Coal and der switches: JINGLE ALL THE WAY

When it comes to holiday entertainment, nothing tops the "heroin-smuggling nuns" episode of the BIONIC WOMAN that played Xmas eve back in the 70s and has never been seen again. But we must settle. Mom wants the CHRISTMAS STORY marathon on TNT ("you kids loved that movie as kids, remember?") My brother and I roll our eyes since we endured high school with co-star Scottie Schwartz. My brother Fred likes BADDER SANTA but that kid grosses me out. I vote for the Pagan Solstice celebration of THE WICKER MAN! There's no kid at all in that, just evil Celtic children snickering at a cop's befuddlement, which is badass. We settle, always, for them all... and just wince whenever 'good' or 'normal' kids are present. Sooner or later they all remind us some kid who annoyed us in school, either on purpose (Scotty) or by accident (everyone else).

Bridgewater-Raritan HS's Scourge

Then there's a second problem with Xmas movies, the classic example of which is in SCROOGED when Bill Murray starts his lengthy rant about how we should all sing soul music together because he's finally learned the meaning of Christmas. My friends, this is nothing more than Münchausen-by-proxy syndrome, the Xmas version, which I call Coal and Switches Syndrome: it's that thing where an egotistical workaholic proceeds to create pointless disasters so that Xmas is almost ruined, all so he can race in at the 11th hour and save it. Beside Murray's Scrooge, there's Nic Cage in The FAMILY MAN (2000) and Arnold Schwarzenegger in JINGLE ALL DER WAY (1996).

To get back to the kid's thing. If kids could have any wish, could be anything they wanted, more than anything they'd want to be adults. They don't ever imagine themselves as kids. There wasn't a single kid in STAR WARS because Lucas understood this (but then forgot it).  Boys especially want to see themselves as men, not as wide-eyed kiddies. Misunderstanding this fundamental rule of viewer identification processes led to the idiotic decision to create sidekicks like Robin and Superboy and all those movies where we don't just see what a kid would imagine, but a kid imagining it.

I mention all this because Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of those men children want to be. His overly muscular body is almost a burlesque of how kids confuse muscles with prowess; we love his comically stern accent; his straightforward way with a catch phrase, wherein you can't tell if he gets the joke or not. But in JINGLE, Arnold is just an ordinary gym owner/personal trainer and largely absentee father, avoiding his son's karate performance because (subconsciously) it would mean some other athlete getting the applause. Arnold thinking he can get away with being an average suburban dad in the first place makes him suspect. He's like a reverse superhero alter-ego with no superhero to turn into but also totally unconvincing as a normal person.

Arnold needs to realize he is not, and has never been, an average dad figure. He is not all-American Joe material, if he was, why would we bother paying to see him? In the symbolic structure of the film, though, being unaverage is a crime tantamount to neglect and he must atone by finding an unavailable/sold out super hero action figure for his emotionally blackmailing son, the superhero itself a burlesque of impotent male (child) rage. Arnold wants to be his son's action figure, but such a character is defined (in a child's mind) by his absence. And in the guilt trip nanny state PC 90's a absence is tantamount to neglect, so he has to bow down to a plastic imitation of himself because his son prefers the totemic imitation phallus to his dad's genuine absence. It's a bit like Jesus being told he's not a good messiah unless he buys all his disciples Christmas presents, for his own birthday.  

JINGLE has hints of turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself (which Guy Debord dubbed détournement - often expressed via subversive graffiti on advertising or re-word ballooning comic strips): the film digs a canal into the rotting roots of the American capitalist frenzy Xmas tooth, only to fill it at the last minute with souvenir gift items available for purchase in the lobby. Like any good capitalist product, JINGLE knows how to incorporate its critique against itself within itself.

my attempt at a detournement

One way Arnold tries to become the action figure phallus-fetish is through the aforementioned Coal-Switch Syndrome: He creates drastic emergencies for himself, crises anyone who's lived in suburbia for more than five minutes would easily avoid. But he's an adrenaline junkie who rides suburban angst the way Charlie Sheen rides air currents in MAXIMUM VELOCITY. He ignores his secretary's notes that he needs to go to his kid's karate practice just so he can speed down the emergency lane at the last minute; he combs through every toy story in town on Xmas Eve like a maniac as he realizes his son's asked-for toy has been sold out for months; he asks for help and invites contemptuous laughter on himself so that he can throw a fellow dad into a toy display; an inability to get a call through to a radio station giving away one of the dolls leads to him smashing up the DJ booth; his son's Xmas wish gives Arnold the sanctified excuse he needs to push and shove old ladies and children, resist arrest, trash a kid's jungle gym in the mall, willfully commit legions of traffic violations, impersonate an officer, terrify innocent pedestrians, break into and rob his neighbor's house, punch out a reindeer and inadvertently interfere with a bust on a bootleg toy factory (run by carny schemers dressed as elves and Santas in the film's funniest bit).

In short he is the worst thing about American foreign policy, the living embodiment of America as perceived by Communist and third world countries, so frenzied in our consumption and desire we trample every country who gets in the way, barging in wherever we smell oil and trampling any ecosystem that dares gets in the way like it's some slow-moving old lady shopper.

I imagine we're supposed to sympathize with Arnold's amok American dad, but the only ones who could possibly relate are the Hollywood elite who aren't off their cell phones more than a few minutes a year, and would be as dumbstruck as Arnold is if they suddenly had to do their own Christmas shopping (fine in itself, but don't expect our sympathy). It would be more believable if Arnold was a toy come to life, fresh out of the box, believing his own cover story, like a Buzz Lightyear or post-Recall Quaid than how it is here, where he's supposed to have been present at this family suburban house since you know, before his kid was even born.

When all his feigned ignorance and willful bull-in-a-china-shop methods fail, Arnold eventually solves it all by becoming the real life version of toy, by positing himself as the kind of father who's not afraid to use a jet pack to trash an African American family's living room as they're sitting down for Xmas eve dinner, praying, Arnold missing their heads for their heads are lowered in prayer, the only mention of God or Jesus anywhere in the film --all to prevent another African American from stealing the toy he's (unfairly) awarded to his own son by endangering the lives of pedestrians through his unauthorized flight. Needless to say, this was before 9/11 and now his behavior seems more unnerving than comical, like showing your son you love him by leaving unmarked black suitcases around an airport. We don't need satires and jet packs any more to point out the monstrosity of consumer-driven Xmas, just look at this:

Who is to blame for this madness?

1) TOY MARKETING STRATEGIES: Perhaps it makes sense from a PR standpoint for toy companies to deliberately limit production on certain popular toys to drive the demand up, but in a country like America where everyone's self-worth hinges on providing their child with whatever they 'wish' for, it can create real stress on the national fibre. There's no reason that the most productive country in the world (China) can't meet the demands of the most demanding country in the world (U.S.) so the blame becomes personal. Movies themselves do this all the time. Disney lets their classic titles go "into the vault" to drive up resale value and ensure higher sales during releases / promotions, and certain rarefied cult director iconoclasts insist on releasing their own films on their own label, like David Lynch or Russ Meyer, ensuring the price never gets too low and avoiding middleman and PR fees. But kids don't understand supply and demand. They only know that if they don't get the toy they want, there is no Santa, and so they may as well become a derelict drug addict.

2) MEASURING-UP ANXIETIES: I don't have kids so I don't quite understand, but from movies like JINGLE I glean a certain fear of measuring up to some paternal ideal that, to be honest, I don't remember seeing when I was a kid in the 70's. Parents once looked after their own good time first (as on MAD MEN) and got us some, not all, presents we wanted. To get us all was considered bad form, 'spoiling' us. Overall we were much more bored than kids today. We had no internet or cell phones. But, in knowing our father didn't need us to feel validated, we at least felt secure. We could hate him with all our might for not giving us a certain toy, but he made sure the electricity stayed on, and our beds were warm and there, ready for sleeping in. Arnold's kid might get the toy he wanted but pays for the luxury with a great deal of collateral anxiety. If the son says he wants a jet ski, for example, and the next day one is waiting in the driveway, what a great dad! But then the kid feels guilty because he sees dad's car is missing, clearly having been sold to pay for the jet ski. Now the kid can't even get a ride to the lake to use it. The indulgent yet largely absent father figure granting consumer good wishes at the cost of security and genuine nurturing, using presents the way moviegoers use their coats to hold their place while they go get popcorn.

3) NO ONE LEARNS THE RIGHT LESSON FROM CAESAR MILAN: If you don't assert your dominance over your dog, your dog assumes you are weak and thus feels he must take over as pack leader, which makes your dog a nervous wreck --how can a dog take care of a family when he can't even open the front door?  Kids with needy parents wind up in the same position. Adults are able to navigate the social order and assess dangers far better than dogs or children. But if they are too weak-willed to be stern and authoritarian when need be, then the children or dogs feel, however unconsciously, that they have to step in. This is why the red states are so unnerved when Obama bows and scrapes before other dignitaries. They know that if a leader is too skittish to make big tough unpopular decisions, if he is dependent on constant validation, then we can't chillax knowing he's got it covered.

Arnold in JINGLE is just such a weak pack leader, illustrated perfectly when he calls his wife to tell her his car is totaled in pursuit of the doll, and Hartman answers the phone saying he's eating Arnold's wife's cookies while she takes a shower. Arnold shouts into the phone: "Put that cookie down! Now!" It's gone on to become quite the meme and gives Arnold the quid pro quo revenge excuse he needs to Grinch up Phil's tree :

While we're expected to root for Arnold, it's actually rival doll-seeker and uncouth mailman Sinbad who is the most complex and the only one worthy of sympathy: first he's the only one at the store who doesn't sneer at Arnold's confusion over the absence of Turbo Men. He even offers to join forces, an offer which Arnold coldly rejects. As we're treated to then-relatively unusual sights like people macing and tazing each other over items at the department store, what's most amazing and sad is how completely oblivious Arnold is to the idea that he is not the only dad in the world who waited too long, that he is just another dopey sucker paying capitalism's harshest price for waiting to buy but buy. He genuinely believes it's his right as an American dad to use excessive force in pursuit of his individual needs, never questioning the rightness of his Coal and Switches Symplex. Even having a coffee with Sinbad, his only friend, guarantees nothing: Arnold shoves the poor mailman aside to be the first caller into a radio station then seems genuinely shocked and hurt when Sinbad does the same to him.

But I adore that, after he hits bottom, Arnold shares a beer with the reindeer he knocked out the previous shot. It's his moment of alleged redemption, making up for decades of bad blood between him and the animal kingdom from when he drunkenly punched out a camel in CONAN. And even if it skirts around being a total anti-consumerist parable, I applaud the film's brutal satirization of the consumer mindset and the Coal Switches Syndrome, even while endorsing each in the end. That's the unique problem of a country with a free press, namely that once an institution incorporates its own critique, it nulls all criticism by depicting the critic criticizing it, of having the thing itself critique its own thinghood. There's nothing left to say because it's already been said, like the kid who punches himself in the face so the bully doesn't get him first. Arnold wouldn't know about that, because he would never punch himself in the face, but can only fight big guys and have it be fair....just like Rock Hudson has to wait until the end of GIANT before he finally finds someone in his same height and weight class. (Sinbad comes close, as does this guy:)

The point is, fatherhood's integrity takes a bullet in the name of commercial fetishization and makes us wonder: who is it that thinks kids most want to see parents suffering indignities on their behalf? The same idiots who think kids want to see kids seeing at all? Arnold's kid is an emotional blackmailer --he NEEDS to have his father not get him the action figure; he needs to feel that terrible sting and get over it, it's part of the maturation process. But this is a kid's movie for kidswho don't understand that emotional blackmail only hurts themselves in the end. Adults like Arnold in JINGLE are not avatars of how boys want to imagine themselves, but stooges, cautionary tales, figures of revenge. Comical, neutered, pleading, desperate, pissing themselves in vain attempts to win their children's fickle favor. Ideally, kid audiences should should be sickened by this horrible reversal. A kid trying to impress his father is natural and helps both parties grow, but a father trying to impress a kid is unnatural and stunts the world, for the kids now have nowhere to grow but down. This is what feminism, the nanny state, equal rights, maternity leave, and anti-smoking legislation hath wrought; they have taken the balls from out the father and then kicked him where they used to be, saying 'if they were there, man that would hurt, so you're welcome!'

A very handicapped man once said "we let 'em smoke, vote and drive, even put 'em in pants! And what do we get? Russian roulette on the highway, a Democrat in the White House, you can't even tell male from female.... unless you meet 'em head on."

That old man was played by Stuart Lancaster, and the movie was the Russ Meyer's 1965's FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL! It's currently out of print, but if ever there was an Xmas movie worth running someone over for it's this one. RIP Haji... you were some kind of a woman... and ballsier than most men.

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Are You Lonesome, Automaton: Terminator and Halloween vs. Hugo

I am a mechanical man
And I do the best I can
Because I have my Family
   -- Charles Manson ("Mechanical Man")

Was it chance I saw Hugo (2011) and The Terminator (1984) in the same day? Two tales of automatons... one amok and one clockwork, both about going into the past, as it were, to either repair or destroy icons. With amazing actors glassening up their eyes and amazing photographers capturing the play of light therein, you don't have much of a chance to stay unmoved on an emotional Sunday afternoon watching Hugo, but the clockwork momentum and awe and everything coming synchronicitly true was much more machine-like than the pre-CGI Terminator; in other words the science fiction film seems ancient and primitive while the nostalgic look back to the silent film era is futuristic slick --the true 'tech noir'.

Like Scorsese, I know there's no getting past the space-time conundrum of my own memories, and like any film critic / theorist love to dredge long lost gold from beneath the skittering heels of post-industrial society. The resurfaced and belatedly lauded (within the film) Méliès is just perhaps the latest/first example of a reflexive Cine-Lazarus resurrection. Alas such resurrections are subject an unspoken bourgeois law that says ahead-of-their-time 'underground' artists must lie buried for not less than one and ideally not more than seven decades. Then the wizard curator gives them something better than life, he gives them a retrospective! Hugo's tin man's heart-shaped key can't compete with its own clockwork orange-hued enshrinement in the perma-pantheon. Though the artist's work has not changed its essential form the world has tick-tocked so many times around the orb that old is new, quaint is revolutionary, whimsical antiquation is post-modern surrealism, cheap drive-in fodder and comic books are hundred million dollar box office business and night table films about film preservation are filled with enough clocks you'll never have to reach very far to smash the snooze button on the industrial age for another two hours of hand color-tinted dreams...

The problems in Hugo are the heart-shaped key (the brand-symbol on the poster) and the Méliès 'brand' of that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye (ever try to watch Trip to the Moon in one sitting? Sure it's imaginative but it's also boring, and all static long shots), and the douche-chilled bouts of bouncily orchestrated whimsey--Amelie's Triplets of Belville cutaways to the budding romance between old dude and the old lady who sits at the cafe, oui, monsieur, but she has, 'ow you say, a bitey dog? So he gets a dog of opposite gender for to woo said dog, and the evil stationmaster (Borat) has a flower girl (Emily Mortimer) who lost a brother the way the stationmaster lost his leg, and Méliès lost his negatives... in zee Great War!


Then there's The Terminator, a film that makes me want to rescue from obscurity James Cameron, not the Titanic control freak, the Pirhana 2 Corman protege.  I remember seeing the preview for The Terminator at the Montgomeryville Drive-In (the main feature was C.H.U.D!) Shuffled in with about six other similar-looking  (i.e. Italian American Gigolo) indie sci fi-ish titles, The Terminator looked cheap, sleazy and we in the car, all Conan fans, loudly mourned how far Arnold had fallen since 1982. The preview showed the Tech Noir bar, with its tacky neon and Arnold dressed like  the kind of guy who usually has fake breasts or knives or Rutger Hauer reflecting in his Gucci sunglasses.

Of course that's not the way it panned out; the reviews glowed and the box office soared, and my jaw dropped in pleased amazement. I remember seeing Terminator by myself in the cinema to get away from my family Thanksgiving day in 1984 and lord knows I felt pretty wowed. The trouble was that it became too popular. Overnight Cameron became an auteur, the most recognized newly minted wunderkind to emerge from the exploitation genre since John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. And if you meshed Hugo and Halloween together, wouldn't you have The Terminator? Look at the resemblance of the 'shape' and the mechanical man in the below shots:

 

1. Automaton!: The idea of the automaton goes back to the 1890s (see below) and was forgotten in the 1920s, but the automaton killer thing began actually with Halloween (or maybe the 1940s Mummy sequels). Of course I'm talking about the slow moving but unstoppable variety, the shambling shapes who can't be killed yet are not alive, and are already slowed yet won't be stopped. And like The Terminator, Halloween was a scrappy independent low budget ($6 million; Halloween was $320K) thriller that wound up being iconic and inspiring many much bigger-budgeted imitations, all of which corresponds to the figure of the undiscovered auteur and his lost gem 'automaton.' The filmmaker's own alienation from the actual machinations of projection, of the mechanism of screening and seeing the film with an audience (aside from the premiere), anxiety about the cross-country marketing and promotion, and the obsessive need to tinker, to keep taking things in and out of the final cut until the last possible moment. What does it all deconstruct to?

"Draughtsman-Writer" by Henri Maillardet c. 1800

The surrealist concept of 'automatic writing' is probably at the farthest extreme of big budget Hollywood moviemaking: the first is unadulterated raw unconscious streaming, the second has been tooled by a tem to wring maximum suspense and greatness, with dozens of unionized voices pitching in and every creative decision having to eventually boil down to entries in a budget ledger. The whole mission becomes capturing the blazing brilliance of the automatic writing session inside the carefully constructed and staggeringly complicated mechanism of filmmaking. It's what occurred to me watching the mechanical man in Hugo start to draw... we don't know what the metal hand will write or create, but neither do we know what our own hand will write during automatic writing... it becomes the opposite end of the Hugo spectrum, the mechanical voice, SKYNET's distant cousin, reaching from beyond the well-guarded door to hopefully scribble something accessible and profound: "I'm sorry, Dave. I can't let you do that." or "we think of the key, each in his prison / thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

2. Women are the fathers of robots - And now, gender controversy comes into the mix, because creating mechanical people is a man thing. The mad scientist is classic Apollonian archetype, attempting to replace the chthonic madness of woman's birth canal with living tissue over titanium endoskeleton... or big fat cogs. The man rejects reality and creates his own, either a shape, a tower, an automaton, a poem, a science fiction or horror film...

So wouldn't it follow that women, then, are perhaps the 'fathers' of automatons, and science fiction and horror films?

Consider yet another Halloween-Terminator similarity: in both films the target of the monster is a normal, good-hearted girl who locates her true heroic self in the course of events, and both films transcend cheap boy's club sexuality and feel more assured about gender than a genre picture had seemed capable of prior to. And a look at the credits reveals why: women were actively involved, as writers and/or producers, in both productions: Debra Hill in Halloween and Gale Ann Hurd in Terminator, and though their contributions tend to go unrecognized in the rush to canonize directors like Carpenter and Cameron, looking at the later works of each lady you see a lot of the same wit and charm that made both these early films so successful (Hill also worked with Carpenter on The Fog and Escape from New York and Hurd on Cameron's Terminator 2, Aliens, and The Abyss), and can feel the absence of same in later work by said auteurs. The trick of course is to have a woman creative voice who understands the masculine psyche without being contemptuous of it (the genius of this being Katheryn Bigelow, below w/ Oscars).

Debra Hill, left

 Within the context of Hugo we have the female character played by Chloe Grace-Moritz who, in the end, finds her own groove by deciding to write the book whose adaptation you have just seen. So in a way she's also a female 'producer' helping a male's vision make it to the screen, filtering the material through feminine perspective, watching from on high as a man expresses through art his own weird gender-fucked issues with self-procreation. Like Hurd and Hill, Moritz is participating in the rearing of a film--through support and input the way a husband would in the rearing of the child. Just as a dad helped conceive the actual child, and may help raise it, he will never get the auteur credit for the child's existence, that credit belongs to the mom, no matter what part dad had in it. So it is that great sci fi and horror films seem to depends on women like Hurd and Hill, who become, in a way, the fathers of these movies (about automatons) birthed by men (Scorsese of course has genius editor Thelma Schoonmaker).

Blue Meanies: (from top) Terminator, Halloween, Hugo

3. The Gears: In the end, our 'submission' to the process of entering a film 'dream state' is an interface with a machine, becoming clockwork. The turning reels of film, the gears and wattage of the projector --this is the end form of the experience. The actual movie may have cost millions to make; it may have been made by talented craftsman tinkering for months, years, but the final result is always just a machine spitting out encoded light and shadow out in some suburban multiplex, noise and voices electronically captured and mimetically reproduced for human ears that are eager to surrender all their human faculties to the machine, so long as their ears and eyes continue to be engages.

Man Ray - Rayograph

We repress or ignore all this mechanism when surrendering to a movie (unless it's out of focus, or too quiet, or the sound is out of sync, or the theater is too hot or cold) as easily as we forget our cell phone calls are beaming back and forth from space, or that we--personally and finally-- could become raw meat in the blink of an eye on the highway, or that 80% of the voices we hear tend to be electronically reproduced, we barely speak anymore except to order food. The automaton then comes as an eruption of the mechanism even further into consciousness, a black hole opening up in the center of the film, fixing to turn us all into mecha-aberrations, like Chaplin threading through the machne in Modern Times, or Sarah Connor in the crushing metal compactor in the Terminator climax.

To avoid this we like to keep a respectful distance from the mechanisms, to hide the wires behind the walls, but as we prepare for 2012 it becomes pretty terrifying to realize how hopelessly addicted we are to electricity. If it goes out, we will be totally lost. The Terminator and the mechanical man in Hugo are both examples of machines that don't use electricity - one just needs to be wound up, the other is nuclear-powered. Neither needs an outlet. They, alone, are truly independent.

4. False Nostalgia Syndrome - Like a suspicious number of films nominated for a 2011 Oscar Hugo bathes in nostalgia for pre-WW1 silent film whimsy, recalling Modern Times if it was remembered by the film scholar who managed to find its lost reel in a mislabeled can and won a prize, and Scorsese is certainly a major savior of film preservation, but is his nostalgia enough to warrant the 'greatness' label for Méliès? Is the subject even a worthy entry in the oeuvre of the man who made Raging Bull and Goodfellas? When dealing with the working class Italian neighborhood of Little Italy or Brooklyn, Scorsese gives us 'real' nostalgia, as in he 'really' witnessed it. For an escapist like myself Hugo seems as suspiciously bourgeois as its fellow 2011 nominee, Midnight in Paris. These are the fantasias of pampered rich kids who have been able to spend their lives tinkering with sound and image and now wonder if maybe, if they could travel back in time, then even Earnest Hemingway would call them geniuses, and they'd be able to recognize themselves in fictional disguises in work by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and get to drink absinthe. It works as their fantasy, but it can't work as ours because they've inhaled the fun out of it, and they've brought nothing but desire, they've shown us nothing but the act of showing us something that meant something to them when they were young and dumb like they think we are now.

The Terminator on the other hand is my experienced moment of childhood whimsy (well, late childhood, I was 17)--and revisiting the film in the light of so many CGI blockbusters it seems, at least on the surface, trashy. With its pouffy hair, pastel clothing, Italian rock synthesizers, rear screen-projected stop motion animation, neon, and casual sex roommates getting killed off first, slasher-style, this pre-digital futuristic film is the 'real' wake-up to nostalgia that Hugo can only catch from a fleeting Parisian postcard (that is, unless Scorsese remembers going to films at the turn of the century and pinning that rocket-in-the-moon's-eye image on their bedroom door to piss off his mama. Because without that genuine connection, only an egoist would think he could deliver any real meaning... unless he admitted Méliès sucked after all that fuss.

Depending on how long it's been since we saw our favorite childhood films our expectations are seldom met, but it's in not meeting them the actual magic occurs. It's the very gritty low budget tangibility, the tactile vividness, of the 1984 Terminator that somehow makes it seem more alive today than a CGI-sandblasted 2011 film like Hugo. No one knew at the time of its making that "I'll be back" would become such a catch phrase, if they did perhaps they would have taken it out to as avoid its embarrassing repetition in the sequels. The original Terminator is a movie free of that kind of presumption which is why it's so indelible. Hugo all but tells us we have to let its magic symbols -- the rocket-in-the-moon's-eye, the heart key--into our hall of future golden memories. But for me, even though I well-knew of Méliès beforehand, and I had his Trip to the Moon on super 8mm and we'd project it on the drummer in our band's light show in 1986-9, what that moon makes me think of all these decades later is "Tonight" by Smashing Pumpkins, another recreation that doesn't even bother with the rocket in the moon's eye shot... to its credit.


5. Pumpkins - The Pumpkins take the look and feel of Méliès' pre-modernist world's fair whimsicality and then update it to rock, speeding up the imagery and adding deep emotional hooks. Scorsese instead tries to slow us all down into Méliès' worship, to put the film in a shrine or museum and destroy its last link to the real world. If Hugo were truly to be worthy of the Scorsese canon it might end, for example, with the audience slowly realizing that the static long shots and endless flurries of spastic activity make Méliès' films kind of boring. The films only capture attention when used in a new context, a collage like the Pumpkins, or as an element of a multimedia fantastic plastic acid test with my own Mexican Mud Band, c. 1987. Scorsese instead captures the chaotic making of the films and does way better hand-tinting and covers up the dullness through just showing a long Academy-style montage of highlights from the found Méliès oeuvre.

Hugo's unthinking reverence for the great Méliès reminds me of the ending of Teacher's Pet: Clark Gable plays a scrappy self-taught city reporter going up against Doris Day as a journalism teacher whose father won a Pulitzer for his smalltown paper editorials. Love happens against their will, with Gable preferring to pick fights with Day's platonic pal Gig Young than make love. It's not until Gable finally reads Day's dad's old editorial clipping that he can proclaim "they stink" and come into his own as the confident uneducated lover of an educated gal. Call it reverence prior to investigation, or just bourgeois idolatry, but it takes him awhile for Clark to value his own opinion enough to make this claim, and until he does he's stranded behind this slab of journalistic integrity that he's expected to measure up to even though he's long since surpassed it. I wouldn't even bring it up if it wasn't Marty.... Marty, come back to the 'hood!

I'm not knocking Hugo; I cried and thought Asa Butterfield was eerily perfect, but while I normally love Moretz she seemed ungainly and confused... Super 8, which was released the same year as Hugo but not nominated for an Oscar, is nostalgic for the era that I too was a a young super 8mm filmmaker in (the Terminator era), but also proactive about actually making movies instead of revering the makers or cleaning the projector. There's no real salute to the creative energy of the moment in Hugo; it's all about preservation and repairmanship; it has to run all the way around the massive sets five times just to make us think the right hand doesn't know the left from a hole in the wall, through which it hopes to add some Amelie Rear-Window-Psycho touchstones without drawing attention to its own absurdly over-qualified self-awareness.

Eyes of Laura Mars

 Super 8 on the other hand is just as top heavy but it fights from its gut; it kicks and scratches and its orphans are only half-orphans and the pain and the bonding between Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney devastated me a lot more in a lot less time, and seems a more logical film to champion for a ballsy academy. But they weren't awake enough to realize Super 8 isn't about the alien or the adults but about kids carving their own sacred space out of the bellies of parents too dumb to know either their own beastliness or their kids' frail genius. The alien in Super 8 suggest what might have happened to ET if he'd not been able to phone home, or if we abducted the greys at the end of Close Encounters. In other words, he's pissed! He's the perfect reflection of the suburban teen forever denied any form of dangerous self-expression yet carrying through anyway, ala Over the Edge or Rise of the Planet of the Apes. No wonder, then, the old timer academy dismissed it, probably with the glint of fear in their eyes they usually reserve for passing carloads o' passing Crips.

Super 8

Final anecdote: I had my own Hugo moment in 1997 whilst out of my mind on acid up at a friend's big weekend party at her Swiss chalet in the Catskills; it was gorgeous night under the stars and everyone spread out under a massive blanket on the ground, facing the blank white side of the house. Behind them I set up my old super 8 projector on a picnic table bench and projected on the wall an old clip reel from 1931's Dracula, unintentionally at the wrong speed, and since I was tripping I had no way of knowing. An already deadly slow movie became dripping with poetry as that slowness was doubled into a total dream state. Is there a more indelible image of death at 24 frames an hour than black and white Mina Harker, her voice almost manlike in its druggy depths, slowly explaining her dream of the room becoming filled with mist? As I crouched hallucinating into the weird gears and mechanisms of the projector, wondering where the speed changer was and if I should bother changing it since no one noticed, threading the machine like some old Rumpelstilskin out of time, shut out by choice and inclination from the orgy of physical warmth going on in front of me with my friends, who lay in a row under a huge zipped together sleeping bag, watching the films of course, but all addled themselves and so beyond space and time they would be the last people to notice how... sloow David Manners was talking.

 

So I was alone, in front, threading my machine to dazzle them with slow motion vampires from 1931, and while most nights my feeling of disconnectedness would shatter me more than my constant drip of bourbon could repair, that night, under the stars I accepted my dwarfish lot and gave up my hunger for the golden hair and sleeping bag sense of belonging. It all came into focus for me in that moment, and though my friends were all making more money than I was via advertising, and were basking in their ability to create human warmth, I had Bela Lugosi... and he knew!

If that doesn't make a Hugo, I don't know what does, or a Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) in The Terminator, who is also in his way, an archivist, going back in time to preserve some imperiled damsel in mid-bloom. Don't we all hope some Hugo is going to dig up our little forgotten super 8mm films up when our time is ready? Or that some secret agent on a motorcycle will pull us out of class and whisk us off into the next world, and our friends will all whistle in envy? Or some collector of my old hand-drawn comic books look me up in hushed awe?

"A mistake is made."

I feel bad for those who truly died before they were re-discovered, like Bela Lugosi and like Ed Wood Jr. and I hope someone will come for me like that one day. We outsiders hope for this the way we hope our children will remember to call on Mother's Day, if we had them. This is what non-family man artists do instead of having real human children of our own: we make them out of clay and wire and words and weird machinations of mechanical whimsy, hoping some version of ourselves in a future generation will come along and figure out what we were trying to say to our unborn grandson. The Mechanical Man's reproductive organ is a metal welding tool but women don't need to have one since they can have real babies... since, like Manson, they have 'a family.' When will intelligent women stop writing about man's obsession with re-animating the dead and building robot children, as if it's she who should be jealous?!

Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley (Bride of Frankenstein)

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Great Films of the 80s: CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

What a time 1982 was.... to be a comic book addict and Robert E. Howard-ophile, with a shellacked completed jigsaw puzzle of Frazetta's "Death Dealer" up on his wall and a stack of paperback reprints on his shelf (including Howard's non-Conan stuff, like all those grisly stories about sailors' bare-knuckle boxing). Suffering the 15 year-old virgin blues in a world gone mad with conservative backlash, Howard was like a proto-punk bidding us hold on until.... into this hell rode a horseman. Herald of the new world! Conan! The Thulsa Doom serpent cult in the film was a perfect analogy for the hippie movement, with its focus on converting young people to blood orgies and training them to kill their parents, and the whole twin serpent motif very pagan and old school unchristian, (twin serpent motifs are common hallucinations in drug experiences, and exist today in our conception of the double helix and in the symbol of the American Medical Association). For kids wondering why they weren't growing up drowned in orgies like their older brothers in the 1970s, the Thulsa Doom crowd was the perfect demonization tool.

Directed by John Milius from a script he co-wrote with Oliver Stone, you could fit the dialogue in this movie on the back of a bar napkin, while the orchestral score probably took down a whole old-growth forest on its own, and that's maybe why it works so well. Conan doesn't even say a word until his famous answer to the question 'what is best in life" -- "To crush your enemies, to see 'dem driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of der wimmen."

The film would be a thunder-headed downer though if not for the lively, lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. She's not in it nearly enough, but that's why the film works so well as a revenge scenario, since we experience the horrible pain of Conan's childhood for the first half hour of running time--forced into slavery, forced to kill like a pit bull, forced to watch his parents be murdered and his people destroyed by Thulsa (James "Vader" Earle Jones)--and then, shortly after finding her, he loses Valeria, also to Thulsa. Oh man but you're pissed at old Thulsa by then!

 Though time has worn my vengeance-craving edge down to a dull memory, the scars of being a sexually frustrated, physically un-mighty teenager linger on, as does the memory of the exaltation I felt watching Conan, the sense of vindication (which would not come again in any movie until Fight Club). Finally, here was a hero we teens could get behind. He was swinging for our team, crashing our older sibling's orgy and trashing the joint, and if there's any place that howls of bloodlust are still okay, it should be in the theater, with the old ladies behind you going "sshhhh!" We may not have been raised pushing a dumb wheel in the middle of nowhere for seemingly no reason, but we could relate, in our hatred of school, of third period geometry class. Conan was our liberator. School's Aowt foah Summah!

Back to Valeria for a moment. When she and Conan bond in a luxurious fur-covered tent after robbing the tower of serpents, we feel him finally beginning to relax, and the whole unbearably rough and dismal film unclenches its fists for the first time and our heart melts as these two orphaned lone wolves find a temporary peace. Though we see lots of Bergman's hot dancer thighs, some breast here and there, and of course Schwarzenegger's acres of muscles, Milius clearly doesn't intend their sex scene should titillate so much as warm our hearts a bit, sincerely and without mawkishness, and as such, it's one of the best sex scenes of all time, with just as much detail on faces and textures--furs, fires, tent walls, jewels--as nudity and moaning, and it's all "earned" so to speak, through character development. Valeria's fierce devotion and her beautiful monologue about passing other people in couples in tents in the night breaks our hearts because we feel that way too, and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because in this case Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon after she found it. Laugh all you want, but this was our Titanic!

Re-visiting it on DVD is cool, because there's a lot of stuff a boy who saw this film a million times on duped, cropped VHS would finally get to see again after the one time in the theater. I was always pissed that the visceral early raid on Conan's village, which blew my mind in the theater, was cropped to the point it was impossible to follow on the pan and scan, and it's been so long since I've seen even that it all seems new, especially in the new remastered extended (!) version, which includes a monologue wherein Conan remembers picking blueberries with his father, and in it he seems for the first time both eloquent and at peace, a bit straight out of The Seventh Seal but that's okay --it's earned, even if it does kill the mood of slowly building menace. My sharper adult eyes and the high res of DVD now notice the importance of a huge jewel stolen from Thulsa Doom, which Conan gives to Valeria which she wears around her neck from then on, and which he later takes back and wears after she's killed; and the way Doom's riders in the beginning of the film know to take off their helmets in respect to Conan's mom, via admiring the handle detailing of an animal skull on her slain husband's awesome sword. In its weird militaristic way (Milius is a great one for armor and warrior codes) this nearly dialogue-free film is damned eloquent.

Because of all the hack job imitations that followed in the wake of Conan's success we've become conditioned to dismiss films like this as mindless, but Conan demands separate treatment from the deluge of crackerjack tripe that followed, like: Deathstalker, Yor, Sword and Sorcery, and Beastmaster.  John Milius is no hack, after all, despite his crazy militarism, he's a close collaborator of artsy fuckers like Coppola and Paul Schrader, and Dino De Laurentiis was able to give the film a huge budget, and it's all up there on the screen: thousands of extras, vast beautiful serpentine sets, dozens of horses, a huge temple exterior staircase on a hilltop and a vast interior mountain cave with a marble orgy chamber that looks like something out of an early Argento (designed by Ron Cobb, of Star Wars and Alien fame). Whatever happened to beautiful, boldly original art direction like this? What have we lost since 1982? I think I know, but if I told you, I'd go to hell.

On widescreen DVD you can see there's actually lots of corpses hanging upside down along the walls in the orgy scene, though you'd expect an orgy scene to be more smoky and with more writhing. But I love the special effects here, which occur without rupturing the soundtrack, which plays almost nonstop thunderous versions of De Falla's El Brujo and doesn't break from the track to announce hey look, "Doom is turning into a snake!" or a giant snake has just woken up, or the sandy wind surrounding Conan's body--covered in writing ala Kwaidan to protect him from evil spirits---is writhing like shadowy reptoid men with long wind tails. The animated bits are slight and beautiful, clearly frame-by- frame hand-painted, using the actual sandstorm wind in the scene as the jumping off point for whirling figurative specters (see below). Not since Forbidden Planet and never since has this sort of thing been done with such class.

Nothing quite illuminates that you're old like realizing the last time you saw Conan you saw him and Valeria as adults and now you see them as children. Arnold's youthfulness and pre-catch phrase sincerity make him quite charismatic; this is the film he made before launching into superstardom with The Terminator and as with that film, it's a true original, made with lots of care and imagination and research, that should never be confused with the imitative junk that followed.

A lot of us Conan fans were initially wary that a German body builder who'd been in one film, Pumping Iron as himself, would be too flippant, too jovial, too A-Team if you will, to be a good Conan. We figured he'd make sure through his contract that he doesn't actually kill anyone, just beats them up and tells them to drink milk and stay in school and don't do drugs. So we were all surprised by the gleeful amorality and downright thuggishness of his barbarian. That's one of the things that makes Conan great -- he ain't no role model. On two different occasions Conan basically breaks into someone else's party, trashes the joint, kills loads, kidnaps a girl and/or kills a priceless pet snake and steals jewels, all without direct provocation. He doesn't wait for them to draw first; he kills people in cold blood, punches out a camel who was just standing there (Conan bumped into him), pushes beggars, steals property and throws witches into the fire. You wouldn't see the A-Team doing that shit. And he doesn't just conk them on the head and then lament about killing to Gabriele, like Xena used to do. He chops off their heads and kicks over their candelabras. He's been dealt a raw deal by fate and he's out to steal and kill to his heart's content, as he's entitled. And there's no dutiful cop trailing him, determined to take him down no matter what the cost. There's no annoyingly liberal captain of police telling him to do things "by the book." Conan is wronged and owed a debt by the social order and the cults therein while at the same time not asking for the liberal government's help in getting it --he's a true conservative antihero, ready and able to lead us out of the 70s.

And so, to our surprise, we loved Arnold to death. Every line he speaks in the film became cherished and repeated ad nauseum by we the fans: "Can we go over theah? Wheh the others do not see?" he asks Jack SUCCUBUS Taylor. "Oil the sowahd... and feed the hoahse," he tells feisty sorcerer Mako, himself a great fountain of quotability through his weird accentuation of random words ("Learning and writing were made... available"). And when he asks about the standard he seeks,  Conan points his two giant fists together and says, awestruck, "two snakes... facing each otha... but theah ONE!" My friends and I could crack up for hours saying lines like that in our German Arnold voices: "Crom, I have never pwayed to you befoah!" I don't mean that at all as a put-down. We all love Arnold. And he does a great job. He invests himself. He does most of his own stunts, as does Sandahl and Gerry Lopez.

Time doesn't permit me to praise Lopez, also a fountain of quotes ("Dinner for wolve"). A surfer Milius bonded with making Big Wednesday. Lopez speaks in the broken English expected of an Asian-looking actor at the time, but isn't stupid and when he occasionally breaks into Cali bro-style enunciation, it's a joy. With Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder, Bergman a Fosse dancer and Lopez a surfer--none of the three actual trained actors--there's a kind of outsider status amongst them that works beautifully for conveying their outsider status. They are not just "high adventurers," not bland actors cast for their looks, or adults with a sense of responsibility --just young, motivated, fit people willing to try anything. They are athletes, barbarians, outsiders, thieves. They were as we felt we would become once the goddamned civilization that made us go to goddamned school every day and learn geometry was burned forever to the ground and the world became scorched and run by warring gangs of the road. Until that day came, we would wait, and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over, and stockpile shields and swords. It was only a matter of time before Columbine. 

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