CinemArchetype #6: The Intimidating Nymph

We've all heard the words that bags both dirt and douche have for sexually active women: skank, slut, and ho. You would think a girl who is generous with her sexuality would be respected and revered amongst such people, who presumably want to get laid one day. But any club that might want their membership is not only deigned but derogated. Phrases like 'suck my dick' and 'cocksucker' are instead the height of insult rather than gentle requests, reflecting deeply repressed sexophobic anxiety. In any sexually sane society they would be positives; "may your parts be fairly and gently sucked" could be a nice way of ending a letter to a friend, for example.  After all, most of all of us love oral sex... so why, forgive the expression, badmouth it?

The Nympho Ward -Shock Corridor

With the help of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, this strange dichotomy becomes clear: If the female one desires is passive and unsure, if she needs to be convinced and coaxed, then the sex is a matter of conquering and 'penetrating.' If the woman is aggressive and eager then the sex is a matter of being devoured, of disappearing. The metaphor might be the rocket that hopes to land on Venus, disembark and plant a nice US flag, but instead the ship lands inside a giant Venus flytrap tongue and is swallowed up. This of course goes back to our anxiety that our mom's penis is missing (she has nothing where we have something, therefore they can fall-off, therefore ours will). And our penis does go missing, out of side with every deep... deep... whatever your pleasure.

In the writing of Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan via Lacan, we can think of this in terms of the objet petit a, wherein sexual gratification with some ultimate hottie is the ultimate status symbol, which will in effect restore us to our status as mom's golden phallic replacement; but this enhanced completion is dependent on the eyes of the big other; therefore we must never 'get' that final puzzle piece because our need for the other's desire constructs our whole identity. Winning the hottie is only one part of it, the other part is the boasting to the friends; this is where the real objet petit a dwells, finding what the Other wants and getting it for ourselves, essentially becoming then what is wanted; but after boasting the man is still disappointed: his friends don't really care beyond a few words of awe, they're too busy staring at the TV; the emptiness is still there. And now what? Ah but with Lacan we can appreciate that it is exactly this moment of emptiness and 'now what' that is the whole point of existence. In between chasing illusions he can see the world as it really is, but yeeesh, it's an empty mess!

Thus female desire is terrifying because it inflicts an external desire onto us rather than vice versa,  and we know about disillusion from our own sexual pursuits; someone wants to lay us and then blame us for leaving them still empty at the core, just as we did to our last conquest. However, since it's a man's world, the female orgasm is considered more traumatic and X-rated than if she's merely disemboweled, which is why the ratings board is so screwed up (Check out This Film is Not Yet Rated), regularly giving NC-17s to any film where a girl is seen having an orgasm but gang rape and butchery may only garner an R. This shit's been making me super mad ever since Porky's introduced the misogynistic sex comedy deluge in the early 1980s, turning me instantly into a 13 year-old proto-feminist.

But hey, I'm no hero; I too know the terror of a desiring female: I had this gorgeous blue-eyed girlfriend in college and some nights while I was tripping intensely she'd come to me with her blue eyes lit up in longing, her loveliness vibrating, the combination of the purple flannel shirt she liked to wear and her pale white skin and cold as heaven blue eyes drawing me to her, and I'd feel uncontrollable terror and revulsion, like her beauty and longing was some monstrous challenge I was in no shape to meet, being as usual super drunk and out of my skull on acid and having just watched Caligula for what seemed like 30 agonizing blood-soaked years in a single night after a nightmarish Halloween gig at a local frat house. At least they'd paid! I counted my share, $100 generally with trembly hands, the pyramids on the singles winking, Washington's face dissolving in a series of dirty green thin lines.

The Seduction

A great example of how male desire hinges on female evasiveness is found in a largely forgotten 1982 Morgan Fairchild vehicle called The Seduction. In it Fairchild is being stalked by a sleazy creep and by the end she has to do battle with him alone in her swanky mansion. How will she fend him off? They run around for awhile, and then, all out of options, fed up with a whole movie worth of his obsessive crap, she suddenly stops fighting and comes onto him, demands he take his pants off, let's get this over with, Stud, see what you're packin' --so she starts pursuing him around the room, acting all needy, etc. It freaks him out and suddenly he can't get away fast enough, his whole raison d'etre flies out the window and so does he.

I had a girl do this to me back at SU in 1987. She'd slept with me for one night the year before, and then again a year later and the morning after we got drunk at Sutter's together and she sat in my lap and prattled and I instantly remembered The Seduction scene. I no longer wanted to go out with her now that she was hanging all over me, whereas before her prior aloofness made me pine like a Twilight character.

We can see this switch in the public's eventual rejection of silent era siren Clara Bow, for example. In the 1920s Bow was a huge success; her sexuality was legend, a matter of national pride. But when the Great Depression and sound came along the public rejected her wild sexuality and renounced her. Indirectly, I'm sure they blamed her promiscuity for the economic collapse; they rejected not just her but their own past obsession, they had made--en masse--the Seduction switch. I remember a similar moment right around 1980, when the 1970s free love vibe succumbed to AIDS awareness, slasher movies, the death of John Lennon, and various daycare sex scandals coalesced into a backlash against the free love of the late 1960s-70s. As a child in the 1970s I'd basked in semi-erotic attention from cute babysitters and my dad's secretaries at late at night at drunken bridge games. Nowadays all those girls would be jailed as pedophiles as would our teachers in elementary school for spanking us on our birthdays, one spank for every year, while the other kids cheered. laughed, and counted along. So I resent that the 1980s stole my girls, and every time some dirt bag says words like 'slut' or 'skank' I feel the urge to go back in time and sabotage the filming of Porky's. Instead, I guess all I can do is round up some examples of super nymphs:

1. Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind (1956)

In their overview for Dorothy Malone, TCM notes she "made her first impact as a nymphomaniac entertaining Humphrey Bogart one thundery afternoon in 'The Big Sleep' (1946)." Nymphomaniac is a pretty strong word since we don't really know what goes on between them in the fade-out between their first drink and her spotting Geiger leaving the shop. Did someone at TCM get this role confused with her Oscar-winning turn in Written on the Wind? Or is it just that if a girl invites a man for a quick tryst in a 1946 detective movie she's a nymphomaniac? I think the real nympho in the Big Sleep is Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood, but I mention the nympho reference as an indication of the casual offensiveness that goes unchecked in our American social codes vis-a-vis girls who are highly sexualized, and I assure you it's not that bad in countries like France, Argentina, and the UK. We're a nation of easily shocked sexophobic prudes!

Malone's character in Written on the Wind is a stellar example of the intimidating sexual woman. If Rock Hudson had a ball in his sac he'd throw the lady a sympathy f--k and then she could move on with her life, but instead he gets all stoic and takes her down by the river for a picnic to renew their vows of eternal besties-hood, leaving her stuck in a town where nothing ever happens, and the best she can do is get drunk and have flings with the poor locals (and a sorry married lot they are, too). At least in the end she's assumed control of the company and there's an indication her sexual heat can find sublimation in big oily business, and then she can lure handsome contractors home like she's Ruth Chatterton in Female (1933)

2. Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan (2007)

There is no condemnation or prudish judgment of Ricci's character in Moan and that's one of the reasons it's so moving and awesome. Meanwhile she is a nymphomaniac in the DSM-IV-style definition yet she's allowed to be still hot, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Never a caricature or an object, not even of pity --she's a fucking person. As my fellow pro-Moan preacher Kim Morgan notes when discussing the initial chaining of the Ricci's wanton to the radiator:

"...here's the movie's daring twist--she eventually wants to listen. But not because Lazarus is a strict prude, preaching the lord and imposing scripture, he's fractured himself, a depressed musician, still stung by his young wife who just left him for his younger brother, he understands Rae's problems. He's also wise to the wanton, something he can truly express through his music, especially when Rae is nearby. While he encourages her to go straight, she inspires him to let loose, culminating in a gloriously sweaty juke joint jaunt. Singing a wonderfully profane "Stagger Lee"/"Stacker Lee"/" (to a gorgeously gyrating Rae) Lazarus shows that sin, goodness and redemption aren't so (and this is perfectly suitable here) black and white." (more)

 

3. Jane Fonda in Klute (1971)
 One of the more disturbing cliche's in our modern lexicon is 'the dead hooker.' Even in comedies like 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, waking up with a the dead hooker in your hotel room is a handy signifier of black-out decadence, right up there with the face tattoo, and the exotic animal in the bathroom. Fonda as Bree in Klute gives you an idea why this threat is so deadly real and nothing to snicker about. Gorgeous and self-possessed is our Bree, but languishing in the back of your mind while gazing at her awesome slinky body is something of the concern Klute (Donald Sutherland) seems to fee. Also, despite whatever amount of sexy ooh yeah, fantastic's she throws your way, there's a feeling you are not going to connect with this chick at all. No matter what kinky shit you come up with or how deep you pour out your heart, she's not going to break character. The man who turns out to be the killer is even complicit with our need to connect to her, in that he dared to feel that in Bree, at last (as we hear on his tape recording of their first encounter) he'd found a woman who can handle his kinky needs, who accepted his violence. That she didn't provokes the repressive's dire need for erasing the evidence. In a way, as Todd McGowan might say, the beating up is his one last ditch attempt to satisfy her... to actually connect with her and deliver the amount of sensation she needs to get off.  Sleeping with Bree is like sleeping with an echo, a ghost, like a waitress you think is super into you as she waits on you at breakfast but then, as the glint of hope fades from your eyes, you realize she's just angling for a tip; she doesn't even really see you. If you kill her, maybe she'll finally notice you.

4. Asia Argento in Scarlet Diva (2000)

"Her bathroom masturbation leads to a flashback where she is five or six and spying through a keyhole on her brother Allosca making out with his girlfriend. The image of her eye in the keyhole serves as a gateway for all that is to follow: the young girl as Peeping Tom, her directorial eye looking in on whatever "dirty things" strike her fancy, daring to seize the reins of spectatorship back from the “male gaze.”  Anna as voyeur is turned on by her own lurid life, and as Anna/Asia she is turned on by making the viewer uncomfortable instead of turned on in turn. But again, if a man films what a man desires and it shocks the audience, he's brave and cutting edge, if a woman does the same she's considered self indulgent and dirty (unless she's Catherine Breillat, i.e. French and not a sex symbol acting in her own films).

"This double standard carries its own erotic charge, which Anna is addicted to. In the bath she shares with Alloscia she mentions to him she might be an actress when she grows up. Alloscia dismisses actresses as "like mom" and "whores." This prompts little Anna to confess she "keeps her panties on" (when she masturbates) which shocks  Alloscia and prompts him to angrily dunk her head under water. Thus we see from this early age how Anna is addicted to both doing "dirty things" and, in true Catholic style, "confessing" to an authority (male) figure in order to then masochistically receive his violent reaction. This form of erotically-charged penance and provocation is really the backbone of the whole film: First Asia invites us to identify with her character, and then she springs a shock on us so fast we don't have time to form a moderate response. She's like a police detective, tricking us into slips of the "mask" of innocence, or in this case, our delusions of our own feminist liberal tolerance. Anna may get her head dunked, but all of her brother's fatherly scolding cannot change the fact that she made him lose control. This is where she takes her victories, such as they are, by proving the fallibility of those she unconsciously enslaves herself to."(Her Body, Her Ashtray - Acidemic #1 -2003)

5. Mae West
"... Mae is genuinely subversive, which is why the Catholic Legion of Decency was so quick to have her censored... It's nothing in her double entendres so much as the copious admiration and financial gain she shows herself getting, onscreen, for her unmarried sexual congress. If Mae's characters had died alone and unloved, having sacrificed all for her daughter, raised in a convent, to marry a prince, etc., she would have been fine with the censors. But daring to indulge in the forbidden fruits and end the film all the richer and with Cary Grant on your arm and no harm done? It was just too dangerous to a rigid class and sex system like the Catholic censorial 1930s.

Those moralists wanted sex to be served in little teacups to a temperate nation. Mae served it by spreading tea leaves on the floor and flooding the building with hot water. It was like showing the corruptible females of the world a magic faucet with which they could drown their men's precious capitalist system with a few flicks of their diamond-bespangled wrists.

What was more than a mere threat to the Christian status quo, though, was Mae's willingness to peek behind the magic curtain where the big deals are made, and to point out that regardless of how much they bellow and bluster, they're all just men underneath the suits and uniforms. The whole social ladder seemed to shake and buckle from the force of Mae's tsunami hips.(Desperation and Divinity- Bright Lights Film Journal #64, 2009)

6. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein- A Dangerous Method (2011)

In a way I see the Jung-Spielren relationship as the analytical extension, with more geniune sex in it, for educational purposes only, of the one between Jackson and Ricci in Black Snake Moan. You can say Jung violates ethical codes by sleeping with his patient but where I come from there's a saying: the two worst things a man can do are intrude on someone's privacy, and refuse the advances of a pretty girl. Oh wait, that's from Edie Sedgwick: Ciao! Manhattan. Well, anyway, I heard it before... and I subscribe to it. Truth is: men who are married and yet tempted by the advances of a hot young homewrecker are really in a no-win situation. If you spurn the girl she might create more trouble than if you just get it over with. Perhaps you can spook her off by being suddenly needy and really bad in bed, but if you're a young Carl Jung and the hot young thing is seminal nymphomaniacal masochist patient Sabina Spielrein you're bound to get a lot farther in treatment if you agree to a little rough trade spanking and sexual consummation. After all, as T.S. Eliot said, "the awful daring of a moment's surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / for this and this alone have we existed." Man, I use that quote an awful lot, don't i? It rationalizes just about everything. I mean wouldn't you risk your career and stable family for Keira Knightley? If you said no then man you art a pussy; if you said yes then man you art eines richtiges schweinhund!

7. Elizabeth Taylor - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8, The Sandpiper, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Suddenly Last Summer, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
It's surely no accident that Liz Taylor frequently played women whose voracious sexual energy cowed the men around her, indirectly turning them all gay: there's Brando's closeted cavalry commander in Golden Eye; closeted Paul Newman in Cat, and gay cousin Sebastian, to name just a few. Sex with Taylor seems very daunting. She's just too smart, too beautiful, and could probably drive you to suicide if you failed to perform like a stud instead of a houseboy.

She was so tough you'd best not call her a tramp, only she can do that, as when she dubs herself "the slut of all time!" in Butterfield 8. In that movie, alas, she has to reform and hate herself at the end, but most of the time Taylor's characters got home all right, dignity intact no matter what, even if they end up stuck with a pompous houseboy too proud to fill the ice bucket while Georgie Boy staggers down the driveway. Taylor's sexual heat is so 'pure' it's pre-Christian, moving her into the same sphere as Olympian deities like Aphrodite and Athena (though she wasn't a convincing Cleopatra). All her targeted men can do to try and match her was get roaring drunk for courage, and like as not pass out while thinking of poor... poor Skippuh.

8. Clara Bow

"After a handful of years as the most desirable woman in America, Bow became its most abused punching bag. Of course, that’s how stardom works — contingent, as it is, upon our ever-shifting affections. But that doesn’t mean that the story of Bow isn’t a tragic one, or that we should forget what was done to a woman whose bliss was so clearly written all over her body." - Anne Helen Peterson

9. Sue Lyon - Night of the Iguana (1964)

Richard Burton does his best to avoid the advances of hot-to-trot, under-age Charlotte (Sue Lyon) in Tennesee William's Night of the Iguana, but it's only because he's been burned once too often, via the opening of the film when he's hissed at in church for bedding down with one of the younger female parishioners.  He later defines statutory rape as "when a man is seduced by a woman under twenty." Charlotte eventually starts throwing tantrums, dancing with Maxine's beach boys, and finally hooking up with the bus tour's uber-bland second wheel, Hank, all because Burton wouldn't put out, but at least there's older women waiting their turn. In the end, I think he should maybe have gone for it. I mean just look at her in those white shorts. Jeeeezus Christ.  On the other hand, what's the best you can hope for? Humbertville? Forget it. Either way, you already lost it all. What was that T.S. Eliot quote again? Oh never mind.  (see also:  My Night of the Iguana)

10. Sharon Stone - Basic Instinct (1992)

 The famous leg crossing scene is a superb example of the threatening power the wanton female has over not only men but patriarchal authority as a whole. The police have deliberately arranged the cross examination in their favor, with three men facing one woman, along with rows of men behind them and behind the two way mirror, but one flash of her crotch and they are all reduced to gibbering baboons. Case in point, and career instantly made.

11. Ann Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson - The Graduate (1967)

I know this film is beloved as a classic but I've always been irked by its treatment of Mrs. Robinson. After all she's just a lonely wife trying to seduce her friend's son, cougar-style. The film doesn't blame Benjamin for eventually succumbing, but is sure blames her. In a way the film itself acts as a destructive hypocrite, first egging Ben on into her bed then judging her for daring to be outraged when Ben also starts dating her daughter, considering him unworthy for a son-in-law since she's shagging him. It's certainly a hypocritical response, yet is it any different from the film's own attitude towards her, or society's attitude towards female libertines in general? If Ben was a real man he'd keep his Robinson thing going, maybe solicit her for rich presents, expensive watches, and would have been nicer to Ross on their first date so she wouldn't have liked him so much, and then found someone from a different family to date on the side. Instead we're supposed to boo Mrs. Robinson for daring to go cougar before the term was invented while Ben is innocent of all wrongdoing because he made a few lame attempts at stalling her? Golly, you are sure groundbreaking, 'Graduate.'

12. The Vixens, Pussycats, and Dolls of Russ Meyer
Part of the ample charm of Russ Meyer's oeuvre is his fondness for big-busted, cartoonish, very very horny and strong-willed female characters. Why they've endured so well and made Meyer in his way regarded as a kind of queasy-quasi feminist is that his amazonian nymphomaniac heroines aren't judged or derided for their appetites, rather it's the menfolk around them who are judged lacking. They are terrified of these women, and who wouldn't be without the safety of the screen to protect them? Sometimes a boy just likes to hold hands and take you to the movies first, to just make out or round second base before the third date deed-gets-done deadline. The girls in films like: Supervixens; Faster Pussycat; Mudhoney; Beneath the Valley of Dolls; Harry, Cherry, and Raquel; and Up!, don't play that punter tosh. They see you pumping gas, they look you up and down, lick their lips and make a grab for your zipper straight up. If you're a guy and a girl's ever come onto you like that then you know the score, it's something you always dreamed of and now it's happening 'too fast' for your drives to kick in... you instinctively try to run away, call you sponsor, make any excuse you can.

Erica Gavin - Vixen

  Maybe that's why I hated all these coke whore friends of my roommate, all making out all over the floor when I used to get up at four AM to use the bathroom, still shaky in my early weeks of sobriety. They reminded me all a woman had to do is turn around and beckon instead of running away and I was fresh out of moves. And of course they can tease, flash come-on smiles, grab your junk over your jeans, and then push you away when you bust a move, shouting loud enough for your mom to hear, "oh my god is that what you thought I was trying to do? I was just being friendly! Good God!" I know a girl who tells me she used do that kind of thing just for fun! Just to torture us!

Bottom line: every man is a sex machine when there's no chance of having sex. Once it's inescapable it becomes a matter of getting it up, keeping it up, and delivering the goods. Maybe afterwards you can bask but until then you are on trial and your whole definition of your own prowess hangs in the shifting urges of a drugged-up wanton! You should man up and go for it but if you feel dirty and guilty later, don't blame the her! Any dog can be brave on the leash, barking and straining, but don't snap at a bitch if she wants to chew it off. She's just free, and you're not. So suck it, Benjamin!

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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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The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER (1975, Andrzej ZulawskI)

The French love their neuromantic triangles, what's up with that? Well, I dated a French lady and I can tell you; they love what they call a cinq à sept (like Cleo, it means from 5-7): a pre-set tryst with one's lover on the way between work and home for dinner. Participating in this convenient and marvelous alternative to a conventional relationship can ruin you for all other kinds, specifically the "I can't understand why you don't like my friends" American variety. The 5-7 is very, very French and in films we have everything from Jean Renoir's La regle du jeu (1939) to Le Mepris (1968) up through to Last Tango in Paris (1970) to reference. Andrzej Zulawksi's third feature, the 1975 romantic tragedy, L'important c'est d'aimer ("The Important thing is to Love")  carries the torch of perversity with knowing references to all three of those aforementioned films, right up to having Georges Delerue do a kind of sequel to his unforgettable orchestral Le Mepris score. That's to say nothing of the film's acknowledged intertextuality, i.e. the ill-fated production of Richard III that centers the action, and off-the-cuff references to Miriam Hopkins (see: 'la reine de Menage a Trois').

In a career-capping self-reflexive performance along the lines of Norma Desmond's in Sunset Boulevard (1950), or Sylvia Miles in Heat (1972), French actress Romy Schneider plays Nadine, a B-list French actress, hanging on by her nails in softcore (?) sex films. She can still look stunning in the right make-up and lighting, but Zulawski keeps her aging face ravaged by strange, pale, orange lighting; we can see the lines of anguish in the corners of her eyes, the world-weary drag of gravity and unfeeling exploitation film crews on her cheeks. Nadine's also burdened by the knowledge that she'd still be neck-deep in a world of prostitution and smack if not for the "Zorro-like" rescue of her otherwise ineffectual husband, Jacques, an autograph collecting cinephile played with intentionally irritating impishness-cum-starry-eyed self-loathing by sometimes-chanson singer Jacques Dutronc.

Joe Gillis en verso: Jacque's rescues Nadine from the garage sale of aging female fallen idols, cleans her off, and stores her in amidst all his stacks of LPS, stills, and film books. The walls around this collection, his bright studio apartment are garish with Hollywood movie posters; it's the kind of pad that DVD collectors may recognize as approximate to their own but in Zulawski's vision it carries a stale, empty, even claustrophobic ennui; it's the den of a consumer, not an artist, not a creator. Reflected within the sad disconnect on Schneider's face and her husband's oblivious oppression, the posters become like prison walls.

We see all this through the depth-focused eyes of handsome, ever-so-tortured photographer Servais (Fabio Testi), who falls for Nadine after he sneaks into her Eurosleaze film shoot on his way to shoot gay porn for his deceptively dapper old pornographer uncle, Mazelli (Claude Dauphin).

But Mazelli is the corrupt one, not the noble Servais, who's just paying off dad's gambling debts.  Servais and Nadine fall in love when they read the pain and emptiness in each others' eyes, bonded by their moral disgust and sense of self-degradation. They are two prudes in a world of porn, so they spend most of the film circling each other, bound by fidelity to their spouses -- a fidelity that is so un-French it needs special reasons to exist (Servias stole his current wife from another man who's since been drinking himself to death, etc., so maybe Servais has a habit of his own). Meanwhile Delerue throbs on the soundtrack like Contempt's kinkier younger brother, egging them on to the inevitable hook up.

Let us take a moment to remember that Paris (and Rome, as per The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone) has always been more cultured in the ways of non-marital financially-rewarding love than America, and the figure of a houseboy/stud who depends on his looks and weak scruples for drug money needn't carry the same repellent currency it has in the States, where pretty rentboys (unless they're Joe Dellassandro) are expected to suffer more operatically even than Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8. William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, Gene Kelly in An American in Paris, and George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name but three examples, all feel the need to censor their enjoyment of their special situation. They take the cash of their rich sponsors and no doubt provide certain services but the censors don't let us know what those services specifically are, and either way they aren't allowed to enjoy their positions and keep our sympathy. They have to squirm like every dollar hurts their pocket. Mon dieu! Les hypocrites!

Zulawski seems to be sending up this kind of self-loathing and torment with D'AMIER, albeit in a post-Sirkian way ala Almodovar or Fassbinder. There are also echoes of Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck in Servais, both are pretty, relatively unspoiled punks clinging to the delusion that they can call the shots without cash to back them up. Adrift in a midnight world of sordid desire, in love with the sadness he catches in the newer porn performer's faces, Servais would like to forget that he borrowed big bucks from Mazelli to co-finance a a performance of Richard III just so that Nadine can play Lady Anne. Ever the noble, he insists the producers not let her know he put up the money. YAWN-ement! But luckily for us, that's where Klaus Kinski enters, and cuts through la merde del martyr like a knife through water.

As with the other Zulawski films that have recently appeared in beautiful editions from Mondo Vision, L'important c'est d'aimer's style is form-fitted to the subtexts: voyeurism, cinema, the insanity that true art both requires and instills, and the spiritual purity of over-acting to a surreal degree. The camera moves in an around actors, leering over their shoulders like a pesky reporter. Often, the actors seem to be trying to get away from the camera, just to relax. They don't really acknowledge the camera directly, but they feel it watching, like a starlet on set might ignore a leering gaffer taping down the set around her. Who knows if this is what's happening? Is Zulawski deliberately annoying his actors to the point they're always about to storm out of the room? He'd still chase them

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. And that is why his image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of the image we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the girtty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who tape it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (the basic tenet of structuralism!) Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy on for the night!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming (but angrily not in pain) scarecrow at the crossroads between genius, insanity, art, exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair aesthete, half wild orangutan. Somehow when he does these low-rent flicks his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage. The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized --they wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in softcore porn; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare.

The key Richard III meta-scene is in act 1, scene 2, where Richard woos Lady Anne as she mourns by Edward's coffin. Romy's not putting it over too well, so the director asks her husband Jacuqes to lie in the coffin, hoping Nadine will perhaps get some extra emotional punch for her performance. Tellingly, Jacques comments during the five-minute break: "I thought I did pretty well, no?" And of course, he will do even better--and help Nadine even more--very soon: his cheerful disregard for the druggy emotional nakedness of this kind of theater will signal his own death; he'll make his stage coffin a permanent home. His flippancy here is a punch-in-the-gut reminder to us viewers that we are standing on the sideline, watching other people act or sing and quietly judging them. We like to think we're secret kings who could do this all super well if we bothered to try. We hate to be reminded that we're just watchers in this world, already dead, looking up from our coffins at the faces weeping down on us. Cue Delerue!

It's that sense of sacrifice and deat that makes up a woman's picture in the classic pre-code Hollywood version of the term: fantasias of women running up and down the pole of financial success via a series of men they've manipulated and ruined, and all the while maybe only really ever loved truly one... he who was no good and had no money, and then they fall from grace and sleep with everyone in sight, except the man they truly love, he alone must stay a perfect memory, untouched by their corrosive caresses.

Thus, the ideal lover is a dead lover, one whom no amount of licentious rubbing can denature. You can pine for him and think he was "the one" and hopefully, for your sake, he's not going to come back from California in two years with gray hairs and gambling debts wanting a "mommy" to make it right.

Where Zulawski takes a self-reflexive step back from all this is with Jacques' possessive insecurity taking on a horrifically babyish form: he's being forced to admit he never learned to fight back or to "care" enough (about the living -- photos and films are a different story). It's very difficult to know what to do, how to be graceful, when one is being cuckolded, or cuckolding, or breaking up a home. It's happened to me on all three sides at various times. I've learned to play all the parts, and that's what Jacques doesn't quite realize --it's an act. Resorting to violence is pointless for any sensible or educated man so all he can do is make snarky comments, bitter veiled threats, and--as I used to do -- spill wine accidentally on the guy's stupid hippie sandals.

One thing you can do is just dig that it's about post-modern Baudrillard simulacrum deconstruction -- i.e. romance inside a mirror, but that doesn't make it any less painful. In the end, Jacques offers a quietly unflattering portrait of a fan who hides behind images and record albums as if a mother's skirt, afraid to look life in the eye. Servais, on the other hand, is a photographer and Nadine a model; they actually create the images that Jacques worships. They feel validated by the act of leaving their mark for better or worse on eternity, superior to the consumers of the images they make, even if their destiny hangs by such abstract threads as an early morning edition theater review in the local paper. The critics! baisez tous les critiques stupides!

Meta-riches are to be found in this film's DVD packaging, which invites you to luxuriate in fine design and cultivate your inner collecteur as you watch a film that savages the collecteur instinct. Consider the image above, wherein Jacques waxes ecstatic over an old photo of Miriam Hopkins while his movie star wife languishes stoically next to him leaving her left flank exposed to the sympathetic gaze of Servais on the right. Her hair pulled back to resemble Hopkins' in the photo, Nadine is radiating a benevolent calm which Jacques entirely misses, instead talking aloud as if to a rapt audience, announcing of the photo: "This one is going in the safe," indicating his preferred treatment (isolation) for all his pretty prizes. Poor Jacques! But not poor Erich, I have my memories and a very cool DVD for the top row of my bookshelf--right next to Godard, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Romero, Argento y Fulci? N'cest pas? Do you feel the self-loathing? I am Jacques! Ach, wohin ist Klaus Kinski!!! Klaus, kommen Sie hier, bitte! Wir verrotten in der Hölle ohne Ihre Verrücktheit!  

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