"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL. His Humbert-ish yens and ectomorph satyriasis provided an exhilarating freshness that was part of the sexual revolution. His nebbishy persona doesn't exclude him from the in-crowd of that era, so he's not as threatened by the competition for the WASP chicks with O'Toole a few successes down the road. But in PUSSYCAT he's not competing against O'Toole, he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, and working as one and with a bevy of hot talented comediennes the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques.

But British directors Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off, before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm and arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk doing Hamlet is about the best Hamlet or O'Toole can be. And Sellers' ridiculous black wig makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole here even more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in the Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, from an era smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to foul-mouthed 17 year-old virgins.

But while MY FAVORITE YEAR was fun and O'Toole played a drunken old buccaneer well, it doesn't hold up well. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and 'oh how zany' old saws like stealing the police horse in Central Park at dawn are way too forced and cliche. But in PUSSYCAT there's real madness in the air and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man who's been laughing a lot in between takes and is grateful to be having such clever lines, and so many pretty girls to woo, and he shows his gratitude by giving the material a depth of actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When he brings cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all month. It's beautiful.

O'Toole plays a charmer so irresistible to women and so unable to resist them that his life has been one long series of one-night stands with one of his more insistent conquests, played by Schneider, demanding he marry her. He loves her so he tries to comply so goes to see a psychiatrist, Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say, "There's nothing funny about it!" in case a sanctimonious but cute girl is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up as Victor, a nervous stripper's aid who somehow winds up taking Romy Schneider home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle apparently which makes sense, but it would have been a completely different film, nowhere near as fun. We'd just hate Beatty for managing to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed. We can't hate O'Toole because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not fun, just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparke. Each broad takes just a bit of his bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention that each time is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all, we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, via a image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty Catholic to really go for it rather than run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they go home with someone else and suddenly no one wants you and you're suddenly tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna's rain cake. O'Toole has that weakened look of a man who's been fought over enough that he barely notices.

from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as a mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round, along with Paula Prentiss, aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward later presents her with a commemorative plaque). Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphotic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up --all but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer, but he's having fun being funny rather than Artsy. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen live large: the sex is fun and easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual renting a prostitute sex of his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to do things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while and his own back yard and love is where you left it and so forth, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy" of Responsibility - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every romcom to turn off even a moralistic lecturer like the post-code MGM. But with PUSSYCAT we don't have to worry about that. Here, everything is always 1965 and no woman runs who doesn't secretly want to be chased, and even the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francoise Hardy. Now there's a French actress I'd have given up my low-down tomcat ways for, and all she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile."

Read More

Let England Take: Pregnant Portman Vs. THE KING'S SPEECH (2010)

There will always be an England, taking... our Oscars. The U.S.A's imperialist academy voters of a certain age with their ensconced sense of drawing room pomp get all weak in the knees at the thought of having tea with the wife of King George VIII, especially if she's embodied by saucy Helena Bonham Carter, and said king's played by dear old Collin Firth. If the film's lit artsy (lit like a Romantic period painting) and crafty (stripped down so every word of dialogue is a fractal composite of the whole), in English (upper crusted accents), and has a happy ending. I've seen them, with their jewels and haughty laughs, and I know what they like! 

I'm rooting for the BLACK SWAN, the defiant Mozart that unnerves the Academy's Salieri-voting block, SWAN is divisive by the very nature of its 'Yellow Wallpaper' feminist-hall-of-mirrors Icarus-ian iconography... it dares to melt the mythic archetypal into the personal and meta until its soul bleeds into its body like Ahab. It's basically an admonishment to the elderly artist, and old is what everyone who votes in the Academy is, or will inevitably be (dead stars get no vote). Yesterday's royalty, Winona Ryder lurks like the Phantom of the Opera in the shadowed wings of SWAN, a film that chooses death, drugs and hot mess madness over respectability; the Academy needless to picked the latter. KING trumped SWAN for me in just one way: Geoffrey Rush as the unorthodox teacher who must cut past "Bertie's" repression-- part of a long, illustrious line of Oscar-snatching, unorthodox teachers who must cut through repression--social and personal--stretching back through Robin Williams in THE DEAD POET'S SOCIETY.  BLACK SWAN's unorthodox teacher--Vincent Cassel-- pushing the star past repression is much younger and cinematically aerodynamic than Rush, and thus seems more like the son of a ballet master than the thing itself. He does a great job, but Rush does a masterful one. 

Rush's teacher feels lived-in, uniquely British in his blend of fiery eccentric lordliness and deeply humble focus. Firth was great too, making us feel every attempt at speaking as a truly heroic force of strength and English will, but if you compare his crumbling speech student to Portman's banshee ballet breakdown it's like comparing life and death, salt and salt-free.  THE KING'S SPEECH is so A+ in every nook and cranny of its white elephant hide it defies description. But oh for a termite.

 SWAN might die at Oscar time because its lack of a clear reality is interpreted, felt, lived, in a way that makes the bourgeoisie nervous: they don't like high art to bite them in their feeding hand. In locating the crux of Tchaikovsky's music and the myth it embodies within the personal life of a repressed ballet star, Aronofsky peels back the yellow wallpaper between texts and makes the myth personal -- it swallows you whole, sucks you down like the Pequod. The viewer of THE KING'S SPEECH is not implicated the way he or she is in SWAN. In SWAN, the metatextual chain of interpretation and performance (i.e. the fact that this is Natlie Portman's break-out picture as a creased, non-gamin actress, and Winona's presence is the grim future for non-gamins), lunges for the jugular and bitch slaps the viewer with their own mortality.  KING'S just causes us minor bumpy traffic jam stress and relief as all the antsy waits as upper crust fortifications are breached and every coherent sentence is like a dream, but the whole effect becomes as calculated as another Geoffrey Rush picture, QUILLS. The movie becomes like a therapist presenting the viewer with ink blot puzzles to solve, with no other solution but the correct one possible. SWAN is more like the therapist that burns down their own office and then makes out with you in their car, then reads you your DSM-IV in bed. 

That said BLACK SWAN has Oscar plusses: stodgy art, tight binding of young girl's feet, Svengali-esque puppeteers and wounded doe Trilbies high on ecstasy; it also has a big Oscar minus: Natalie Portman's character is rude to--and directly disobeys--her long-suffering Mrs. Bates-ish stage mother (Barbara Hershey) and isn't directly punished for it! As the academy is chock full of hard-working stage mothers, such disobedience is usually Oscar death. The scandal of Mila Kunis not being nominated indicates a secret law Nathan R pointed out in in a post I can't find at the moment: giving oral sex to Natalie Portman in SWAN ensured Kunis' lack of a nomination and that 'tis better to receive than give in olde Hollywood, and new as well. 

Due to higher education being available based on merit and interest as opposed to wealth, more of the working class in socialized countries like GB seem to possess a genuine interest in 'high art' than here in the States, where tenured professors, teacher's unions and old women in expensive jewelry make 'classical' and 'boring' inextricably entwined. The journey from US government education board lesson planning (they should all have to read Anna Karinina!) to hungover, underpaid educator ("pay attention! this woman was Russian!") to ADD sugar-addict child mind twisting in and out of wooden desk/chair torture combo unit, ensures a kind of tedious base-line conformity that discourages passionate interest. In London, if a man has no love for literature, he's allowed to stay in shop class fixing engines... all his life, on a nice stipend. So it is that a working class taxi driver may love Bartok and Handel, and a prince may jam to the Clash without irony. Since they 'know their place' neither can be accused of slumming or class-climbing as they would here, thus art and education are free to fly and be living and vital. 

By this of course I mean--and again no offense meant to the films or filmmakers--the unquestioned embrace of all things British by our bourgeoisie is not the fault of these highly trained artisans and keepers of the classical flame, but just that the nature of grants means they mustn't travel too far, darlings. And if there is some Shakespeare, or something legitimately powerful and poetic, it has to be watered down and steamed ala SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (above) or welded to a single cheering moment, like a speech, a stage show (TOPSY TURVEY) or sports event (CHARIOTS OF FIRE - below) in order to stop it from spilling out into the streets and starting a riot.

The average English person understands this issue of tish-toshy, royalty-suck-up-to glimmer glammer, even more than we do, this tendency of critics to fall on their knees as soon as Collin Firth picks up an expensive period pen, or Helena Bonham Carter emerges, high heels and white gloves first, from a period Bentley pulled up before a flower-and-footman-bestrewn mansion. They're a droll bunch the Brits, keenly aware of their country's faults and foibles through their hitherto discussed vibrant relation to the arts. Americans have their 'Super Bowl,' Britain has its theater, and films like THE RULING CLASS and TV shows like THE AVENGERS. which come chock full of wry self-deprecating Britishness. America isn't quite ready for that level of self-satire. The only film that maybe comes close is Richard Kelly's unappreciated SOUTHLAND TALES, and our collective lack of arts education is, and gentlemen I say this without hesitation, the reason for us not loving it.

Still - I don't really see anything new or alive or chance-taking, nothing fresh, in the KING'S SPEECH compared to the wacky attempt to fuse 800 levels of intertextual operatics into 90 minutes of the BLACK SWAN's tightening gyre. Yet by any standard you care to name, THE KING'S SPEECH is stunning - even the music manages to sidestep the kind of corny orchestral bombast someone like John "Excuse me while I rip Les Baxter" Williams would have brought to it. The photography of all the royal landmark interiors is breathtakingly romanticist. The acting jaw-dropping in its perfection; the script one of those perfect little traps wherein everything from the speech therapist's pedantic audition to play Richard III in an amateur theater troupe, to the threat of Nazism (seen by the King as a kind of proletariat revolutionary threat, a class war), to the meteoric all-pervasiveness of the wireless; to Prince Albert's abdication to run off with a married woman; to the leavening of true distance between royalty and commoners, all congeals like a completed puzzle that operates on every textual level there is, all into one halting final speech/broadcast that involves two middle-aged men, alone together, in a room, with a sheets hung from the ceiling, and there's nothing gay about it.

 In the end it proves that little has changed since the nouveau riche Texas oil wives were lugging home British butlers and kissing up to European nobility in the early 20s, while Charlie Ruggles and W.C. Fields looked on aghast before slinking to the bar. There's a still a contingent of these 'cultured' elite, most of them of Oscar voting-age, for whom soft-spoken women who know their place, and men who'd rather die than cut loose on camera aren't even required to prove themselves...  America just hands over its most precious award show trinkets like they've forgotten all about the 'art' of genuine revolution, you know, like the war?  That we won? From them?

POST NOTE: As so often happens, my crush on Natalie Portman is gone now that she's all proudly pregnant. Knocked up by a commoner--a dance instructor, no less---and showing off her budding oven like it's by Jean Paul Gautier, that's doing the whole 'king becoming friends with his commoner speech therapist' thing one worse -- as painful to see for me as my own creeping gray hairedness. I'll admit for me it's that old unsnaswered question: Why? Why was I born just to have to go to school and brussel sprouts? Is that all there is... to a circus? Then let's keep / dancing-- but with Millipedes?

 So for me, seeing Portman knocked up is like what seeing Justin Bieber with beer bloat, dilated pupils, and mussed hair in a future DUI mugshot will be for legions of reticently aging Bieber fans now freshly married with children of their own. Can't we keep our icons in some pressurized chamber that turns counter to the earth's rotation so they never age, or menstruate? Or worse, meet some some rare straight French dance instructor and leave us all alone to our dreadful mortal thoughts?

IN OTHER BRITISH NEWS: PJ Harvey's new album is out, LET ENGLAND SHAKE. And it's awesome, and all about England.  PJ Harvey is one of those eternally gutsy artist with the cajones to not only address her nation's slaughtering ways, but to dab herself in the blood like its stage make-up in a Bertolt Brecht pageant number. And Polly Jean's using her "White Chalk" falsetto still, making those of us who remember the awesome, deep, full-bodied sexuality with which she once sang lines like "Aaaaa Aaaah Eee /and you believe me!" Still it's pretty awesome and I spent the walk over here listening to it and imagining political cartoons comparing the States' fucked-up healthcare and education systems with England's far more advanced socialist network. America's fur-wrapped Academy voters may still be dreaming of tea with the queen and voting accordingly, but at least they got one thing right: England Ruled. Now we're ruled by someone called Mark Zuckerberg. THE SOCIAL NETWORK's theme will, I think, be lost on the Academy, who regard the internet as something devoutly to be feared, up there with all the other things that might symbolize handing over the keys to the Twilight generation.

Of course the age war is nothing new for Academy Award choices, and the British mix of conqueror and civilization, reserve and madness, inbreeding, tea, crumpets, assault and apology, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, jolly good quips and oppression is everything that 'youth' is not. THE KING'S SPEECH is adult... as adult as dull lectures, as decaffeinated tea, as not the sudden glorious death of Icarus but the slow, rotting flesh decay of the elderly statesman.

In that movie THE RULING CLASS for example, Peter O'Toole (above) is cured of of his Christ complex which had him loving all creatures and thinking himself God--and transformed into a draconian Jack the Ripper-type conservative, advocating the return of public flogging in the House of Lords -- in other words, he grows 'English' old boy, like Clockwork Alex in verso. Our Oscar voter may not have enough therapy under their belts to realize it, and it's too late because no one in the Ameristocracy attended Marxism 101 in college, just got automatic A's thanks to their dad's donation. Then again, maybe it's someone else that rigs the world... just what in the world is a Rothschild Zionist and who do I have to sacrifice to become one?

Read More

Nearer my Templar to Thee: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, BECKETT and THE BLIND DEAD

I never thought I'd be glad that parental over-protective hysteria is so rampant in this country, but thanks to widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations and the recently released documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN  there's finally a real answer to "Won't somebody think of the children!?" Hopefully the protests and awareness will spread amongst the uppity parents of the nation and gain force in showing up these protectors of incompetent, dangerously apathetic teachers, papal pedophiles, and other abusers and saboteurs of our children's welfare who hide behind tenure and other outdated legalities that protect the guilty and champion the mediocre.




And another thing: none of it's at all new! Let's take a look at BECKETT (1964, above), for example. Richard Burton is the jaded intellectual pal of Peter O'Toole's happy-go-lusty King Henry. Henry appoints Beckett (Burton) the archbishop of Canterbury in hopes of continuing his lascivious ways unhindered by marital rigmarole, but it all boils to a head real fast when Beckett gets all pious, giving away his fancy clothes and then protecting a pedophile priest! O'Toole wants to do right by the locals and send the priest out to be hanged, but Burton insists the priest go to the Vatican, for 'um', whatever amount of rosary-related penance the pope sees fit to assign.

Time for a quick personal anecdote: Of my 'group' from college, friends of friends who have since gone on to become doctors of psychiatry, professors of social work, professors, etc., a good portion of them were total flakes in undergraduate college, and it's hilarious to hear them solemnly and sanctimoniously preach the same stuff we used to make fun of... ala Burton in BECKETT. I'm not saying I'm any better but if I was Peter O'Toole I wouldn't trust them to screw in a light bulb and yet they're the one's with the degrees and certification higher than mine... and I'm jealous! An...an... and I blame society!

Tomb of the Blind Dead (1971)

Hey, another reason I'm not a doctor is that I hate studying and going to class, but I know something about the embattled world of academia and the difference between real thinkers and educators vs. professors who just protect their little niche: a lot of times they just sort of follow in some (long dead) real thinker's footsteps (see my "Kill All Jonesers"), and appoint themselves 'experts' on people like Wordsworth and Whitman and yet, were they to meet them in person, said profs would probably run away in disgust (Whitman I bet you smelled really bad). I used to see these types in AA, touting how program-perfect they are and while no, they never actually got drunk or liked to drink, they're sure they would have had a problem had they ever started down that road to ruin! So now they're fucking experts on sobriety and so glad their "nightmare" is over!" Dude, what nightmare? We used to joke about how leaving behind half-full beers was alcohol abuse, and on that level only are they 'problem' drinkers.

A lot of this problem could be solved by taking the status and dusty immunity of academic, medical and religious positions away, and adapting a broader socialist system, like Argentina's.  Last I heard, a doctor made around $400 a month, A MONTH, in Buenos Aires. A cab driver, maybe $125 a month, a teacher, $250... and they get by, cuz it's socialism. Here we're blessed with a capitalist system, wherein doctors and lawyers are supposed to be robbing us all blind; we're supposed to not be able to afford our rent. In Argentina, the doctors make house calls! They come over to look at your tonsils, have a mate', smoke a cigarette with you in the kitchen, use your phone to call in to the office, get the next address of a patient in need, and they're off, like firemen. Imagine if your house was on fire but you had to go the firehouse and fill out forms and show your insurance before they'd go out to your house? Absurd, right? Imagine if before a cop would come investigate your robbery you had to show him your police insurance card? Why is that more absurd to us than hospitals where patients die in the waiting room or are turned away to bleed to death in the streets? Imagine having to pay the cops for them to arrest a burglar in your house? Actually, if that was bribes you mean by paying, that would be Argentina, too. But why is that different than health insurance? Why are doctors and lawyers chosen more from rich parents who can afford medical school vs. true humanitarians and gifted healers who may have something to offer, but are too lazy to study and think cadavers are gross? 






Now let's move over to the priesthood and the issue of celibacy. I understand the motivation behind the vow of celibacy, but the celibacy thing should just be a natural result of being close to God. When God is near, sex falls away like a booster rocket, but only if the subject is truly dwelling 24/7 in the conscious grace of perfect love. Being called a priest does not automatically lift you beyond sexual desire, anymore than graduating college means you're an intellectual. If you're forced into the priesthood by fucked up parents and are horny as hell, not even allowed to masturbate by Catholic consensus, then you are a like a ticking time bomb. Why are celibate priests expected to somehow abstain from a basic human need? There's a reason straight guys get with other guys in prison - and a priesthood's no different. What I'm getting at is, you can't expect a dickhead to suddenly be a saint just because his parents paid his way to get a degree from the Sainthood Academy.

Here's a personal anecdote: as a child I had a lot of trouble learning to tie my shoelaces. I heard other kids and adults say that everyone knows how to tie their shoes by the time they are five years old. As I was already four and a half I just figured I'd wait it out. So on my fifth birthday I actually expected I'd just miraculously know how to tie them. I ran into the bathroom during my birthday party, untied my shoelace (which mom had tied, of course) and just assumed I would now magically know.

Needless to say, I didn't know how to tie them just because I was five. But I learned something even more valuable: you can't think that a socially-conferred title (like 'five' or 'professor') actually has any 'real' power to change you - "all children should be able to read by the time they're seven;" "all graduates from medical school must know how to fix a hernia;" "all teachers in the union are great educators" -- yet this is the party line towed by deans and union officials the nation over.

 Being five doesn't mean you can tie your shoes any more than being chosen as a priest means you are miraculously free of all sexual desire. If you have said desire and repress it, then look out, because all the praying in the world is only going to prolong the pressure cooking of your libido, like thinking you can hold a Nerf ball under water for 30 straight years and its never going to pop up and smack some poor kid in the face, just because he has a certificate that says 'No Nerf.'


Now it's easy in retrospect to forget that plenty of children grew up going to Catholic school without being molested. There are plenty of great humanitarian doctors and excellent teachers, and teachers' unions are a good thing as far as assuring reasonable pay rates and so forth, but once in place, the union should be ready to get out of the way and let bad teachers be fired, unions should not be championing incompetence, or forfeiting across the board raises in favor of being granted more control, which our union recently did, the equivalent of your boss saying 'your wife and I agreed you would take a pay cut but she'll get to control your life."

Now I'll even go out on a limb here and say that most teachers who have tenure are awesome in every way, which is why they get tenure, but a very small and certain few got it by chicanery, string-pulling and just applying every year for decade after decade until a dean is overly forgiving and just gives everyone who applies tenure, and now there are 2-3 teachers who never should have gotten it and you can't get rid of them; or they get tenure and are great but then they let a little taste of power turn them into litigious, self-righteous grudge-carriers, kind of like old BECKETT. He was great as a teacher/drinking buddy but turn him into an archbishop/union rep and he's a menace to the public interest. Huffington's Kelli Goff writes about this in her review of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN: 

In a scene that will make every person's skin crawl, Guggenheim interviews a former superintendent who recounts attempting to fire teachers who were caught on video reading the newspaper as their students sat waiting to learn, and another who placed a child's head in a urinal. After firing the teachers in question -- like any normal person would -- the superintendent and district were forced to rehire them -- with back pay -- due to tenure. (Kelli Goff, Huffington Post, 9/28/10)

Peter O'Toole's Henry is pretty sure old Beckett's just fallen in love with his new sense of power and is not actually believing all that holier than thou business, but he's wrong, Burton's Beckett has bought into the rigmarole hook line and sinker. And that's the problem with power in the wrong hands whether in Beckett's, tenured faculty, the clergy, or the unions. O'Toole's nutty king is worthy of power because he wears all his evil up front: he's good inside with an evil shell. Burton's Beckett hangs back and looks pious, but he's the real danger in the realm: he's evil inside and pious/good outside. Give him a title and he'll be crazy enough to take it seriously. Such people are dangerous to all concerned, blind to their own absurd sense of inflated self-importance, dead to the compassion their role demands, afflicted with what Lacan might call "signifier-blindness" (1) - BLIND DEAD, in fact!.

The first of a trilogy, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1971) involves ghost-zombies of old Portuguese Knights Templar chasing and killing all the sinful locals who trespass around their old Malta stomping grounds, wrapping their skeleton hands around all the lovely ladies and gigolo boyfriends,  most of whom behave in such a dumb, unassuming way as to be ridiculously easy to kill. It's a perfect metaphor for our current situation: we may be aware that these pious undead union Templars are out there, slowly shambling towards us on their slow mo horses, but unless we stop behaving like easy prey and start rising up en masse to demand radical reform of the tenure system, unions and the church, we'll be slaughtered by Templars, Draconians, and Freemasons, and our children will be abused systematically until the last spark of life drains from their dewy eyes. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!??

Until we take drastic steps like the above and/or failing that, getting out the torches and pitchforks, we're like those vice-engorged Portuguese in TOMBS, jetsetting ourselves and our children up for a royal trimming by the Templars. The idiocy of the humans in this movie is appalling. They're all alone out there and surrounded by zombies, and the guy goes: "Honey, you wait here. I'm going to go check out that weird screaming noise out there in the dark," leaving her of course completely vulnerable. Is this not what we say to our families, still trusting in the decency of the status quo to protect us? Honey you have to go to school - you have to listen to your teachers. And the teacher is always right, no one believes the kid in a me vs. him argument. Cuz they're teachers. They know things, until of course they're caught seducing a child - then they're hung out to dry. But what about boring a child? What about ignoring a child?




NOTES
1. Like snow-blindness, rather than like being blind to signifiers.

Read More