the test of manhood, either by getting drunk and sleeping around and then hating himself, or tripping on acid and getting in a fight or riding the mechanical bull, or in the words of Craig Finn from The Hold Steady, "waking up in someone else's van with a backstage pass in your back pocket."

I guess I'm squeamish since I was just as insecure as Eisenberg until around 1985 when I started drinking. To use the iconography of ZOMBIELAND, I went from a Jessie to a Woody in one swift funnel. Thing with Eisenberg is -- the two movies I've seen him in are both a) one world titles ending in "land" b) about amusement parks - the first is the semi-fun comedy ADVENTURELAND, wherein he slavers after the delectable pout of (below) Kristen Stewart (I hope you can feel that every time I write that name there is about a 2 minute pause while I swoon to the floor like a 16-year old promise ring-wearing Goth).

If this was a WW2 metaphor Eisenberg (and me prior to discovering alcohol) would be tightass Montgomery and Woody Harrelson would be a mighty Patton. Picture if you will, a small boy. He is Russian, and acting as a scout behind German lines for the Soviet Army. This kid is so tough and adorable, he'll break your heart and inspire you to risk death in the name of victory, all in one Hawks-like swoop. The film, she is called IVAN'S CHILDHOOD (1962). If this kid can be that cool, surely our Ceras and our Jesses can get themselves some nice Mickey Rourke-style bruises and at least give heroin a try?! The Cera-Eisenberg principle instead operates on the kind of squeamish comic embarrassment Ricky Gervais smuggled over from the BBC. And of course, Judd Apatow, and the "growing up" element has more to do with letting a hot girl kiss you without running away, or going to bed with her without stuttering some excuse why "it wouldn't be right" before realizing that "hey, it's the little things that matter." Or as Bushwick Bill once said "Size ain't shit!"

I've got nothing against wimps and computer nerds,  now that I can stare like Clint and  have a deep voice... so I get mad when nerds betray their struggling nerd audience with a bad role model like Eisenberg, for whom everything is done the hard way, when meanwhile Xanax and booze are free for the taking at deserted pharmacies and supermarkets across the nation.

I'm sorry, ZOMBIELAND, you're okay. A good enough zom-com is good enough for me. If it was easy to make a good-enough zom-com, there would be lots more good ones, so take a bow. Let us fill up virtual racks at the rental store with these unfettered amalgams! And the best part is, one of us invented the whole unified zombie mythos, i.e. a 20th century indie film maverick (as opposed to a Victorian playwright), George Romero - yet no one has to pay him a ha'penny of royalties. I mean, I wish they did, so he could be rich and afford to make his own zombie films... better. I mean I couldn't even get more than 20 minutes into DIARY OF THE DEAD. Jesus Christ, it's worse than Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS!


What's generally missing in all these Romero homage/spin/rip-offs is Romero's original deeply embedded critique of consumerism. There's a scene for example in the original, long-ass DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979) where the heroine is getting herself all dolled up in the mirror, with beautiful gold lighting done in a commercial manner, and with the gun seamlessly integrated into her ensemble. ZOMBIELAND by contrast would have Eisenberg's narration go "It was like we were living in a critique of consumerism." and show a Phillip Seymour Hoffman cameo as a zombie Marxist liberal arts professor.

Z is for Zombie, that's good enough for me, and if the movie is really more of an amusement park ride than an actual horror film, and even if Bill Murray has to show up doing a frickin' Be Kind Rewind -remix of the library scene from GHOSTBUSTERS with his home's invaders, who'm I gonna call? So just remember that Zombieland is about appreciating the little things, and family, and fire arms, and all the stuff we take for granted that's going to go down in flames in a few short years. Hallelujah oh Dark Lord whom I choose to call Kristen!

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EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribillis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack

Though Harvey Keitel has become a listing in our cinema icon treasury, he's still been booted off at least two films: EYES WIDE SHUT and APOCALYPSE NOW, and considering the films in question, must be one kinky wildman. Therefore, these two films might be considered bookends of an era, because he kind of nailed similar roles in 1993, as a kind of gone-native Kurtzian honorary Maori in THE PIANO and a depraved representative of power in BAD LIEUTENANT, where, interestingly enough, he does full frontal nudity ( in both films).

But that's not why we're here. We need to discuss EYES WIDE SHUT and the late, beloved director/ actor Sydney Pollack, who had a pretty good film career playing rich, smartass New York Jews (as Randy Newman would sing) with penchants for beautiful prostitutes and heavy nostril breathing. There's something about his casual older guy frankness that adds chilling layers of ambiguity to his performances; as a nonchalant womanizer he's unsettling in the Lacanian-Zizek anal father horrific way (1). It makes his a disturbingly intimate presence, like catching your girlfriend's dad in bed with your little sister.

Pollack's character in EYES especially is chilling in his unconscious acceptance of his privileged status quo: he sees nothing wrong with spending more money than you make in a year in order to hire sweet young things as his coarse pleasure tools... is there any more subtly offensive line in all of Woody's oeuvre than Pollack's glowing review of a hooker in HUSBANDS AND WIVES (1993, below left): "She has a mouth like velvet," as if describing the seats in first class? But it works because Woody is horrified he said it and no doubt later, when no one is around to appreciate his moral outrage, intrigued.

But that's just a warm-up for EYES WIDE SHUT (and may have been what got Pollack the role). There's something about the way he says the word "hooker" in EYES that makes the blood run cold. the hooker in this case is a beautiful, tall, perfectly figured lass who seems to be everywhere at once in Cruise's big night of almost-passion, including the big masked orgy.

I never understood this orgy scene, and I've understood many an orgy scene. First of all, if everyone is masked, why is everyone so uptight? No one knows who they are! Does security have to be that tight because human sacrifices are occurring shortly? And why is dopey Cruise so anxious to crash in where he's not wanted, especially in this dreary scene, more a bourgeoisie museum retrospective version of a masked orgy than a real thing, where people come and go whispering of fellatio / while all the while maybe 2-7 people per gigantic room are actually getting it on, and only in the most dull lifeless way imaginable (lord knows how many takes Kubrick demanded, but every time I watch this scene I shudder in sympathy for those poor models with their achingly perfect, breasts, being banged around like lifeless cattle, their masks no doubt suffocating their skin). And we have to wonder which came first -- does Kubrick make films about dehumanization because he's worried about us, or because he's cold and clinical by nature, and so he changes the message to match his limitations? (i.e. when you're a rich sadist, you can pay huge amounts of overtime to watch perfect breasts jiggle from doggy style thrusting, take after take, until the poor girls have nervous breakdowns?)

Masked scenes in pornography are never a good idea, since facial expressions are important for arousal, unless of course, a) you want to hide and b) fetishize some particular body part that precludes any real eye-to-eye connection. But if you want your lovers anesthetized like the night upon the table... man, I guess that could work. T.S. Eliot is really creeping into this entry. But then again, that makes perfect sense. For if EYES WIDE SHUT has a iconographic codex, it would surely be "The Wasteland":

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
which an age of prudence can never retract
by this, and this alone, have we existed
which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficient spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor. (405)

Because you see, all the threats made against Bill (Cruise) after he's caught at the masked orgy make no sense since a) nothing illegal (or even transgressive) is technically going on and b) everyone is masked. He doesn't know who in hell was there and they're all so worried he crashed the scene. Who cares? The only reason such harsh security would be necessary is if everyone wasn't masked, and he was, say, a reporter from the NY Post. And a bevy of abducted children were shortly to be cut open and their still beating hearts fed to a demonic manifestation inside the flames. Hasn't Kubrick ever been to an orgy? Or watched a masked orgy in 70s porn?

I've been obsessed with orgies since I was nine years old and didn't even know what they were. But man, what a great name, orgy... they sound so wild and crazy. Then again, if we bring this back like a long chalkboard curve to the Lacanian model of desire, it makes perfect sense that it turns out to be such a dull, humorless show --the closer our proximity to our desire (objet petit a) the more nervous and self-sabotaging we become, for it's just a big empty finish line and the momentum of the race is all there is to keep us from falling off the planet.

Of course this weird mix of prurience and play is part of the film's swirling appeal for some people and I can appreciate that. I can appreciate the beauty of all the women and wallpaper in the film and the way Tom Cruise kind of bashfully lets his character be sucked up into various hottie vortices, so to speak, but if the rumors as to why Keitel was fired are true, then it just goes to show you what powerful prudes Cruise and Kidman really are. Who cares if he came in her hair? This is acting! In a goddamned sex film! Would Arnold Schwarzenegger fire someone for accidentally punching him in a fight scene? Would he run and call his momma in Germany? No, he wouldn't. At least Keitel would have at least brought a kind of legit sexual energy (did he come on that car door in BAD LIEUTENANT?) that Pollack just can't duplicate and probably doesn't want to. Even playing rich sleazebags he's a gentlemen of poise and money, yet that's what ultimately works - his character seethes with menace because Pollack the actor's inherent decency isn't subsumed but merely switched over to mask status. He is a man who goes to orgies yet has given up on orgies and sex as his objet petit a. To him these young beauties are little more than distractions, like the 800th time you go to yoga class and realize you're falling asleep during your asanas. For Pollack's rich Jews the only concern is the risk his young chippies will embarrass him in front of his heavy intellectual friends (talking about astrology at his bourgeois friend's dinner party in HUSBANDS AND WIVES, or worrying the girl in his bedroom doesn't O.D. and thus embarrass him in EYES WIDE SHUT, below).

If you've forgotten that last one, it's after the lengthy preparation for the birthday party scene, and the Cruise-Kidman's nervous arrival (all beautifully done). Upstairs we see the birthday boy Pollack getting hurriedly getting dressed as a beautiful naked woman lies splayed out on a chair in his room. He's sent for Cruise because she "O.D.-ed, doing a speedball or something." Which is ridiculous, since the chick's lips aren't even blue (above). Dude, she passed out, so the fuck what? She's fine. Put her into bed and turn the lights out. She'll probably just come to in a few hours and sneak out the back with your whiskey decanter and wife's fur coat. Instead, Cruise brings her out of her stupor and gives her a patronizing lecture about how she almost died, which carries all the inauthentic ring of a Sarah Palin lecture on international affairs. Dude, how can you talk about things of which you know less than nothing? Pollack for his part is worried not because he cares about her but that disposing of the body would be hard with so many people downstairs, kind of like he just spilled red wine on his tuxedo jacket and doesn't have time to yell at the cleaning lady.

But the cool thing is, I do believe this is all intentional and that Pollack is brave and focused as an actor, especially for his willingness to play with moral ambiguity, to use his own aging, hairy bourgeois Jew profile as an exmple of what William Burroughs once described as "the cold, dead look of heavy power," tapping into a common racist/classisct/ageist phobia that rich old Svengalis are stealing off our Trilbys. Like Christophe Waltz in BASTERDS, he uses deep, relaxed nasal breathing to make you feel very close to him and you don't want to be; you feel like he's stolen something from you and you're afraid to ask for it back. There's something incestuous about the way we're conditioned to accept him as a "good guy" via his ease with signifiers of wealth.  He seems to turn the viewer into a prostitute through his nostrils and through his use of anonymous but gorgeous younger women for sex, the way most people wearily order pizza, "again" for a dull dinner. But with that heavy serpentine weariness comes the knowledge that as a representative of the power elite it's his job to posit himself as "the one who enjoys," to situate the rest of us as outsiders in the fantasy realm so that we can keep ourselves in a distracted orbit around the real and thus preserve the gravitational field. Notein the scene below, Pollack's genial massage of Cruise's shoulders. This is a man who lives his pleasures close to the hairy surface; he's tactile. He forces us to imagine him having sex via his physical looseness. Cruise by contrast is repressed, i.e. 'normal' and like us, he worries the whole world is a continual orgy the moment his back is turned, that he and he alone is the odd man out, the one everyone hides their stash and their nudity from, even when fully undressed in his doctor's office.

So while I have yet to like EYES WIDE SHUT as a film, in general, when the time is right, and I get over my revulsion/admiration for Pollack's casually evil performance, his superb grasp of "prohibitive enjoyment," I'll probably dig it. And Kidman is amazing, running acting rings around her narcissist husband while he flexes into the mirror.  On some level you can understand both Pollack's and Kidman's frustration; it is a dream world, and they are surrounded by idiots like Cruise, who so desperately wants to live a dream he can't even see he's already asleep. Kidman and Pollack don't have much interaction in this film (whatever that "hairy" scene was with Keitel was presumably cut at her and Cruise's insistence) but they anchor the main character's delusional pursuit of orgiastic experience with their adult understanding that even in the thick of a wild drug-fueled orgy you sometimes have to fantasize in order to feel like you're really eve n there.

And Kubrick, the Tiresias who perhaps has not fore-suffered all, tacitly stands on the sidelines leaving us to wonder if he's so far behind the cinematic times that he's ahead of them (as he was in LOLITA) or just utterly lost due to his hermitage (as he was in FULL METAL JACKET). We can wonder, and I'm glad we'll never have a clear answer, for the hazy ambiguity of intent adds to WIDE SHUT's luster. The impossibility of desire's fulfillment has seldom been more lushly, mercilessly illuminated in sex cinema. For what Pollack represents in the Kubrick stable isn't the Tiresias of Eliot nor the impotent hermit wrestling with his genius mantle of the auteur himself, but the stale endgame of accumulated wealth and power. Pollack's billiard room may be lush, but it's still just a room with a pool table, and sex is still just sex, regardless of the wealth and masks and perfect breasts. Actual emotional connection is what makes sex hot, and it's missing altogether in EYES WIDE SHUT. In order to perpetuate the myth of "hot" anonymous sex, or the GQ/Maxim subterfuge of confusing sex, love and consumer goods, Pollack keeps his orgy mask on 24/7, even though he's perhaps all to aware its become saggy and old -- or to paraphrase Nick Tosches' biography of Dean Martin -- "no matter how far you get in life, your dreams of success just wind down to a drink and a blow job." The trick is to pretend you don't care so the masses think you do and hate you for it so they can continue to live in the illusion that your lifestyle would solve their problems and bring them satisfaction if they only had it.

But maybe, just maybe, you don't have to choose between the smarmy unconsciousness of Cruise, nor the withered entitlement of Pollack, nor the primordial mockery of Kidman. You can be free, and real, like Harvey Keitel.

Only they won't let you swagger around nude on crack and masturbate into people's hair at these hoity toity big budget control freak orgies (if ever there was a contradiction in terms!) To really "bring it" you have to find a dark alley with Abel Ferrara's camera rolling on 'e,' and in the dark ominousness of a real New York, not Kubrick's expensive indoor studio sets. Kubrick's film tries to deconstruct the notion of a "No sex, please, we're British" sex film about sex in New York, but it has nothing to do with New York, per se (as in the bridge and tunnel gang making homphobic remarks at Cruise like its 1979) and instead ends up lost in its own self-reflexive maze of overthought set design, suffocating luxury and meaningless sex.

But what does that matter? Jesus said a rich man can no more enter the gates of heaven than a camel can pass through the eye of a needle. Pollack's elite power broker is the rich man going through camel after smashed and twisted camel, trying to compact them and force them through that needle so he can feel as alive as reckless Harvey's BAD LIEUTENANT, who just goes around snorting coke, passing out, making bets on the Dodgers, jerking off at underage Jersey girls, and screaming through the gates of heaven into the arms of Christ our Lord as He appeareth in a crack withdrawal flashback. Amen, brother. 

------I wrote the above, then found this from Zizek, which doesn't mention the anal father aspect, but is nonetheless interesting as an explanation of the orgy scene's antiquated timidity:

"It is only Nicole Kidman’s fantasy that truly is a fantasy, while Tom Cruise’s fantasy is a reflexive fake, a desperate attempt to artificially recreate/reach the fantasy, a fantasising triggered by the traumatic encounter of the Other’s fantasy, a desperate attempt to answer the enigma of the Other’s fantasy: what was the fantasized scene/encounter that so deeply marked her? What Cruise does on his adventurous night is to go on a kind of window-shopping trip for fantasies: each situation in which he finds himself can be read as a realized fantasy – firstly the fantasy of being the object of the passionate love interest of his patient’s daughter; then the fantasy of encountering a kind prostitute who doesn’t even want money from him; then the encounter with the weird Serb (?) owner of the mask rental store who is also a pimp for his juvenile daughter; finally, the big orgy in the suburban villa. This accounts for the strangely subdued, statuesque, ‘impotent’ even, character of the scene of the orgy in which his adventure finds its culmination. What many a critic dismissed as the film’s ridiculously aseptic and out-of-date depiction of the orgy works to its advantage, pointing towards the paralysis of the hero’s ‘capacity to fantasize." (173-175) 

But there you go again, Harvey Keitel ain't paralyzed! He lives the fantasy cuz he's much too drunk to fantasize! (TDTF). Go Harvey! Oh wait, is he passed out?

Read more on Harvey Keitel and whoremongering in my Funkamatic Piece on Cinematic Pimps!

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Villain of the Year

For this year's Oscars, the only nomination I really care about after all the smoke settles is Christophe Waltz as Waffen SS Colonel Hans Landa of Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Is that my fault or Hollywood's? Am I out on a limb in saying that the only interesting characters coming out of Hollywood these days are villains? Even while smiling politely, Hans Landa exudes a kind of menace that makes his every microgesture burn its way into our cortex, the way, say a frightened 1st grader might focus trapped laser beam attention on every nose hair of his irate elementary school principal.

When it comes to Nazis, Hollywood's never before really found a groove, muddled by whether to have them speak German with subtitles or speak English; and if English how much of a German accent? As for characters, we either get slimy sadists or military career officers who use discipline and regalia to distract themsleves from the realization that they're a) the bad guys and b) losing. Now I'm sure both kinds of Nazis existed aplenty, but Quentin Tarantino reminds us in BASTERDS that there were lots of shades and colors within the black, men of culture and distingue, for whom vices like pride, lack of empathy and bullying arrogance were encouraged by the times to the point of snow-blindness. As Patton knew, sanity can be a hindrance when it comes to war, just like compassion can doom a gangster (ala Tony Montana in the 1979 SCARFACE) and by having a Nazi be the most charming male character in the film, Tarantino muddies and exasperates our genre expectations concerning war films until we finally settle into a state of fearlessly sado-masochistic amorality as if by default. Landa is all the more charismatic and reprehensible for the way he's able to stay recognizably human--polite, full of jokes and pithy insights--while pursuing a ruthless, horrific genocidal agenda.

I confess I've been watching a lot of the History Channel lately, and its endless WW2 documentaries. It's fascinating to consider how there were once villains of such a globally spectacular level of evil that nearly all the world--rich, poor, commie and conspicuous consumer-- were united in righteous anger against them. Even as late as 1939, America was determined to stay neutral regarding Europe's latest fracas. We were still recovering form the modernist hangover of World War One. We were totally uninterested in anything outside our own borders. When we finally shook over our leviathan-like slumber and stirred into action, it was not unlike your Incredible Hulk: at first he is just the sleepy pacifist Bruce Banner and then-- yo, you done got him all mad, and green and with the smashing and the nuking and the roaring. When the smoke clears, of course, no one went back to being pacifist neutral and we were left with a mountainous petro-nuclear hulk trying to pretend he was just an ordinary meddling observer from the UN.

And so, the Nazis, the ultimate villain for all times, and so gleefully proud of being the bad guys they even dress in black and wear skulls on their caps. The concentration camps they left behind for the allies to find and weep over are still unrivaled in the pantheon of man's barbaric inhumanity to man, a permanent rip in the fabric of our basic human decency that, in a way, manages to continue to work as a warning that please, whatever we may repeat of history, let us not repeat this. With the film footage of the holocaust, racism's gruesome endgame is forever on display for all to see. Sometimes the only way to deal with such horror is through repetition-compulsion, watching Nazi documentaries over and over again (thus the History Channel's maligned nickname, 'The Hitler Channel') like scratching a scar that can never properly heal.

No matter how many times you watch that footage, it still haunts and disturbs, for if even one of us is capable of such madness, are not we all? To submerge oneself in WW2 history is to climb a roller coaster that takes you straight to the hellish bottom of the Universal Self. After a few hours down there, all other roller coasters seem like an afternoon at Kids R. Us.

Thus Landa becomes the ultimate in hipster evil -- smart enough to know what he's doing is wrong, and yet hip enough to go with the flow, to adopt a sportsman's disinterest in issues of life or death, or even national loyalty, to turn evil into an art form beyond mere petty bullying and sadism. Landa's character operates from a feeling of superiority harnessed to a bemused noblesse oblige, but there's a master hunter's disinterest in any actual outcome. The game, the puzzle, is the thing. He languidly talks a farmer into giving up the Jews he's sheltering, yet lets one of them escape, like a fisherman throwing back the "too small" fish to catch another day.

We can become so fascinated by the gaping black hole of evil that Nazis blasted into our collective humanity, that we can surely become them if we're not careful --but just as surely we can be re-affirmed in our collective goodness. The genius of the Landa character is how he manages to register on both counts, drawing us into evil and repelling us at the same time. We identify with him as we identify with RICHARD III in Shakespeare or Prince Prospero in Poe's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. -- a man too smart for his time, who's grown used to being the most cultured and canny guy in the room, to the point that he positions himself outside convention, and so treats all of life as a daydream meant for his own wayward indulgences. By the end of the film, Landa's presence onscreen has become so intimate that we feel completely trapped by him, like a slow, relentless, cheerful "just doing my job" IRS auditor or homicide detective setting up camp in our living room, who talks slower and slower as our heart quickens to panic levels, and no end in sight, or a lover who seems to suck the air out of our lungs even as we're drawn into their charismatic orbit.

It is especially through drawing attention to language--always a key element in Tarantino--that this sense of intimacy manifests itself. Landa speaks French, German, English and Italian during BASTERDS, and each with great relish and a sense of poetic appreciation, his tongue rolling through the French vowels like a hot bath, stopping on a dime to switch over from one tongue to the other, taking advantage of other people's lack of understanding to tease and prolong their (and our) suspense. Education and fearless confidence make us admire him even as we despise and--most importantly--fear him. The result is a muddled locus of identification that we're not used to outside of gangster pictures, wherein underdog class conflict and anti-authoritarianism give the bad guy at least a few admirable traits. The only aspect of the Nazis that is not reprehensible by contrast is their unabashed relish in that reprehensibility.

In Tarantino's war we're encouraged to identify with Landa but also with his prey: the weary farmer who just can't sustain his stoic front over a prolonged glass of milk; the German actress/spy who leaves behind a telltale shoe; Shoshana, his escaped Jew now disguised as a theater owner in Paris. By first fearing, then identifying with (due to his charm) and then fearing him again as our identification moves to these other figures, we dredge up the kind of Stockholm Syndrome repulsion-attraction that can put is in the thrall of the worst of monsters if they're charismatic enough (i.e. the irresistible MILF hotness that is Sarah Palin, lower right, man I love her deep reds and blacks).

The fact that every non-Nazi who saw them, no matter what their rank or nation, were so unabashedly horrified by the concentration camps is, in the end, testament to a common humanity that transcends iron curtains, class and color divides.  No amount of crying and moaning softly into one's pillow--even today, over half a century later--can lessen the horror of the Final Solution. It is this horror and endless grief, however, that brings us all together. What else can one do? If you're not traumatized, on a personal level, by the Nazi genocide, just watch the Hitler Channel for a few days and let it all sink in. Then revisit INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and appreciate just what a daring high wire act Waltz and Tarantino really pull off, getting you to laugh wryly even as the horrors of the war are branded on your soul, creating a character so insinuating and inescapable it feels like he's somehow followed us home from the theater and making us, for what it's worth, proud and happy to be a human being capable of a deep empathic response of sorrow, pity and deep, deep horror.

PS. After that, if you're still not devastated, see COME AND SEE (1985)

P.P.S. When researching last week's Leo di Caprio entry, I learned he was originally considered for BASTERDS as Hans Landa. Can you imagine? I'm curious to know if he backed out (my guess he was too worried about his good guy reputation and ever-more-limited glumby range.) Anyway, I sure am glad Waltz got the part, and I sure hope he wins der Oskar!

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