Caretaker Sparkle and the Selfie Side: ROOM 237

from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237 is a lightning crack to the head; all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious; two because the film is terrifying in and of itself; three because it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis, from the ur-dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of nonwriters in a publish-or-perish deadlock, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses; four because we tend to forget that since we're a nation conditioned to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images--which in THE SHINING's case means the "Heee-rree's Johnny!" grinning Jack Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack-- the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective.

In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of ci madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with too much time on their hands and a good education who've read too much of the world. Filmmaker Rodney Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time with their paranoiac collage that Kubrick did with the source material, and so the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, especially when far too crazy to take seriously (and the editing makes even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, his getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.

Hey, if Kubrick did put that little touch in there intentionally, how nice that it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe silver fox shawl)-- will also be recognized. Artists do these odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal touches we leave in our art or writing will be recognized by someone, or something, and that they will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see.

But the really trippy moments come when one fan plays the film backwards over the film moving forward simultaneously, so they overlap over one another (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows, it might be, as we learn here Kubrick had a 200 IQ and was very well read on all sorts of horrors and sought to encode a lot of subliminal information. At any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, so I did too, as in the many collages on here (only the below is from the film).

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

Even if it's not intentional, does it really matter? In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots for Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

"Pull it Togetherless"  (note phallus fingers)

The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite."  I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer on some level to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconsious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use tools, not to build bridges but to crush their enemies skulls.  so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. We as humans are evil murderers, it is who we are, our genes, the mighty procreate and endure, the weak die on the roadside. We can discuss the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' is that we did what they did and got away with it.  We were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN.

"We're going to make a new rule" 

That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us those trees and mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar.

In Kubrick this 'help' is revealed in all its terrifying ambivalence, the behavioral modification techniques as in CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are about a dehumanizing conditioning process that has backfired; and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. But better blind than to be able to 'see' and not be afraid (the last words of JACKET's narration) at the cost of... what? Of blood-free hands? Through evil parents a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward into the unknown (such as going to space, or writing a novel). Where would our moon landing be without the Russians for example (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russian science writers in 2001) or war without a divided self? Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (while Jack has made contact with the 'inside party'), in other words, the boy has 'talked' to those socialist science writers; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  

"Maisie Squared" 

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

Even ROOM 237 seems to be snickering at some of thsee more loco ideas, such as, the singing of The 3 Little Pigs wolf call as a link to the Holocaust. The Onion in its snarky surmise spoke to Kubrick's assistant on the film to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct:'

"the suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 

This is of course imbecilic When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery... in the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, ONION!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

 Call the lunatic critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenics on some level, but at least they know how to look properly, and the lunatic is, in the end, merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface at every given moment. He goes crazy because he can't shut it out of his mind, it doesn't go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts... stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day. It's only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's stretchy face used to really bother me as Wendy, I'll confess, until ROOM 237 'corrected' my perceptions. Now I know why their mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure when they're confronted with the horrors and that this isn't a film about fighting back and acting logically and shouting at the screen hey don't do that, it's 'the mind' or 'the Munch' ---the sheer overwhelming horror that is the only 'sane' response to an insane world. Apparently one of his quickest shoots was CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001, happened largely because of Malcolm McDowell, who once answered the question what was it like to work with Kubrick that it was great, "if he trusted you." If he doesn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, it is a living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way or maybe to just be a sadist or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot. Are the great artists of our time all just naturally screwed up bully sociopaths? Is that all art is?

Hitchcock certainly got his insanity out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by film's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy fear. Malcolm seems to tap into that madness no problem for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, both of whom  apparently got favorite treatment. No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that Jack's Jack starts out crazy so has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always farther to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. 

In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy, the 'caretaker sparkle' is Nicole Kidman. Kubrick's first genuine female character. She likes to have sex and Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, so he can ogle his own perfect body; Cruise is a cipher trying to break into a dimension that sees through his facility in ways he cannot. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the 'selfie side' of the camera app; he's trying to see, rather than be seen seeing himself seeing.

The actor with the shine in his eyes is the one who can do both: they can 'see' all right. Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the one that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims for, for there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. If it's not there, maybe 40 straight takes of the same scene will help the actor find it. 

The gold room in The Shining is where Jack experiences his relative distance even from the majority of ghosts, who ignore him as he wanders around with his drink (which he doesn't ever sip from), and has the advocaat spilled on him. Nicole Kidman's immanent desirability in Eyes Wide Shut means that she is never safe from being hit on the very minute she is alone and seems bored in the (same) gold room. This smooth talking yet vaguely sinister figure she dances with is her own private Lloyd the bartender, an animus of sexual mystery, providing the direct connection to the unconscious core of sexuality the Cruise's character lacks (i.e. her bourbon is named sex; his is named Tom Cruise).

 Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic; all of his films are about the cold break of time when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality and the inner and outer merge. Even BARRY LYNDON focuses on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after winning a duel and being robbed by a highwayman. PATHS OF GLORY in the transitions between men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves --each side clueless about the other. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the Highwayman's cold, terrifying instructions in LYNDON, and the execution of the three soldiers in PATHS. Kubrick brings this cold, clinical reason deep into the murky homicidal core of man's decision-making skills, the unconscious self-sabotaging remainder. Jack continually lets his family get away, the troops refuse to charge, HAL refuses to admit his mistake, Lyndon refuses the call to bravery, and only our isolated flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see they're all just ants.

Gearing up for some lashings of the old Wendy. Gimme the bat!

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. The stress of 'faking the moon landings' and the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.

Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between four AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and camels have all gone to bed, as it were, and the tiresome curtain of tedious convention, the collective guise of sanity, or decency and normality, at last may part. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They all vainly struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For we who are truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction. The sane are now the insane ones, and oh how they danced... at Stonhenge.

NOTES:
1. As one of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes: most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact

ALSO ON ACIDEMIC:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

ON BRIGHT LIGHTS:

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA

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A Tale of Three Anti-Capitalist Musicals: HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, BRIGADOON, MARAT/SADE

HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM
1933 - **** - dir. Lewis Milestone
A pre-code salute to vagrancy, anarchism, and the days when Central Park was a refuge for depression-era homelessness, Milestone's delightful film is crammed with half-spoken Rogers and Hart songs lamenting the amount of work it takes to remain unemployed ("You own the world / when you don't own a thing"). There's enough economic savvy and cool Central Park set design here to make it both Brechtian and bucolic, an AS YOU LIKE IT with Central Park as Arden and Jolson the swaggering Mack the Knife from THE THREE PENNY OPERA if he was played by a balding Marx brother; with the evil duke a thousand dollar bill Jolson finds in the trash --the very rumor of which sends the park's unwashed denizens into a near riot. Hard boiled softie newspaper man-turned-Broadway scribe Ben Hecht wrote the shit out of it-- Imagine the Lubitsch touch on a SCARFACE spittoon. One of the many awesome little joys is hearing Frank "The Wonderful Wizard" Morgan saying "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home" six years early!

I've avoided ever seeing THE JAZZ SINGER (1929) on account of my apprehension of boredom, blackface and schmaltz, but now I want to, indeed, must see it. Though he may be a throwback to a bygone age of minstrels in the 'Swanee / how I love ya how I love ya! Mammy!' jazz-hands tradition, there's something blue collar grotesque about Jolson (if he was taller he could play Moose Malloy). He doesn't seem to be imitating black people or minstrels--that's just him - he's a leftover survivor from a bygone age when everyone sang and acted with gigantic smiles plastered on their pusses, irregardless of if they had huge gaps in their teeth. Watching the film nearly 80 years later, he seems like a cross between a  a lost Marx Brother impersonating Maurice Chevalier, and the misbegotten love child of Lauren Hutton and Frankenstein. With his pancake makeup, strange elocution, and black lipstick he seems like some monstrous human railroad track between all races, religions, and classes... in short, America. And respect the unique frumpiness of Harry Langdon as a  socialist agitant trash collector ("your clothes are worn and your socks have holes / but you're plutocrats down to your souls!"), and dig gorgeous Madge Evans as the mayor's amnesiac mistress, whom Jolson heroically rescues when she plunges several feet off a Central Park bridge into the shallow stream below. Needless to say Jolson falls, too, in love, and he decides to get a job to support his soaked siren, much to the shock and horror of his hobo friends and well-wishers. Capitalism, in short, is for lovers, but it's not admirable!

 BRIGADOON
1954- **1/2 - dir. Vincente Minnelli
You never thought a magical Scottish hamlet could be boring, but you're wrong. Vincente Minnelli clearly has no grasp of what makes Scottish culture great, i.e. Scotch whiskey. Alcohol here is clearly associated with a crowded Manhattan bar Gene Kelly and sourpuss drunk Van Johnson inhabit before and after their trip to Scotland (to shoot grouse, of all things). Scotland is played by various uninspired sets on which Kelly climbs and taps and sings like a silly monkey.

Minnelli stacks the deck by making everyone at the bar vulgarians and Kelly's fiancee a social climbing materialistic bitch. But associating booze with big city shallowness doesn't allay the dull piety of the mythical town itself, which is stranded in a fundamentalist annex of John Ford chaperone-and-plow malarkey but without Ford's magic touch. This ain't the Scottish musical version of THE QUIET MAN, much as it would like to be. For one thing, more booze and fistfights, and ghosts, would have helped. And the widescreen formatting--meant for giant Cinemascope stretch screens-- eschews close-ups and fast edits (such things made audiences nauseous and disoriented on such large canvases)  in favor of long shots on obvious stage sets, where, for example, everyone's dancing feet are at the bottom of the screen, and their heads at the top, duplicating a Broadway theater experience, perhaps, but in failing to explore the magical possibilities of its subject, even on the big screen it's enough to reduce you to napping in all the wrong places.

If you want something magically Scottish, check out I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING or LOCAL HERO. What you get from BRIGADOON is the dry notion that Scottish culture is so inhibited it makes Irish Catholics look like Haight-Ashbury hippies  Considering the awesomeness of the stars--Kelly and my favorite Cyd Charisse--there's some surprisingly awkward dancing amidst the finery, and the super sexy Cyd is barely recognizable: her legs hidden in thick skirts, shapely upper regions sheathed in a highlands sash. She's supposed to look wan and bonny but often just seems sad and hungover.

Meanwhile Van Johnson is the ugly American personified, grousing about how he came to Scotland to shoot grouse and making alcohol look bad as he drawls off his endless flask and shotguns treed locals. Why does Kelly insist on bringing him along? He's like Ronald Coleman's ungrateful brother in LOST HORIZON. Why go to Scotland just to deal with that kind of crap? Just don't hang out with him! On the other hand, does Kelly really want to eat haggis and smell peat moss fires and offal for the rest of time immortal? Why doesn't he just go back to New York and find a different bar? One less crowded and boorish? He's a grass is greener type, aye, and sure'n the grass is no greener than in a wee place you can never get to except once every hundred years.

MARAT/SADE
1967 **** - dir. Peter Brook.
Glenda Jackson stabs a guy named Marat during the French Revolution, while the Marquis de Sade looks on, delighted, and corrects flubbed lines--or are his corrections part of the play within the play? Meanwhile the mental institution director interrupts too, but in rhyme, so is he part of the play or not? What are all these interruptions! Revolution!!

Based on Peter Weiss's play-within-a-play about some drama therapy at the insane asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, the full UK title is "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade", and since you're watching this on TV now you're watching a video of a movie of a play within a play about the French Revolution, so there's guillotines, Brechtian frame-bending through a whole maze of fourth walls, and long twisted monologues about walking through the bloody streets of Paris, rolling like a river of severed heads and blood, and bath steam, and the special way syphilis makes you insane (antibiotics had yet to be invented) and hydrotherapy might help for the moment but there's no cure for the madness of trying to create a government for the people when the people are all corrupt, murderous, uneducated, unwashed denizens!

I used to intern in the creative arts therapy drama department at Bellevue, so I know the score, and this here's real! Watch out Glenda Jackson doesn't reach right out from the screen and stab you too. Superb on every level, some of the songs are almost Fairport Convention-level psych-folkish. As the NY Times TV critic used to say, pounce. Or in this case, stream! Enjoy the digital fruits of your capitalist bourgeois internet whilst you may.  New Marats are born every day, or am I thinking of mallrats? Either way, we're doomed.

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The Kinski Precipice: Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.

I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you won't play it?) Then there's Herzog's titles, which are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? That's the title of your film? Why assume they wouldn't?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old PAL VHS of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. Nothing personal. I was just a dumb Yankee at the time, and knew for example, nothing of the rest of the world and the little creatures in it.

But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced, and more tolerant of my naturalistic German side, I'm perhaps better equipped to recognize my own issues tainting the clarity of Herzog's hallucinatory nature-phobic naturalism. I am growing up/into appreciating his mix of German sturm und drang and lysergi-bucolic mysticism and how his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness turn his narrative into a static panorama. I can't help but admire and love Herzog's willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same. Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out emptied.

Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a theater production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline, and brings Peru into it. Of course. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was born to preach the gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub plays the face. Brad Dourif is a dead-on Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle with a Samurai sword stashed in his shed. Chloe Sevigny is the girlfriend who tries to channel Brad's madness by bringing him into her theater group.. but you can't shrug off holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Arsenic and Old Lace or Bye Bye Birdy. 

 Lynch regular Piper Laurie plays the mom, dead even before she dies-- she's the middle-aged version of Mary in ERASERHEAD. An inner voice warns Brad not to go kayaking with his hippie friends in Peru (they all drown, offscreen). Awakened and chastened, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception; loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront, gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his meds into the broken-glass covered street of messianic schizophrenia. Back at home his clinging mom won't stop feeding him jello. And so what can a poor man do once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries? As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"

 On that note, I think the part of Herzog's quest to find the holy grail of pure madness may be a smokescreen for his private worry he already found it and lost it, namely in the eyes of the late, great Klaus Kinski. For the recent BAD LIEUTENANT--of which MY SON is almost a sequel thanks to similar cinematic patina and supporting cast (Shannon, Brad Douriff, Imra P. Hall, and Michael Pena)--Nic Cage brought his own line of insanity to the collaboration. There was little room left for Herzog to project his post-Kinski stress disorder, but without a strong lead to delimit him, Herzog's liable to forget that it helps our appreciation of onscreen derangement if we first see someone else in the film act normal, at least once or twice, to get our bearings.

In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, period, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy; he's a charismatic actor doing a fine job of capturing the full spectrum of the manic-messianic complex, but there's no charm to his insanity, no reason we can think of -- aside from his attractive bearing -- for anyone to put up with his tantrum-esque ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him into the holy light.

Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog wanted to anyway: Kinski is a wild man, archetypal and one-of-a-kind. He's a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE. I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness, which is, as Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, the 'only performance that truly makes it." Good as Michael Shannon is, he just doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg?

Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe plays the homicide detective who tracks Brad back from the crime scene to where he's holed up with hostages, demands for pizza, etc. Udo Kier shows up as the theater director who was putting on Elektra with Shannon as the star.  Since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior.' And that's the problem, a) why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care, and b) if they weren't going to help him, why endure his holy madness if it's not fun or fascinating to be around? c) Wasn't he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.

As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with a mix of the resignation of an old queen indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy and the genuine fascination artists feel around those rare souls more fucked-up than themselves, and the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to try and make a film with someone who's completely delusional. But as with Shannon, Kier doesn't project the maniacal charisma that would possibly ground a loose wire like Brad. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a champion! And vice backacha!

Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own baggage, he gets whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And you sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part (he's great)--that Kinski is there, working ghostlike machinations, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows to give Lynch and Herzog time to become Kinski with each other. The issue at work here may as well be too much respect and not enough spittle.

The collaboration between Cage and Herzog in BL2 had a reckless, exhilarating momentum, the Lynch-Herzog collaboration doesn't have immediacy, perhaps as it neglects the 'glue' of normal 'strong' grounding characters like Eva Mendez's prostitute, or a Lynchian heroine like Naomi Watts or Laura Dern. Willem Dafoe tries to be grounded as the homicide detective on the scene, but Dafoe will never be able to play 'grounded' --the more he tries, the creepier he gets --and I mean that as a compliment. He's too nice and sweet a soul to play one on TV. He's warmer when he's colder.

In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's auteur-like motifs? He's either crazy himself, super enlightened, has done psychedelics, or--most likely--all three, in addition to hanging out with a lot of messianic schizophrenics, otherwise he'd never get so many details of the horror of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess other so very exactly right. There wouldn't be the terrible realization that the hallucination of a giant mantis alien sucking the psionic marrow out of your third eye isn't actually a hallucination but the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of aching skin walking down dangerous streets and hurtling in steely cars towards crushed oblivion is no easy thing to bear. 

 Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, generally, an order which has no way to process the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place...  coherence through artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper and he's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.

Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? Here's what else I learned from MY SON MY SON:

1. The only way to channel holy madness without causing destruction and misery is art but that has its own problems, as a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out, ala Michael Shannon's Greek tragedian. Don't think it doesn't happen! MACBETH has made plenty of actors into mounds of raving jello, and they say the Joker killed Heath Ledger, and mom's jello kills them all... served while Jack Benny smiles from afar...

2. No matter how bad things get, the old country blues and/or gospel can make it okay. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery,  I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips' (seen at left, with his double zither) who's "What a friend We have in Jee-ee-sus" has made it onto dozens of my mix tapes. For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD Frisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster than the songs of an old, dead, black, blind singing preacher. What a friend we have in Jesus!

3. There comes a special moment when even artists realize they need to break away from their urge to write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge, but unless we let go of the rope, we'll never see the bottom... never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners. 

Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with our full vision, or instead of silently watching a movie or taking in a vista in rapture, find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and speech/writing rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak.Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to feel because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will never come back, but it does, a new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip.

4.  Shannon in a Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table: a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted, all else gone to shadow.

 

The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of god, try not announcing how spiritual you are to your horrified other, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.

The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity. The longer you ignore it the sweeter its songs. But your ego's sitting on a cupboard full of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows. The person who is deemed mad is the person who who surrenders and silences the ego in a sudden snuffing so the cupboards can open and light pour out. He is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge responsibility to keep this holy state going as long as possible, rather than knowing to surrender even that goal he runs about shaking the lapels of those still asleep, but maybe they don't want to wake up, and why should they, just 'cuz you say so?

A few incarnations later, he learns that unless he's cared for by a dozen attendants and speaking daily at the ashram, he better keep the ego around, and he can balance all that in art. Within art you can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. We dismiss ideas that challenge our egos outright, but we'll always stop for a good movie, one that stealthily addresses ideas of madness and artistry and newly minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Where are the damned lepers in San Diego?

 MY SON MY SON has a lot of that kind of inner problem, the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn you into a raving lunatic. When the House is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all; roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away, unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? Whohin bist du, meinen rattemessias!? Ich liebe, Ich liebe dich so... 

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In Praise of Dangerous Men: George C. Scott as PATTON (1970)

"The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans."

- Patton (1970)

Now that Kathryn Bigelow has made it safe for us to recklessly court macho annihilation again, let's examine one of the more respected and controversial military leaders of our time-- General George Patton, and the 1970 film that bears his name, starring George C. Scott, which I recently had the pleasure of acquiring on an excellent blu-ray disc, and which is highly recommended to fans of THE HURT LOCKER (2009), THE DEER HUNTER (1977) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and anyone whose ever had a heart, who wouldn't turn around and expose its flank to daily howitzer bombardments... or who is interested in this new Tom Hanks-produced mini-series, THE PACIFIC (though Patton wasn't in the Pacific, it's still the same God-damned wonderful war!)

From the famous opening (quoted above) -- Patton's clinically insane and perhaps wrong but nonetheless inspiring opening speech in front of a giant American flag -- onwards, we know we're in for some heavy stuff, as Scott has no plans to pull punches, glorify the American dream or lament the unfairness of war. Indeed, as the esteemed general of the magnificent Third Army, Scott's ranting makes you realize, as a man, that part of cowardice involves forgetting there's no real reward to being alive in the first place, as a coward.  Unless you risk it all, it's all wasted.

It makes sense that Francis Ford Coppola worked on the script, since the man knows a thing or too about the seductive lure of megalomania and the high of facing death on a daily basis. Coppola was kicked off the PATTON production but later found fictional editions of that kind of military mindset in characters like Kilgore, Willard and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW, and brilliantly captured the way an ordinary man might find himself manifesting the cold reptilian killer via Michael Corleone's transformation from idealistic young lover of Diane Keaton to cold-as-ice Don in THE GODFATHER. And of course, there's the inspired use of Sicily, a deeply-rooted trans-historical lyricism seems to emanate from the very soil of that island, and Coppola knew it and let it infuse GODFATHER 2. 

In order to rouse his newly assigned group of men from their first defeat in North Africa (he's replacing an ineffectual general who let the boys get slaughtered), Patton initially presents himself as a maniac for discipline and army regulation, making his men fear and hate him, but the hate makes them better soldiers, and when they finally measure up, his admiration becomes enough of a reward that they're ready to die for him. As Cesar "The Dog Whisperer" Milan would say, he is an excellent pack leader, radiating calm, assertive energy and understanding that all affection must be earned for it to have value. Or as Tura Satana said in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL: "You don't have to believe it, just act it." Patton doesn't mind that your hands shake so long as you're trying to keep them steady. It's only when you cower and quit that he boots you into the deep end like a sadistic but wise pool instructor (my own most hated-feared childhood figure).

I don't dare presume I wouldn't be ten times more afraid and shell-shocked in the field of battle than the man Patton slaps, or even Jeremy Davies in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998). One can't know from a besotted armchair field position, but there are other ways to prove your courage, such as smuggling drugs out of Istanbul, or trying to score with the hottest chick in the room without any wingman or back-up, or bluffing your way past the velvet ropes at a hot nightclub, or even just not drinking, one day at a time. True adult courage is important to bear in mind as the alienating effect of technology quietly mutates us back into children via unsupervised lengths of time in complete privacy, allowing the illusion of a mommy bound to serve you instead of vice versa. If God had given us wings he'd expect us to fly, even demand it, so in the age of internet, why not go all the way and abandon your body? If God hadn't meant us to leave our bodies he wouldn't have given us the internet. Needless to say, that kind of alone time is deprived our common foot soldier or tank brigadier. You can get almost anything in the army except privacy. A soldier is booted into manhood and has to stay there until he likes it, and that could take years. By the time he figures it out, the war is over.

Patton's discipline is intended to create that condition of initiation, Stockholm syndrome in the service of country - there's still going to be the odd soldier who resists the comfort of berserker madness and thinks clinging to the crumbling shards of his childhood persona will preserve rather than destroy him. In the end all the military drilling and exhaustion is to weaken the ego's dogmatic hold, so you can actually be molded into a killing machine who can then run into the path of flaming bullets--against all self-preservational logic. But as long as one soldier can get away with pretending to be sick to get out of combat, the morale of the whole unit is in jeopardy. Hence a little bitch-slap, which he performs in a sense as performance for the other men. Watching this with my dad as a child I used to think Patton was being a bully for slapping the soldier. Later, as a hippie, I thought he was existentialist and square. Now I'm all into his heart of darkness. Patton must necessarily be excused from any consequences that may stem from disrespecting boundaries, for the best defense is a good offense and therefore disrespecting boundaries is the mark of a good general. Eisenhower also shows himself a good general too in the way he masterfully plays up the slapping event up to deflect Nazi attention from D-Day (he had Patton scoping locations in Turkey, tricking the Germans sure into thinking he would invade there, and that the slap incident was a flimsy smokescreen - double reverse psych!).  A slap from a general may be humiliating, but in a way it did more for the war than getting blown up by a stray shell from Rommel's Panzer corps.

A word should be paid in tribute to the blu-ray version of this film: Dazzling! Originally shot on 70mm the picture is deep, and that has made all the difference in the 1080 transfer, enabling a dazzling clarity that lets you look up the nose of a man in a tank 5,000 yards away. The many long range desert battles seem to be in 3-D. The horizon line of the desert (this movie is always very horizon line conscious) warps the sides of the frame (Todd AO fisheye Cinerama 360 lenses) into a sloped elongated triangle, so it's like looking into a sloping Victorian house attic with North African desert wallpaper. If ever there was a reason to get blu-ray, this or Polanski's REPULSION would be it for me. I tried looking at the GODFATHER blu-ray, but got freaked out that you could finally see Bonasara the Undertaker's yellowed teeth clattering in the shadows as he talked of "vengeance for my daughter!"

Scott's nose is amazing on blu-ray, too: we can see three layers of veins in.  But his aim sucks. When shooting at German dive bombers, you have to lead them, not shoot behind them! He should have shot straight over his head - you got to "lead" em (1)!

Consider the line from the hippest movie ever made, PERFORMANCE:  "The only performance that truly makes it is one that achieves madness." When George C. Scott looks out at the carnage along the River Elbe, and says of war, "I love it. God help me I do love it so," one's aware that this right here is a performance that "truly makes it."

I've seen this movie all through my life and my reaction to that line varies with age. As a child watching it with my dad on TV I thought it was pretentious. Later, it seemed existentially gutsy; still later, callous. Now I see it as a coping mechanism, the very nature of heroism is perhaps this coping mechanism, an alchemical transubstantiation that enables one to derive perverse, counter-intuitive satisfaction from horror, the "you must make friend of horror" aspect, a looking down under the pretty flowers and below the serpents under them, to the deep roots wherein one endures the unendurable through a cultivated detachment, the stripping away of illusion's bodice, to reveal the grinning skull and scythe below. The tripper and the warrior both must kiss this skull and call it love.

To survive this awful surrender the hipster has his rueful irony, the court its jester, the American G.I. his endless complaining and satiric reading of army sloganeering.  The Germans never got that sense of humor -- they considered it our weakness.  They didn't realize that irony can be a kind of casual loyalty that works better than attack dog allegiance because--and this turned out to be a crucial advantage--the GI could improvise and think on his feet while the German was trained only to follow direct orders. As long as we can gripe and crack wise about it we can endure anything, that was what made us the winners: freedom to gripe about being losers!

One of my favorite war stories is how, during the Battle of the Bulge, the US tanks' top machine guns froze solid and couldn't be fired at the closely advancing enemy. Here it is, Germans breathing down their necks, bullets all around; it's freezing out, guns jammed and what do the machine gunners do? Urinate on them for a quick defrost! See, a German soldier would never think to do that. One needs a certain level of free-flying insanity to win a war, and that's what Patton had, and inspired in his men. To paraphrase Cesar Milan again: Insanity + Discipline, then affection.

Perhaps in war there simply is no rational response other than hoorror and heartbreak, neither of which wins wars. Therefore an irrational response is required: surrender completely to the "I love it, I do love it so," like a mantra, a relishing of the insane response. Do not the true prophets teach even that? To love your enemy like a brother even as you blow him to pieces? The movie ends with Scott intoning Patton's description of the triumphant Roman processionals of loot and conquered slaves before him: "And behind him, stood a slave with a golden crown, holding it over the conqueror's head while whispering in his ear, 'all glory is fleeting.'" But the film holds an even more shattering truth: life fleets even faster and death is not the end. Ladies and gentlemen, as he was in ancient Rome so shall he be in this future life. General Patton will be back!

(1) from the pages of the DC comic Sgt. Rock (c. 1980) - "You got to lead 'em! Lead 'em" when shooting at passing Messerschmidts. My friend Al and I quoted that a lot.

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