CinemArchetype #7: The Shadow

The Shadow is that most threatening of archetypes, the malevolent root chord of the subconscious. As opposed to the anima/unconscious which is more collective and soul-based, the subconscious is the basement of repressed memories and desires, a dank cellar stuffed with taped-shut moving boxes that still shift back and forth occasionally like something's trying to escape. Freud's big short sighted flaw in his visualization of the subconscious was perhaps insisting that these dark lower storage cubby holes were merely to store the still-beating heart of our repressed memories and desires. For the purposes of 'the Shadow' this is no doubt true. As soon as we learn to hate ourselves, the shadow is there to take the hate off our backs so we can function in daily life.

But in successfully denying the eros, the freedom, the lust and passion and abandon of uninhibited desire, the conscious subject eventually becomes stale, plays it safe, has nothing interesting to say, becomes a derivative Body Snatchers pod-style copy of their former self. If they want to get their mojo back they need to traipse gingerly down into the basement and poke around in those taped-up boxes, find some vitality and get the hell out of there fast, but promise to come back soon, so the demons will promise not to try and fuck up your jam.

If this is not done, the conscious self grows weak and watered down and the repressed shadow goes up in proof.. until it finally explodes in a whiskey still fireball / autonomous complex.

 As humans we unconsciously understand this and our culture invariably has pressure valves in place, some airholes on those boxes, a special outlet moment or holiday when the demons are uncrated and marched into the light so they can breathe and stretch. Such holidays have been with us since the dawn of time: Halloween, solstices, May days, drunken wedding receptions, bachelorette parties, post-prom beach trips, peyote ceremonies, etc., but in incorporating the shadow even for a night or afternoon we face all our collected hate and revulsion, our rage, all the repressed junk in mid-fermentation. That's why it's best to depressurize early and often, so that resentment-ferment doesn't have a chance to build...

"Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions." - Jung, Psychology and Religion: 131

 1. Mila Kunis as Lily - The Black Swan (2010)

"If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the ego to give up its pride and priggishness and to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may not be. This can require a sacrifice just as heroic as the conquest of passion, but in an opposite sense." -- Dr. M. L. von Franz 'Man And His Symbols', Dell Publishing/ copyright: 1964, by Aldus Books, Limited, London

 2. Orson Welles as Harry Lime - The Third Man (1949)
As a writer of westerns, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) makes a living by translating American history into the formulaic story of good triumphing over evil; you can tell which side is which by looking at the color of their hats: good guys wear white hats, bad guys wear black. When Holly blunders through the mire of  post-war Vienna, he finds that all hats are gray.  He reacts, as ugly Americans will, as if it's his duty to translate the gray shades into a high contrast ratio so he can figure out who he should save and from what. As if emblematic of that gray area, Harry Lime lies 'dead' until Holly becomes so far in over his head that his repression mechanism--his ability to distinguish good and evil-- fails, and Lime bursts out of the shadows, literally.

Not exactly evil, Lime creates evil through the black market watering down of antibiotics in post-war Vienna, something any of us might be capable of in such topsy-turvy circumstances. Harry's freedom from moral restraint is a superb shadow to Holly's burdensome, nosy parker good deedism.

"...the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow…represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar."  - C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

 3. Andy Serkis as Gollum - Lord of the Rings trilogy
This bit of writing from a suspiciously advertisement-saturated site is kind of term paper-ish, but maybe that's apropo:

Another psychological reading of the character views him as Frodo’s shadow personality. Should Frodo allow Sméagol mastery, he will become him and be ruled by the ring. But in all Jungian hero interpretations, the way to personality integration is to make use of those shadow aspects of the personality so that the individual controls rather than is controlled by the shadow. In this sense, as Frodo’s shadow, Frodo using Gollum as a guide into the darkness or underworld setting of Mordor, shows personality integration or in Jungian terms, individuation of the self. (Mobile WiseGeek)

 4. Peter Parker as Dark Spidey - Spiderman 3 (2007)
I hated the first two Spidermans but liked the third, mainly because it redresses the problem of Tobey Maguire's unstomachable wussiness as Peter Parker. I couldn't stomach his sad sack "I'm too busy meddling in New York's crime world to pay my rent, but I'm really trying!" kind of aw shucks hangdog malarkey in the first two films, not to mention his cop-out refusal to kiss Mary Jane at the end. What a pisher! But all the balls Parker was holding underwater come bouncing up when black alien goo affixes itself to him in the 3rd go-round. Suddenly he's not afraid to stand up for himself and expose Topher Grace's photoshopped attempts to steal his job at the Daily Bugle, or to strut down the street wowing the girls who pass him in all directions, and to order around the landlord's lovestruck daughter like a personal maid.

Of course old ego, that too much thing, comes in and overdoes it and Parker ends up becoming like a grandiose coked-up Spider Hyde, but at least, by the end--thanks to his own encounter with the shadow and its eventually balanced incorporation into his psyche--he's able to stop blaming criminals and landlords for his namby pambiness and in forgiving the world, he forgives himself, and we're finally left with a real hero.

5. Owen Wilson as Hansel in Zoolander (2001)
As Hansel, Owen Wilson is not really a shadow in a negative sense, but he represents the aspects of self Zoolander really needs to absorb, like the ability to turn foes into bros, and to see the world as warm and inviting instead of as merely a vehicle for the endless deluge of adoration that keeps Zoolander's hungry ghost nose ever troughside. In short Hansel is an anti-shadow, representing the easygoing compassion Zoolander's ego has kicked to the cellar over the years.

 If we study this in relation to Lily in The Black Swan, we're left with the story of an artist's evolution--perhaps the inverse of a superhero-- as aspects of suppressed altruism and tactile extroversion are allowed to open up a closed-off narcissist with the result he's less worried about people's perceptions of him and more genuinely concerned about others' welfare. To do that you got to get humble. Lordy, it's hard. Druggy tea helps.

"Jung says that if we could fully meet our Shadow, we would be immune to all any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves. Finding this sort of transformation to a state beyond guilt is a task for the hero/ine who has the strength to descend into the underworld and wrestle dark creatures." - Tony Crisp  (Archetype of the Shadow)

6. Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden - Fight Club (1999)

"The quest for liberation seldom extends beyond that liberation, and this is why revolutions so quickly turn into dictatorships, and the joy of Saturday night’s ecstasy turns into Tuesday’s deep depression, and the girl you love to party with turns out to be destructively bi-polar. Norton tries to halt Tyler’s spread of malice, but it is too late; you can't blind yourself twice, you can only try to 'double see'."  (Masculinity and Self-Annihilation. )

7. Rutger Hauer as Wulfgar - Nighthawks (1981)
A terrorist in the 1970s mold ala The Baader-Meinhof Complex and Carlos, one can draw a line in the masculine psyche sand from Hansel's transcendental bliss to Tyler's liberation of the civilized man from staleness to violence, to Wulfgar's freewheeling Thugee-ish super-terrorist. His famous line to Sly Stallone's cool cop is "We're not heroes, we're victims!"

The shadow Wulfgar represents posits an alternative to complacency in the face of corrupt leaders' genocide and oppression in far-off regions while the population grumbles but does nothing to stop it. The terrorist mentality is one of nomadic quid pro quo, so violence done against the Arab people in Palestine is retaliated for by random bombings in NYC ten years later. Wulfgar  treats 'this world' like a dream - who cares, Holly, if some of those ants down there stop moving? Or as he says to a guy right before he shoots him point blank with a Mac-10, "You're going to a better life." The cops must move towards the reverse, making the worse life stick around -- the larger picture can't matter, they support 'this life' for better or worse--and in the end, wrongs and rights cancel themselves out and leave only Disney left standing where once beautiful Times Square filth did thrive.

8. Bela Lugosi -- The Wolf Man (1941)
A metaphor for our young country's anxiety about our seemingly inevitable intrusion to Nazi-occupied Europe, The Wolfman shares a main character with The Third Man: Larry Talbot is very similar to Holly Martin. Like Holly, Larry gets in over his head with his distinctly American self-righteous naivete. But then Talbot goes farther than Holly, becoming a killing machine, starting with the old gypsy's werewolf son Bela (Lugosi) and since in the process he's bitten, Talbot ends up inheriting the curse. In other words, Bela is the shadow Chaney incorporates all too well; he gives this new animal force it's own time slot --nights of the full moon--to run amok, and lets Larry pick up the pieces.

Released a year before Pearl Harbor, The Wolf Man reflects the anxieties of a country determined not to waste its boys' lives in any more war-torn European quagmires. In other words, we in the US were Talbot and Lugosi was the Axis, Evelyn Ankers the innocent populations of free Europe. In killing the guy who tried to take over the world we are now forced to take it over in his place. We become the inheritors of the global house keys by default, as well as the full moon madness of heavy power.

Talbot's main flaw as a person is that he's thick-headed and presumes the world runs how he was taught it should in his first world schoolbooks, and that Evelyn Ankers must fall in love with him because he's chosen her... and his dad owns everything in town. The wolfman self represents the logical end point of that attitude: the date rapist or Mai Lai massacre-maker (or that amok nut in Afghanistan). As the conquering white male we have been led to expect a world waiting to embrace us unconditionally. When it doesn't happen all we can think of is the world must be insane, so we can take from it whatever we want. Let the Larry of tomorrow morning pick up the pieces! Rrroaaarrr!

9. Maria Montez - Cobra Woman (1944)

The evil twin is a reliable marker for 'the shadow' in Jungian archetypal psychology, but through the fractured lens of Hollywood's pre-PC 'exotica' mill, the twins (both played by Maria Montez) become a swirling, intoxicating spectacularly colorful miscegenation fantasia. The good twin, Tollea, is about to be married to a bland honky seaman with the deceptively 'native' name of Ramu (Huntz Hall). We first see her innocently getting ready for her wedding under the watchful eye of the British consulate, and then she's kidnapped... by Lon Chaney Jr.!

Ramu too will have his evil shadow too, in the form of Martok (Edgar Barrier) the sinister counsel to evil cobra princess Naja. Ramu even subdues Martok and changes clothes with him, cementing their link. As this is all occurring under the draconian misogyny of the code, both Naja and Tollea seem incapable of thinking for themselves without male guidance, but the main difference is that Tollea is part of a happily 'civilized', i.e. colonial present, with loving old British consuls fussing over her trousseau, while Naja represents the threat of the unassimilated Other, the shadow of the Commonwealth. Her violent sacrificial ways are a link to the Thugees (Gunga Din), Fu Manchu, and countless other savage 'yellow' or 'brown' or 'black' menaces that served in the era's pop culture as both villains and justifications for British subjugation. We might recall that Mel Gibson even justifies Spanish conquistador subjugation of the Mayans this way in Apocalypto. 

 10. Josh Brolin as Trupo - American Gangster (2007)

Though he's presented as the film's only real bad guy--a dirty cop compared to the 'clean' one played by Russel Crowe and an amoral, greedy thug compared to the upstanding citizen drug kingpin played by Denzel--it's hard to not root for Trupo just because he alone seems to have some genuine moral complexity, and balls. When we see, for example, Crowe counting out hundreds of thousands of drug money dollars he found in an abandoned vehicle and is now about to impound in evidence, we feel the contempt of the cops looking on who would have loved to just pocket the cash and forget all about its origin, and why not? Meanwhile the whole idea of the war on drugs is a farce anyhow, so it's hard to root against cops taking a cut to look the other way. Is it the dealer's fault if kids get shot in the process of cops launching an armed attack on their innocent heroin and crack processing tenement room? Personally I don't think so. Brolin's character may be evil but at least he has archetypal resonance and appreciates the value of a dirty dollar. (see "A Well-Tempered Potier")

11. Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1958)
 To understand this shadow one need only look at the goofball "Mexican" political policeman in Touch of Evil vs. the corrupt and corpulent Welles. Here he has a hot Janet Leigh on his arm and the best this 'Mexican' can do is send her off to some remote hotel alone to be terrorized, as she'd later be in Psycho. He can neither focus on his case--calling her every five minutes, petulantly saying "I'd like to be able to take care of my wife in my own country!"--nor Leigh, using every excuse to avoid the terror of her sultry negligee languor. Quinlan, on the other hand, has bulldog focus, sensing through his game leg the weird gay frisson of Vargas' avoidance of his sexual responsibility ("where's your wife, Vargas?") and actually getting things done, even if it's through cheating. His eventual destruction leaves Vargas in the position of having killed a cop, and forced to realize that Quinlan's hunch was right, the kid really did plant that bomb.

And it never dawns on Vargas that if his wife should be killed or successfully railroaded for murder and drugs then his love of law and order might seriously be questioned and he'd go all Dirty Harry on them much the way Vargas has. Once he finally realizes his bride is missing he storms the Grandy bar, shouting "I'm not a cop anymore I'm a husband!" and trashing the joint. Vargas is too thick-skulled to see that his rage over his missing wife essentially turns him into Quinlan, a once-honorable cop who's spent decades in that bar-trashing state, still making sure no one else gets off on technicalities like the strangler of his wife did. She was strangled, Pete. 

 12.  Scar - The Lion King (1994)

"Scar could be considered Simba's Shadow Archetype in Jungian terms: he is an adult with young Simba's headstrong and cocky nature and immature understanding of what being king means ("I'm the king, I can do whatever I want"). The plot is only solved when Simba defeats Scar, removing from himself his childishness." - TV Tropes

Yikes, that Scar one hit a little too close to home! I'm out. My shadow is capped, you hear? CAPPED!

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Peaking on Crystal: 10 Reasons Terminator 3 (2003)

The year T3 came out, 2003, was a defining year in my life, and I saw it in the theater right before my own edition of a similar mythic arc was about to happen. If you make the The Kristanna Loken T-model my ex-wife and re-cast Arnold's part with Angelina Jolie circa Girl, Interrupted, and replace Crystal Peak with a fifth floor walk up in the East Village, well suddenly it's all there. If your life isn't as damaged by cool cyborgs from the future as mine was you can surely appreciate these ten other reasons:

1. Clare Danes
What's a pistol of her caliber doing here? How did we get so lucky? Angela Chase... "Go... now," whispered as she races to class; visions of Jordan Catalano slouching through her deep dark red-hair; endless eyes welling with tears in perfectly modulated familial reconciliations. Here she's a put-together veterinarian with a petit-bourgeois fiancee, the kind of guy who willingly goes to Bed, Bath and Beyond to make out a bridal registry, so you know we'll be glad he dies. She has her doubts about him too but her Skynet-building barely-around Air Force officer dad is sure his little girl is smart enough to make the right decision. Naturally she looks at mangy mutt John Connor with a mix of horror and concern upon learning she's supposed to marry him instead, in da futuah... but most wondrously, she also kicks his ass after she catches him robbing her tranq stash: "I use these to chemically neuter dogs!" she says, her voice warbling with concern, disgust, and unconscious gonzo admiration.

2. Nick Stahl as John Connor
Say what you will, Stahl is awesome. He was great in Bully and brings a real sweaty bewilderment to John Connor, and why not? This time Connor's a junky! If he doesn't end up shaking with withdrawal later on it's only because of all the adrenalin pumping through him. I don't think he falls asleep in the entire film, it all practically unfolds in real time. Hard to believe they didn't want him back as Connor for Salvation but maybe that was the trouble --he was too busy acting and feeling and making the pain and reality of the situation felt (according to Wiki, perhaps he had a drug problem of his own)--their loss. He brings a tortured break to his voice that reminds me of James Dean. His reaction to on first seeing Arnold, his boyhood buddy, is like a hurt kid: "You don't remember me?" That Stahl had to be hurt later by not being asked back makes me want to side with Skynet as far as human extermination. Just because he has that weird lip and those huge, desperate eyes and junky pallor you think he made Connor suddenly sketchy?

3. Kristanna Loken, Airbrushed
The idea of having the hot but vaguely blank Kristanna Loken kind of fake tan airbrushed to look halfway to CGI is a genius post-modern touch. And I'll tell you what else is a great touch...

AND FROM HERE ON IN SPOILER ALERT... I'm writing the rest of his mainly for people who've seen the movie -- so see it and don't ruin it for yourself, then come back and let me assure you of the awesomeness that was there. (PS - as always, enter with a nice buzz and low expectations, so just forget I said anything.)

4. The Presidential Bomb Shelter at Crystal Peak.
Kubrick-esque couches, the mod chandelier, the very 60's NASA mural, the presidential TV podium with old school TV camera, the DR. NO-style super villain command center-hewn rock walls, and most of all the sense of being underneath the world, bomb-proof, nothing to do but reproduce and DJ the post-apocalyptic resistance. As a drunk I am beholden to basement bars in suburban homes. At Max's Princeton basement he and I would pound shots, sing and record Blind Blake songs, and round out the night watching International House and Eraserhead and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with one eye shut until suddenly it was the following afternoon. I dream about descending in rickety old elevators down deep to basement hide-outs very similar to Crystal Peak's. It's a place where I don't need to worry about running out of bourbon or where I'm sleeping. I don't even mind the vague smell of mold and dog hair.

All I'd need to make T3's bomb shelter my own is a place to set up my old DVD player and my WC Fields and 1950s giant bug films, some guitars (so Claire and I could jam on the emergency broadcast presidential podium network) and some assurance there's a huge bourbon stash so I could relapse like Jack Torrance (since the shelter was constructed and decorated back when Nixon was in office, I'm presuming there is, though the drugs may by expired by 30 odd years or so) and I'd be set to lead the human uprising and send my own future dad back in time. Betcher sweet ass!

5. Arnold's final catch phrase to Connor: "We'll meet again"
(he says that since in the future this very same Terminator kills him) almost makes up for lame quips and catch phrase reduxes, the bows to juvenile audience member demands that he recall the past films by saying "I'm back" and fussing over which sunglasses to wear. The whole bit with the coffin connects to this future death in subconscious metaphorical overdrift, suggesting Connor is already dead and now on some weird journey through the circles of Hell.

6. The sense of mounting dread as doomsday approaches.
For the last two films, plus most of this one, we've seen terminators coming back from the future warning us about Skynet... now, finally the future is "all used up" (like Hank Quinlan's), and Skynet is about to go live and that's all she wrote and, as time progresses the momentum speeds up rather than slowing down, and the effect is as similar in a way to only two films I've seen since: The Black Swan and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Present and the future are truly connecting here on the Moebius strip. It all of a sudden gets really real, like suddenly it's almost here, then it really is here, then it's begun. No amount of slamming on the breaks or reloading guns in the back seat, or converting to electric cars can stop it.

7. Pacing
The movie flows almost in real time, taking place in an approx 12 hour stretch from late night and into the following day, with events speeding up faster and faster towards the ominous stretch, ala great films like HALLOWEEN.

8. Giant crane truck chase! - Great non-CGI metal, and the chase occurs at dawn, the best time for trashing downtown LA.

9. The relatively un-cliche'd music and great foley work 
Love those crunching, buckling windshields and that squeaky bouncey castle. Marco Beltrami's doesn't telegraph anything, and a lot of long sequences go by without any music at all.

10. The End
They don't even have time to look at each other as they assume the myth they were born to emody. Suddenly available to them is something that no one involved in the sprawling mess of our global village ever gets: they are truly bound to each other. They can no sooner reject each other than Adam and Eve, or Robinson and Friday. The past three films, the good terminators vs. bad, it all has led them to this moment. Hand in hand they enter the realm in which there are no days, no sun, no dark, no ghosts nor weird kid with a talking finger.... In a very primordial way, theirs is the only perfect freedom... long as there's bourbon. I'm sure Nixon packed bourbon.
 ------

If it wasn't forced to compare with the awesome first two Terminators and was instead a John Carpenter film, and he had excised some of the more embarrassing Arnold one-liners, T3 would  be recognized as a whole different classic in its own right. But if you love Arnold then you love his dumb one-liners so why front? Oh and incidentally --John Carpenter rules!

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CinemArchetype #6: The Intimidating Nymph

We've all heard the words that bags both dirt and douche have for sexually active women: skank, slut, and ho. You would think a girl who is generous with her sexuality would be respected and revered amongst such people, who presumably want to get laid one day. But any club that might want their membership is not only deigned but derogated. Phrases like 'suck my dick' and 'cocksucker' are instead the height of insult rather than gentle requests, reflecting deeply repressed sexophobic anxiety. In any sexually sane society they would be positives; "may your parts be fairly and gently sucked" could be a nice way of ending a letter to a friend, for example.  After all, most of all of us love oral sex... so why, forgive the expression, badmouth it?

The Nympho Ward -Shock Corridor

With the help of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, this strange dichotomy becomes clear: If the female one desires is passive and unsure, if she needs to be convinced and coaxed, then the sex is a matter of conquering and 'penetrating.' If the woman is aggressive and eager then the sex is a matter of being devoured, of disappearing. The metaphor might be the rocket that hopes to land on Venus, disembark and plant a nice US flag, but instead the ship lands inside a giant Venus flytrap tongue and is swallowed up. This of course goes back to our anxiety that our mom's penis is missing (she has nothing where we have something, therefore they can fall-off, therefore ours will). And our penis does go missing, out of side with every deep... deep... whatever your pleasure.

In the writing of Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan via Lacan, we can think of this in terms of the objet petit a, wherein sexual gratification with some ultimate hottie is the ultimate status symbol, which will in effect restore us to our status as mom's golden phallic replacement; but this enhanced completion is dependent on the eyes of the big other; therefore we must never 'get' that final puzzle piece because our need for the other's desire constructs our whole identity. Winning the hottie is only one part of it, the other part is the boasting to the friends; this is where the real objet petit a dwells, finding what the Other wants and getting it for ourselves, essentially becoming then what is wanted; but after boasting the man is still disappointed: his friends don't really care beyond a few words of awe, they're too busy staring at the TV; the emptiness is still there. And now what? Ah but with Lacan we can appreciate that it is exactly this moment of emptiness and 'now what' that is the whole point of existence. In between chasing illusions he can see the world as it really is, but yeeesh, it's an empty mess!

Thus female desire is terrifying because it inflicts an external desire onto us rather than vice versa,  and we know about disillusion from our own sexual pursuits; someone wants to lay us and then blame us for leaving them still empty at the core, just as we did to our last conquest. However, since it's a man's world, the female orgasm is considered more traumatic and X-rated than if she's merely disemboweled, which is why the ratings board is so screwed up (Check out This Film is Not Yet Rated), regularly giving NC-17s to any film where a girl is seen having an orgasm but gang rape and butchery may only garner an R. This shit's been making me super mad ever since Porky's introduced the misogynistic sex comedy deluge in the early 1980s, turning me instantly into a 13 year-old proto-feminist.

But hey, I'm no hero; I too know the terror of a desiring female: I had this gorgeous blue-eyed girlfriend in college and some nights while I was tripping intensely she'd come to me with her blue eyes lit up in longing, her loveliness vibrating, the combination of the purple flannel shirt she liked to wear and her pale white skin and cold as heaven blue eyes drawing me to her, and I'd feel uncontrollable terror and revulsion, like her beauty and longing was some monstrous challenge I was in no shape to meet, being as usual super drunk and out of my skull on acid and having just watched Caligula for what seemed like 30 agonizing blood-soaked years in a single night after a nightmarish Halloween gig at a local frat house. At least they'd paid! I counted my share, $100 generally with trembly hands, the pyramids on the singles winking, Washington's face dissolving in a series of dirty green thin lines.

The Seduction

A great example of how male desire hinges on female evasiveness is found in a largely forgotten 1982 Morgan Fairchild vehicle called The Seduction. In it Fairchild is being stalked by a sleazy creep and by the end she has to do battle with him alone in her swanky mansion. How will she fend him off? They run around for awhile, and then, all out of options, fed up with a whole movie worth of his obsessive crap, she suddenly stops fighting and comes onto him, demands he take his pants off, let's get this over with, Stud, see what you're packin' --so she starts pursuing him around the room, acting all needy, etc. It freaks him out and suddenly he can't get away fast enough, his whole raison d'etre flies out the window and so does he.

I had a girl do this to me back at SU in 1987. She'd slept with me for one night the year before, and then again a year later and the morning after we got drunk at Sutter's together and she sat in my lap and prattled and I instantly remembered The Seduction scene. I no longer wanted to go out with her now that she was hanging all over me, whereas before her prior aloofness made me pine like a Twilight character.

We can see this switch in the public's eventual rejection of silent era siren Clara Bow, for example. In the 1920s Bow was a huge success; her sexuality was legend, a matter of national pride. But when the Great Depression and sound came along the public rejected her wild sexuality and renounced her. Indirectly, I'm sure they blamed her promiscuity for the economic collapse; they rejected not just her but their own past obsession, they had made--en masse--the Seduction switch. I remember a similar moment right around 1980, when the 1970s free love vibe succumbed to AIDS awareness, slasher movies, the death of John Lennon, and various daycare sex scandals coalesced into a backlash against the free love of the late 1960s-70s. As a child in the 1970s I'd basked in semi-erotic attention from cute babysitters and my dad's secretaries at late at night at drunken bridge games. Nowadays all those girls would be jailed as pedophiles as would our teachers in elementary school for spanking us on our birthdays, one spank for every year, while the other kids cheered. laughed, and counted along. So I resent that the 1980s stole my girls, and every time some dirt bag says words like 'slut' or 'skank' I feel the urge to go back in time and sabotage the filming of Porky's. Instead, I guess all I can do is round up some examples of super nymphs:

1. Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind (1956)

In their overview for Dorothy Malone, TCM notes she "made her first impact as a nymphomaniac entertaining Humphrey Bogart one thundery afternoon in 'The Big Sleep' (1946)." Nymphomaniac is a pretty strong word since we don't really know what goes on between them in the fade-out between their first drink and her spotting Geiger leaving the shop. Did someone at TCM get this role confused with her Oscar-winning turn in Written on the Wind? Or is it just that if a girl invites a man for a quick tryst in a 1946 detective movie she's a nymphomaniac? I think the real nympho in the Big Sleep is Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood, but I mention the nympho reference as an indication of the casual offensiveness that goes unchecked in our American social codes vis-a-vis girls who are highly sexualized, and I assure you it's not that bad in countries like France, Argentina, and the UK. We're a nation of easily shocked sexophobic prudes!

Malone's character in Written on the Wind is a stellar example of the intimidating sexual woman. If Rock Hudson had a ball in his sac he'd throw the lady a sympathy f--k and then she could move on with her life, but instead he gets all stoic and takes her down by the river for a picnic to renew their vows of eternal besties-hood, leaving her stuck in a town where nothing ever happens, and the best she can do is get drunk and have flings with the poor locals (and a sorry married lot they are, too). At least in the end she's assumed control of the company and there's an indication her sexual heat can find sublimation in big oily business, and then she can lure handsome contractors home like she's Ruth Chatterton in Female (1933)

2. Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan (2007)

There is no condemnation or prudish judgment of Ricci's character in Moan and that's one of the reasons it's so moving and awesome. Meanwhile she is a nymphomaniac in the DSM-IV-style definition yet she's allowed to be still hot, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Never a caricature or an object, not even of pity --she's a fucking person. As my fellow pro-Moan preacher Kim Morgan notes when discussing the initial chaining of the Ricci's wanton to the radiator:

"...here's the movie's daring twist--she eventually wants to listen. But not because Lazarus is a strict prude, preaching the lord and imposing scripture, he's fractured himself, a depressed musician, still stung by his young wife who just left him for his younger brother, he understands Rae's problems. He's also wise to the wanton, something he can truly express through his music, especially when Rae is nearby. While he encourages her to go straight, she inspires him to let loose, culminating in a gloriously sweaty juke joint jaunt. Singing a wonderfully profane "Stagger Lee"/"Stacker Lee"/" (to a gorgeously gyrating Rae) Lazarus shows that sin, goodness and redemption aren't so (and this is perfectly suitable here) black and white." (more)

 

3. Jane Fonda in Klute (1971)
 One of the more disturbing cliche's in our modern lexicon is 'the dead hooker.' Even in comedies like 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, waking up with a the dead hooker in your hotel room is a handy signifier of black-out decadence, right up there with the face tattoo, and the exotic animal in the bathroom. Fonda as Bree in Klute gives you an idea why this threat is so deadly real and nothing to snicker about. Gorgeous and self-possessed is our Bree, but languishing in the back of your mind while gazing at her awesome slinky body is something of the concern Klute (Donald Sutherland) seems to fee. Also, despite whatever amount of sexy ooh yeah, fantastic's she throws your way, there's a feeling you are not going to connect with this chick at all. No matter what kinky shit you come up with or how deep you pour out your heart, she's not going to break character. The man who turns out to be the killer is even complicit with our need to connect to her, in that he dared to feel that in Bree, at last (as we hear on his tape recording of their first encounter) he'd found a woman who can handle his kinky needs, who accepted his violence. That she didn't provokes the repressive's dire need for erasing the evidence. In a way, as Todd McGowan might say, the beating up is his one last ditch attempt to satisfy her... to actually connect with her and deliver the amount of sensation she needs to get off.  Sleeping with Bree is like sleeping with an echo, a ghost, like a waitress you think is super into you as she waits on you at breakfast but then, as the glint of hope fades from your eyes, you realize she's just angling for a tip; she doesn't even really see you. If you kill her, maybe she'll finally notice you.

4. Asia Argento in Scarlet Diva (2000)

"Her bathroom masturbation leads to a flashback where she is five or six and spying through a keyhole on her brother Allosca making out with his girlfriend. The image of her eye in the keyhole serves as a gateway for all that is to follow: the young girl as Peeping Tom, her directorial eye looking in on whatever "dirty things" strike her fancy, daring to seize the reins of spectatorship back from the “male gaze.”  Anna as voyeur is turned on by her own lurid life, and as Anna/Asia she is turned on by making the viewer uncomfortable instead of turned on in turn. But again, if a man films what a man desires and it shocks the audience, he's brave and cutting edge, if a woman does the same she's considered self indulgent and dirty (unless she's Catherine Breillat, i.e. French and not a sex symbol acting in her own films).

"This double standard carries its own erotic charge, which Anna is addicted to. In the bath she shares with Alloscia she mentions to him she might be an actress when she grows up. Alloscia dismisses actresses as "like mom" and "whores." This prompts little Anna to confess she "keeps her panties on" (when she masturbates) which shocks  Alloscia and prompts him to angrily dunk her head under water. Thus we see from this early age how Anna is addicted to both doing "dirty things" and, in true Catholic style, "confessing" to an authority (male) figure in order to then masochistically receive his violent reaction. This form of erotically-charged penance and provocation is really the backbone of the whole film: First Asia invites us to identify with her character, and then she springs a shock on us so fast we don't have time to form a moderate response. She's like a police detective, tricking us into slips of the "mask" of innocence, or in this case, our delusions of our own feminist liberal tolerance. Anna may get her head dunked, but all of her brother's fatherly scolding cannot change the fact that she made him lose control. This is where she takes her victories, such as they are, by proving the fallibility of those she unconsciously enslaves herself to."(Her Body, Her Ashtray - Acidemic #1 -2003)

5. Mae West
"... Mae is genuinely subversive, which is why the Catholic Legion of Decency was so quick to have her censored... It's nothing in her double entendres so much as the copious admiration and financial gain she shows herself getting, onscreen, for her unmarried sexual congress. If Mae's characters had died alone and unloved, having sacrificed all for her daughter, raised in a convent, to marry a prince, etc., she would have been fine with the censors. But daring to indulge in the forbidden fruits and end the film all the richer and with Cary Grant on your arm and no harm done? It was just too dangerous to a rigid class and sex system like the Catholic censorial 1930s.

Those moralists wanted sex to be served in little teacups to a temperate nation. Mae served it by spreading tea leaves on the floor and flooding the building with hot water. It was like showing the corruptible females of the world a magic faucet with which they could drown their men's precious capitalist system with a few flicks of their diamond-bespangled wrists.

What was more than a mere threat to the Christian status quo, though, was Mae's willingness to peek behind the magic curtain where the big deals are made, and to point out that regardless of how much they bellow and bluster, they're all just men underneath the suits and uniforms. The whole social ladder seemed to shake and buckle from the force of Mae's tsunami hips.(Desperation and Divinity- Bright Lights Film Journal #64, 2009)

6. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein- A Dangerous Method (2011)

In a way I see the Jung-Spielren relationship as the analytical extension, with more geniune sex in it, for educational purposes only, of the one between Jackson and Ricci in Black Snake Moan. You can say Jung violates ethical codes by sleeping with his patient but where I come from there's a saying: the two worst things a man can do are intrude on someone's privacy, and refuse the advances of a pretty girl. Oh wait, that's from Edie Sedgwick: Ciao! Manhattan. Well, anyway, I heard it before... and I subscribe to it. Truth is: men who are married and yet tempted by the advances of a hot young homewrecker are really in a no-win situation. If you spurn the girl she might create more trouble than if you just get it over with. Perhaps you can spook her off by being suddenly needy and really bad in bed, but if you're a young Carl Jung and the hot young thing is seminal nymphomaniacal masochist patient Sabina Spielrein you're bound to get a lot farther in treatment if you agree to a little rough trade spanking and sexual consummation. After all, as T.S. Eliot said, "the awful daring of a moment's surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / for this and this alone have we existed." Man, I use that quote an awful lot, don't i? It rationalizes just about everything. I mean wouldn't you risk your career and stable family for Keira Knightley? If you said no then man you art a pussy; if you said yes then man you art eines richtiges schweinhund!

7. Elizabeth Taylor - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8, The Sandpiper, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Suddenly Last Summer, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
It's surely no accident that Liz Taylor frequently played women whose voracious sexual energy cowed the men around her, indirectly turning them all gay: there's Brando's closeted cavalry commander in Golden Eye; closeted Paul Newman in Cat, and gay cousin Sebastian, to name just a few. Sex with Taylor seems very daunting. She's just too smart, too beautiful, and could probably drive you to suicide if you failed to perform like a stud instead of a houseboy.

She was so tough you'd best not call her a tramp, only she can do that, as when she dubs herself "the slut of all time!" in Butterfield 8. In that movie, alas, she has to reform and hate herself at the end, but most of the time Taylor's characters got home all right, dignity intact no matter what, even if they end up stuck with a pompous houseboy too proud to fill the ice bucket while Georgie Boy staggers down the driveway. Taylor's sexual heat is so 'pure' it's pre-Christian, moving her into the same sphere as Olympian deities like Aphrodite and Athena (though she wasn't a convincing Cleopatra). All her targeted men can do to try and match her was get roaring drunk for courage, and like as not pass out while thinking of poor... poor Skippuh.

8. Clara Bow

"After a handful of years as the most desirable woman in America, Bow became its most abused punching bag. Of course, that’s how stardom works — contingent, as it is, upon our ever-shifting affections. But that doesn’t mean that the story of Bow isn’t a tragic one, or that we should forget what was done to a woman whose bliss was so clearly written all over her body." - Anne Helen Peterson

9. Sue Lyon - Night of the Iguana (1964)

Richard Burton does his best to avoid the advances of hot-to-trot, under-age Charlotte (Sue Lyon) in Tennesee William's Night of the Iguana, but it's only because he's been burned once too often, via the opening of the film when he's hissed at in church for bedding down with one of the younger female parishioners.  He later defines statutory rape as "when a man is seduced by a woman under twenty." Charlotte eventually starts throwing tantrums, dancing with Maxine's beach boys, and finally hooking up with the bus tour's uber-bland second wheel, Hank, all because Burton wouldn't put out, but at least there's older women waiting their turn. In the end, I think he should maybe have gone for it. I mean just look at her in those white shorts. Jeeeezus Christ.  On the other hand, what's the best you can hope for? Humbertville? Forget it. Either way, you already lost it all. What was that T.S. Eliot quote again? Oh never mind.  (see also:  My Night of the Iguana)

10. Sharon Stone - Basic Instinct (1992)

 The famous leg crossing scene is a superb example of the threatening power the wanton female has over not only men but patriarchal authority as a whole. The police have deliberately arranged the cross examination in their favor, with three men facing one woman, along with rows of men behind them and behind the two way mirror, but one flash of her crotch and they are all reduced to gibbering baboons. Case in point, and career instantly made.

11. Ann Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson - The Graduate (1967)

I know this film is beloved as a classic but I've always been irked by its treatment of Mrs. Robinson. After all she's just a lonely wife trying to seduce her friend's son, cougar-style. The film doesn't blame Benjamin for eventually succumbing, but is sure blames her. In a way the film itself acts as a destructive hypocrite, first egging Ben on into her bed then judging her for daring to be outraged when Ben also starts dating her daughter, considering him unworthy for a son-in-law since she's shagging him. It's certainly a hypocritical response, yet is it any different from the film's own attitude towards her, or society's attitude towards female libertines in general? If Ben was a real man he'd keep his Robinson thing going, maybe solicit her for rich presents, expensive watches, and would have been nicer to Ross on their first date so she wouldn't have liked him so much, and then found someone from a different family to date on the side. Instead we're supposed to boo Mrs. Robinson for daring to go cougar before the term was invented while Ben is innocent of all wrongdoing because he made a few lame attempts at stalling her? Golly, you are sure groundbreaking, 'Graduate.'

12. The Vixens, Pussycats, and Dolls of Russ Meyer
Part of the ample charm of Russ Meyer's oeuvre is his fondness for big-busted, cartoonish, very very horny and strong-willed female characters. Why they've endured so well and made Meyer in his way regarded as a kind of queasy-quasi feminist is that his amazonian nymphomaniac heroines aren't judged or derided for their appetites, rather it's the menfolk around them who are judged lacking. They are terrified of these women, and who wouldn't be without the safety of the screen to protect them? Sometimes a boy just likes to hold hands and take you to the movies first, to just make out or round second base before the third date deed-gets-done deadline. The girls in films like: Supervixens; Faster Pussycat; Mudhoney; Beneath the Valley of Dolls; Harry, Cherry, and Raquel; and Up!, don't play that punter tosh. They see you pumping gas, they look you up and down, lick their lips and make a grab for your zipper straight up. If you're a guy and a girl's ever come onto you like that then you know the score, it's something you always dreamed of and now it's happening 'too fast' for your drives to kick in... you instinctively try to run away, call you sponsor, make any excuse you can.

Erica Gavin - Vixen

  Maybe that's why I hated all these coke whore friends of my roommate, all making out all over the floor when I used to get up at four AM to use the bathroom, still shaky in my early weeks of sobriety. They reminded me all a woman had to do is turn around and beckon instead of running away and I was fresh out of moves. And of course they can tease, flash come-on smiles, grab your junk over your jeans, and then push you away when you bust a move, shouting loud enough for your mom to hear, "oh my god is that what you thought I was trying to do? I was just being friendly! Good God!" I know a girl who tells me she used do that kind of thing just for fun! Just to torture us!

Bottom line: every man is a sex machine when there's no chance of having sex. Once it's inescapable it becomes a matter of getting it up, keeping it up, and delivering the goods. Maybe afterwards you can bask but until then you are on trial and your whole definition of your own prowess hangs in the shifting urges of a drugged-up wanton! You should man up and go for it but if you feel dirty and guilty later, don't blame the her! Any dog can be brave on the leash, barking and straining, but don't snap at a bitch if she wants to chew it off. She's just free, and you're not. So suck it, Benjamin!

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CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice

"To the primitive mind, good and evil, life and death are in the nature of materialistic qualities capable of transference or expulsion by quasi-mechanical operations... Sacrifice then is the normal means of transferring life and power to mortal deities to keep them vigorous and beneficent."- E.O. James

The innocence lost as a maiden leaps into an active volcano or a heart comes out in an Aztec human sacrifice, the ripping to shreds of a recently deflowered forest nymph boy to ensure a good harvest--where does it--the 'innocent' property--go? It's all deeply archetypal, with Jesus on the cross being the most glaring instance. The whole notion of 'he died for our sins' is deeply linked to the sacrifice of the virgin boy at harvest time in pagan matriarchies. His blood is spilled over the fields to water them with nutrients in an agrarian rendition of the sacrament. Come spring, a terrible beauty is born... again.

In a sense the sacrifice takes the scythe swipe meant for us. But what did they use before Jesus? And what if you believe that God is dead and that someone, some... thing rules in his place? You would need to get someone else to take the fall, or worse, be forced to take the fall for someone else. Such offered lives are our candles tossed into the wind of the other, our shadow beyond the wall of mortality, and the elder gods are waiting for us to join them... but we're hoping we can just keep stalling it by tossing more virgins on the fire. Don't say it doesn't happen, because it does, but then again they don't have to be virgins, sometimes debauched libertines are just as useful. And according to David Icke, virgin really just mean child. It got translated wrong over the aeons.

Bird of Paradise (1932)

The (symbolic / mythic) killing of these virgins, children, and debauched libertines serves many purposes --I would argue they need not die in the traditional sense, but are wed through the process of death to the anima mundi, a bride or groom for the unseen spirit-- their perspective vanishes but is not dead, merely diffused. Sometimes it takes a few weird happenings to make them realize they are already dead, so they hang in mid-air like a cruciform beacon before finding their way back to the foot of the throne. They are death's 'test case' - we hope death will like the present of their soul, accept it as an appetizer, rather than dig right into us. But then again, according to Jung, the sacrifice isn't useful unless your ego is totally wrapped up in the sacrificial object/person. That's why Abraham was expected to kill his son, or Wally Lamb's brother chopped off his hand in the library, or the Yakuza still dice off their little fingers as a way of apology to their bosses for failed kills.

In the movies the sacrificial subject creates a great unease because it hits so close to home; the death is intrinsically tied into the act of viewing itself. The tribe always gathers to watch the sacrifice, otherwise what's the point? Watching these sacrifices now stirs up deep archetypal responses from our past lives still seeing through the two-way crystal ball eye. If the film is clever about it the whole process sneaks up on us and suddenly, too late to do anything about it, we feel the big black body bag suddenly close over our heads and the credits roll us right into the cremation furnace. Sometimes we're led by the nose ring of desire, sometimes we're manacled unwillingly to the Satanic altar, either way it's like a spin the bottle game where sooner or later the bottle is going to point to us... and then when it does we're always hoping for that last minute rescue and when that last minute's up we try one last gambit: take my wife, please.

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1. Blood on Satan's Claw (1970)

"The Blood on Satan’s Claw dabbles in an idea The Wicker Man was to enlarge upon, transmuting the licentiousness of the hippie era into a meditation on a return to a pagan Britain based in an earthy, unfettered, inescapably corporeal creed, where bodies are the truest barometer of spirituality in substance. In a concept later stolen by movies like The Mummy (1999), Satan is literally assembled bit by bit from the pieces grown on sundry villagers, some willing converts to Angel’s cult, others innocent bystanders. Ralph’s initial discovery of the beast buried within earth releases a long-dormant yet sustained and readily infectious pagan force which seems indivisible from the scenery, and when Angel’s coven is glimpsed it comes garbed not in black cloaks and stygian paraphernalia but in nature-child garlands of flowers. The rampant miasma of sexuality sees the unholy mark spreading on the locals like the tell-tale stigmata of venereal diseases. Hayden, who gained initial stature as a horror starlet in Peter Sasdy’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) playing a respectable Victorian daughter turned into a vessel of vengeful sexuality to punish a hypocritical father, here plays the teenage girl as the embodiment of everything destructive to the settled order." (Ferdy on Films)

2. Suddenly Last Summer (1958)
"Williams' own real life sexual interests follow the Greek ideal, testifying to his profound grasp of Greek tragedy's ability to explain the cosmos in terms of rabid rentboys. With his body sacrificed to ensure the harvest, the ghost of Sebastian is free to hover over the fertile action like Poe's Lost Lenore or the dominating spirit of REBECCA. What does he look like? We don't even know, never see a picutre, and that gives the film extra power: we have to create his image for ourselves, and the only comparison would be Oscar Wilde, someone long ago from the past like that - Poe or Marquis de Sade or Anais Nin, someone too modern for their time, and who we think of as blood relatives of the terrible future. In short, ourselves." (August, 2009)

3. Bird of Paradise (1932)

This tale of a Polynesian princess Dolores Del Rio's love for hunky white man Joel McCrea is emblematic of Hollywood's fear of miscegenation. The climax involves McCrea and Dolores Del Rio escaping being sacrificed to Pele, the volcano god. But on the yacht ride back home--while McCrea's life hangs in the balance from some mysterious illness and the captain debates the horror and shame bound to strike Joel's family if he brings home this non-white girl--a deux ex machina solves the miscegenation issue for them, as Joanne Hershfield notes in Cinema Journal #37:

 "Luckily Luana's father arrives to reclaim his daughter and the crew doesn't have to make the final decision. The captain translates the king's speech for the other crew members: "The volcano curse has been put on Johnny. Unless Luana returns, Johnny will die." (...) Luana decides she must sacrifice hers to save his life; she chooses to return to the island with her people. The film's final sequence shows Luana in her royal robe and feathers climbing up toward Pele, the volcano's flames superimposed over her. It is clear that she will burn in hell for her sins... However Johnny, the white male hero, is acquitted. His male sexual potency is ultimately preserved for his family, his future progeny, the white race, and America." (p. 10-11)

4. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
If you've always thought the big masked orgy center of Kubrick's last film seems like much ado about nothing (i.e. tons of security for an event that's masked and barely R-rated anyway so who cares if a non-member crashes the party) and if you never quite buy the the proposed theory that the event is supposed to be stale and 'safe' to comment on desire's ultimate emptiness, then maybe you're not surprised to learn the whole 'British' cut of the orgy was just PR to distract from the deeper cuts, of footage that may have caused Kubrick's death. According to some in-the-know paranoid conspiracy theorists there was quite a lot cut from the ceremonial scenes, i.e. child sacrifice, which would bear out all the stuffy preparations for this descent into posh spice hell. Well, of course I'm talking about all those horrific visions recounted by hypnotized children in the early 1990s of rich powerful people in the throes of reptillian bloodlust at top secret black magick ceremonies torturing young girls and children to create compartmentalized split personalities through ritual trauma, debasing them and killing them and drinking their fear. According to Carlee on the Freedom from Reptilian Mind Control message board:

The reptilian-illuminati hybrids are obsessed with sexual aggression and domination, which is evidenced by their sex magic rituals. Humans are routinely taken and programmed to serve them as familiars and sex slaves; more evidence of their desire to control and "own" others. Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut is probably an accurate representation of what takes place in one of these rituals. He was certainly involved with some of their circles and must have been exposed to things like this on more than a few occasions.. As a side note, he was apparently killed because he refused to cut a scene which contained subliminal triggers that were intended to break the mind-control programs of the people in the audience. Following his death, the scene was cut and never made it to the final film.

I neither believe or disbelieve such a paranoid tale, but it's pretty weird that he always got these unlimited budgets and all the time in the world to make his little movies. And it does always seem like he knows more about the cold, brutal, shiny inner workings of the world than we ever will.

5. Lindsay Lohan  and Frances Farmer
The Hollywood system preaches freedom while constraining it, and the Sacrificial Woman is their bible. In the 1930s, Farmer was driven insane and hauled off the nuthouse for daring to speak her mind and not kowtow to the dull patriarchal scoldings of law and order. Lohan, with her missed court appointments and relapses, also knows the way Hollywood exploits hot mess 'truth' even while sacrificing it on the altar of insurance premium fiction, requiring daily drug tests on the set of a movie about drugs, and/or otherwise getting mad when their actresses stop acting like gentle doormats and start breaking windows, even though if their male actors do the same thing it's just boys being 'spirited.'

This is partly due to gynophobia and partly due to the sacrificial knife always needing a victim. They hope for a Marilyn overdose to turn their creative property into dorm poster legend, but they'll settle for a public burning, the threat of the witch, the chthonic feminine symbolically scorched from the earth so the sexually frustrated housewives don't have to worry they're missing something while they outfit their cages in the latest gold gildings.

6. Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves (1997)

Nordic wunkerkind Lars Von Trier gets accused of being misogynist by people who don't know the difference between addressing an issue and vouching for it, and they probably think Ken Russel's The Devils is pro-Catholic. No ma'am. The women LVT nails to the crosses of his films are martyrs who harken back to the women's pictures of the 1910s-40s, films made for one of the most coveted demographics in an age before TV soap operas: bored housewives.

The films these women liked were masochistic tales of suffering and redemption, wherein a naive country girl follows a smooth-talking slicker (usually played by Ricardo Cortez or Monroe Owsley) into the big city, believes his lies and immediately finds herself penniless, pregnant, and unwed, forced into a choice between prostitution or starvation. So her out-of-wedlock baby goes up for adoption and grows up to become District Attorney, and our heroine says nothing to him while she's on trial for murde,r preferring a martyr's death in the electric chair to making her baby D.A. cry.

Those plots are long gone, but Von Trier hasn't forgotten them and in this his breakthrough English language movie Watson's sexual degradation on behalf of her injured husband's health is just an alchemical X-rated upgrade of the same dark sacrificial gesture. Ditto Bjork's letting herself get hung so her son can have an eye operation in Dancer in the Dark. It's not 'sexism' per se underneath this but the nature of true persona sacrifice, and faith that God (or the Devil) never misses a payment so long as you follow through on giving up every last thing you hold dear. It's not until Dogville that this sacrificial chain is finally broken, and the wrenching pain of every woman's sacrifice on the altar of their selfless love comes roaring back with a vengeance, like ripping the new testament out of the bible and using it to light the fire under a bound-and-thorn-crowned Rick Santorum.

7. The Wicker Man (1973 and 2006) + Burning Man
+ Dark Secret of Harvest Home 

Some Wiccans will argue that John Barleycorn was never meant to be a real human 'virgin' sacrifice, and Burning Man is just a place to inhale DMT and chalky desert dust. One of Christianity's most noble aspects is its complete hatred of human (and animal) sacrifice. Perhaps they knew way back that only demons feed on souls, so sacrificing a virgin to Satan is like popping open a amyl nitrate under a dying man's nose, or rescuing him from drowning, or pulling a thorn out of the lion's paw. . Not only that, David Icke says the term sacrificial virgin is just a mis-translation of the word 'child' by some ancient squeamish scroll decoder. Child sacrifice would be a bit TOO creepy to represent in either film, so we're willing to accept a full-grown uptight Christian in the original WM (1973) and a full-grown chauvanistic dillweed in the remake.

See, the Christian bible HAD to make polytheistic agrarian matriarchal societies into a threat, otherwise we'd never have invented the car --we'd still be dancing around maypoles and killing our own livestock instead of buying 'meat' with a clean conscience (no sad porcine eyes to look into as you raise the axe). That may sound harsh but I'm serious: we had a few thousand years of agrarian pastoral happiness and a few thousand years is enough. And most of all, men needed to take back control because literally they had nothing else to do. Shut outside of all the group decision making they became little more than stud service workhorses, all but tethered in the barn when they weren't working themselves to death under the merciless one-eyed devil sun.

"Isn't it sad to realize the patriarchy has to repress and belittle the feminine, for the very simple reason that otherwise women will realize it's much better to kill men off once they've served their reproductive purpose, or send them off to work in the fields as castrated slave labor? Hasn't anyone seen CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)? What's the matter with you people? You think this is a joke? A child is missing! (See: Port of Call Summer's Isle)

8. Venus in Furs (1969)
"Venus in furs will be smiling / when the moment arrives" sings Barbara McNair every time another of Wanda's victims die in this swingin' sixties X-ploitation from Jess Franco. The plot has Jimmy (James Darren), a jazz trumpet player who jams with Manfred Man before accidentally witnessing the kinky sex murder of the white fur coat-wearing, blank-eyed party girl, Wanda (Maria Rohm). Jimmy splits the scene for a job in Rio during Carnivale so that he can get away from the death and weirdness, hah! Apparently Jess Franco loves Carnivale since it means he can include lots of handheld footage of street celebrations, which he then cuts in with interior shots of Jimmy and his Euro-funk compatriots jamming in a rich dude's red suite. As Jimmy jams, his lady Barbara McNair sings, and then sulks as the ghost of Wanda shows up in the crowd making eyes at him.

Jimmy fools around with Wanda, now reborn (he's sure it can't be the same dame), and after they fool around she gets up grabs her fur coat and wanders out to seduce and destroy another one of the party people who thrill-killed her back in Europe. Imagine if the dead prostitute from Eyes Wide Shut came back to kill Sydney Pollack and everyone else at that Long Island party, one at a time, via seduction, and she shacked up with Cruise in between kills while wife Nicole Kidman sobbed and sang "Eyes Wide Shut will be Closin' / When the credits arrive!" Cheap as it is in spots, the sacrificial archetype aspect ensures that everyone but the outclassed McNair is at one point killed and the truly horrific aspect is the realization that Jimmy might not even know he's dead too, until his body finally washes ashore --- and the moment arrives. As Weldon put it, "far out."

9. Cherie Currie in Foxes (1980)

From the first time we see Annie bouncing around with a sultry smile and platinum blonde short hair, we know she's doomed. She's too free and easy to last to the end of the film, anymore than Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, or Matt Dillon in Over the Edge, or Mickey Rourke in Bullet. Her dad is a mean cop who chases her all over town while her mom sits paralyzed with fear and rage at home, flanked by two large Rottweilers to keep him from beating on her (she never goes to school, which is his excuse run around trying to smash her face in). Currie's performance here is startlingly open, conveying the way some girls deal with childhood horror by just letting go of all fear, living from minute to minute, hopping from the back of one shady motorcycle to another, always one step ahead of their brutal demonic pursuers. But as is the case so often with hot mess beauty in the movies, freedom equals death. As much as Jodie Foster tries to protect her, one way or the other you know Annie will be dead by the end of the film. She is the self-aware sacrifice, always one breath from the Aztec knife. To bear out the connection with agrarian matriarchal blood crop 'watering,' towards the end Jodie Foster mentions Annie wanted to be buried under a pear tree, sans coffin, so her friends could hang out above her resting place every year, eat a pear and have a taste of Annie, Jesus wine blood Virgin Spring-style!  

10.Don't Look Now (1973)
With his obsessive montage editing, Nicolas Roeg has always been the auteur version of one of Dali's melting clocks: time runs backwards, seldom forwards, and life bleeds out of the margins of a page crowded by notes on ancient architecture. In Look, Donald Sutherland plays an art restorer in denial of his psychic abilities, even though the sight of red ink leaking off one of his slides is enough for him to realize his red raincoat-wearing daughter has just drowned outside in the back yard. Flush with grief, Donald and wife Julie Christie head to Venice where a psychic old lady tells them their daughter's spirit is sitting right next to them at brunch. Donald is obsessed with denying it even though he's got the gift himself.

The way it's supposed to go down in life is that death attacks the oldest first--your grandparents--and gradually works it's way down the generations while you squirm helplessly on the wheel of time. You see the reaper take your grandfather, then your father, then.... suddenly the trail goes blank until you notice your daughter is alone and crying over a grave with your name on it. But if the daughter goes first, your sense of preparedness is thrown way off. Now death can come at any time, it may have already come and you don't know it, like poor Jimmy in Rio. In one chilling scene Sutherland witnesses his own Viking funeral passing him on a black ship in the other direction as he sails down a Venice canal. That's the definition of the archetypal sacrifice: the scythe is already always in mid-swipe so you must offer someone else in your place or take it yourself. Because he can't stop pursuing that tiny figure in the elusive red raincoat and because he doesn't heed the warnings all around him, doesn't sacrifice his own obsession with reality and embrace the unknown, Sutherland's known collapses until its as ground down by gravity as the inter-dimensional red dwarfs of PHANTASM, literally.

 

11. Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960) /
Venetia Stevenson in Horror Hotel (1960)

There's so many strange similarities between these two films that, were they not made in the exact same year on opposite sides of the Atlantic you'd swear they were emulating each other. Both involve pretty blondes who wear their hair moddishly short and leave their comfort zones on big adventures, alone, against other people's advice or good common sense, and wind up staying at decrepit inns where they are killed, by a knife, in the middle of the night, and the middle of the picture. Then follows the boyfriend and/or detectives to investigate and eliminate the threat, but the damage has been done; our locus of identification is forever shattered. Welcome to the 60s.

The cute, inquiring Alice in Wonderland-like blonde who inadvertently winds up way out of her depth is an archetype we're familiar with, and we naturally assume we'll be riding with these babes all the way to the finish, and the evil will go up in flames, woodsman to the rescue, etc. Psycho and Horror Hotel betray that assumption, slicing of our eye's apple in half right when we least expect it. The experience is jarring, emblematic of the loss of innocence. The sacrifice of these curious blonde kittens is a wake-up call not to the chaotic uncertainty to come, the trading in of buried secrets and friendly barbecue rocketship suburban dream for corruption, hippies, and liberals who let killers go free on technicalities. Justice is gone. Only the victim's immediate family, usually father, boyfriend, her sister, can stop the menace.

Leigh careens from sex kitten to virginal bride and back, sometimes in the space of a single shot . . . and when she vanishes or appears, we hold onto our seats for fear of spinning out of control, reminded with a jolt just how easily our locus of identification can become uncalibrated. The second half of Psycho is haunted by her absence; she vanishes down the rabbit hole ink drain of her pupil and emerges a year or so later — none the worse for wear and much more worldly for the trip — in Manchurian Candidate, coolly coming on to a shattered Frank Sinatra in a train car doorway.(Bright Lights #59, 2/08)

12. The girls of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
The Australian outback is a very old, mysterious place - and if you send beautiful, virginal repressed budding flowers in between the old mysterious rock formations in the 19th century, well, you're basically just opening up a giant Wicker Mouth of Madness - a dimensional gateway into the unknown as only the super weird Peter Weir can suss them. Caught between his LAST WAVE - about a white lawyer struggling with the Aboriginal apocalypse - and GALLIPOLI, with its turn-of-the-century tale of beautiful Aussie youth needlessly ground down by Turkish machine guns, The HANGING ROCK is a mesmerizing tale of coming of  outback mystery (partly based on a real place, revered by the Aborigines) and the dangers of sexual repression, where all the search parties in the world won't bring your sacrificial blonde lambs back from the beyond, even if that beyond isn't death, but some strange sort of marriage.
 

13. Famke Janssen as Phoenix/ Jean Grey - X-Men: Last Stand (2006)

As a kid who collected X-Men comics in the 1980s I too was in love with Jean Grey and dreamed of one day owning the big double issue wherein she died in Cyclops' arms. Such romantic deaths / double issues are what dreams are made of for virginal 15 year-old boys. No one single real-life non-fictional girl can encompass the vast amount of longing and hormonal emotion we feel, nor would they want to, nor would we be able to talk to them without stuttering if they were to try. But in comics we're manly and confident and love at an operatic pitch, and that's why the death of Jean Grey was so wrenching. We loved her so much they had to bring her back. Her return was then partly our fault, the way Elektra couldn't stay dead in Daredevil and the bionic woman Lindsay Wagner couldn't stay dead after her two episode arc in The Six Million Dollar Man and so was given her own show, The Bionic Woman. Our gaze sends young girls into the abyss by instinct, but true love can draw them back out again, for sometimes whole story arcs.

Still, Jean Grey was different: our collective fanboy longing brought her back in her all consuming phoenix form, but the 'return' of Phoenix, while grand and death-drive fascinating, was a mistake, a kind of Monkey's Paw Deathdream moment that undid the nature of sacrifice and tried to 'take back' what was already been given. The phoenix from the sacrificial flames is, in the end, nobody's idea of a good time. She destroys the good, the bad, and everything else in her path, including those of us who still love her. With this heartbreaking reality in mind, we have no choice: we man up, take a shot of bonded courage, and ask a real live girl for an actual date.... gods help us...

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