Vandal in the Wind: OVER THE EDGE (1979)

"I'm sorry about your son - sorry he was on drugs!"  -- Doberman

Walking home from work, fall day, Cheap Trick's "Surrender" came on my iPod and whisked me back to New Grenada, 1979... walking home from Knapp Elementary; "Let's Blow Up the School" was the movie I filmed in my mind; all I needed was a camera. Hell, I didn't even need a camera. My own imagining of the carnage ignited all my lower chakras; that tingle up and down the spine gradually dulled but was lit up all over again, for a few minutes, by "Surrender." That raw, powerful, dangerous, sexy thrill that seems gone in the kids of today, as gone as the analog hiss of old eight tracks. My hiss is gone too. I'm old, man. So why do the kids today seem even older?

Blowing up the school is not a new idea, of course, and nowadays it gets muddied in terrorism and Columbine; it's no longer permissible to even blow up the school in one's mind, or cinema. Only a handful of films have ever acted on this basic childhood fantasy: ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (see: Columbine Queen: PJ Soles) and OVER THE EDGE. Both came out in 1979. Coincidence? I was twelve, and we were wild in the streets.

None of us knew about either film in 1979 of course. HIGH made some drive-ins and rock clubs but we were too young to see them; EDGE was quietly snuffed out for being too dangerous. It found its audience later, on VHS and cable. I myself stumbled on it via a TBS afternoon screening while loafing around at my parent's house after college, unemployed, alcoholic, bitterly single.

Any resemblance to an after school special was strictly coincidental.

The change couldn't have been more drastic in the film and in life. In 1979 we were running loose all over the middle class Lansdale neighborhood: all-night games of kick the can while the block party our parents were at devolved into wife swapping and off-key renditions of "Soolaimon" and "Everybody loves a Nut";  awful teeth-on-teeth collisions trying to make-out; starting small fires beside the green creek; puffing incorrectly on found Marlboros and sipping father's Tom Collins on the way in from the kitchen; biking over to the gas station candy machine with all the loose change we could ransack from the couch recesses; lusting after denim jacketed babysitters and riding them like a horsey.

But I went to school with the younger siblings of older kids like those in OVER THE EDGE: I remember the Farrah feathery style of the girls' hair. I knew the long haired blonde boys, the badasses in their red bandannas, both the bullies and the kids who would protect you from the bullies. I knew the air rifles and 'punks' and firecrackers, and Playboys, and small fires started against the trunks of trees. I loved the teachers with their hand-knit shawls and Kate Jackson hair who had us sit in circles and listen to 'Free to Be You and Me' and watch 16 mm projected science fiction shorts about the collapse of the environment and the dangers of conformity and overpopulation. We had a freedom kids today with their 'play-dates' and nannies can't even imagine. If we ruined it for them by wasting that freedom on petty vandalism and games of doctor well, sorry about that, boppers.

Or at any rate, the older Vincent Spano types ruined it, not me. EDGE opens with him shooting out a cop car windshield, setting a whole string of escalating events in motion: first Sgt. Doberman's routine harassment of the first two kids he stumbles across: Carl (Michael Kramer) and Richie (Matt Dillon). Richie's mom's cool but Carl's dad instantly presumes is his son't fault and then has the rec center closed when some big Texas investors visit the town, leading to a near-riot. The escalation of kid resistance to mindless parental authority is truly galvanizing. When the waste case poetic soul of the film, Claude (Tom Fergus), is busted by Doberman after the kid who sold him the hash rats him out; the reprisal against the rat is the first real shot across the bow, but it leads to Doberman's killing Richie, and from there onward in escalating disaster until even catharsis is pushed too far.

In EDGE we see it all, and we see it all slowly being taken away: cigarette smoking privileges being revoked as a reprisal against school vandalism. Claude taking speed to help him with a test but realizing it was acid and we in the audience being trusted to know the difference and to be knowingly bemused and sympathetic rather than clueless and appalled (as we've all been there, in that Bosch moment). Vincent Spano with his mook sidekick delivering a pre-emptive squealer beat-down; Matt Dillon with his real pistol and smirk.

 Free from the urge to bow to parental rule-making hysterics, the kids in this film know the thrill of breaking and entering, the sting of unjust police harassment, the frustration of only sporadically open rec centers; promises of bowling alleys and theaters all yanked away; first feints at sex that are the result of affection so extra tragic to lose with the onset of Porky's-style exploitation; great rock on the bedroom hi-fi  giving way to the crisp but strangely soulless synth pop.

The parents in this film never bother to think about whether or not the 'trouble' some of these kids are in has any basis in fact, or what defines 'trouble' -- they're still getting over the fear of being 'in trouble' themselves. "I don't have to tell you how deep... in trouble... some of these children are," Jerry says as if lecturing a bunch of kids caught shoplifting in the emergency PTA meeting.

Any kid who's ever been hassled by petty cops like Doberman (above) knows the deal. He considers you dangerously strung out on 'narcotics' if he catches you with a sliver of hash. He chases you on a high speed pursuit if you throw a narc-rat-fink kid into the pond ("a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"), never understanding the difference between keeping a community safe and declaring war on children, between protecting citizens and insisting free souls surrender to the same illogical bootheel of anxiety and voter-appeasing restrictions of liberty that have him so cowed in his heart of hearts.

As we become adults we just roll with these sorts of idiocies, understanding the hopelessly entangled process by which genuine democracy lurches blindly around the seesaw of freedom/experimentation and remorse/repression. Kids shouldn't have to understand, or forgive.

These kids may be fucked up and angry but they're mainly bored, and who wouldn't be? They aren't archetype cliches cobbled together for an after school lesson about drug abuse, vandalism, guns, and curfew-breaking. They're real.  Stuck in the isolated hypocrisy of New Grenada, trapped by the world, by parents and cops and teachers all of whom push and prod in directions handed done by rote. They are awake in a town that's asleep, and the best the town can do is make waking up illegal.

This is my generation up there, so to speak,  captured right at the point where the 70s turned to the 80s, the William Macy suicide center of BOOGIE NIGHTS, the dawn of the crackdown on our freedom to live in the moment and create our own tribes, our own interlocking separate society. We didn't need freedom anymore once had cable and VHS. We stopped talking about movies we had seen and just rented them.

Throughout the film's loyalty is unquestionably with these kids, for whom every day is a challenge and or a bore, hanging out in a half-completed townhouse, waving around stolen guns; treating their own safety with the disregard they feel it deserves, in a town where there's nothing to do, no legal outlet for their accumulated energy and drive. It's like if Cary Grant and his crew of aviators in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS lost their postal contract, and were suddenly just a bunch of dudes in a bar in South America, nowhere to put all their nervous energy and death defying fearlessness. The group needs a cause, a Camelot, a band, a truck full of unstable nitro to haul through the jungle, a bowling alley, something to hold onto and belong in that's bigger than family but smaller than country. It doesn't matter if they're kids, they're still people, and they can fuck you up if you don't respect them. When they're ready to rock, you better get them to an instrument quick...

It's important to note that OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless, which is a total reversal of most after school specials: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find ourselves in MONKEY BUSINESS, with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater, the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy surfboard Erica Jong zipper.

The reactionary rabble, ah yes, they are on the move even now, as the juggernaut of parental outrage has slowly been gaining steam as it roars forward into the new world of cyber-bullying, teen online suicides, and a million forms of new veiled draconian rubrics, from being ignored to micro-managed with nothing in between. We all knew the catch-22 as kids in the earlier eras-- in order to convince your parents you were really depressed and needed to see a shrink you had to commit suicide. Similarly coming home traumatized from bullying was just 'adjustment' and learning to stick up for oneself. Now--only now--after this string of suicides--are parents admitting maybe there might be a problem with the way inter-child harassment---extortion (for lunch money), assault, sexual harassment, stalking--is tolerated, or was. So now, metal detectors and routine searches, kids expelled for just pointing a finger and making a gun sound.

Like the exploding police cars at the end of EDGE, it's too much too late for overreaction. By the time the justifiably furious are done smashing stuff, and the crazed parents done erecting new 'freedom-enhancing' restrictions, it won't even matter. The repressed will be off to erupt in a new dimension, a new location, and the laws will just hang there along the coast like waiting empty straitjackets for the next wave of kids, who shouldn't have to wear them --they didn't do nothing, but you'll make these kids put them on anyway won't you, mom? Just in case. And so good for their posture!

A smart parent or cop understands the social order exists in two simultaneous dimensions- the top 'normal' and the fantasmatic underbelly, conscious and unconscious-- and drug laws may serve the purpose of allowing kids a way to rebel and bond through the risk of smoking pot and drinking underage, rather than having to resort to something truly dangerous in order to rebel. And rebel they must. If a child never learns to break unjust rules his or her growth as a free-thinking individual is stunted. He or she can become, in the words of Varla in FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL, "a real-safety first Clyde," and when he shows up in movies that aim to be the equivalent of EDGE, he's played by Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg, and directed by Cameron Crowe. 

This is not to say OVER THE EDGE necessarily condones these kids' rebellious actions, it's just to say they don't condemn them either, but looks beyond such easy side-choosing. The parents' tendency to 'combat' the issue with escalated police presence and curfew mirrors our often clumsy military intervention in other nations, our reactions based on second or third hand alarmist information, indicating as always that the parent's in their castrated social slavery don't respect genuine freedom. If the dad takes everything the cop says as gospel and dismisses his son's own version of the truth, then he is a coward. If he refuses to believe the cops because his son can do no wrong, then he is even worse than a coward. It stands to reason that if his son dares sneer at the cop instead of flinching, and dares fight back and refuse to recognize the cop's authority, it reflects badly on the parent not for bad parenting but for being more of a coward than their own child, still flinching with fear the minute a cop talks to them, like they've got something to hide even if they don't.

When a peer group is captured correctly on film, as in Howard Hawks, or Richard Linklater, you get a feeling of the power and joy of belonging, a power and joy most adults hiding behind the evening paper at home have no recollection of. They condemn it in their children as dangerous, but without that kind of peer group power there wouldn't be a civil rights movement, a free India or America, or women voters, or even the current Wall Street occupation. And I can't help but wonder if EDGE wasn't shelved just for that reason, because of the terror producers must have felt when seeing a movie where the kids were genuinely dangerous, instead of just screwing in cars and kidnapping the school mascot and being 'edgy' in that edgeless rote misogynist PORKY'S way.

The ultimate factor that destroys New Grenada is the refusal of the parents to admit that the base of their pyramid will probably not widen, and that their kids can't slow their maturation to suit your dowdy urban growth schedule. Nowadays kids don't blow up their schools they just build their own online while the parents do their homework for them. But they're beginning to fight back anyway: it's Wall Street they're going after now... where the money from Middle America flows and drops like a giant Coinstar. I watch these protesters on the news and for the first time in awhile I have hope. One day, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun, but first, I guess, the darkness... like homework. Give the darkness to Claude, let him smoke it and peer unafraid into Bosch folios; let Matt Dillon create modern indie junkie comovage cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford Coppola; Motorcycle Boy, YOU Live! We... we belong dead. We who have burned so very brightly, Roy, but not to last. And never before or since will the bus ride to juvenile hall seem like such a triumph, a march into Valhalla on the rays of a beautiful sun. One day, when the world is much righter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The Hills have Eyes / with the Sound of Music

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

 

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

Someone ain't!

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

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

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

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

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

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Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!

"So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."

- Padame Skywalker

There are no accidents in weird rainy accidental double features, like when I chanced upon the very strange 'forgotten' 1962 film, HITLER (with Sam Fuller stalwart Richard Basehart as Hitler? Whaaat?) after watching Altman's SECRET HONOR (1984), with Phillip Baker Hall as ole Tricky Dick Nixon, and then a UFO Hunters episode and now The Myth Behind Star Wars, with little snatches of everyone from Joe Campbell (my Merlin), to Camille Paglia (my Kali). Let me tell you, it was a great night to be alone with a microphone and multiple video monitors reflecting my exteriors, clinking ice, overflowing ashtrays, and an alien that looks like a cat monitoring my every move.

"I'd like to thank Birch for recommending this film in a previous post."

SECRET HONOR might bore the layman but should be inspiring to fans of George C. Scott, for it seems Phillip Baker Hall--magnificent in crushed velvet deep red jacket-- channels that actor's raspy but concise fury, or at least shares a similar vocal timbre when he goes for the deep lusty curses and rap-rap-rap-rapid stutter-patter. Too bad he pours Scotch like a woman.  Chivas drinkers, weep at his tiny little sips!

I was bored by Nixon when this was all happening live on national TV in 1972 (I was five), but learning how to cut loose in your oak-paneled study and empty out your soul into a microphone or a painting or a keyboard is something I really relate to today. Like many writers and artists I had the realization awhile ago that being home alone with recording equipment, paint, ink, music etc.  is as good as it can ever get - that everything else--going out, seeing friends, sex, bonding, etc, work--is all just avoiding this, the task beyond all tasks. The terror of being alone in your study with just the blank page or microphone in front of you - armed only with a whiskey tumbler and maybe a cigarette --this is the period at the end of the sentence. All the rock and roll and drugs and madness was all for this. Risking your neck fucking over the boys at the Bohemian Grove was all just for this, for the cassette tape, for posterity, to preserve your fuck you to Lord Lhus in the annals of the eternity. Lord Lhus, fuck you! Ommmmm

It's only American to believe in the dark secrets behind the Masonic symbolism of the presidency but only Dick--ripped raw in his haze of paranoia, scotch and mother issues--dares speak the truth alone with his studio audience, which is that the Bohemian Grove--where he was brought several times to hear the edicts of his shadowy sponsors-- is the true seat of power in this country. Washington is just where their edicts are implemented. "A bunch of homos from Cambridge - these guys were assorted white trash - what they wanted was a political laboratory" controlled from deep in the Grove, where 'Jew mobsters' like Meyer 'Hymen Roth' Lansky could run naked and free and assume their natural giant saurian shapes. It is all just too much for old Dick and he himself turns out to be Deep Throat, bringing the Washington Post down upon his sorry ass before he's forced to sell out the country any further. He is just an "un-indicted co-conspirator like everybody else in the United States of America!" His "Secret Honor" is that he saved the country at the loss of his innocence. He bears the shame of saving you!

Bohemian Grove 'Cremation of Care' Ceremony - you never saw this.

If you surrender to Hall/Nixon's fever dream rant (and you may as well since there's nothing else going on in the film) you enter a pretty spooky world, a U.S. with the curtains ripped back to reveal giant white owls devouring a pile of gutted mice and money. Presidents like Nixon (and now Obama) are just brought in as straw dogs to take all the shit the manipulated American public cares to volley after being robbed and deluded by the previous office holders (who conveniently step down right before it hits the podium). Watergate was Nixon's way of reversing the straw dog parabolic mirror. Instead of the plan to throw Nixon to the wolves so his puppeteer overlords could sneak away into the redwoods unmolested, Dick snags up the strings by pretending to fall off the stage, derailing their entire evil plan... for now.

Meanwhile we see the paintings of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson on the oval office walls, and they all seem twisted and arcane, as if swirling reptilian pan-dimensional aliens were, even now, within the confines of a portrait on television on television, writhing and breathing and corrupting the deepest tissue of man's democracy and soul with Martian spider eggs.

Note - collage by EK made from SECRET HONOR still-  "your perception may vary"

SECRET HONOR seems to be missing a key ingredient if you see it at home: an audience response. I saw it alone and it made me uncomfortable, like being locked in a room with a raving drunk who doesn't really see you, thinks you're probably a ghost (maybe you are) but still expects you to laugh at his jokes. In the rapturous flow of good scotch he hears the ghost applause anyway, rushing in his ear canals like blood currents. Who amongst us drunks or white knuckle glory days-obsessed dry drunks can't relate when Nixon notes, "I used to love to sit in the Lincoln study -- fireplace going... air conditioner on." Is that not, in fact, the best combination known to man? And it's evil, too!

Right after I hit stop on my DVD, along came HITLER (1962) on the Military Channel. "Made the same year as PSYCHO!" raves Lou "Blue" Diamond Phillips, your host of An Officer and a Movie.  I love to watch it Friday or Saturday nights while pretending I'm seeing it on an empty couch in the barracks lounge in THE HURT LOCKER. It's very strange that someone apparently filtered several reels of the HITLER's vocal soundtrack through a flanger, as if it was just too painful to hear without distortion! Without the flanger, HITLER still comes off as very strange, like a lengthy episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents, Monogram's Lawrence Tierney-starred DILLINGER, and Sam Fuller directing a sci fi sequel to John Huston's FREUD.  I can imagine Godard and Bassin pissing themselves with delight seeing this at the Cinémathèque Française, sans subtitles and Tarantino probably imagined them pissing at it too when he made BASTERDS. Strange that this film's not listed in either Lenny Maltin or Time Out Britania, and even Time Warner's info screen for it says 2003, and with Hitler's mental problems really just stemming from a Ross and Rachel-like orbit with Eva Braun and a Norman Bates-style orbit with his loving mother, it may as well be from 2011 or 1954.


Alas, the film is relentlessly unpleasant, as Hitler buckles under the pain of sexual frustration and ze burden of having to carry his mother to zee root celler bunker, whenever Himmler comes over.

Now, I know what it's like to have a hot Germanic blonde young cousin, and let me tell you it's not that bad. You can handle it, you don't have to arrange for your thugs to shoot her after she shouts at you: "Your mother, always your mother! You can't live vit ze shame! You will see your mother in every woman's face, just like you see her in mine tonight! I dare you to look at me and tell me who you see!" You don't need to let it get that far. Hitler notes: "attraction turns to revulsion - the satisfaction that even an animal enjoys is denied me!" and becomes more and more icky. He can't bust a nut cuz his nut was shot off at Somme... or so ze legends say.

Hitler it turns out is just a misunderstood impotent lecher surrounded first by evil political machinations and then by people who dare to try and save what remains of Germany's civilian population instead of fawning over his infantile tantrums. With the poverty budget, his infamous bunker looks like little more than a basement rec room, and the whole arc of the war takes place in and around a handful of tables, maps, and filing cabinets. The only really attractive set is the decadent apartment he shares with his hot blonde cousin. He should have stayed home, alone with his microphones and kept his raving indoors, like our friend Phillip Baker Hall as Nixon in SECRET HONOR, or Dubya!

Next up on the cable flip was History Channel's UFO Hunters --an interesting show that thinks it can win over skeptics through its cock-eyed idea of 'rational' thinking, which is what Sherlock Holmes would dismiss as inductive reasoning: Let's say a kid sees a bunny rabbit in her backyard and tells you, all excited, and you tell her rabbits don't live in the area, therefore she is lying, or it's just a dream. But then 40 years later she still insists she saw a rabbit, and the UFO Hunters show her a cotton ball, asking her if it looks at all like the rabbit's tail. She says it does. They therefore conclude that she's not lying, or dreaming, but that someone left a cotton ball out in the fields and her imagination did the rest.

But then the other UFO hunter points out that no one has been out in the fields taking off their nail polish with a cotton ball soaked in nail polish remover, and so no cotton ball is possible. This is all of course excuses made to cover their inability to admit the truth of a rabbit. That's the sad tail-chasing truth of inductive scientific inquiry --they can't wrap their minds around the much more logical idea of the rabbit. Why not? Because rabbits don't live in the area. Everyone knows that. The rabbit is where mainstream western science, which has been leading us for so long, chokes up on the reins and rather than turn the reins over to the right brained empaths they throw the reins into the fire. But who am I to judge them, I with not a single un-violated precept? I, who can't be sure what he saw in 1974 wasn't a kite instead of a real alien drone?

The Mythology of Star Wars came on right after... and they brought up the interconnected conspiracies of the Empire, with Christopher Lee and his desert world mining operations as the Nixon, the Obama, the 9/11, the Reichstag... the flaming goat dog of straw! The cremation of care!

In closing let me say that I'm not a crook, or co-conspirator, or a believer, a nutcase, or a fascist, your honor... depending on whom you ask of course, but there's a lot of people to ask. Everyone thinks someone else doesn't deserve to be here. Somewhere someone thinks you're a crook just for having read these words, and that someone is right over your shoulders. Erich says 'An undivided self is an oxymoron.' Unite your warring halves and watch it all just disappear... and you shall be be a dark cloud remembering it was only ever water and air, never meant to last, never meant to be kept so separate from the sea and the sky by slow pressure cooker compresses and midlantic storm front regions until it grew as stale with cumulonimbus conservative paranoia as tricky D. Nix himself.

If the ocean could come claim you it would gladly dissolve you back into itself, dear rabbit-denying crowd. In that, fill thy coffee mug with comfort, and a liberal dash of mortal dread atop it, like foam. But when you lift your cup to drink, lo! There is no cup, no arm to lift, no fingers, no mouth. Your drinking motion is just a folding of a single wave back on itself, a splash more Chivas and then even 'then' is gone ...

and the reptiles in the grove just smirk and loll in the aeons of your warm blood surf.

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Linkage to the Past and World

 

A site devoted to the 4 AM UHF TV experience, specifically the films I saw as a kid watching Dr. Shock on channel 17, Philadelphia, in the 1970s, this was my first website, and one I thought lost. Begun circa 1999 and ended in 2003 with the birth of Acidemic Journal of Film and Media.

This site began when I was still drinking, and saw me through sobriety, and being scared to death (in a good way) by the Blair Witch Project (prompting me to create 'Frightened Male Monthly').  Dr. Twilite was my code name in college, for various arcane deals and projects too illegitimate to describe, suffice it to say Bela Lugosi in his poverty row films was a huge inspiration for the site, as was the art of Drew Friedman.  DR. TWILITE'S NEIGHBORHOOD

A very cool site called SubtitledOnline deserves a cross-pollinating shout-out. They have a dizzying array of cool articles on everything from Japanese DVD releases to the best in subtitled horror, all written in a witty, informed style. God damn it, the world is wide, and Middle America's aversion to subtitles is a blight upon our international rep. Let's quell it. Let's drink!

Drinking and listening to the words spoken and trying to 'not' read the subtitles and understand instead how the words spoken resemble the words printed - you have a window into another language. It's common in Europe to have a drink before language class, as it loosens the brain and helps you think in foreign tongues.  

So yeah. I'm sober.

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You Can't be Coughing on a Moving Train: CONTAGION and the Soderbergh/Assayas Post-Post Post

If you can't wait and must see Steven Soderbergh's disaster movie CONTAGION (2011) in a theater, be sure to sit next to a guy who won't stop coughing  --it's what this movie needs to really 'hit you' with that William Castle 'Percepto' aural 3-D meta feeling, and Steven Soderbergh must have known a coughing person in every showing was all but assured based on its early autumn release --in 2011 of all years, right before the 'man comes around'  in 2012.

As a product of one of indie-dom's few prolific auteurs, CONTAGION makes me worry Soderbergh's bottomed out in the post-affect school of eternal jet lag, i.e. he's become a permanent tourist, convinced the brooding post-modern thrill of hustling from airport to airport while a cool ambient techno track percolates underneath the electric walkway and the colors are 'cool' as Miles Davis at five AM on a Sunday will get you through the vaguest and most anemic of shaggy plague dog tales. But he forgot that some of us don't just automatically root for the cardboard humanity on display, especially if we're population control advocates. In the end, the only characters we end up feeling bad for are the animals --frightened pigs and traumatized monkeys are tortured and slaughtered in the name of science, all so a few million more people don't die, like we really need them not to.

And as far as the post-affect jet lag genre goes, Soderbergh's just tagging along in the brisk terminal moving sidewalk footsteps of French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, the genius behind the influential post-affect films BOARDING GATE (2007, above) and DEMONLOVER (2002). As long as Soderbergh is focusing on the progression of the disease--making the virus itself the star--a hand smear on a door, or the fingerprint smudge on a subway pole, bus strap, door to a store, hand-rail down the subway stairs, apron to shaking hands to panhandles--it's fine - the virus is like Jason Bourne or Will Smith in ENEMY OF THE STATE (1998), tracked by satellites and security cams patched into the nexuszzz. But there's always dumb moments that seem far more contemptible than the riots and looting, like the Matt Damon righteous father making a big beeyootiful prom space for his isolated daughter and then crying in the closet looking at his wife's pictures from Hong Kong, which he should have turned in to the feds, but then we wouldn't have all this 'perfect' meta Baudrillardian closure. 

Soderbergh himself has become so post-post that these scenes are as trite as one of those irritatingly homespun Peter Coyote ipad2 commercial voiceovers. Assayas is too smart for such rot; he finds the humanity in running from it and that is the secret to the post-post cinematic time-image affect. Soderbergh can't show the virus coming home from work after a hard day of dodging the men in the white hazmat suits, so he does the next worse thing. Won't somebody please think of the janitor!? Look at this picture of his small boy!

Moving out to a metatextual wide shot, CONTAGION will not promote international tourism (you will not want to visit Hong Kong after this film) it also doesn't encourage cinema-going in a city like New York, especially if you took the subway to the theater and forgot your hand sanitizer. One moron in our row at the BAM coughed more or less nonstop until his date made him go outside and get a drink of water. At first he just joked and pretended to be super sick like he thought she was kidding. Three minutes later he was back again, coughing away, oblivious.

I wanted to kill him, with plastic gloves on.

He confirmed my worst suspicions about humanity's decline into the abyss, and Soderbergh's suspicions seem confirmed as well, for what we see in CONTAGION is not the truth, not even a fantasy, but a problem that is the result of our overpopulated horrifically over-linked social order, the 'nonfiction fiction' collapse of interpersonal borders. With Soderbergh's smug liberalism even our fictional minor characters are too important to let die, so everyone lives to endanger humanity as a whole -- and the meltdown of genres and styles as well as communities ensures that no one can escape the thresher with a golden ticket - the sorrows of the individual are the ambivalent solution of the many.  Mere life takes effect and no one is allowed a vegan or special dietary restriction option on their in-flight meal.There are lives at stake....mmmm steak.

Not to be a devil's advocate, BUT... If contagious diseases can spread this fast because we're so super-connected, wouldn't it help to be less connected? To lose sixty percent off our world population total and revert to an agrarian hunter-gatherer post-apocalyptic paradise? A couple billion people could die on this planet and--if you didn't know them--would you miss them? Would you weep with frustration at the big statistics in the paper or would you breathe a sigh of relief that real estate prices are going down? And what about the pigs, chickens, goats, cows, and fish who die by the billions daily to feed our combined appetite? Won't someone think of the innocent turkeys and pigs that might have more on the ball than the slack-jawed cradle-to-grave welfare recipient who assumes his red meat just comes magically from the back of the supermarket, and who gets indignant when an activist shows him photos of an abattoir? If any and all humans weren't 'entitled' by the welfare system to a lifetime of free meals they are way too stupid to ever catch for themselves, natural selection might have a fighting chance. To use the TEXAS CHAINSAW analogy, we're a nation of comatose grandpas, too weak to even lift the hammer but still guaranteed a piece of Marilyn Burns, and thus the Burns's are chopped up by the thousands at the Leatherface brand Marilyn packing center.

CONTAGION brings these feeling up by ignoring them, never realizing the animals seen in the film are the only humans worth rooting for, and their welfare is in the hands of sadistic liberals who would kill an entire population of chimps if it might save one terminally ill human pedophile.

12 Monkeys

If I was king I would free these monkeys, move them to an animal sanctuary and use convicted felons and pedophiles for lab rats instead: one monkey freed for every criminal convicted --making a reverse monkey jail!  Reverse Monkey Jail monkeys, you shall be free...(If you appreciate my overpopulation concerns, see my "Necessity of Plagues" on the 'C' Influence 10/10)

In a way I'm secretly proud of my fellow humans that so many of them seem genuinely concerned for the welfare of those people in places like Indonesia or Rwanda, places they only read about on the news but still feel, by 'virtue' of having read the stories--connected, outraged, and personally responsible. They don't need even to see the faces of the suffering, just the statistics alone awaken the armchair humanitarian's strident compassion. Maybe, though, it's all  just a pose they've been taught at their bourgeois private schools and somehow Soderbergh's seems enamored of the pose rather than the compassion.

I personally think that genuine compassion must engage the issues of overpopulation, cruelty to animals and depletion of resources. If you only have food to feed three people, why struggle to keep 30,000 more mouths alive, knowing that in a few years it will swell to 50,000 because America's fundamentalist Christian bloc won't let you give them condoms?

And it's that stony, long range humanism that marks a great genius like Assayas, the abandoning of the publicity-garnering, short-sighted moral high ground in favor of a prismatic retreat that the not-one-domino liberal quagmirism of CONTAGION fails to encompass, and thus the whole film falls flat unless it's to turn you vegan.

Compare for example Assayas' CARLOS (2010) with Soderbergh's CHE (2008): they're both multi-part biopics about globe-traveling revolutionary terrorists, both are set in the 1960s-70s, both have one word name titles that start with 'C', but the lines dividing them are so basic, so elementary, they go back to the basic dividing line of all pop culture - the Stones/Beatles dichotomy: Assayas and Carlos the Jackal are the Stones to Soderbergh's, Guevara Beatles. Like the Beatles, Soderbergh seems to believe in humanity as it currently defines itself, never losing faith in 'Us' - believing that love is all there is and the love you take is equal to the love you make and still confident in the possibility of utopia.  Like the Stones, by contrast, Assayas knows you can't always get what you want, but if you keep moving forward, keep lunging through the crack in every closing door, keep rocking and balling, never saying no to a drink or drug, always showing sympathy to the devil and jiving sister morphine then maybe you might at least get what you need, and not have to wait for some scientist to tell you it's safe to eat. There's no belief the possibility of a fair system for Assayas because he knows any system in itself doesn't exist... and never has. Men live and die by ficciones.

Che, top / Carlos, bottom

Even when doing non-fiction like CARLOS, Assayas isn't too concerned with 'real' people and integral consistency: his Carlos changes as a character from moment to moment as calmly as Travis Bickle or Lawrence of Arabia, fluctuating along lines that erase all distinctions between social and personal action, and maybe the only difference between terrorism and heroism lies along these same lines. Soderbergh's Che must always struggle for the people, for the cause... and that means tending to the wounded even if it means staying behind, and of course never smiling because he's just so full of righteousness. Both characters delude themselves in their quest for a 'better world' and how to get it. But at least Carlos knows--deep down--there wouldn't be a movie about him if he wasn't dangerous. Che can't allow such honesty to corrupt his Marxist buzz. While Che would be making bandages, showing you photos of the poor people of his village and reading aloud from Das Kapital, Carlos would be hiding his bazooka under your bed, drinking all your whiskey, and stealing your girlfriend.

demonlover

This is why Assayas' heroines--like Asia Argento's jetset assassin in BOARDING GATE or Connie Nielsen's corporate spy (above) in DEMONLOVER--are so much more alive and sympathetic and even realistic than the 'good guy' girls in CONTAGION like Winslet's epidemi-vestigator or Marion Cotillard's Stockholm-syndrome hostage (her run back to her abductors in the airport comes off phony and bleeding heart self-righteous) or Jennifer Ehle's spunky little biologist (top) in her cute orange outfits and blue-green dishwashing gloves, cooking away in the sterilized lab kitchen-- the ultimate petrochemical-armed mom as envisioned in Laurie Anderson's "O Superman." In their noble paths to save as many space-wasting lives as possible Soderbergh's chicks are the bleeding hearts that stop human evolution in its tracks -- not that they shouldn't save the planet but they could at least acknowledge the paradox: If they could go back in time and prevent the bubonic plague, would they? or the Spanish influenza, or even small pox? I can see some idiot out there saying of course they should! Life would be so much better if our global pop. was 12 billion instead of only six! They're all for it until, of course, someone expects them to share their bedroom with a homeless family and their chicken.

That last image I cribbed from Dr. ZHIVAGO, and like that film, CONTAGION is the kind of moving train Howard Zinn decided awhile ago you can't be neutral on, though by now this train has become so crowded you can't even sit down, let alone remain neutral, or anything but suffocated. The only time a seat opens up is when someone dies but then Soderbergh's doctors run up and save them for a few more stops, until the only ones allowed to sit are the dying which never quite die thanks to those 'heroic' medicos... and soon there are many trains on the track they all have to crawl slower and slower until they're nearly as torturous as the 4 'express' at NYC rush hour, and people are hanging off the sides like the commuter to Kolkata.

And people wonder why we're broke, and why our democratic system is so crippled by fear of change. Being from France, Assayas moves much more freely through the post-affect landscape: his characters get off the train and sneak down alleyway shortcuts. Soderbergh might ape the New World Order / Assayas post-modern gridwork image-within-image paradigm, but he's still a tourist, and CONTAGION is just another stack of high-res postcards from the edgelessness.

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