The Balloon that is Welles: MR. ARKADIN

 "I've spent years inflating the balloon that is Welles. Please do not puncture it."
- Orson Welles (to Mary Livingston on The Jack Benny Show)

Orson Welles has his hair and beard like a rolling Van Gogh storm cloud for MR ARKADIN (1955), recently screened on TCM and at least trippy enough with its mismatched sound rhythms that you can feel Orson Welles playing around all through post-production, having a high old time. It's too bad it's couched in a luxuriant 3-DVD + novel set on Criterion and not floating in on the late late night UHF movie after PLAN NINE or THE CREEPING TERROR, because its Brecht/Godardian deconstruction is  all in your face from the get go, it begs to be reconsidered as a Monogram horror film that's gone off the rails and run off to Europe, rather than 'Art.'

The cheap budget means most of the action is just discussed rather than seen, in rooms where people lurch about as if in the stateroom of a heaving yacht, or drink champagne or method act in waves and the plot also circles around like a bizarre combination of two old radio shows playing at once in perfect synchronicity and the connections with narcotics, Nazi money laundering, captain of industry psychedelia, and the feeling that maybe poor Orson's just been masking his lonesome all along, as the past comes catching up with him; you can smell the wine and cigar smoke, Ibiza perfume and suntan lotion and ghost laughter of passing mistresses; whiskey spills along the strips of celluloid; snatches of great dialogue that seems to be a kind of journal of witty things Welles has said and heard in his European exile.

 Pretty Woman: 

Do you remember me?

Mischa Auer: 

No. I can never remember a pretty woman, it's so expensive!

Like internet dating, this film is the story of trying to unmask someone while keeping your own mask on, trying to open up a dangerous candy egg as it in turn is trying opening you, for you are also a candy egg. Inside the normal, competent, witty candy shell could be anything, from a saintly cream to the bitter pills of maniac psycho yawning void with sharp can opener fingers or more of the same candy shell, waiting to leak out into your mouth, venomously or no. The girl who came off so polished and nice becomes bossy and mirthless as the night moves on and you struggle to make sobriety appear effortless while a churlish demon sulks within your egg, scratching at your insides like they were his dream journal until your tongue slips and reveals a screaming multitude of convicted hellions writhing (and writing) below your smooth surface.

It takes a great director to tap into that hellish core energy but an even greater to tap in a whole layer further to find the black comic heart of that inner core, for evil too has an inner yolk, a deep, well-earned sense of wit and good humor. Such a yolk is Welles, who rules in the Hell of his B-movie sphere rather than serve in Hollywood's regimented heaven.

To get back to the internet date analogy, consider the date is a success and they are married and even then, for a few months, the candy shells are undamaged by the demon yolks within. But now the stress of daily grind, of each others' messes have made hairline fractures and the yolk demons have figured out how to short wave radio to each other with special code words that crack shells like high pitched arias. This fighting is the great expression of love between demons. It is something foreign, alas, to someone like Welles, a towering genius who preferred women at a distance, to be loomed over as they cringe with their jigsaw puzzles or to be seen only in passing, in the shadows of sharks ala LADY FROM SHANGHAI. But this evasion tactic will not stall them forever. Rather than show his true core demon to his daughter (played by his much younger fiancee at the time) Arkadin would prefer to just disappear into the ether.

So a 'towering' genius like Welles must inevitable embrace loneliness like he embraces alcohol, tobacco, and hashish, and all other eggshell removers, until the last vestige of phony candy shell is gone, and the whole social sphere-- wherein friends bring friends over who bring people who amused them on the boat now--seem dull and inane. He'd rather be alone in his editing suite than at a party or in bed with a gorgeous blonde. In proto-nouvelle vague fashion there's the sense that while you're watching an ARKADIN scene, Welles is giving you his notes on it, fusing his commentary track half a century early into the essence of the dialogue, overdubbed by himself for nearly every male character. You get the sense meanwhile that the female actresses could be dubbed by whomever wakes up first in Welles' chateau, before whiskey and sycophants render her incoherent.

Note that Welles has never made a movie about an actor or artist struggling with their art, tending rather towards murderers, rogues, and captains of industry (Arkadin is all three). Not for him the sanctimonious glum piety of something like QUILLS, which mistakes the addiction of writing flagellant smut for a holy purpose; or the classical polish of actors like Laurence Olivier and Patrick Stewart, who sometimes mistake Shakespeare for bourgeois highbrow Art as opposed to merely the pinnacle of charlatanism. Welles made a career laughing at the titanic absurdity of his own persona, especially as a guest on radio shows like Jack Benny and Fred Allen. He always preferred to play the devil rather than the angel, and the one time he wasn't the heavy--in LADY FROM SHANGHAI--he showed why he wasn't much good at it. He couldn't even make eye contact with his own ex-wife, turning away to pontificate in his high whispered Irish brogue instead while Mr. Bernstein ran away with the loathsome ogre lawyer showman, the plumb part designed clearly for the balloon that is Welles.

To Welles, and to Don Birnim, and to Ben in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, and to myself of course, whiskey is a far more noble addiction than writing. We'd rather be remembered as being able to hold our liquor rather than holding a Pulitzer. Drinking leaves only empty bottles, and maybe broken glass, while writing leaves ugly thoughts that can gestate for centuries until your original meaning has been torn out and the zombie husk of your words used to champion any old egg-crushing cause.

Or worse, they can be forgotten altogether.

I know from my own work that how seductive it is when you're the star and love to edit and look at yourself on screen. There's something quite magical about it, the chance to study how you look to other people, frame by frame. Welles never lived long enough to see the age of affordable digital video, and I wish he'd made a dozen ARKADIN sequels instead of making just one three times. Such is the life of a vagabond obsessive. Indecision reigns but at least glum sanctimony has been kicked out the window. Welles makes any other egotistical tyrant genius look shabby by comparison, and he makes himself perhaps shabbiest of all.That is why we love him: he's cinema's one true prodigal, and his own best company.

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Great 70's Dads: Will Varner (Orson Welles) in THE LONG HOT SUMMER

"I love life, Minnie."

He may be made-up to resemble some expressionist Apache War Chief, but Orson Welles is in fine sparkly, robust form as Will Varner in 1961's THE LONG, HOT SUMMER (1961) and in fact I love this character even more than his Hank Quinlan. And when one considers with Welles all the great films Welles could have done and didn't due to his heroically self-indulgent arrogance, such as deciding to play the dopey romantic lead instead of the slimy self-loathing lawyer he'd likely written for himself in LADY FROM SHANGHAI, ore realizes great roles like this should be cherished. Director Martin Ritt keeps Orson on a short leash, for his own protection, but he's still allowed to bark.

So often Welles became his own worst enemy; no one wanted to work with him because he couldn't stop suggesting things, and then eventually suggesting so many things he tried to take over the picture. He did best when a good director and rest of cast was able to at least hold their own and not let his portly ego capsize the vessel. This might be the reason John Huston didn't cast him as Ahab in MOBY DICK, for example, but gave him one long sermon to cut loose in (as the preacher) then left him on the dock.

But we were talking about Will Varner. He's acidemic in the way no other Welles character is, aside from himself in F FOR FAKE, naturally. Good-natured if bossy, robust and over-the-top, witty but devious; fearless but frail (the movie starts as he comes home from the hospital, high on HOT TIN roofies). A drinker unafraid of trashing his aging constitution, Will Varner is a living force to be reckoned with -- until he dies, that is, which he may do soon. The closest thing the film has to a 'villain,' it's more like he's a father who teaches by bullying and bellowing; he's a Great Santini without the military drive. He forces his weak-willed son Jody (Anthony Fanciosa) to desperate measures for letting himself get outfoxed by old Ben Quick (Paul Newman) while all but chaining Quick to his dow-ta's baid.

Best of all is the way he calls out the coded momma's boy (TV's Oscar Madison) for wasting the fertile years of said brainy, ill-banged (in both senses) daughter, played by Joanne Woodward. The DVD extras tell that Newman and Woodward were hot, crazy lovers at the time and spent their weekends driving off to luxury hotels to shack up for marathon lovemaking sessions, which probably explains why Woodward's character comes off as the most comfortable-in-her-own-skin 21-year old virgin in cinema. We also learn from the extras that Welles re-wrote his scenes and no one could understand a word he said.

Why is he a great 1970's dad for all that? You can't understand most of what 1970's dads say either. Another reason is encoded in how Woodward's belle triumphs over both father and suitor through sheer her unyielding womanly wiles and will, and thus earns her Newman -- then and forever. That's the sign of a loving patriarch who, for all his assertive grandson-craving, clearly hasn't fostered fearful children. There's no indication of physical abuse in their faces, no ominous chords in the score  indicating he might slap someone at any moment. His tantrums and demonstrations of force preclude all resorts to mundane physical or mental abuse to get his way (unless you count hollerin' - but since Woodward's not at all cowed by it, you shouldn't). I'm sure there's students of feminism out there who would object to his sheer ungainly macho manner, and maybe they're the reasons so many movie, TV, commercial fathers all talk in these high, wimpy little voices. 

Also true to great 1970s dad form, Varner's comfortable in his sense of sexual mastery, making only the feint-inest attempt at discretion when driving over to his mistress's. Larger than life, committed to his see-gars, Varner demonstrates his excellent child-rearing not in his outrageous procreative demands but in the way he indirectly rewards his children for rebelling against him, which mirrors in turn the way he rebels against society at large, even if he is, in effect, society itself in that town. He'd rather have his kids be fighters than cowering victims or worse, the type of children who cling to their cribs too long, the way Oscar Madison does.  He even recognizes progress in his spoiled simpleton son Jody not because Jody tried to burn him to death but because he had to rescue him at the last minute. That's a good 1970's dad!! And through it all, he stays true to his oversize, deep-bellowing way of life and outrageous expressionistic Apache make-up. Will Varner loves life, Minnie, and I love Will Varner!

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The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. Yet in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK, other than THERE WILL BE BLOOD, TSN can really be compared with), Welles' clueless billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Welles, but of course now the press itself is far different: instead of yellow journalism smear campaigns between rival papers, scandal can be brought out by even the most drunk and marginalized of nerds.  

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara, shortly to be seen as Lisabeth S. in the DRAGON TATTOO remake) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned about getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 bazillion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after. If Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed. He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere, and lives in eternal orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. Mansions mean nothing if all you need is a wireless connection to keep your million friends always in reach.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle - the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to conquer. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his childhood progress to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl who forces him to confront his own immaturity.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies, and sometimes a billion friends are your own worst enemy.

Welles in Rio with his million friends

Mark Z, anywhere, with his millions friends

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which wasted money and talent and sucked. And frankly, I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies deluge, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists a sense of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere? Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC; the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The world is my bedroom, I shall not log.

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between him in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party seemed tragically sad and hollow but it's truly unusual in film and it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down at the less together mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting' --even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there 'could' be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one they're not invited to. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures. In a way this version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again which came first? The nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But as Tricky said, it's cool, that's what money's for. It's to make tall waitresses with attitude smile at you, getting that 20% tip that's big enough for your own private jet ski all by itself.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 testies! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like at 4 AM after a bad date, reminded me I had friends who liked me -- it was instant and it worked! My need to socialize in real time dropped off by half. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and my socializing dropped off to nothing. Now, on iMeds, and Facebook, and not being allowed to smoke in bars or restaurants, I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room. And he's on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of THE SOCIAL NETWORK.  Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy, maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

One thing's for sure, the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point not even a javelin will get you across it. A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. The real sled smells of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports game, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to crack your dingy snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans

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Hallowed be thy Shakes: The 3 Macbeths

Shakespeare's Macbeth is super psychedelic Halloweenish expat hallucidoses. It's got witches! It's got real Hunter S. Thompson-esque fear and loathing. It's the thriller from Scotland's Hillas and there's three great film versions by three titans of cinema - Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Akira Kurosawa.

A tale of woe, blind ambition, remorse, hallucinations, drinking, wife-on-husband nagging, archetypal psychology (Lady Macbeth is a great paranoid/inner critic anima), ghosts, floating daggers, cold-blooded regicide, Macbeth captures the 'wait until your dad gets home' dread, that feeling of coming out of two day black-out alone in bed with one shoe still on, and your girl asleep on the fold-out in the living room and there's magic marker all over your face, and, consumed by bottomless regret, you reach for the one friend still with you in the universe, that half-empty whiskey bottle under the bed. And yeah, and the play itself is cursed! Norotious for wreaking havoc on its cast and crew, Macbeth carries a RING-style meta aftershock. Those damned witches all but call you on the phone after the final curtain and let you know it's time to meet your Banquo.

Lady Macbeth and Mr. Macbeth also happen to have one of the most fucked up yet strangely beautiful romances in all Shakespeare, the one perhaps most like the real evil parents we all know, the dysfunctional libertines who flicker to life only when pondering murder on behalf of corporate advancement. Macbeth sends a message on ahead to his lady, alerting her to the the witches' freaky prophecy and he barely gets off his horse and kisses her hello before they're conspiring in hushed whispers like kids on Christmas eve. Maybe their sex life isn't so hot. That would explain her cold insistence that she'd smash her own baby against a rock before letting her man chicken out.

Say what you will about that kind of attitude, it beats mopey Hamlet's, or self-loathing Othello's. From evil to guilt to tumbling madly into the abyss, Lady Macbeth and her man never waiver in their devotion to each other, even if they may hesitate before their nasty deed or regret it after. Wracked by guilt, paranoia and regret as they both are, they never rat each other out, nor blame each other, but when the jig is up, each face their own demise with brave and wild-eyed willingness.  In short, they're the UK's first Syd and Nancy!

There's three really stellar Macbeths in cinema thus far: Orson Welles' Republic studio-bound western-on-acid watching IVAN THE TERRIBLE version from 1948, which is my favorite, even though it's nowhere near as good as the other two: Polanski's 1971 naturalistic sex and gore and pretty people version and Akira Kurosawas's heavy yet delightfully weird THRONE OF BLOOD (1957).


Even if  the whole butoh theater thing is not new to you, BLOOD's sheer ghostly otherness puts you in a high art trance, occurring mostly in wooden box rooms and across terrifyingly strange landscapes of volcanic ash, it's Kurosawa's great triumph that his windblown images resonate straight through all their age and culture barriers like a sword through a paper walls. Toshiro Mifune in Satanic beard and crazy black hat, was born to look stricken by ghosts and guilt. I love how he stands there in these wacky butoh poses, his eyes bugging out, his crazy mascara eyes alight with that 'holy shit' waking up from a three-day black-out expression.  We can read every thought that passes across his brow from 30 yards away. Meanwhile, Kurosawa is artfully arranging his shot like a moody, foggy, rock garden.

Derek Malcom at the Guardian on THRONE OF BLOOD: 

"It was, for what it's worth, TS Eliot's favourite film. The drama is presented with stark economy, its words subservient to the slow exposition of its plot, and the characterization admittedly less subtle than Shakespeare's. But I doubt the Bard would have turned in his grave. Kurosawa's parallel eloquence matches Shakespeare's so completely that it even outshines that of Verdi's musical version."

So I love THRONE OF BLOOD, but wish the English version had kept the original title "Spiderweb Castle." I probably would have seen it sooner, imagining spider rampages. As it is I've grown comfortable with Orson Welles version and that's surely my favorite. I dream of being able to go back in time and see his Voodoo stage version of the 1930s that made him a star in Harlem. But he didn't star in that production, and if e'er an Illinois ham war born to play Macbeth, drunkenly unspooling vast gusts of Shakespearean wind, Welles war.

The main set for Welles' version, a mishmash of found objects from Republic's western scenery department, consists of the side of a rocky cliff with trails for the horses propped up by columns,  like some Escheresque mind trap. Welles' sweaty face foregrounded against the processionals of horses makes them drip like ghost cops from a SHOCK CORRIDOR dream sequence drainpipe. Dig this perceptive piece from a professor named KJ:

Part of its mastery is its use of voiceover for most of the speech. That, combined with Welles' magnificent camera work (including angles, shadows, and focus—or out-of-focus—effects) give us a Macbeth who is more disoriented than evil. Welles seems to have taken Macbeth's inability to sleep and extended it into all aspects of the character. At first, he appears to be playing Macbeth drunk. Upon consideration, he's playing Macbeth as sleep-deprived. As a college teacher, I recognize this as method acting worth of Stanislavski himself!

Polanski's is great but I need to see it again. I've seen Orson's version probably twenty times. Over and over again once while convulsing alone in my apartment in November 1998 after an alcoholic relapse. It's also the closest Orson got to making a horror movie. But Polanski made a horror movie or two before doing his Macbeth, so there's a kind of crossroads of Polanski themes a lurking: the madness of beautiful women (Repulsion); the meta connection to brutal, sudden violence ala Manson and the Nazis; and the all-consuming horror... of the elderly. (Rosemary's Baby).

Suffice it to say, Lady MacBeth (Francesca Annis) in the Polanski is a hottie, unlike the Macbeth of either of the other films, and the witches number in the dozens and are naked and kinky and only about half are old like a Castavet. Everyone else is young and pretty and the bloodlust that wells up in the breast of our MacBeth (Jon Finch) seems more a madness born of Apollonian narcissism and flipside paranoia rather than sleep deprivation or, in the Kurosawa case, supernatural fatalism and schizophrenia. Take your pick, or pick 'em all, you can't go wrong. Just kill the king... when I draw the Queen of Hearts, my dear breast-nursed serpent. There is no cooler name to say while drunk than... Banquo.

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The Fury of a Thousand Bronsons!

In honor of Moon in the Gutter's Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon, here's one of my early from the 2007 Academy Award era... a bold pronouncement that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD indicated a return of the repressed wild man archetype, i.e. the force sought by the Men's Movement:

(originally posted in Bright Lights After Dark 3/08)

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they’ve been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards– we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was pouffy hair and loud jackets and closeted queers confusing straight dudes into thinking wearing eye liner was punk rock. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let’s face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it’s the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back -- how far down you hold the Nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he’s like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell boxfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin’s not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they’ve been away from Hollywood for awhile, Lewis cobbling in Italy and Brolin wandering through Ireland with his young 'uns. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beatdown. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature — this was once part of something known as the Men’s Movement, around the late 1980s--early 1990s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and howl and shed their tired sad sack personae; a time before the age of Irony, before changing times made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit – he’s returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview’s oil pumps!

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as you can tell by my vigorous enthusiasm, I was totally hoping for something that actually did happen the following year with films like THE WRESTLER and has since vanished as the Coens went back to torturing wusses and the Rom-Coms and Cera-Eisenbergs have flooded the gates, but they're out there.... come back wildmen! So later in 2008 I wrote a piece riffing on Manny Farber's White Elephant art vs. Termite Art: THE TERMITES OF PLAINVIEW:

The few critics and artists who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype–due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually–tend to be the ones who are “trying” to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers, explorers, depth-sounders and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Tarantino, Baumbach and Martel, and more to the “workmanlike” mapper precision of the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Payne–those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber’s termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers–the ungodly mess, in short–can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride as we follow the brave deep into the cinematic danger zone; we'd rather get lost in the woods than a lovely elaborate hedge maze.  There’s some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there’s some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and tittering like the late beloved Richard Widmark.

A unique example to discuss of a mapper and explorer rolled into one would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic “explorer” works: UNDER THE VOLCANO is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry’s novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man’s drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn’t put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A “classic” example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles’ MACBETH vs. Olivier’s HAMLET (both 1948). Olivier’s film (left) is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated and the deep shadow lines visible all the way in the back of the cavernous sets. There’s plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia’s bathwater, so to speak. Welles’ MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe where a good chunk of the dialogue tends to be inaudible under scratchy recording and thick brogues (Welles famously pre-recorded the dialogue and monologues and made his actors lip-sync). Just take a look below at that outrageous hat!

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day meth binge. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway. Welles shivers with horror like he's hoping if he acts like its a nightmare he'll wake up and have blood-free hands. His Macbeth bellows great lungfuls of melodious brogue, hallucinating Banquos hither an yon. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches’ bubbling pot at any second, but I’ll order Ham on Welles over Hamlet Olivier any day. There’s mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet silence. Daniel Plainview and THERE WILL BE BLOOD are like that, and for the Olivier loving mappers of the world, that's just too long-haired, indulgent, and reckless.

And God do I hate Olivier's short bangs in all his Shakespeare stuff. He looks like Sting's queer older brother, but not in a good way. HAMLET's photography is brilliant however and every word spoken goes down like a hundred dollar bottle of anything. If Victor Mature as Doc Holliday were here, good Sirs, then perhaps he could finish. I can't remember the rest! 

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Great Acid Movies #29: MOBY DICK (1956)

Here's an old existentialist shark hunter "joke:" an existentialist dies and goes to heaven and he's all excited to ask god why humans exist. "To feed the sharks!" Is God's taciturn reply. The man replied, aghast "But god! We're hardly ever even in the water anymore!" To which God replies, "You hightailed it out of there as soon as you found out. Why do you think I created seals?"

Not only does this joke deal with man's sense of purposelessness in the universe, it's got sharks. And man never feels he's lost his purpose when he's battling leviathans at sea, be they giant sharks, squids, whales, or sea serpents... the leviathan is made in God's real image and likeness, so hunting this double-crossing man-eating God stand-in with single-minded vengeance (for creating us just to be shark food) is a true "if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him" spiritual path. All of which is why John Huston's MOBY DICK is such a good acid film. Like Huston's other acid-ready films (such as UNDER THE VOLCANO) there's no psychedelic drugs in it, but it comes from an age of writing when great minds were just more open to seeing God in the nature around them, rather than adopting the cold, clinically cynical attitude of today's scientific-minded writers. And Huston's just naturally dosed, which is also known as being a badass to the bone, to the point you don't even have to prove it. Melville also is just such a badass and my guess is that in his day their bread had ergot in it.

Just look at that top picture, tied to the whale and still stabbing at it furiously! That's what tripping's like, sometimes, being lashed to a giant white whale and just trying to remember to take a deep breath every time you go under, and keep calm, keep stabbing, and know deep down only your own hell-bent fury will see you through. That's how you surf the psychedelic tidal waves, Shipmates! Stabbing all the way! 



With Dick you got everything: a tattooed giant as your friend, the born-tripping Orson Welles in a white beard giving a rousing lecture in full poetic nautispeak, and an Ahab that comes off like Abe Lincoln crossed with Colonel Kurz lording it over a psych ward full of schizophrenic pirates.



People say that Peck--38 at the time--was too young to play Ahab, that it should have been Welles, instead. I say thee, nay. Peck is perfect; his stovepipe hat and beard giving him a trippy Abe Lincoln echo--a Lincoln gone-wrong. And Orson's presence is felt all through the film via his spellbinding oration in the church scene anyway, allowing Peck to emerge as the dark shadowed self to Orson's resonant rev: skeletal where Orson's robust; evil where Orson is good, etc. (check Orson's ham enunciation as Ahab in his Mercury Broadcast of Moby Dick here). Welles' bravado is contained and thus more powerful given only one scene. Plus, Peck uses his natural charisma, his Atticus Finch oratory. to inspire loyalty and fervor, where Welles would likely inspire only eye rolls (on the radio show he sounds hammy, adopting an "Argh, matey!"-style pirate accent).

A key scene that shows off Peck's genius is when Ahab finally emerges from his quarters and gets out and stalks around the bridge before the assembled crew, poetically ranting against the white whale and nailing a gold doubloon to the mast - the reward for the one who first spots Moby Dick ("He's white I say!") I always feel ready to die for Ahab 100%. in these scenes, even if I'm mercilessly sober. At last, here is the true meaning of Christmas, an ancient dark messiah who wants to stalk up the chimney and crucify Santa Clause on the TV antennae, just like you always dreamed of doing, but thought was wrong; but, at sea, a captain cannot be wrong.

And there was Pip, Dear Pip the cabin boy. And Starbuck, whose courage was like any other commodity on the ship, there when needed but not to be foolishly squandered.


For me this is Peck at his finest. Frankly, I didn't know he had it in him. He was perfect in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD but that kind of remote patriarchal decency was hung on him like an albatross. Here on the Pequod, in that crazy black stove pipe hat and beard, his eyes wild with endorphin-activating old testament energy, he's the closest thing yet I'd seen to a living mythic American wild man archetype, that is, until Daniel Day Lewis showed up as Bill the Butcher, and later Daniel Plainview. When I hear Ahab ask who will follow him after Moby Dick, "to his death!" I invariably jump up and cheer, going insane just like Queequeg. Even though I know full well the Pequod won't come back, I can feel the pull in my blood like a magnet. That's psychedelic shamanism at its finest, shipmates! To your flagons!

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