Caretaker Sparkle and the Selfie Side: ROOM 237

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

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

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

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

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

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

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

"Pull it Togetherless"  (note phallus fingers)

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

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

"We're going to make a new rule" 

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

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

"Maisie Squared" 

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

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

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

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

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

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

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

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

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALSO ON ACIDEMIC:

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

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

ON BRIGHT LIGHTS:

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

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Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, and the Republican National Convention

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. Burying pet and children chasing balls, and anyone else your now-limited government can't protect, sweeping them under the rug, becomes necessary. Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over you're no longer 'our family', but something abject and ostracized, best shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room, spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all warts.

Like Medicare and Social Security, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America  is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet: anxiety over population control (in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for death); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. Whatever you bury up the hill in a certain spot returns the next day, a demonic somnambulist of voracious homicidal ill will. It's like sending your good Christian values kid away to college and having them come back a vegetarian pothead socialist.

All this deep subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtext. Instead it belongs with the invaluable crapola consciousness-raiser Godsend, not just because they are both about the horrid deals distraught  parents might be willing to make in order to allay the grief of losing a child but because they do so right under a blase' horror audience's nose. Naturally we'd have to do whatever it took to bring them back if it was possible, as parents, but since it's impossible we can truly relax into our pain, surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue helps the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1) in examining how the reanimation option can cause loads of trouble. And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in PET the leavening Woodsianism comes from the image of a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of 2012 (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral can provide" - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1967)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comfort funerals can provide." In the Romero analogy, Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals, but I say these are our loved ones and we're not going to give them up!" Or vice versa, the utterly short-sighted nonsensical concept that we can better save ourselves by fucking over the earth or, more metaphorically, there's no time to put out the kitchen fire, moms have to make dinner tonight! It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from her toes; Arabs are pulling out her entrails; the Asian markets are scooping up her brains for overseas jobs. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country.

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice, and avoid 'getting everything you want' which would mean a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression on one side or an overly permissive socialist Welfare State on the other.  Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight for show - for balance.

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media who paint the opposition in vivid brushes to make it seem as if the comfort a funeral can provide is really after all not 'dubious.' The media's obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, while PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so awesome. In Romero's zombie films, we have the mom with the trowel in the first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from the man and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch determined to recognize that life begins at death, to the point of his posse killing anyone who disagrees. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' - it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic. Society is still in the midst of its collapse and two crotchety Irish landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain them up and let them deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster image for it all (above) is a hot Irish lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of it. It's a great moment: National Velvet of the Living Dead. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely paintings which 'come to 'life' the way the buried do. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young. And there's a fine line between wanting to return to any kind of past glory and actual denial of death. Zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior danger. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we floating in the cheap seats can live, for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove)  with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own. The dead people in the photo are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted hindsight. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet: if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels. "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again, just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he can't tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides would be lost without the other to blame in order to keep their rabid constituents happy - and sometimes the more angry you are at the other side the more it's really you're angry at someone else, but they're gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, mocking you from the mantelpiece, until the first face Fox tells you to hate, you hate.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)

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Tony Curtis makes THE MANITOU (1978), Shire a PROPHECY (1979)

When I was growing up in the 70s,  back in Lansdale, PA, if I used my kid's telescope out my bedroom window on a dark clear night I could see the glow from the Montgomeryville Drive-In, down the hill, the bottom of the screen partially obstructed by tall fir trees. Without access to sound or any firm idea what was happening in each film, I nonetheless--or maybe because of--was spooked, especially by THE MANITOU, a film that promised via the newspaper reviews and TV ads: demons, shamans, Indian ghosts growing on shoulders, and people getting skinned alive!

I was also riveted by the commercials, ads, and reviews for PROPHECY, starring Talia Shire and more Native Americans. The crying PSA chief (left) on the litter-strewn highway was a cultural icon of the hour; conscientious adults still threw their fast food trash out their car window and left picnic grounds awash in litter. A single tear from a single Native American almost single-handedly changed that. Combine that single tear with the amok nature angle of JAWS and it all congeals into the late 1970s horror cinema landscape. White industrialists cut corners and end up mutating the wild life via mercury poisoning, the shaman sees it all, and shakes his rattle... the monsters come, like tears in rain...

Alas, every review I read at the time about either PROPHECY or THE MANITOU said they were pretty bad, and that's what kept me waiting all this time, over 30 years, to see them. It took the death of Tony Curtis to finally get my off my ass and into the cheap seats. Man, I'm glad I waited for digital widescreen, where the full glory shines through.

In MANITOU, Curtis plays a free-spirited Love Boat-style example of one of those semi-phony 'frisco spiritualists who've been fleecing gullible lonely Nob Hill widows since the days of Samuel Spade license number 596. Older perhaps, with a weird buzz cut, Curtis sports a cool robe and a hard-won devil-may-care demeanor. In fact if he had more hair and a K-Mart Scarface loungewear ensemble, he'd dress and cavort a lot like me. In fact, we both have ex-wives with growths in their backs that are slowly forming dwarf Native American medicine men coming back from a 400 year sleep to wreak havoc on the white man's world. And we both have cool stereo systems. And we dance with a hard-won sense of existential jubilation, the way Jean Paul Belmondo dances in PIERROT LE FOU.

As the plot matures, the western doctors try and cut off his ex-wife's growth. It fights back by making the doctor cut his own wrist instead. The doctors next try to use lasers, but the laser goes Star Wars nutso -- unfortunately beheading no one. Finally Curtis sends for a cool Native American medicine man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara, who underplays beautifully).

Now, maybe it was because my expectations were so rock bottom, but I really liked the laid-back edge of THE MANITOU. It's almost like an extended episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker. Most of all I dig the way there's remarkably little antagonism between the Native shaman and western medicinal cultures. You can tell in the above shot the suspicion and vague interest from the white doctor as he gives up the reigns of treatment to John Singing Rock. But it's a cool instance of flexibility and inter-cultural communication as western medicine must bow down and admit Native American magic knows more about the lands beyond beyond. As for the fiery climax, they'll have to work together, like Deepak Chopra, or a medicinal version of THE DEFIANT ONES. 

Giving the film some staunch method cred, Susan Strasberg (of PSYCH-OUT and THE TRIP/ daughter of Lee) plays the afflicted ex-wife, spending the bulk of the film in bed with an oxygen tube but returning in time to go topless for the finale, grinning like a maniac at the most inappropriate of times, and of course she rides the far-out visuals that PSYCH-OUT so sadly failed to deliver.

In other words, MANITOU is a low budget yet ambitious hack job that leans on Tony Curtis to carry it the way the Monogram horror films of the 1940s used to lean on Bela Lugosi. In both instances they made a good choice. Curtis plays it like an Italian working class Bob Hope in sufficiently serious CAT AND THE CANARY mode and carries the ball just as well as Darren McGavin in THE NIGHT STALKER, and that's no faint praise. 

PROPHECY is much better as far as photography and music, maybe even acting... but it's nowhere near the ditzy fun of MANITOUS, with its ALTERED STATES-cum-2001 hallucinations of one-eyed Godsquatches, lizard demons, STAR WARS-ish hand laser tag, a hospital room floating in outer space, Native American 'old' magic vs. medicine / machine age magic ("the typewriter has its own manitou!") all the way to decapitation and oh yes, the torn flesh of Strasberg's back (presumably) makes it looks like she's wearing a pink shower curtain liner. That's just fine with me.

PROPHECY meanwhile is too busy looking scared and preaching to remember if and when it should be scary or funny or anything else monster movies are supposed to be. Oscars are strove for in scenes involving pregnant Talia Shire listening to her EPA doctor husband express outrage at the poverty of the ghetto he visits early in the film, and then double outrage up in Vermont at the mercury leakage that's made tadpoles grow two feet long and an old medicine man go blind. So no, he doesn't want to bring a child into this fucked-up world! She hears all this while waiting to tell him the 'good' news of her pregnancy as he plays back his tape elaborating on all the horrible mutations that afflict fetuses subjected to mercury poisoned salmon, which of course they ate only the night before.This is a pretty great scene, full of unspoken dread and drama, but it drags on forever.

Supplying the Native American voice of crying-at-litter enviro-reason, Armand Assante smolders his way through a turn as the local 'Original People' chief. Rather than a real Native American he reminds us of , how you say? Ah yes. Antonio Banderas. In a good... way? Reminding us that method acting, somber mood and low key lighting reigned supreme in the 1970s, PROPHECY broods like it wants to be the method Coppola horror film of the era, reminding us even THE GODFATHER started out just another adaptation of a drugstore best seller.

So while THE MANITOU is gaudy like those great early Marvel monster comics, PROPHECY is more 70s gravitas, more the R-rated side, the GRIZZLY meets TAXI DRIVER side, the older kids side... with gloomy photography; children thrown and shattered against trees while still in their star-shaped sleeping bags; heads bitten off; some truly effective scenes of terrified humans waiting and listening in tunnels as the monster trashes the camp above, and detailed tours through the paper milling process at a factory downriver of an unseen Maine lumber camp.  However, after about the third self-righteous tantrum of our EPA doctor, and the endless caterwauling of the eventually forgotten mutant baby (not Shire's), you just want to press the button on all of humanity and get it over with.

Kind of uncertain about how to balance its interests, PROPHECY operates the way someone boring you with long-winded sermons at a bar suddenly remembers they're late for dinner and races out the door, forgetting their hat, gloves and coat and not even giving you time for rebuttal. Compared to the merry inconsistencies and everything-but-the kitchen sink Space Exorcist Rosemary Odyssey psychedelia nonchalance of THE MANITOU, PROPHECY's solemn messages about man's polluting the wilderness with his toxic runoff seems way too bleak. The monster crossing the lake scene, though, is damned awesome.

The difference between the two is like the difference between life in AA and life if you stay in the bar and wind up passed out underneath the stools. Do you want to clean up the mess of your polluted life, give the forest back to the Native Americans and ask the mountains for forgiveness? Or do you want to throw typewriters at dwarf medicine men and watch your ex-wife shoot lasers at giant space eyeballs?

I thought so.

Then again, you could do like I did, and not make a choice at all, make 'em a double (feature that is). Just remember to keep that nonjudgmental childhood telescope trained on the partially obstructed drive-in screen of bemused tolerance and low expectations. Sometimes sound, a clear view, and a full understanding of the plot can be downright detrimental.

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