All Hail the New Flesh Keychain: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), ESCAPE's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism as we watch a nuclear family implode as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.

As this dissolving father, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating --though for what she's too stressed to bother finding out.

Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children, the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) and how one is considered holy and the other vile, each a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than granting him any power or respect as 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.

This post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children. Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters meanwhile are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu. C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?

But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?

Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!

Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching). Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.

If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls show up he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do a bit to cement the equation of madness with Disney's subversive use of archetypal psychology, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes, make-believe, costumed freaks, and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease.

If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play. If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, waiting for that one week off in July, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after it opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.

I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they are unable to discover what in advance of seeing it. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as just the oldest child, the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son as the mom more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. You can try to be free while she glowers and nags, but soon even there the thrill will be gone, the bloom will be off the rose, and the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look, you're smiling!

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Cinq au sept (5-7) vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL, ON THE TOWN, RED DESERT

Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night it was presumed someone would be pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more you try to control something the more paranoid you get, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their misguided sexually repressed fear leads this warped idea that men change into monsters as soon as bedtime looms, as parodied in this hilarious 2008 SNL sketch:



If someone did sleep over in a post-code film, for example if there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, we can never go right to the next day or morning, the scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR you could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking, and later that night, and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving nonetheless, later that night, and leave room for reasonable doubt. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch.

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossip next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Taliban rule?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would do with no idea of what's involved. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But this baster Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and sex maniacs to think something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.

In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent directors and screenwriters (excuse the redundancy) use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience. Here are some worthy examples:

BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. As the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal, hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies sex.  And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they:" the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? Yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to control things, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression, a flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex he forces her to sign the statement against her husband. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly -- one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that black bar until it forces Malden into a corner.

LOLITA (1962)

A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s. (Wilder was an unrepentant fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank stud Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenadng gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull boyfriend, homework, etc.)

I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq au sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and meeting the wife for a 7:30 dinner. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:

Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)

Damn straight, age-consciousness. May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than an older man is in a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired).

ON THE TOWN (1949)

The war was over but girls were still being nice to guys in the service, and a certain sexual leeway was perhaps implied, especially between the working girls of New York (or San Francisco as with Dorothy Malone and that cute cabbie in THE BIG SLEEP - 1946). Once she gets rid of her roommate, taxi driver Betty Garrett all but devours Sinatra during the afternoon while Gene Kelly chases Miss Turnstiles and fellow sailor Jules Munshin hooks up with sassy sketch artist Ann Miller. We don't see much of that hook-up but it sure is great watching Garrett devour Sinatra: "I like your face," she tells him. "It's empty, know what I mean?" At least she keeps her goals reasonable -- going for Frank. "I knew you'd come back. They all come back." And since they all meet later, 8 PM I think, up in the Empire States Building, the unchaperoned nooner between Frank and Brunhilde (as Garrett is named) goes off without a hitch. The censor dozes right on through it. It was the war after all, or had been. Girls could hook up with sailors before marriage as long as they didn't stay the night and made it to their wartime riveting job on time the next morning. (see also High Society Matrons of Frank).

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old friend-of-an-old-girlfriend and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq au sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...

In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from (or would run away from them) if they ever actually found it. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're so single and so eager to settle? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq au sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.

RED DESERT (1964)

It's Antonioni's big art joke --the modernist response -- writ fast to the frisson disconnect of censorship - Vitti, her husband, her maybe lover, and a few assorted wives, secretaries, managers and swinging bosses all rendezvous for lunch at a brokedown shack by the docks. A conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of fertilized bird eggs leads to one of Vitti's few outbursts of ease-in-the-skin, "I want to make love," and this big bedroom space in the shack, painted red, is gradually full of bodies all being drawn to each other, dancing and slowly acting on their lusty interlocked blase cool. Have they gathered for an orgy? Or is just one almost happening? Is it a matter of Italian censorship that Antonioni can't be specific or is this the modern art genius? Yes, of course it's both, as in all these 5-7 movies. If we demand to know what did happen in the fade-out then we are like Karl Malden in Baby Doll, and we will lose our mind! Ah... Modernité!

Anyway we have the dissolve to darkness and when we fade in it's clear some great energy has been expended, or they ran out of wine or there's just one of those momentary lulls that occur sometimes among people having a really good time and almost having an orgy, but then backing off and feeling their good mood turn on them, pissed they chickened out. We're not meant to know, and by accepting never knowing we realize that's the point and that's why Vitti is crazy because even she doesn't know yet there is no knowing. She's the 'awake' character beginning to realize that all these other people know stuff she doesn't, that they have lives between frames, scenes, before and after, which she lacks. But is there really anything to lack? Again, that's the genius - no questions - we must embrace ambiguity as a pre-requisite to waking from the dream of consensual linear time. The result of our collective slumber to our true reality is what is poisoning the world. We miss the beauty of the trees so lose them. We 'don't know what it's got til it's gone,' but even when it's gone we don't know - unless we first get enough perspective, enough distance from our beds. So wake up, sleeper! The nap is over, the mistress is sated and watching the clock. The censor will be getting home soon; time to feign dignity and dishwater dull decency, until tomorrow, same time, same brief candle. The best part of it all is, you can wait.

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Mid-Life Crisis Superstar: Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

I'll be a guest on Film Geeks tribute to Kubrick podcast this Dec. 5: here's an excerpt from my 2009 Bright Lights Film Journal article:

"All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives"  Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA:
 
It's hard to believe now in our jaded world but in the late 1960s/1970s, even first-class artist filmmakers such as Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) and Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris) earned X ratings, making their movie posters reverberate in the deep recesses of my child mind.  Back then an X meant pulling no punches but also being artistic and thus these films still carry the potent whiff of sexuality as a genuine danger, whose loss Camille Paglia, and this essay, laments. The danger still exists, but we are disconnected from the accompanying desire, it is too late to feel things deeply, in the flesh. We check in with our bodies periodically, during a commercial break, or when it's time to pass the joystick. Only later, when the TV and ipods are all shut off, do the demons and traumas make themselves felt.

Like most of Kubrick's work, Lolita (1961) reflects this gradual rotation ever further into the simulacrum but from an earlier epoch, going from the refinements and closeted perversities of old Europe to the postmodern "no tell" motels of modern America (remember these were the days when police could arrest you for transporting a minor over state lines, or just having a woman in your hotel room). There are three levels of time passing in our filmic discussion: the span of time since Lolita was released, the span of time of the actual movie (2 ½ hours), and the time spanned in the movie's mise en scene (as in "3 years later"). Kubrick ingeniously unites all three. As the film progresses, it moves from shrill bedroom farce to tense Freudian scenes of insane jealousy and the film itself becomes full of deep, sad shadows. This progression into madness is similar actually to another of Mason's roles, that of the cortisone-maniac dad in Bigger Than Life. The monstrousness of his actions becomes apparent only later, when he's struggling to keep his mask on in the face of all the subterfuge --the self-fulfilling prophecy of jealousy. Simultaneously, we move as a world from a genuine sexual revolution through to the launch of the AIDS miasma and into a simulacrum fog. Sex now involves so many layers of protection we're better off just imagining it --in your head you always ride bareback, so to speak.

In the 1970s we wished for the some weird new form of cassette, where we could compile our favorite movies around us as a fort, to not be enslaved to the TV Guide (I sometimes arose at dawn just to see some bizarre piece of crap like Zombies on Broadway). In the 2010s we are stuck, like James Woods in Videodrome, with our head halfway into the cathode ray mouth; our Satanic wish has become fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams, in excess to the point of nightmare. Now that the entire world has access to all the movies ever made, almost, being surrounded by favorite movies carries no currency. As Baudrillard put it in The Conspiracy of Art,: "It is useless to be dispassionate in a dispassionate world. Being carefree in a divested world has no meaning. That is how we became orphans."

We can see the bait-and-switch of the simulacrum in the commercials shown before movies in theaters now. I remember seeing two commercials back to back after not having seen any for a while (I gave up cable for a few years) and was flipped out of my gourd. The first ad was one of those anti-drug messages, aimed at teens: "Coke Kills." The next is a Coke (as in Coca-Cola) commercial, where a sad little boy takes a sip from his glistening black bottle and flowers and rainbows shoot out of his head: "Coke is life." These are cinema's options — the approved drink is named Coke (which originally had cocaine in it) but is pitched at having the exact effect of the one drug it does not have, the forbidden drug from which it gets half its name --"the real real thing." This is a very devious switcheroo, regardless of whether it's for our own good. My shrink told me the other day that one of the strands of drugs I was on was scheduled by the FDA on the level of Valium, etc. And why? Because the rats liked it. They kept pressing the lever. No other noticeable problems to long-term use but the rats liked it. They just don't want us rats to have a good time,  or is it that, like our concerned parents, they want us to stop watching old movies and go outside and get some fresh air?

I'm all for keeping irresponsible people away from drugs, but the switcheroo presented by these two commercials is a Pavlov equivalent of forcing the rat's hand on the lever while giving him nothing in return. If you're feeling high off drugs, why tell your doctor? Now he has to do something about it, the twin serpents on his profession's fraternal emblem obligate him to halt your ecstasy. The doctors hold the keys to the kingdom, dangling the precious pills above our heads like we're doggies. If we pant and beg, no treat; we have to seem utterly disinterested. Thus displays of enjoyment are rendered dangerous unless completely faked.

This cycle of bait and switch is the feature selling point of Lolita as it revolves gradually from the bourgeois end game hungover morning after (death) to bucolic innocence, to gradual dissolution and back again. Lo's glasses and pregnant belly (at the end of the film) prove a less shrill but nonetheless archetypal blonde suburban mom a la her mother, whom Humbert visited with equal muted horror at the beginning of the film. A similar revolution on the meta level mirrors this: as the film grows less and less "contemporary," it grows less "obscene." Yesterday's pornography is today's literary canon, though a return to it being burned in the street in some Handmaid's Tale-style future seems still distantly possible. Even so, Lolita is an odd-film-out in the Kubrick oeuvre, particularly in that it's one of his few films that attempt to deal with sex, his Achilles heel. Always squeamish about consensual sex, for Kubrick impotence becomes, by default, his sinthom magnifique. (Sterling Hayden's mad general in Dr. Strangelove: "I don't deny myself the company of women, Mandrake. I just deny them my essence.")

To see how Kubrick's 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie, we have to look way back before that, to the late 1950s: repressive Cold War paranoia was giving way to the emerging strands of freethinking that would gradually weave into the rope of countercultural "free love." Sex, which had been safely encrypted in the pre-suburban "Our Town" style of living before WW II, came roaring up from the land of the repressed in cinema via films such as 1954's Baby Doll. The Kinsey Report had made "the sex life of suburbia" into a hot topic, as did the craze for Freud and psychoanalysis. Why not swap wives when we're all comfortably middle class and hip to the Oedipus complex, and drunk? Kinsey made it seem like everyone else was doing it, and one wouldn't want to be left out. Scandalous intellectuals-only satire, however, would only do for so long. Without the same amount of repression to work your lusting Wildean wit against, Lolita ceases to be subversive. Viewing the film in the 1990s, it was no longer risqué but a shrill bedroom farce in the style of Fox's early 90s sitcom, Married with Children (which also featured a hot, nubile daughter perched scandalously amidst a family of raving sex maniacs). What was once scandalous had become cartoonish.

Lolita sits at the tape mark on a Moebius strip of time dealing with our national obsession for nymphets: A huge backlash against the loosey-goosey sexuality of children began in the early 1980s, with day-care molestation scandals and TV's America's Most Wanted. We went from letting kids run wild in the streets if they were old enough to walk ('70s), to freaking out if they're out of our sight for a second ('80s), to accompanying them to school and sitting through their classes with them, arranging play dates as if working for the secret service ('90s-forever). Yet nowadays you walk down the streets of middle America and you see the 13- to 16-year-old Hannah Montana nymphets glorified in short shorts they never would have been able to wear outside the house even in the '70s, and a salon tan, and bottle-blond hair, Britneyed to the nines, wobbling around the mall on their high heels in the company of their moms, who are doughy enough to make Shelley Winters look like Nico and don't seem to even notice. Women teachers sleeping with young male students, meanwhile, has become top news and fodder, and multiplexes pack in single working women on Friday nights to see Notes on a Scandal, Sex and the City, Elizabeth, The Reader. Koo Koo ka Choo, Mrs. Robinson! And let's not forget the dour, craftsmanship-suffocated Lolita remake by Adrian Lyne! As with everything they touch, the bourgeoisie keep the sex and scuttle the myth, and first demonize, then overvalue, that which was better off without their meddling.

What's most altered our perception of Lolita's "sexuality" is the tumbling down of the enforced moral code, which has eliminated altogether the "did they or didn't they" question. As a code-breaker, Lolita really has a lot in common with Baby Doll, such as the way Quilty and Lolita exploit Humbert's insane jealousy, just as in Baby Doll, Carroll Baker (below) and Eli Wallach deliberately provoke and tease the dirty-minded hick played by Karl Malden. Each self-diagnosed cuckold wants to "know for sure" what the code can never explicitly say. The code itself is then the meta-textual source of anxiety, a stand-in for sex itself and thus the films' code-enforced sexual ambiguity serves as a "self-fulfilling prophecy," driving the hicks mad. We can imagine one lone dude in the theater who still thinks there's a way to prove for sure what Lolita and Humbert did or didn't do that morning in the hotel room with the cot, or Eli and Baker in the room with the crib in Baby Doll. That one lone dude in the theater is the censor.

One of the best ways to use the code to frustrate our prurient censors is simply changing the time of day when sex occurs: It's implicit in code-sanctioned romance that the sex happens in the fade-out between a kiss at night and breakfast the following day — with no distinct demarcation of sleeping on a couch or in the other room. The actual sex is absent, and the length of the time elapsed in the fade-out can range from a few minutes to decades. Only when the filmmakers deliberately toy with these symbolic markers for the express purpose of beguilement do genuine subversion and satire finally occur.  

Lolita and Baby Doll are movies that explore the frustrations created by the code on our desire to know what happened in between the kiss and the next day, the Oedipal detective mystery of childhood consuming us as if it had never been dormant. Even if we've had actual sex since then, it's been no more than a phony head getting sliced off by a castrating sheet of glass compared to the wild lurid promise of our imaginations. (read full article here)

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