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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Have we got a tough guy here? Have we got a tough guy from the streets?

In this hipster overrun time of ours, we've been slowly losing our dangerous man persona, ever since THE GRADUATE made it hip to be sullen. Men of earlier decades were real, complex, intelligent and tough: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, Brando,  Lee Marvin, Sinatra, Bronson, Bogart... badasses not afraid to show intellect and wit, to pick fights and help others with their brains, fists and--when needed--guns.

We've still got some tough guys today, but most of them are pretty boys with glazed eyes. They toughen themselves up with military haircuts and grimy armor and CGI high contrast. For lack of a better all-around representative of this style, I'm using Channing Tatum, who I like a lot, actually, as far as this kind of new male goes. In all fair prejudice,  I'm looking at movie star males who are a whole generation younger than me, a generation that's grown up neck-deep in real war (Iraq and Afghanistan) video game war (too many to name, but most recently TOUR OF DUTY IV) and online fantasy war (W.O.W.). They celebrate the new sincerity and new virginity, and it scares me to death. Theirs is a bizarro-world, more conservative than their great grand-parents in the 1950s! At least the grandparents smoked cigarettes and had unprotected sex in drunken blackouts... for awhile..."cough"

 

At least Tatum has a fairly deep voice, but look at his baby face and his brow furrowed with dopey concentration, the kind of blank face that helps smart kids fit in, which is fine considering the callow war heroes he specializes in, but now, dear reader, now let's think of real tough guys, and how they don't have to pretend they're not witty, crazy and full of venom and vinegar. Imagine the original STAR WARS if there was NO Harrison Ford to add a real 'dangerous man' energy to the role. Instead, imagine if Hayden Christensen played Solo, or Freddie Prinze Jr. You have fallen asleep!? Welcome to the 10s! 

  

Just to prove it's got nothing to do with face and hair color (i.e., apple-cheeked and fair-haired callow) check out Angelina Jolie's dad (below left) in an old photo. He's got a baby face too, but take a deep look into those eyes. Even squinted shut you can tell there's a man in there, he'll fuck you up and not need to call for back-up and body armor before he does it. 

What you get with Tatum is more like a male model --a mix of tough guy posing, bedroom twinkle and the vacancy of a kid whose used to being stuck in classrooms and churches and not fathoming a word the teacher or preacher is saying and no one cares because there are kids worse off and louder.

Also, you have a kind of military professionalism. In the absence of actual fathers in the home, these kids have adopted military ethics and leadership as the de-facto non du pere (or "no of the father" - the prohibition of enjoyment that constitutes acceptance into the social order, away from the realm of the mother). 

That's all well and good until you remember just how dangerous, how far outside the box, our stars used to be. Our men used to be so dangerous that Harvey Keitel was the callow pretty boy (below). Now of course his hair and eyelashes are longer than Tatum's, but why is that? WHY oh WHY does every young thug-lite now have this awful mix of 50s crewcut and 80s gel hair? Oh, don't get me wrong, the actors of old could still bring the danger with no hair or even a self-inflicted Mohawk. Just look at De Niro's eyes (left) and you get a chill right down your spine.

I've been getting into The Dog Whisperer and I think he would call this trend an example of "bad leadership skills" or lack of assertiveness. A passive little boy lostness has infected our young men due to a crisis of fathering that's been getting worse since the dawn of the industrial age, and which they can't shake no matter how many CGI buildings they demolish...

As a final illustration, let's compare the new 3-D CLASH OF THE TITANS hero's look (GLADIATOR/300-style) with the original Harry Hamlin (whom I originally hated even seeing it in theaters as a kid back in 1983, for being also too smarmy). But compared with the harsh nihilism of the near-bald mercenary version of Perseus at left, freakin' Hamlin's a small miracle.

That said, we know where the Hamlin look comes from, and the first "tough guy pretty boy" from which the title of this blog entry comes (Randy Newman's "Pretty Boy" from 1979's Born Again) but it launched a thousand seamy/sexy NYC youth ships, and made glazed-eyed, pouty-lipped mono-syllabic working class boyhood into a sexual commodity that still sells today, even though the original is all but forgotten. I refer of course to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977).

P.S. for an antidote and return to full cool toughness, I recommend Kim Morgan's Dangerous Soulful Sexy Deep Freeze: Lee Marvin.

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Bright Lights Film Journal #67

The inestimable Bright Lights Film Journal has received a swell make-over, so if you're having trouble finding it, just go here.

To give you some background on this amazing and long-running magazine, definitely check out Matthew Sorrento's interview with BL editor Gary Morris. Finding Bright Lights can be like coming home after years of wandering. If you like first-rate film writing mixed with freestyle cultural associations and psychosocial analytic theory, then Pounce! Gary Morris rocks!

 I've got a few things in their latest issue, #67:

Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings

By Erich Kuersten

"Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it." 

Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini.  Hammer Glamour, by Marcus Hearn.

Reviewed by Erich Kuersten

And on the blog, Bright Lights After Dark, from today:

Charge of the White Elephant:  

"When Lee Krasner describes Pollock’s creative art to potential buyers or critics it’s in a stilted, rushed way, as if she’s trying to earn a 20% commission before she gets cut out of the deal AND keep her thick long island accent in effect at the same time: “What Jacksin’s doin’ with line and cullah goes beyond abstrackshin.” It’s all overstuffed with pompous gravitas and we know that the lines coming out of Krasner’s mouth are meant as exposition so that we, the viewers,  can share in her drunk husband/infant’s brilliance, but instead the feeling is kind of like going to what you think is a cocktail party and it’s really a time share condo pitch."

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VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!

Notoriously absent from the world of DVD... until now, comes VOODOO MAN (1944). The missing link in the chain of strange, boring, inept but irresistibly fascinating, Brechtian and hilarious horror films from poverty row studio Monogram, usually starring John Carradine, George Zucco, Bela Lugosi or in rare and precious instances such as this, all three. 

The wartime era was a lean one for horror films, with the war overseas far more horrific than anything that could be imagined blah blah blah---meanwhile the poverty row studios like Monogram snuck in when the lights were out and filled the bill, the "second feature" bill, and in the process tapped into the undernourished unconscious of the home front, the women and children left behind while the men all went to Europe and Asia and dreamed demons of their own. 

I first encountered VOODOO MAN as a bored child in the 1970s. It was on UHF TV almost all the time, along with other Monogram Lugosi 'classics': THE APE MAN, GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE, THE CORPSE VANISHES, BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT and THE INVISIBLE GHOST... all could barely register against the constant attacks of static and "ghosting" on UHF channels, and in retrospect, that made them seem better - like maybe we missed something.  We bad-at-sports children had to watch these titles over and over again in our forlorn pre-VHS  hope of catching a view of a real frickin' monster. The "Voodoo" title of this one made us think that, maybe, there'd be, I don't know, a zombie? Anything? But Noooo! Just hypnotized chicks in robes, and Bela Lugosi and George Zucco in a crazy headdress, all seeming to have been filmed on a single dirty staircase with a ratty old camera, and as full of dull adult talk as any crappy film one's parents watched. But still... when Bela was on, we were transported!

To really appreciate VOODOO MAN as a key 20th century work of art, you need to vibe with the lonesome beauty of Edward Hopper's paintings, as in the gas station scene above. It's hard to tell if the VOODOO MAN gas station (above, below the Hopper) is indoors on a set or outside at a real gas station. But the resemblance is uncanny for other reasons then the shape of the pumps; the same lonesome quality of Hopper's gas station--the dusk approaching, darkening the forest down the road so it seems like a black devouring sadness is creeping up the road towards the man working outside. He seems endangered like he doesn't know he's in HILLS HAVE EYES VII. Similarly, the drivers who pass by George Zucco's gas station don't realize he's the bad guy! And the station's where he chooses his victims, not unlike many a street wandering roughie. In bigger budgeted films you might see a long shot of the gas station along the road, but Monogram's aesthetic afforded no non-stock footage exteriors. So the Zucco station demands close framing all the time, giving the film a cramped feeling as if the road is only around 4 miles total in length, and then the world just ends.

World War Two saw, among other things, men going off to fight battles who, before they left for Europe, got married so they could have sanctioned sex, i,e, not die a virgin, and maybe even leave a kid behind as a legacy. For a nation of these young women and young men, the sexual relation was hot and short, leaving them with a whetted appetite and little else. Their erotic awakening froze in early bloom. The soldier’s bride especially, having had only the faintest taste of marital relations before being left behind, surely felt as if she was married to a nonexistent entity (perhaps she even sets the table in case he comes home, in shades of Lugosi’s first Monogram pic, THE LIVING GHOST). Not only is her man not around, but his next letter may arrive weeks after he is already dead. These sorts of things were probably swilling around the collective unconscious like a plague of ghost G.I.s and seductive traveling salesman Hitlers. Like the Voodoo Man, in fact. 

And of course, through it all, that horrendous ache, the lonesome sadness, the same sadness a boy in the early 1970s like myself was feeling from staying indoors on a sunny day, unable to leave Bela's side in his hour of woe, sighing over his Charlie's Angels bubblegum cards in prepubescent longing all the more tortuous for the fact that Kate Jackson was so out of reach, yet right there - in ephemeral mirage form. Life.... to death. Image... to life, and each side greener than the other.

Thus to appreciate the beauty of VOODOO MAN without the background of having seen it ad nausea as a child in the 1970s, or as a wartime lover,  you must first understand true suffering: romantic longing, unfair parents, stupid little brothers, annoying teachers. You should be a mad genius trapped in the mundane reality of normal suburbia. For like such a mad genius, VOODOO MAN suffers from disrespect and the hostile derision of lesser mortals. For indeed, the poverty row horrors of the 1940s were dissed by everyone, even  their own makers; a sad state of affairs when the director and writer admit throughout the film that they don't give a damn about what they're doing and you shouldn't either. But we were used to being told stuff we liked was crap. And we raged against boredom and against every bedtime and in this refusal to kowtow to life's petty rules we really found a kinsman in Lugosi. It didn't matter how bad everyone else was in front of and behind the camera, Bela was the star and he gave it 120 proof.

So yeah, the director William "One Shot" Beaudine shot the film with his usual adherence to the lazy tenets of his nickname, though like the lazy he occasionally lurches into inspired brilliance. "Romantic" lead Tod Andrews plays Ralph, the most unimaginative and dull screenwriter in Hollywood, though his existential suggestion that Bela Lugosi star in the film he has just written and/or lived, does in fact come true, Moebius strip style. Still, in Ralph's own words, "Zombies are a scenario writers worst nightmare. I should know, I wrote one once.” 

Hmm, so zombie and horror films are for morons, and Monogram's writers should know, because they write them? That's rather self-defeating and dubious logic, yet no one can argue that here the picture is, soaring through time and cobweb covered wings long after the lame writer has been forgotten. Such self-defeating and dubious logic abounds all through the film, as as when the sheriff refuses the hero's help in finding the ever increasing roster of missing women: "Me and Elmer've done all right looking for them ourselves, I guess we can look for one more." The self-defeating and dubious logic in action once more! Not that they've found any clues, or leads, or women, but they're doing "all right by themselves." That's something a child says when they're too shy to ask for help. Such blatant contempt for the intellect of an audience borders on the pathological, even further, until it loops back around to crest the pinnacle of high art.

This meta-logic ties into the practice of voodoo itself, in both in the contempt it inspires in the western "white man," and the way trances actually can be induced to universal benefit and cosmic aura enhancement. The voodoo spells performed are just contempuous mumbo jumbo but the actors are game and Lugosi and Zucco both intone like skilled hypnotists or bass players, and their mojo robs the reasoning powers of nearly everyone in the crew, the cast and the mise en scene, leaving our true antihero-- the insane, grieving hypnotist Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi)--to treat the landscape of the film as his own tyrant sandbox, outwitting the sluggish sheriff, berating his cringing dingbat servant Toby (John Carradine) and leaving hypnotized women shambling around his whole world backyard. It fits the mindset of any frustrated kid who (often rightly) feels the adults in charge are raving idiots and/or cocktail-dazed bullies. The only other 'real' person he knows- - his long-gone wife--is dead, or in kid terms, his best friend moved away, or Kate Jackson exists only on the cover of Bananas, in WW2 terms it's that girl back home re-reading the letters written by her MIA husband until they're sogged. 

In case you don't have a drunken father or son or me to make snide comments as you watch the film, the VOODOO MAN DVD comes with the comic stylings of Rifftrax, hence the cover that makes this look like some frat boy Tiki party video: Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, ala Mystery Science Theater, are the comics and rather than robot silhouettes there's thankfully just a hilarious audio commentary option. I'm certainly grateful to them for getting the film out on DVD, in a nice transfer, and for keeping their comments on a separate track so I can enjoy the purity of the original and refer to their company only when I want to make sure they caught some ridiculous moment which is often, and they catch them all. Keep 'em coming, buckos!

 
So now that I've trashed the film and everyone, let's concentrate on the brilliance beneath: Lugosi, naturally. His  restrained, melancholic performance reflects, as I've said, that he always brought his "A" game (check his "handy" robe above), no matter how contemptuously the actors around him treated the story. As grieving husbands trying to resurrect their lost Lenores he could pull you right into the screen by the throat just by welling up his eyes with tears and spacing out his words in the right way... "Life... to... death!" And the sense of despair and dejected madness is again totally metatextual, for he was a classically trained toast of Romanian theater who had come to Hollywood and rose to iconic fame and just as quickly fell off big studio favor for being too much a prima donna, and now here he was at some flea-bitten old and probably cold Monogram studio, with William "One Shot" Beaudine, kind of like Klaus Kinski in AGUIRRE: WRATH OF GOD, ending up the king of a gaggle of unimpressed monkeys.


Bela's megalomania and devotion to the eternal "play" of acting, then, earns our love despite and because of the dregs surrounding him. Children still at that pre-compassion stage could easily identify with that kind of protective madness, the insanity that prevents true genius from succumbing to despair at the mundanity all around.” 

I also like how the film adheres to the spirit of a child’s sense of play, where no one really dies or escapes fake death. All must pretend to die and thus live forever. In all these Monograms there was seldom any actual harm done to these young frozen brides. They usually snapped out of whatever trance they happened to by the picture’s end (presumably unmolested -- coded into the 'child-like' nature of her keepers), while Bela inevitably died in his burning lab, usually with his hands happily locked around the neck of a gorilla. Every kid knows that, in war games, the only true winner is the one with the final, longest most dramatic death scene. Even the last man standing knows that to truly win one is the last person killed, not standing - for the last man alive is always shot by someone already dead, as a kind of final exhale of life and bullets: in death there are no losers. After all, what is the difference between a living soldier and an emotionless zombie if not that he is seen, and heard from, and missed. Come home, soldier. Andy, come home.

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Sprays of Heaven: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976)

"Help means so much more than giving you weapons." 

What happens when a peaceful rocket full of sexy East Germans are lured to a western colonized planet and are subject to drugs (the red spray is "spicy" while the blue spray is "sweet"), erotic dancing and orgiastic staring contests?  Das ist die frage in Gottfried Kolditz's colorful, cool and just plain weird film, 1976's IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (Im Staub der Sterne). Classy is the word I use to describe this crew, four women and two older guys, well-dressed and even-tempered. Nice hair.

Answering a distress signal, this East German rocketship (from the planet Cynro) emergency lands and is greeted first by a woman dressed like Pocahontas driving a combination school bus-railroad handcar who comes rumbling up to the ship in welcome like she's Robby the Robot in FORBIDDEN PLANET. Suko stays behind to spy while the rest ride over to the club to sit on divans and catch snide insults from the local bosses. Someone wants this spaceship to go home, but first, why not invite them to the party? Pocahontas comes by later with prismatic plastic fantastic invitations for each of them.

The "boss" of the planet is a fey German artiste who gets his hair spray painted blue and is forced to play with lite-brite and a keyboard that controls a disco dance floor full of pythons and gel-lit frauleinen. Don Draper this guy aint. And let me tell you, his army sucks. Mostly the battles consist in a lot of standing around, working up the nerve to bust a cap, like a high school dance in Hell. These cavorting hedonists never speak, but spend most of their time spraying drugs of one color or another into their mouths, brainwashing nosy visitors with pen flashlights and doing licentious dances. The costumes aren't up to Mario Bava PLANET OF THE VAMPIRE standards but nonetheless pretty fetching, with an uncanny resemblance to UN peacekeepers. And it's nice that they change clothes about five times a day and stay color coordinated with each other, as if through telepathic EFSP (Extra-Fashion-Sense Perception). The patterns and styles are elegant and mod without being tacky or cumbersome, and they go well with the natural blonde shag haircuts of the majority of the crew. Jana Brejchová is the hottie commander (at right). She was once married to Milos Foreman!

In a way, DUST OF THE STARS is the perfect Iron Curtain counterpart to the American space fantasia of 50's sci fi films, ala: CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON/MISSILE TO THE MOON/QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE and THREE STOOGES IN OUTER SPACE, wherein dopey male astronauts land on a planets run by space women with a hankering for new blood... in their lineage and on their mandibles. In DUST there seems to be mainly dudes on the planet, at least with speaking roles (aside from Pocahontas) and the men are in weird Studio 54-esque "boytoy" attire, all ready to offer a hit of primo "spray" to any crew member with an open nostril, er, I mean mouth. And the girls in the crew are the ones who call the shots! The two men on the crew are clearly both well-laid and mildly emasculated... a perfect Euro combination that Americans can only sneer at in envy. Both Paul Lind and Mae West would have loved them!

Kind of like HELL HOUSE (the Halloween 'haunted house' wherein Christian kids finally get to dance, pretend to do drugs and worship Satan in their own way), the licentious dancing and spraying of the aliens here presumably was acceptable to the East German censors because it was negatively depicted as a trap-- set by decadent western Imperialists--to ensnare good honest communists.

The parties these aliens throw are awesome, but for my money nothing can beat the black tights beatnik bar modern expressionist dancing of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Man, those girls just nailed it! And though one of the two men on the Cynro crew is pretty smart (usually in these films, only one paranoid crew member smells danger while the others consider him a buzzkill), the commander is a woman--and competent!-- navigating her sometimes overly compassionate female emotions with the same objective grappling of, say, Kirk on STAR TREK, and between all of the crew is a sexually relaxed vibe (they sleep with each other and make no big deal of it? Man, those East Germans!). My favorite is the girl at lower left; what a magnificently sensual pout!

I think her name is Miu. She's played by Regine Heintze, and I love her. Also, I love the offhand way that the film's sexuality and lovely female forms are displayed without any leering and/or slavering. It's like the characters in this film actually have sex rather than just winking and drooling and then finally having one chaste kiss like they're David Manners at an ice cream social. In DUST, they just do it and forget about it. The Germans have no patience for lovelorn leering! Stand straight! Are you slouching?! Achtung!

I am grateful to Netflix for having this film on instant stream and thus indirectly introducing me to the wonderful site known as Teleport City ("Bringing you yesterday's tomorrow... today!"). I love what their writer says about the loose nature of the crew (remember this was the 70s, pre-AIDS awareness, when sex wasn't a four letter word):

Now, in addition to their refreshing gender make-up, there are other things about the Cynro crew, only subtly hinted at for the most part, that make them just a little different from what you'd normally expect from the militarily-ranked team manning your average movie starship. I think, also, that these things are meant to suggest the way things roll back on Cynro. For one thing, this gang is just a tad more touchy-feely with one another than the behavior of those serving aboard the Enterprise and its like have accustomed us to. Secondly, Suko, as a not-all-that-in-shape middle aged guy with thinning hair, clearly has the arrangement to beat onboard the vessel, as he seems to be the boy toy of at least two of the female crew members, including the Captain and her blond colleague Miu. Miu, for her part, also might have a thing for the ladies, as one later scene seems to suggest. While all of this implied hanky-panky provides the opportunity for a bit of casual nudity and light petting between the cast members, it's all presented very matter-of-factly, with none of the exploitational hubba hubba you might expect. Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman this is not -- and the tone seems to suggest that the egalitarian ethos observed on this lots' home planet extends to everyone getting an equal piece, not just of the proverbial pie, but of each other, as well.

Now I don't know about you, space neighbors, but that seems pretty cool to me. If the wall hadn't come down, I might be tempted to hurtle it. I would disagree with Teleport City about the score (they don't like it). Yes, it's a bedroom-ish low fi casio-guitar soundtrack, but it's superb in its monochromatic moodiness; it's low-fi shoegaze twenty years ahead of schedule and as such is 100 times better than those super-slick-hyper-cliched Danny Elfman orchestral/children's choir cues that have been deadening so many big budget sci fi and fantasy films here in the states in the last 20 years.

Similarly ahead of his time is the fey "boss" of the bad guys, a prancing Caligula-wannabe who parties with snakes and likes to change his hair color to match his mercurial mood. He could be knocking back drinks with any 1990s Manhattan loungecore crowd and everyone would assume he's in advertising -- but it's still only 1979 and he's a communist. And we think those East Germans were behind the times? In 1979 they were partying like it's 1997, which is to say, hard and unsmilingly.

In typical commie fashion, the action break-out finale looks more like a labor strike than a shootout, replete with hundreds of confused, identically-dressed male extras hacking at rocks, locking arms and shuffling around in nonviolent protest. No one seems very militarily coordinated on this planet, with opposing armies running to and fro like herds of awkward antelope, but they look good, specimen-wise. Boasting a mix of modular architecture and muddy grassland roughly parallel to Gene Roddenberry's TV special futurescapes of the era, the film earns extra points for the natural and uncanny weirdness of East German design, and the refreshing lack of western sexism. Not once does any male say anything condescending! And our director manages to make them all seem both vulnerable and strong, smart and gullible -- all while never missing a chance to show some sexy thighs (below left).

Much more bizarre in terms of sci fi plots is the moral quandary the crew faces: If they intervene on behalf of the oppressed workers of the planet, they'll have to stay around like a peacekeeping delegation and will probably get involved in an interplanetary war; if they just leave then they've turned their back on a people in need. It makes a good modern parable for a UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Liberia or Darfur--or the reason, for example, that George Bush Sr. was too smart to invade Iraq ("no exit strategy").  The conquering Tem people know they can't kill or attack the ship directly if they want to avoid an "inter-galactic incident," but the miners are all fair game, used as human shields, slave labor and so forth, again, just like real life!

Another perhaps more controversial analogy is with modern UFO philosophy--i.e. the notion that we're (as in earthlings) under the rule of trans-dimensional aliens who harvest our genetically modified souls and have worked their way into the fabric of all levels of social leadership. The space travelers tell the enslaved Tekk: "We can't build a force field around your planet so you can develop undisturbed like we would like"-- a lament very similar to UN policy toward underdeveloped nations undergoing exploitation by slick multi-nationals, or the way grays try not to disrupt our evolution even as they tinker with our DNA on the sidelines.

Whoa! Don't think I'm crazy. I've just been reading Nigel Kerner's new book all weekend. It's not that I 100% believe we're a soul farm stud on Orion's Belt, but if we in the first world can't/won't imagine there might be some extraterrestrial race for whom we're a third world primitive society in the midst of being exploited (we learned colonialism from somewhere) maybe we deserve all we get, or may have already gotten. Plus, our East German rocket comrades bear more than passing resemblance to the "blonde" aliens sometimes seen cruising around in saucers or European dance clubs.You will now please erase this nonsense from your mind. Alles ist schone. Alles ist schone...

Due to budget or obscure communist censorship laws we don't see too much violence or special effects; most of the attacks are offscreen and we hear about them on the ship's radio. The big climax just involves one "important" death, which causes "the Boss" to smash his orbs, if you know what I mean. On both sides of the squabble there's a remarkably etched-in sense of collective teamwork, decision making and leadership skills. But hey, we don't have to see scenes just because the rickety sci fi framework plot requires them;  we've seen it all before -- fill in your own blanks, let your tongue feel the spray, and dig those astro-boots (right).

In the end, DUST says more about communist notions of decadence, binaca-style spray drugs and open-sexuality than a whole festival of Amerikanische schweinhunde filmen ever could. Most devastating is the implication that the need to get high and exploit nude bodies is perhaps just a capitalist-conditioned response to the repression and misery instilled by our Puritan forefathers. These East Germans don't need to do all that because they just have casual sex with each other, wear cool clothes, and forget about it. With a crew of beautiful, healthy German women to give your aching head a maternal massage as needed-- and/or dance while you eat breakfast, maybe you'd be just fine as a cog in the people's machine. After all, what are you exploiting the workers and getting high for, anyway?

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The Bulls Fighter

There's tough guys, and then there's Charlie Bronson. Johnny Cochran fought the law and the law won, but Bronson has fought the law for three decades and it seems to be a bloody tie. All the bulls can do is keep him locked down - the minute he's free, he starts a ruckus. And it's a bleedin' true story! He wanted to be famous and he is, but the whys go unanswered.

The film's slow mo strut and staggering formalist tracking shots, timed to great classical music and shrill Pet Shop Boys disco would be CLOCKWORK ORANGE enough to get posh with highbrow critics (it glorifies hooliganism!) and since Kubrick's film was surely a big influence on both the man, the country and the system-- our hero's angry edge-of-your-zipper male persona is something that's ultimately made rather sad and tragic, not to mention slyly post-modern. Bronson is an unstable terror, but kind of a hero in that he doesn't actually kill or rape anyone, nor does he seem to pick on anyone smaller than he is; he's not a sadist or a bully, per se, yet the man ends up serving more time than most rapists or murderers have. What a world! 

Whatever your view on violence, you got to love those tracking shots and the Wagner, right? Wait, did we all see the same film? Read all these confusing reactions by Peter Travers in ROLLING STONE:

Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, known for his Pusher trilogy, pushes hard at the boundaries of banal film biography. Bronson talks directly to the camera, wears menacing clown paint and does music-hall bits. He also makes life hell for guards who interfere with his vision of himself as an artist. So much for the global petition circulating to free Bronson. Whether or not you'd sign the petition, this movie and Hardy's electrifying performance will knock you for a loop.

Guards "interfere with his vision of himself as an artist"? Man, what kind of artist is he if not the Picasso of ass kicking? Like Picasso, he likes to fight with the bulls (English slang for prison guards in this case) and when he decides to be the drawing kind of artist, he gets support from the system, so what are you talking about, Peter Travers? The verb "push" used twice in a sentence?  Why does making hell for guards (which seems inaccurate since most of the guards seem like sadists happy to indulge our hero's masochistic penchants) have anything to do with a global petition? Travers thinks "menacing clown makeup" wraps up the question of a global petition, pat, and no mention of said petition is made in the film, which ends on a very sad and depressing note. So, did Travers really even stay to the end or did he just crib from the press release?

Clearly, it's seems enough that critics are safely unanimous in their 3 out of 4 star rating for this gutsy little opera of punching and pounding. The film is stylish and sharply observed without being derivative or suffocatingly crafty, but after the first amazing powerhouse 20 minutes there's really nowhere to go but right to left, then left to right, your toofless, in those lovely musical tracking shots. Here's Ebert:

Originally sentenced to seven years ("You'll be out in three," his mother calls to him in the courtroom), he has now served 34 uninterrupted years, 30 of them in solitary confinement. Why? We don't know. The movie doesn't know. If Bronson knows, he's not telling

 But Roger, we do know: from making an in-house ruckus!  Just because you're in jail when you assault guards and hold people hostage doesn't stop it from adding time to your sentence. If he'd been a good boy he'd been out in four, but assault charges do add up, murder or none. So it's hard to feel like he's a victim of the system. Then again, it's more like the system is a victim of him, and that's why the film works even without going too deep under the skin. He's not that much of a threat to society--besides petty robbery--but he is a threat to the penal system. Brit corrections can't do a thing with a guy who actually likes being forced into prolonged periods of solitary confinement--or pretends to. Every time he gets his act a bit together the warden cautiously grants him some privileges, only to regret it, time and again, culminating in the tragic climax wherein he holds his own art teacher hostage for 44 insane hours.

My overall point of quoting the above critics is to perhaps convey how being high up in the press circle might make BRONSON more opaque, which is a sad thing to have to say, especially about ROLLING STONE magazine which, as I dimly recall, used to have its finger at least in the same town as the counterculture's pulse. A sleek, younger journal like SLANT nails it beautifully however in this piece of knowing, liquid mercury prose from Nick Schager:

As the famed inmate, whose bald head, upturned mustache, and imposing physique (usually nude or in white long-sleeved T-shirts) resembled that of a cartoon carnival strongman, Hardy is a whirlwind force of nature, stomping around a cell like a one-track pain train, leaping into battle with rabid-dog intensity (in one sequence, he actually takes on a Doberman), and in his first-person monologues, flashing unnervingly funny menace. Bronson so immediately and definitively establishes its template and character that each scene soon plays like a disturbed Loony Tunes cartoon replete with concluding punch(line). And when Bronson appears on stage with face covered in white makeup (and, in a magnificently deranged, schizo sequence, with half his face au natural and the other half done up like a mad Nurse Ratchet), Refn strikingly nails his subject as a monstrous clown, a lunatic who took great, sadistically comical pleasure from putting fists to flesh.

Love the Nurse Ratchet, monstrous clown cartoon animal strongman observations! But even here, Schager is wrong. It wasn't a wussy Doberman Bronson fought, it was a bleedin' pit bull!

Fittingly, though it's the brilliant UK writers at GUARDIAN who really nail the anguish of the man. Check out this from Erwin James, who actually met Bronson whilst serving his own life sentence:

(the) film made me think a little deeper about the real Charlie Bronson. We have had some correspondence recently. His first letter made me want to cry. "It has been nine years since I caused anyone any harm," he wrote. "Surely it must be time now to give me a chance?" I was touched by his vulnerability. Having been a prisoner with little hope once, I wanted to reach out and reassure him. For all the pain he has caused - in his prison career he has taken 11 hostages and staged nine rooftop protests - he has had an abundance of grief in return. The film, he says, has given him a new impetus for life. "It has brought me a great feeling of inner strength and self-worth. I actually feel human again." All he wants to do now is get out and concentrate on his art. "I'm a born-again artist," he says. "Through all this mad journey of institutions, I have found myself in art."

See? It would have been good to know all that in the film... or to know anything that went a bit deeper into what makes this fighter tick. Perhaps--and this is only a guess--it's something to do with latent homosexuality? The preference of male skin--even if it's only knuckles of the bulls--over the confusing, maddening touch of unknowable woman? Yes? Tom Hardy's intense, beautiful, heartbreaking, and incredibly jacked performance certainly allows for this possibility without committing one way or another. He's smashing, he is!

Also, how in the world does he manage to--apparently--keep all his teeth? He should look at least mildly Mickey Rourke-ish after a few fights... and how can he charge into battle naked and have no bulls smash a nightstick or taser to his naughty bits?  That's what I'd do, by crikey. But, it takes a Brit to know a Brit, and on that note, here's one of my new favorites, Florence, of Florence and the Machines (below). If this song was rolling over BRONSON's credits perhaps, it might have made everything a mite clearer. So... will you join me in imagining this music video re-done with tons of BRONSON footage? (though you can certainly enjoy Florence's hot little shimmy), and then raising a glass to England, where they still rage like America used to in the 1970s? Danu bless each and every one of them:

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