Crazy gorgeous, crazy for real, unstable, reckless, spontaneous, today they'd be called bi-polar --there's a lot going on with modernist European art cinema's women. We love them and they love us back, or are scared of us (by us I mean camera / viewer / audience) since they can't really see us, not quite, like they wake up to how trapped they are inside of a rectangular screen and we're the unseen child spirit trying whisper words of comfort across time and media platforms into their forlorn ossicles. We're like the tiny human figures these madwomen dream they give birth to in great numbers. Sometimes you'd swear as you gaze into their gigantic dilated pupils they can see you, no matter how big or small you are in perspective to them, across time in the dark they can almost read your mind, can almost tell if you are enraptured or at least sympathetic to their cause or just leering down their dress... like everybody else... sigh.
Women like the one played by Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita (1960, below - right), or Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 - above, below-left) are forever reaching for a 'real' connection with the men inside their film environments, trying to trap them into a full commitment, to devour them through hydra hair anemone tendrils, and considering how bad Mad Men makes America look at the same approx time frame, sexual harassment-wise, I can only imagine how bad it was in Italia! These poor harassed, molested, objectified and leered-at ladies need more than just assurances from some diegetic dimwit trying to get them into bed; they need a champion, a little man they can keep it their pocket, small, so you can look up to her, so she can be your ideal.
But is she? I mean, she's crazy! And too hot for words. Even a sensitive intellectual like Antonioni may fall into the dress-leering trap as he endeavors to sympathize with his female character's neurotic condition. We hope he can succeed, and that his star can transcend the confines of the Mussolini-period architecture and minimalist gallery space and escape out the open corner of the screen, into his / our arms or, within the screen, someone mature, rich, and debonair.Alas, there is only one Marcello Mastroianni, and he spreads himself thin. Only suicide threats seem to get him to come home anymore, at least for Fellini. Antonioni is much more of a nice guy to his women. In the past his madwomen could find solace and escape from modern life via breathtaking mountain views (as in L'Aventura), in vacant lots (ala La Notte), or even the friendly quiet of a glider over the countryside (L'Eclisse), but for Red Desert all these avenues are condemned, or gone. Yellow poisons are in the sky, the waters of the river are choked a dull coal black --almost Star Trek alien worldly' even Vitti's apartment seems like just a different wing of the same factory. Vitti needs a different escape avenue, this time she's got to go all the way through the looking glass, into post-modernism metatextual refraction until her persona finally shatters like a Lady from Shanghai funhouse mirror in Only thing is, we in the dark theater are the Irish sailor dupe. Always.
Twelve years ago Dr. Paul Narkunas (the skeptical professor in The Lacan Hour if you're keeping score) lent me his DVD of The Red Desert, painting it in my mind as a lurid desert odyssey that went dark places he knew I'd been to, neurochemically. And he said it was funny, too.
But twelve years ago I was a different person--I didn't know Spinoza from Shiteuxlle and the DVD Paul had was a far-off cry from the gorgeous Criterion blu-ray I have seen thricefold since, weeping with joylessness as my throat pouch widens to encompass more and more hot, psychotropic gas with every viewing because sooner or later, it 'clicks.' But the Narkunas disc was a bust. My TV was smaller too , too far away for letterboxing; even my socialist art filmmaker wife at the time was bored after twenty minutes. The story's vagueness and incoherence combined to gave me a headache and then I fell into a half-asleep, and coasted through to the end, unwilling to turn it off lest I have to admit defeat, and that I was not man enough or intellectual enough to 'get it.'
My problem was not uncommon for an American of my posture, sloth and limited education. Now I realize my initial response of boredom was intellectual. French critics labor for years to reach such complete disinterest! And how can a film that bores you stiff the first time get better with repeat viewings? That makes no sense, and no sense is very European. But Criterion's blu-ray is gorgeous and now my TV is larger and flat with deep blacks. The fog is 3-D now, pulsazione como veleno deliziosa, purple and dark blue flecks that taste like cotton candy. My outer life has gotten worse, sparser, less anamorphic, to accommodate the balance shift. My glasses are dirtier, my mind shrunken and polluted with rivers of pharmacological run-off. But the screen breathes and grows, ever sharper, deeper, vaster.
Speaking of psychotropically inflated throat pouches, let us vault into the future for the new post-modern comic mini-series, Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of Babylon, a recently de-vaultified 70s miniseries deconstruction from IFC. Here, at last, is high camp trash deconstructed past the point of being genuinely funny, and more like Godardian abstraction, somewhere between Ed Wood (1994) and an actual Ed Wood movie, between intentional failure and unintentional result. Real et Surreal. Guiliana (Vitti), the crushingly alone and confused wife in Red Desert lets modern alienation vault her into madness, but Babylon is already there, itself, as a whole, refracting in on itself in a deadpan absurdity ouroboros. It is madness' final destination.
In both, the acting and writing are intentionally 'off' with no grounding in anything approaching reality, reaching a heightened abstraction that makes even Sirk's Written on the Wind seem like kitchen sink realism (see here on Splitsider for a shot-by-shot comparison). While Red Desert achieves post-modern affect through mixed signals and ambiguity (in short, art), Spoils achieves it through specific soap signals which are then delocated to the point of abstraction. Giuliana doesn't know what kind of movie she's in -- comedy, tragedy, horror, sexual soap, clinical study of depression --she has no idea what the right response to any situation is and the movie never gives her a signifier without contradicting it a moment later; in Spoils, the link between signifier and signified is broken. Meaning spills out everywhere, adding up to nothing.
Spoils' story, for example, apes the 70s mini-series and 50s soap only for the first two episodes. By the end there's no longer a sense of being in any one generation (though probably it's meant to be the late 60s). The story of foundling adventurer Devon Morehouse (Tobey MacGuire), his capitalist amok sister Cynthia (Kristin Wiig), and their forbidden love stretching from Depression before rising up Rink-like in plumes of oil and blacking the sky of WW2, beatnik junkiedom, hipster underwater observatories and into a climactic shoot-out in front of a bemused Shah of Iran. The six-part series' deadpan humor comes less from jokes and more from inept direction, dialogue, framing, mismatched rear projection and adorable miniatures. Carey Mulligan's voice shows up inside a mannequin playing a British wife brought home by Devon when he the war from home comes a-marchin' - and that's the order they would use those words in France, and maybe under the sloshy pen of trash novelist Eric Jonrosh, played with windy Paul Masson-era Welles-ishness by Will Ferrell. The idea of a mannequin is a legit rival for Cynthia is both oddly foreboding - a Stepford wife moment - and funny, depicting the dehumanized interchangeability of characters when stripped to the bones of meaning. The iconography of the mini-series becomes in SPOILS as a tattered yard sale, or the way a red velvet smoking jacket might sell for $500,000. if it was owned by Errol Flynn, or tossed into a rummage pile for .50 cents if owned by Errol Flynn's stand-in, and yet be the exact same jacket - and in fact, it was the same jacket. Deal with it.
The idea of stand-ins and a deep ambiguity illuminating the arbitrariness of place, value, and ownership course through Antonioni's work constantly in both micro- and macrocosms, and in Spoils there is an arbitrary dividing line set up, a story as elusive in its ultimate unimportance as the disappearance in L'Aventura. The forbidden love of Cynthia and Devon is made so only in the sense of social propriety --they are not related by blood -- but soap opera cannot function without such refusals, such sacrifices of love in the name of propriety; this sense of sacrifice helped found the Italian film industry, stemming in part from floridly romantic opera and verse and the realities of the post-war post-class economy and censorship which also factors in Red Desert --man's willful exile from an Eden that exists only in the memory (being in Eden is impossible by definition, like bringing money to heaven); one can't be an impassioned sensualist and a 9-5 captain of industry. Operatic soapy romantic signifiers are cinema's way of mourning the loss of sensuality, the thing that is sacrificed, the sexuality sublimated in the name of victory --in war, commerce, and construction -- and the way the rise of provincial conservative censorship is intrinsically tied into that commerce, and how grand actress gestures of selfless sacrifice are the icing that sells the workers this bogus cake.
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| Blow out the candle and make a wish! |
In Spoils, Cynthia mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy they nurture, the objet petit a renouncement that sacrificing love on the alter of propriety entails. Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, it's been cut-off by toxic sludge, and that even thinking some new man understands her is barely substantial enough to be a pipe dream. If we've been presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs, we're as confused as she is. But the signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up, they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using smokestacks instead of scissors. Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have is the only thing worth having. The signifiers don't add up in Spoils either, less out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style windbag.
I think being American is a distinct disadvantage to getting the modernist alienation affect. Europeans and South Americans all sneer at us for not being into subtitles, or for learning languages other than our own and yet they admire our innocence, knowing it is born out of a single language system. But if we imagine seeing a German film in German class (hence without subtitles) and not being able to understand because we haven't paid attention ever in class, then we too can get the modern alienation effect so coveted by the Cahiers du Cinema set. And if, after 20 minutes or so, bored and restless, we start to notice how silly and strange the people onscreen seem when language isn't there to contextualize their behavior, then we can feel the spirit of Bazin rise within us. Antonioni helps us realize we're bound up in signifiers even without language: if we see in this unsubtitled German film a woman at a child's bed against a white wall, and the kid has what looks like a thermometer in his mouth, we would totally believe that the kid is sick and the mom is concerned. But then we pan back and the thermometer is revealed to be a candy cigarette and it's not a hospital room but a post-modern apartment. So who is the woman? Suddenly an orderly comes in to take her away and you think she's insane and this is a mental hospital, but how did we know it was an orderly? Did he have a white lab coat on? That was no orderly! Now. Now you get it.
The censors don't want this to ever happen. They already demand a certain kind of code of conduct and a secret code to imply sex has occurred if your adult enough to read it. From there it's a small step to leading that crazy Jack Torrance dirty-minded censor on a wild goose chase through the Overlook maze of contradictory signifiers while you laugh and laugh. To take Americans outside the prison walls of language takes a great deal of this laughing; it's important to realize that Antonioni arrives at his 'plain as the nose on a plane goes twirl' effect through serious artistry, while the three layers of intentional accidental post-modern intention in Spoils of Babylon occur through lack thereof. It's the difference between acting the role of a guy leaving a half-eaten doughnut on a park bench and realizing there is no audience, or camera, or script around you, and so you were really just a dude leaving a doughnut on a park bench. Did anyone in the park see you leave it? If no one saw you leave it, how do you know it was even yours? Maybe you should quick pick it up and eat it before they notice!
An example of a similarly dry refracted modernism in Spoils of Babylon is right there in the name of one of the characters: Seymour Lutz, a variation of course on the name 'Seymour Butz,' an old Bart Simpson prank phone call favorite ("Is there a Butz here? I wanna Seymour Butz!")
This joke in its unaltered form would be far too crass for Jonrosh--a great Falstaffian bargain of a man--so in Babylon the name is abstracted, mispronounced by Cynthia constantly, leaving him to finally shout "it's pronounced Lutz! LUTZ!"
Now of course any comedy lover reading this set up will presume Wiig's calling him Seymour Butz instead of Seymour Lutz, which is where the joke would be if it was only once refracted. But Cynthia keeps calling him "Seymour Lund." Quintessential Jonrosh. Also, in saying "Lutz! Lutz!" he's invoking the tone and delivery of W.C. Fields in 1933's International House saying "Nuts! Nuts!" while fixing a loosened nut on his autogyro. Coincidence? Never!
One similar favorite moment late in Red Desert made me finally understand why Paul recommended it: Feeling guilty about the affair brewing when she's alone with Corrado (Richard Harris) in his swanky bachelor quarters, Giuliana looks up from the bed, sees the door is open, worried neighbors or husband or the porter might barge in any minute and so she closes the door, but it's to the cabinet by his bedside!
At an earlier point she runs off after him towards a ship that's been quarantined, to stop him from what she thinks is him risking his life by going aboard to help with the sick, but then she tuns around, separated from the group in the fog, Corrado at her side; the others look at her as if she's been caught red handed in an affair --but are they really feeling that, or is just another passing mood? Now she thinks she's the one who needs to go rescue the sick on the ship. Both impulses are forgotten by the next distraction, just like they would be for someone on strong acid. Everyone seems always about to start an orgy or come onto her, but are they? Is this what being a hot mess in sex-crazed Italy is like? Or are they just ghost Repulsion wall arms? The answer is she's not crazy, we are. Antonioni is revealing our tendency to seek romantic sparks and soapy betrayal everywhere.
Finally, let's examine the cart selling apples, all strangely painted silver-grayish, on the Ravenna street. Who would buy gray apples? Are they some kind of decoration? Are the apples poison? Then why the gray paint buckets, also so completely painted over as to challenge the idea they are paint buckets at all? Is this art or pollution? We can't tell but when Giuliana sits by the cart for a minute she becomes a neo-realist apple peddler. Still, we can't deduce what's up with this cart, or her relationship to it, anymore than we can deduce if an orgy happens later, or after that a cheap affair or a tortured unrequired bonding, or none of the above, and if we don't fight the surreal de-signification domino effect then not knowing is like waking up from a dream within the dream. The hidden puppeteer hand is clumsily pulled down onto the stage and the mind's tendency to lose itself in green smoke and booming voices finds itself challenged by the sudden sight of curtainless wizards in their underwear. But there's a reason we like that hand offstage, the wizards clothed and behind curtains hidden, because once we no longer fall for the illusion we have to face our own death, and she speaks to us, as always, through a collage of remembered movie lines, song lyrics, and poetry, and in Scarlett Johansen's voice, and with Veronica Lake's hair, and the way she looks at Alan Ladd like she's just rescued him from a bad orphanage.
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