CinemArchetype #26: The Stoner

A sub-phyla of both the Hanged Man and the Holy Fool, the Stoner is both wasting their life and found nirvana. As holy as the Dali Lama, as singular of purpose in their mission as the Pope, and as frozen at the yellow wood road's fork as Travis Bickle or the Scarecrow, cometh, in his fashion, the Stoner. As lost as their or any generation will allow, if we liberal arts undergraduated within the prescribed four years at college, we weren't one of them. Somehow that's the only marker I can find to determine the stoner vs. the merely stoned, because I of course made it out in four.

The stoner in Cabin in the Woods was our confirmation that this character was ready to step into the fray, to get a spotlight of his or her own, inspiring my 2012 thesis "A Stoner Shall Rise."

1. Shaggy-- Dude in Cabin in The Woods (2010)

The signifiers and signs of horror (masks, knives, corridors, POV steadicams, phone calls, Martin Balsam in PSYCHO-style unmaskings) are now so beyond cliche they don't even need to be tied to anything substantial having a stoned hipster gesture towards them with his thumb is enough. The hipster's thumb is the new black. CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012) has taken this idea farther than anyone yet this year, metatexually refracting the cliche of attractive high school seniors heading off to the woods for the weekend into Lovecraftian abstraction. And stoners are the inevitable fifth or seventh wheel in such youthful crews, and have been since obnoxious brother in the wheelchair in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1977) first appeared. But he was a goner, always a periphery, but now one shall rise among them. A stoner... shall rise... man and survive, or the past tense, survave, man. And instead of a fifth wheel, lo! The unicyclist.

Yes, horror has recognized in its target audience a common thread that runs counter to general programming, the insider realization that pot protects you from evil. All along we were right to be paranoid, man, and we need Mary Jane's plant power on our side. And as so often happens, this concept is literally true as recent studies show.

What is even more troubling is that the United States Government actually did a secret follow up-study on the Virginia findings, in the mid '90's. When it only served to confirm the results of the 1974 research, and showed that THC (one of the main active ingredient in cannabis – and the one the government loves to hate), when administered to mice, protected them against malignancy, true to form, our government attempted to bury the results. Fortunately, a draft copy of the study was leaked to the journal, AIDS Treatment News, and the media covered the story. An excellent article by Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML, covers this part of our shameful history. (more)

I can't really reveal what happens in THE CABIN IN THE WOODS since 'holy shit! no way! Really? O man!' reactions are so essential, but I will quote Gregory Cwik's article on it in the current issue ofAcidemic's Journal of Film and Media: "..after Halloween was labeled a morality play, its character's seemingly punished for acting immorally, smoking became a death sentence for horror characters. Instead, Whedon's pothead uses his bong as a weapon against the enemy. Maybe its a sign of changes to come." Maybe it is, if we kill enough old people first. You know the types: maybe the pot ban is good for that as so many of them die from being unable to keep food down after chemo. They refuse to smoke the pot that might help with that since it's 'the devil's weed' when all along it was their only true cure. Who's the real devil here, pops? Part of growing up should be the realization you can't believe a word Uncle Sam tells you. If you refused to read that memo, well, Darwinian nature shall take its course. Win-win. If you can't agree maybe you could stand to be higher.

2. Brigitte Fonda - Jackie Brown (1997)
When Sam Jackson's indelible character Ordell Robie in JACKIE BROWN critiques his little surfer girl's habit of being high, he says that shit fucks with your ambition, sitting around smoking pot and watching TV weakens your ambition, she says "Not if your ambition is to smoke pot and watch TV" absolutely goddamn right, sister. I sympathize with a poor recently paroled ex-con Robert De Niro in the film, caught up in her surfer girl stoner orbit, languidly staying super baked, unable to think clearly through a golden calf and green herb combo. I say this because I too have been caught up in such orbits, and Ordell too reminds me of her boyfriend (the chick I'm referring to). Damn man, writing sloppy, it's soo nice, and I can because, dig, you know, the topic.

3. Cheech and Chong, of course
I've never been a big fan, for their humor is way too dumb for me, but it is of its era. They are the groundbreakers, for the likes of Harold and Kumar, films like Half-Baked and How High? And on and on. I'm trying to remember where I know the girl above on the far right from, what other movie where I totally fell in love with her, back in the 70s. Man, brain cells, am I right?

4. Reincarnated (2012) Snoop Lion
(top 3 pictures are also from this film)
A mind that is at once endearingly straight-forward and fathomlessly guiling, it takes a certain forceful naivete to decide to convert to Rastafarianism and drop the dog in your name, switching whole phyla of the kingdom, dig, from a dog to a cat, the sphynx, the smiling sphynx. He hard a childhood, and it's toughened him like teflon; he's split the atomic difference between the clown/serious guy dichotomoy; he's both Chuck D. and Flava, if you will (I'm old school to the point I stopped listening to rap when Dre's "Chronic" dropped. Course by then I'd even graduated from boomerang academy, if you feel me, "fam.'") The funniest part is that during his holy pilgrimage he goes to record in Jamaica's legendary Trojan studios and it's all white hipsters!

5. James Franco as Saul Silver in Pineapple Express
Right?

Saul: I wish I had a job like that. Where I could just sit around and smoke weed all day
Dale Denton: Hey you do have that job. You do sit around and smoke weed all day.
Saul: Hey you're right. Hey thanks man.

6. Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin - Flirting with Disaster
So much...

Mel: You made LSD? Is that what you're saying?
Richard Schlichting: We made LSD.
Mary Schlichting: Yes, yes. We made acid.
Richard Schlichting: And we gave it out to people who needed it. You know that there are hundreds of pharmaceutical executives in this country... that are selling drugs, FDA approved drugs.
Mary Schlichting: On the open market.
Richard Schlichting: Over the counter with incredible side...
Mary Schlichting: Horrible side effects.
Richard Schlichting: Terrible side effects. And these people are not in jail.
Mary Schlichting: They're not in prison anywhere.
Richard Schlichting: They're, they're, they're in country clubs or playing golf. They're having drinks.
Mary Schlichting: They're running the country, Mel.

7. Jim Breuer, everyone - Half Baked (1998)
Course, man! Everyone but the character played by Dave Chapelle, who gives up weed for some animus-dominated straight edge girl who don't understand the value!

Gregory Hines, who understands the value: History of the World Part 1

---

8. Rory Cochrane in Dazed and Confused (1993)

"Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington, man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man, when he come in the door, man, she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man."

9. Michael Caine - Children of Men (2006)
I love so much about this movie, including the careful and accurate attention to proper use of a flask (and why Clive Owen reminds me of me), but the whole "oh man, like no children are being born anymore, so why not kill ourselves." And meanwhile there's immigrant problems and overpopulation all at once? That seems foolish, and very very Catholic, having your "holy mother of God whom I adore I am so unworthy of your breast milk, ai Maria" nonsense, positing Catholicism against itself, as in we all live only for the mother and the child so if we can't have them, then surely it must be not a sin to suicide. But Michael Caine sees through it all as a very believable weed grower with a dying, crazy wife for whom he buys a suicide kit and later goes out in a literal and figurative blaze of glory -- pull my finga!

10. Jeff Bridges - The Big Lebowski (1998)

"Take 'er easy, dude. I know you will, too."

11. Brad Pitt - True Romance (1993)
Here the stoner is again in the Tarantino-scripted Tony Scott directed putter on the mapper and way to Pulp Fiction layer. Dig, but is there such a character in Pulp Fiction? No, man, by then the guy was onto harder stuff. That's that Roger Avery shit, the coke and heroin mix-up guy. Shit that movie was dope, though.
Wait, so Brad Pitt in True Romance, a pretty easy role to pull off -- he don't even stand, yo!

 "Get some cleaning products?"

12. Claude - Over the Edge (1979)

"... Give the darkness to Claude, let him smoke it and peer unafraid into Bosch folios; let Matt Dillon create modern indie junkie comovage cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford; Motorcycle Boy, YOU Live! We... we belong dead. We who have burned so very brightly, Roy, but not to last, we will go now, into the beyond. And never before or since will the bus ride to juvenile hall seem like such a triumph, a march into Valhalla on the rays of a beautiful sun. One day, when the world is much righter."

Dude, what the hell was I on when I wrote that, man? Optimism.

How am I going to pull this all together? Do I need to? Even if you never tried it you have to admit that this list reflects a pretty peaceful bunch. Sure they throw slushies and cavort in the flames but they don't shoot unless first shot at, and in general they prefer to sit around and watch cartoons, which leaves them safely off the streets and out of the way of the hustle and bustle. Which is good, because there's no room at the top anymore -- too many damned people, climbing over each other like those zombies in World War Z. So forget it, man, forget it. Weed, man. It's the dead end on the road through life, but just how far do you need to drive man, before you realize you're still in the goddamned driveway? 

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White as a Sheet: BLACK MOON (1934) and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 (2010)

Voodoo and witchcraft-related horror films often simmer with a whole gris-gris bag of subtext vis-a-vis gender, race, and psychology under a boilerplate plot: a white dolt either with a white girl or alone lands on a voodoo island for gold or research or shipwreck, a cute young (white) woman from the village betrays the gods to be with him; they escape in a boat as the island erupts in flames and all the black monsters die except the grinning ferryman who is innocent in his naivete, who spirits them away where they can breed and uphold the status quo and in later years go "Voodoo? Harumph!" when the kids ask him about it. If the woman who betrays her people for the white visitor is not white, however, she dies to save him or to appease the tiki gods or miscegenation-phobic censors. If she does live, you must imagine Carl Denham lecturing at a feminist studies group: "She was a queen in her jungle world, but she threw it all away to follow a handsome stranger home to to his own lands, and here she is, barefoot and pregnant, for your own amusement!"

Few places is this gender/class/race subtext more glaring and yet consciously progressive than Columbia's rare and hard-to-find BLACK MOON (1934). With its mix of horror-action and white man's burden-coded proto-feminism it just may be the least racist and sexist of all 1930s racist-sexist zombie movies --a kind of pre-Lewton Lewton where women understand the supernatural realms instinctively while the half asleep men try to keep it all buried via tactics like condescension, humiliation, beatings, and threats --none of which work a damn-- until the status quo boundaries have shrunk to noose size.


Keeping with the subjugation motif, Fay Wray gets second billing in MOON but is the most recognized name, having tangled with Kong on Skull Island the year before. However, on this particular forgotten island the white power over the denizens is long established via racist French sugar cane plantation owner (Arnold Korff). His young niece (Dorothy Burgess) left the island years ago for New York City and now wants to come visit. He doesn't want her to, lest it excite the natives. Living there as a kid she apparently did some serious mystic bonding with the locals and now the drums are calling her to return, return, with her own young daughter (a maid, and Wray) in tow.

The voodoo scenes turn out to be surprisingly respectful of the tradition - and the drumming and singing is awesome, with day-for-night shots of glistening black bodies drumming and dancing, old wizened faces staring off into the distance, and lots of white garb that may be more true to the area but is much less 'fun' in a wrong way (i.e. no Anton Grot or William Menzies-type set design). The unsung master of stereotype transcendence, Clarence Muse, is on hand as the charter boat captain who takes old Jack Holt to the island. Muse is worried about his own girl, a local who's become much too mixed up with the voodoo scene. (See my ode to him here). Somehow or other all the racist crap of the era seems to just melt away around Muse. He even forms a kind of interesting bond with Holt --just two normal American guys wondering what's got into their women. There's no nonsense like would be if their characters were played by Willie Best and Bob Hope, for example, which wasn't too bad in and of itself compared to other teams, like the ungodly shuffling of Steppin Fetchit in CHARLIE CHAN IN EGYPT.

But while it's applaudable on these levels, and it is spooky right from the opening with servants in the voodoo lady's New York City apartment, shuddering at the sound of Dorothy Burgess teaching her infant daughter to play voodoo drums, it never lasts: a strange man who works for the colonialist uncle shows up with the message he doesn't want Burgess to go to the island--the natives are too agitated--she tells him ring off and he's killed on his way to see the husband to tell him to get his wife locked down. What's cool is we want her to go to the island, so the native skulkers are killing the messenger for our benefit. The natives are clearly the good guys up to a point, as we bristle at the idea these scowling white dudes are going to decide where Dorothy Burgess can and can't go. But in the end of course they are right.

Lacking any kind of central figure to care about, aside from Wray and Muse (both minor figures in the film) makes the film a little too reliant on atmosphere and expectation. The ominousness builds up for the big ceremony but it's so 'respectful' when it comes it's a bit of an anticlimax. The kid's maid is killed early on when she keeps objecting to the child being given things like knives and voodoo dolls to play with, but we don't see the murder or the body. Why? Wray wires for Holt to come and take them home but the wire operator is killed before he can send it. At least we get to see the explosion. Even so, we side with the voodoo crowd because we're waiting for something genuinely 'bad' to happen. But we do like Holt's relationship with his little daughter. They have a genuine bond and he's not a simpering sort like dads in films today, but a rough and ready 70s dad type and she loves it.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2 shares a lot of BLACK MOON's deep subtextual feminism. Here the dad is a self-satisfied liberal authoritarian pretending to be fun, hip, gentle family man but he scoffs at the supernatural while his wife and maid know better, which only makes him resentful and furious, forbidding any mention of supernatural goings-on in his presence. 

Like its forerunner, PA2 was a huge hit in theaters, and like BLACK MOON has a great set-up with only mild yield: the initial ghost attack looks enough like an ordinary break-in that it compels dad to install security cameras and as our subjects sleep through the night these security cam images--a ghostly lit pool with the cleaner snake slithering around the surface; the crib room with the German shepherd guardian (the dog's not much for supernatural detection, surprisingly), the big petit bourgeois living room--take on a creepy life of their own as our eyes nervously scour the scene in search of some uncanny element or movement. Andre Bazin would surely approve!
 

Why the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY films work as instant pop culture artifacts is their William Castle-ish utilitarianism - they are here to provide bonding moments of shock in the cinema on Saturday night, or to creep out couples on their couches, couples similar to the couples depicted. And that is all - they are obviously super cheap to make, and make far more than their more expensive competitors. But what they show is something new--the modern American family to itself as it really is, revealing the awful difference between how 'scary' we look on video vs. the pretty people we see in the mirror. The dad thinks he's a hilarious righteous sex machine but we see he's an asshole, etc. and then, watching himself on screen, so does he. These people are the American family that the sitcoms and TV want to portray, but don't have enough time. All the corpses the screenwriters can dredge up in the family garden pale in comparison to the unstoppable demonic ghost possession in the real time found footage usually edited out of TV shows. For eight hours or so every night most of us are in a sate of total unconsciousness. Who knows what's going on while we're asleep? It's creepy. That's what got us hooked in the first place with the first PA - a possessed sleeping girl standing motionless over her sleeping husband... hour after hour.

It's important in each example here that the endangered family be upper-middle class as success makes the dad 'dependent' on the prevailing reality and culture. He's got something to lose. He knows hungry young bucks are eyeing his spot. A white trash redneck sleeping in his pick-up truck has nothing to lose by embracing new paradigms and is thus way more likely to be down with the supernatural. But in the American upper middle class' unconscious, the uncanny is ghettoized so deep that when dad finally sees the tape and learns the truth he becomes a fractured, incoherent mess, worse than useless and ripe for possession. If such a possession was offered he'd snap at it, a chance to switch sides and affix his star to whatever's currently in charge, whatever overpowering force wants to supply the new paradigm, no matter, as long as he can still feel smug.

Just as BLACK MOON is not just about race oppression and more about gender oppression, each one a metaphor for the other, so too the PARANORMAL films convey the freak-out that occurs when the rational left-brained know-it-all douche bag dad types are forced to confront the truth in inarguable form, on security cameras. They can never completely protect their children --their kids will always be exposed to danger.  Not even the TV set can provide a respite now. Over the last twenty years dad's nervous system has been swamped by the belief that pedophiles and danger lurk in every corner, but the liberals say don't get a gun, trust the government to take care of it, just realize they won't It's a two prong attack designed to sell SUVs and home security systems, and when a threat comes right through all the defenses money can buy, the dad can only vehemently deny it doesn't exist, and persecute anyone who says otherwise.

Such a realization of complete powerlessness is the apocalypse of the American family and its one salvation. One thinks back to the "they're here" moment in POLTERGEIST, and if you compare the downward spiral from level-headedness to powerless tired mess of Craig T. Nelson as the dad in that film vs. the gone-to-pieces dad in PA2, all you can do is weep for the incredible dissolving father. The ghosts came through the TV static in that 1980 pre-cable film (when white noise static and station sign-offs still existed), but the PA films are made on and with digital --there is no more four AM shot of an American flag to signal the end of another broadcast day, no chance for static to speak through. We have 900 channels of cable and it never, ever sleeps. All hail Shark Vacuum! 

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Capsules d'Monstre: GHIDORAH, PHANTASM II, MANSTER, THE SMILING GHOST, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

1964 - dir. Ishiro Honda

****

I've seen a lot of Godzilla movies as a kid but I never... until lately. Man, GHIDORAH is the best one! Maybe it's Akira Ifukube's great, blowsy ominous-cool bassoon jazz score, which perfectly captures the drunken heaviness of these here monster giants as they stagger around and down volcanoes and bump into apartment complexes. Ifukube's cues repeat over and over but that's fine.  The dubbing is solid. The framing and colors are comic book perfection. Maybe it's because it ingeniously integrates a lot of fringe science elements. GHIDORAH: Number One!

It seems a bunch of scientists have been having nightly meetings with UFOs, so they invite a lady reporter to come check out how cool they are. When the UFOs don't come the night she's there, they accuse her of sending skeptical brainwaves out into the atmosphere and scaring the aliens off! Skeptical brainwaves! When the reporter dismisses the idea that brainwaves even exist, the scientists smile patronizingly. That's cool despite being sexist because it shows the easy way science can flip-flop on issues, condemning non-believers with an array of defense mechanisms, from witch burning to shows like Fact or Faked and Myth-busters. One day they sneer at the 'nuts' who believe UFOs exist; the next day they sneer at the 'cranks' who believe they don't. Look at the scientist's desk above and you see the way science might have matured had not events like Roswell been so effectively hushed up.

Anyway, later that night some hot princess of the mythical kingdom of Sergina (Akiko Wakabayashi) is abducted from her private plane by a UFO right before a terrorist bomb blows it to bits. The next day, scientists investigate a meteor that crashed in the mountains and left a huge Ghidorah egg. The princess appears at the dock, now possessed by a Martian (below) for a dockside press conference: "I come from the planet you call Mars! The earth--your planet-- is on the brink of destruction, and you refuse to take it seriously." They laugh. And the hatching egg is their reward. Look who's come all the way from space to show you that three heads are better than one, and that killing whales, dolphins, and Nanking is wrong! Ghidorah functions here as a kind of anti-global terrorist bomb, sent to wipe out violent civilizations before they can become a threat to the Galactic Federation (which is a real thing, according to my in-the-know informants!)

 

Of course, the glee with which Japan is wiped out time and again has become dampened by recent cataclysms, but can we doubt this scrappy dolphin-hating nation won't bounce back? So I got to go with Ghidorah on this one, even if those cute Mothra handler sisters are around to sing their little songs to get Godzilla and the latest incarnation of Mothra (still in caterpillar form) to unite against him. Then that Ifukube drunken bassoon score really stumbles into low, low gear, and the rumble atop the volcanic jungle is on.

 It's true, I used to root for the bad guys as a child watching Speed Racer; being a tot and inexperienced, I kept thinking "This time... this time they'll finally win." They never won! Like me, in kickball. Ghidorah, I want that Mach-5 crushed underfoot!

PHANTASM II 

1988 - dir. Don Coscarelli

***

Who knows where we go after we die? The Shadow and Don Coscarelli know, or at least dare to look in the same trans-dimensional direction as fringe theorists like David Icke and Nick Redfern. Like its predecessor, PHANTASM II deconstructs down to reveal what it's like to see the warped mysteries of humanity's archaic funeral rituals through the eyes of a young terrified child wandering the mausoleum while his parents cremate grandma, and being freaked out by the glint of the fading afternoon sun on the shiny marble walls, imagining a flying metal ball coming around looking for him, to drill out his pineal gland (the home of the soul) for use in bizarre fourth dimensional enslavement rites. Also, there's the ingenious STAR WARS-associative use of Jawa fashions for the tall man's undead ghost-dwarf minions.

Considering all the bizarre accoutrements of the funeral trade, you can imagine there being a hidden white room in the mortuary, where corpses are compacted for rebirth in a dimension where the gravity is much stronger, the colors morphed, and the winds relentless. The dimension when finally shown eerily resembles near-death experiences of the unlucky ones who miss the white light. Such people report their astral body/soul floating up to the white light and then being snatched by hands emerging from the dark shadows along the tunnel's sides, yanked into this prison of Hell, where untold despair is instilled and harvested as they march along a long trail through a desert-like plain led in front by a flying saucer that seems to be harvesting elements of their souls! Part Moses and Yaweh leading the Israelites through the wasteland, part literal hell.

Whoa, hey! Too much? Then just enjoy this low key TERMINATOR-meets-EVIL DEAD thrill ride movie, with its periodic in-jokes (the name on one bag of cremation ashes is "Sam Raimi") and pretend you're in a car at a crumbling drive-in in the early 1980s, the world alive with youth, health, and bravado... all of which about to shortly crumble down around you, like the drive-in itself, until all that's left are ashes in an urn and an undead dwarf in a brown robe, texting furiously.

THE MANSTER

1959 - dir. George P. Breakson

***

Here's something you don't see often: a black and white Japanese horror movie where all the actors speak English (i.e. they are not post-dubbed). Pretty awesome, as is the moody but economical but moody black and white photography and surplus of monsters. The story has the evil Dr. Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamara) and his hot assistant (Terri Zimmern) drugging (with experimental mutant-making serum) a dimwitted American journalist named Larry (Peter Dynely) then having Terri seduce him so that he'll stick around Japan and they can monitor him as he devolves. Adrift in the Tokyo bar scene, Larry starts drinking heavily, skulking around at night, killing random people, lusting for Terri, and avoiding his journalistic responsibilities.

Terri Zimmern

Dialogue is awesome in its directness; acting is okay; low-key B-movie expressionism rocks--as in the famous Dali-esque eyeball shoulder scene--and a Val Letwon-RKO kind of midnight ramble through a Zen Buddhist temple. So keenly rendered is the way the serum makes Larry into a hard-drinking, surly mess that I would recommend this movie to rehab centers. There's even some intervention-style drama with a clingy gaijin wife (Jayne Hilton) who wants Larry to come home and live a life of quiet desperation and he can't stand quiet desperation! As we say in AA, I really related.

THE SMILING GHOST

1941 - dir. Lewis Selier

**1/2

This all-nonsense studio B-picture concerns a layabout-for-hire (Wayne Morris) brought to a mysterious estate to marry an heiress (Alexis Smith) with a rep as 'the black widow' since her last three husbands died suspiciously. She wants to find out why, so marries our dimwit handyman hero as bait. Cue sheet metal thunder and secret panels! Meanwhile a spunky female reporter (Brenda Marshall) snoops around the bushes and an old uncle (Charles Halton) tries to add Willie Best's slack-jawed noggin to his shrunken head collection. I've seen some horribly racist caricatures of black people in old horror movies, but nothing quite like this! Willie Best even withholds vital information that could save lives because he's too busy overacting, as when he witnesses a secret passage open and shut and--even after armed good guys burst into the room moment later--all he can do is run away gibbering and bug-eyed instead of telling them where the panel is. It's almost enough to make you forget the rest of the movie's pretty good. It's not Best's fault but unlike Mantan Moreland's similar roles, there's no subversive actorly subtext (that I noticed anyway).

Brenda Marshall

Tiffany Bolling and friend

KINGDOM THE SPIDERS

1977 - dir. John "Bud" Cardos

***1/2

A loose remake of THE BIRDS, this spawn of the post-JAWS environ-amok genre stars William Shatner as a small town Arizona veterinarian and Tiffany Bolling as a big town etymologist sent in to help when toxicology on a dead calf reveals spider venom. Bolling's the Melanie Daniels; Marcy Lafferty (Shatner's real-life wife at the time) is the Annie Hayworth; the meet cute is at a gas station instead of a pet store, but there's still the holing up at the hotel bar with the cross section of the populace, and the big attack with people running around in panic with little creatures on them.

The Arizona scenery is beautiful with mesas like the ones in STAGECOACH. The worried black rancher (Woody Strode) fearful of losing his livestock in a quarantine-- "he worked for seven years to get that bull!"--is allowed much dignity and concern, so we're slowly climbing up the stereotypes from Best's cowardly manservant to over-serious humble sobriety... it's still a cliche, though, since he and his wife are the first humans to die. It's pretty dumb that the white folks decide to go on a picnic after finding the dead black couple lying in the grass covered with arachnid bites. Dumb, but typical.

But hey, you know this film is awesome when a tarantula--with scary library music cues filling the soundtrack--slowly climbs up onto Bolling's desk and into the open desk drawer while she's in the shower. When she finds it she just smiles like she's found a kitten, cradles it in her hand, then releases it outside. Tiffany Bolling, in other words, kicks ass! I love the way she towers over Shatner, and gently mocks him when he tries to seduce her, while still letting him continue to try. Her reputation amongst the Psychotronic set is well-deserved. I instantly ordered BONNIE'S KIDS after seeing this, and rented TRIANGLE (1970). Bill Shatner earns his cult, too, especially when he does an awesome high-stepping dance to not step on any of the spiders. He sometimes does step on them, but at least no hairpieces were harmed during the making of this movie.

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Darker than Black: GANJA AND HESS (1973), a love story

Valentines Day means red hearts and flowers, dinners by candlelight, hands reaching across the table. Like this dubious 'holiday,' horror films are defined by their cliches: damsels in nightgowns holding chandeliers; undead hands reaching from a mound of dirt to touch your heart; stock footage full moons hitting your eye, like our love, baby; frightened horses..."easy... steady... steady, girl." Such a well trod path ensures we don't get lost. It's as easy as falling off a bike into the abyss.

But if you are an African American artist making a 'black' horror film, your cliche palette is doubly restricted: blaxpectations are always high, and then low, the split between a disciplined soldier of community betterment and a louche parasite: for every rainbow-feathered pimp you need a monologue about brothers being kept down by the man; for every jive-talking freak you need a noble cop fighting white corruption. It's got to be funky, but brother, it's got to be cognizant of its social message.

In addition to V-Day, February is Black History Month, a time when the message runs rampant, diluted by 'safe' social commentary that beg the questions: Can the black experience be represented in a risky, artistic, even abstracted manner? Or must 'intelligent' blackness be rendered only as noble suffering, dignified non-threatening mouthpieces for equality.

African American playwright/actor Bill Gunn was given money to make a black horror film. AIP's BLACULA (1972) made bank. And it was made by a white man. Get a brother to make the next one, some suits thought, maybe things will get even bankier

Gunn gave them something far different than a FUBU-LACULA. GANJA AND HESS wasn't blaxploitation at all, but Gunn's own thing, a nouvelle vague semi-experimental horror love story that was both a choppy, fragmented mess and inescapably mesmerizing. GANJA AND HESS looks haphazardly framed, grainy, amateurishly recorded, but once you adjust your eyes and ears, poetry blooms.

Not least of its assets are two evolved and interesting black characters: the rich, isolated doctor Hess (Duane Jones) and his future wife, Ganja (Marlene Clark), a very unusual type of strong black woman who manages to assert herself without rustling feathers or being bitchy or unsexy. They are antithetical and ambivalent as in the best tragic figures of Shakespeare -- like Macbeth and his Lady. They have the guts to admit they don't really care if other people die. They are characters dealing with blackness, as opposed to being representations of  a blackness toned down or played up to fit pre-fabricated molds (see my 2007 analysis of this via Cabin in the Sky, here).

I love Nick Pinkerton's description from the Village Voice doing a Bill Gunn retrospective:

Hired to crank out a Blacula knock-off (with a drug-joke title), Gunn instead wrote a surreal love triangle among black sophisticates, devoid of sex-machine phoniness, and directed it in a muttered, disorienting style, with a strange brew of Afro-Euro symbolism. Duane Jones is Dr. Hess, a gentleman scholar studying a pre-Christian African blood cult; Stop's gorgeous, sloe-eyed Marlene Clark is Ganja, as lively and droll as Hess is lethargic. Gunn himself plays the turbulent artist who infects the doctor. He had a genius for writing monologues, and delivers them with absorbing intensity, especially in his character's schizo suicide dream of playing both murderer and victim, showing Gunn's fascination with the divided self.

When seeking a way to wrap your narrative-expectations around Gunn's "muttered, disorienting style," it helps to have a bit of a grasp of black cinema history. The films, for example, of African American pioneer filmmaker Oscar Micheux were notoriously mismatched and fragmented, as if the audience was handed a stack of coupons, leaflets, half-finished letters and told to read through them and let the complete novel form in their brains. For sure, there's a feeling, as in the best art, that your own brain is the final editing room for the film, with the series of seemingly disconnected scenes (are whole pages of exposition and explanation in GANJA missing?) coming together in your mind as you watch it, creating a delayed sink pull drag effect, as if by the time you figure out something's after you, it's got you by the neck and you're already dead.

George Romero showed a remarkably colorblind casting ability with Duane Jones in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and it's perhaps no coincidence that Jones plays the lead in GANJA AND HESS. Like his character in DEAD, Jones' Hess is a man with no time or interest in proving his intelligence or lessening his powerful image to not intimidate whitey. We see his intellectual strength, fatherly tenderness and icy reserve, for example, when he visits  his son at boarding school, and the pair have conversation in French, a reminder of the way so many black artists expatriated to Paris in order to escape racism. He's closed-off, aloof, abstracted.

Examples of the racism a character like Hess would have to endure were all over the papers when GANJA AND HESS opened, and when it was selected to represent America in the 1973 Cannes Critic's week. Gunn wrote this in a letter to the NY Times on May 13, 1973 (following the tepid reviews of his film, including outright admissions by critics of walking out):

"If I were white, I would probably be called "fresh and different." If I were European, "Ganja and Hess" might be that little film you must see." Because I am black, I do not even deserve the pride that one American feels for another when he discovers that a fellow countryman's film has been selected as the only American film to be shown during "Critic's Week" at the Cannes Film Festival, May, 1973. Not one white critic from any of the major American newspapers even mentioned it."

Indeed one wonders, would this film be recognized even today? Probably even less so now that our culture has grown further distracted by CGI and MTV whiplash editing. GANJA does drag a bit in the beginning, and I confess I spent the first ten minutes kind of puttering around the TV, distracted. The film stock is grainy and the shots seem poorly framed and too long, but if you pay attention the film slowly and inexorably rewires you to a new sort of low budget film language. But would I have paid that much attention if I was a film critic seeing this in a screening room on a busy day of deadlines and headaches? Who knows, I might have dozed off. It certainly would have helped to have read a Cahiers du Cinema appreciation of it in advance.

On the other hand, if the film was French, these Times critics would have fallen all over themselves trying to 'discover' it first. I often wonder what Godard movies would be like in France, without subtitles, as subtitles fit so well his post-structural imagery, and so much of his dialogue overlaps or is mixed low making full comprehension impossible without them. Gunn's film basically answers my question, and the answer is _____.

To appreciate this film you have to let go of having everything spelled out, you have to trust your unconscious understands the background whispering, the disjointed meanings, even as you scratch your head and think about doing the dishes. Stick with it, and your unconscious will reward you.

The main thing that kept me rooted to the film was the incredible electronically-warped soundtrack: African tribal chants and spirit calls echo throughout the film like an ancient tribe stumbled upon a flanger and a feedback amp and managed to send their chants forward through time. In Gunn's world, the distant past and the future are both relatively unfixed: the past can roar up to grab you and the future is already biting you and draining your blood so it can survive into another day. Gunn uses a growing feedback squall to indicate when the 'bloodlust' jones is on our vampire hero, making us aware of the link between vampirism and heroin addiction, or alcohol, the way a person who's been waiting for 4PM cocktail hour since he woke up will snap the head off a person who suggests going on a three-hour hike.

The droning demand for blood and the ghostly presence of African drum on the soundtrack make the ethereal score an audio-mimetic equivalent of the ghosts that haunt The Emperor Jones in Eugene O'Neill's play. An early suicide in the film is set to music that gradually echoes into abstract noise as the camera circles around the self-inflicted carnage, creating a dizzying POV sense of a soul suddenly freed of its body, no ears to turn the dissonant sound waves into music.

Is this surreal echoing booming what a tree sounds like if it falls in the woods and there's no one around to hear it? I got a panic attack when a similar effect was done on the song "I can't live (If living is without you)" in Roger Avery's RULES OF ATTRACTION. Watching this scene it was like that panic attack finally blow its own brains out, like a rose from the tip of the crown chakra. More than any other 'vampire' film, 'black' film, or even 'white' film, GANJA AND HESS dares to examine sound and vision that lie past life and death dichotomies, refusing even to see a difference. It re-imagines the Bluebeard legend as a chance for forgiveness and admission of true and refreshing ambivalence about life.

What's missing in the film is a serious line of continuity, and that's where Gunn relies on cliche, as we "know" the missing scenes (continuity shots are rare - whole chunks of the film seem to have been left out). Clearly, a mix of budget constraints and artistic control necessitated some of these choices, but they work, because they force us to fill in the blanks, like watching a foreign language film without subtitles. And then, when Ganja shows up, she's so warmly human and yet so strong that the film kicks into gear, as you've been straining to get into it through Duane Jones' thick distancing persona, you're sensitized and ready for her sensual assault. I wont spoil it, but about halfway through the film she delivers a long, tearful monologue, lit only by firelight, and the subsequent eruption of happiness and music is one of the most powerful cinematic moments I've had in awhile, and the long single take monologue in dark lighting is what helps catapult it. In short, Gunn uses his limitations for powerful effect, mixing the agonizing real-time emotional build-ups with ecstatic release: all the strain pays off.

Looking at this marvelous, truly unique film as a whole, it makes a fine mirror parable to problems discussed at the start of this essay: How can a black artist be true to himself, relevant to the pop cultural landscape, and supportive of his black ancestry all at the same time. And should a black artist be continually burdened with conveying the 'entire' black experience, or indeed any of it? Gunn also addresses this in his response to criticism in the Times:

"Another critic wrote - where is the race problem? If he looks closely, he will find it in his own review."

This innate 'extra' requirement for black art is like a lead albatross affixed to every struggling black author or artist, and a problems faced by Hess in the film: knowing the only thing that can hurt him is the shadow of a cross over his heart, he decides to get born again down at the local church. Sometimes, merely climbing out of a swimming pool can be a true baptism, just like sometimes raggedy scraps of black film can come together to form jaw-dropping art, and sometimes that art can be recognized, even if it's made by a black man and is ignored by white critics in his own country, even if the black man is expressing himself rather than the all-consuming thirst of blackness.

 (Special thanks to poet/performance artist Tracie Morris for turning me onto this film and informing sections of this review. And thanks to The Temple of Schlock.' for posting that Times article, reprinted in part above. Check out!)

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