All you need is holes: WONDERWALL (1968) and the Entomological Mystery Tour

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely peepers," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran) at a waterworks entomologist who collects bugs and peeps through a hole in the wall at neighbor and fashion model Penny Lane (Jane Birkin). Through microscope viewer-size holes in their shared wall he can see her modeling for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, and dealing with her two-timing boyfriend (Ian Quarrier, who tries to get her into a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg) but Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time and less of old Collins. But mostly we see her only in a round hole.

So what is going on? Is this a PEEPING TOM for the Carnaby Street dandies? Why do we spend so much dull time with Collins? When Quarrier visits him to borrow borrow ice and sugar at various times,  the professor always dressed as if hoping to be invited over and it's very, very dispiriting. The film drags on and we learn Penny's pregnant. Will Quarrier help raise his forthcoming baby. Will the professor ride to the rescue? I mean in some capacity other than cocking his head quizzically, as might a beagle trying to understand his master's command, letting us know he's more or less neutered and nothing to fear as far as midnight slashings or pantings or underwear drawer rufflings?

Whatever the motives, the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the chemically-enhanced ear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.

From top: Joi Lansing, WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who penned VANISHING POINT (1972). One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR, a fellow who doesn't need to abduct a pretty young specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is creepy in itself, but doubly so when filmmaker Joe Massott films these actions to a bouncy polka and double projection speed ala Harold Lloyd or Benny Hill. Instead of laughs, what Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into Penny's pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins!

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond its basic function as a pretty eye-popping light show showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, a reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field; if you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps. Factoring in the Beatles and pop art psychedelic hipster culture elements, Collins is a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a student art film, REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart if he had no friends and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her and we were somehow expected to root for this delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with his imagining having a big duel with her boyfriend for her, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all just so she can load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young Turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose. Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Collins?

Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that same bouncy children vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below, above left) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy working class yobbos instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist role, his mellifluent orating voice for naught; his hairy face like a feral Einstein, the whimsical electric banana I-am-a-Tangerine psychedelia regularly mystifies him but his playing along on his own side of the wall has a sad quality - wearing a tux that he keeps in a jar by the door.

In short, this is a very, very timid movie - it watches the hippies at play through binoculars like a dirty old man but gussies them up in enough insect coloring to give him the out that it's 'for educational and scientific purposes only.' Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue, he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins with, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. Penny has to almost die for the prof to have a chance to kiss her without it being creepy but even then he flitters away too scared to remember even how to use a phone.

For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis. And I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely at two AM on BBC-4 while coming down off LSD then well then you might write a song about it, too. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, there can be no doubt it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray, we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need of British counterculture to address the problem of the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now, but in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed collar bag, with a socialist streak, a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say WONDERWALL continually thrusts forward the idea of the audience needing to see who we're seeing through.

For all his faults, an American filmmaker like Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. Woody's going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet he at least is honest about it and that's the very core of art, an elaborate disguise for something too twisted to convey any other way. In real life, Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced he was Peter Pan instead of John Wayne Gacy on a short leash; each believing that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than the drive to create enough distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as self-aware comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?

By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES if the entire movie was spent with him watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve. In 1976, he was hired to make Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering him and manager Peter Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique behind it (and they hadn't seen it, which would have been a dealbreaker). And so they hired him work unseen for SONG (and then fired him halfway through). I saw SONG for the first time on TV after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!), and tripping on too much acid to find fault with it, and I loved it. So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, are present in SONG, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful young adults of the Zeppelin. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so, Monsieur Collins, adieu! J'snooze!