America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton

The new Lana Del Rey album is out this week, like the dark ebb of the Stygian tide, and with it "controversy" so perfectly-pitch that Del Rey and her salivate-on-cue detractors must be in on some cosmic PR joke. Take it from one who didn't, from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned hipster who missed all his chances, it is cool to die young, whatever Frances Bean may say. The only freedom from irrelevance lies in the obsidian wind that whistles up through gratings along that other sewer's shore. In death, in dreams, comes the realization--coveted by all damaged artists--one has really 'made it.' Once past life, one's art is past time, and a great pastime art the movies. There is no difference between living through the movies and living through death. If you're writing for the edification of your future selves rest assured, in peace, they will pretend to have read it. But first, your death is needed. Lana Del Rey knows. When the artist pursues fame only after he or she's dead, one is free from the need for validation. Surrender is the only true courage, which does not mean being a pussy about it.

And from Lana Del Rey's perfectly framed early 60s car crashes we can stagger down an off-road shortcut through the fifties, and all the way to the WW2 graveyard of Val Lewton.

It was no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started around yesterday-ish while simultaneously TCM played Val Lewton's acclaimed low-key masterwork THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943) as part of an apparent devil day, shoe-"horned" between THE DEVIL'S BRIDE (AK THE DEVIL RIDES OUT 1968) and TO THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942), which I mention only to tie in WWII, as Val Lewton's best work was made in 1942-43, suffused with a deep paranoia about being left back in the States, so far from the action no bombs could reach him, and so needing to dredge the war back up from the ground like collective unconscious crude, like a modern art exhibit after the public has drifted home and the main lights are off and a half-blind janitor slowly mops up, pausing at strange noises, the crumpled up invites and provenance lists rustling like stage tumbleweeds.

from top: "Summertime Sadness," I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, "Tropico"

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both understand the ebb tide of abandonment and death, and how when it washes through the land, the crap's washed away and all that remains are the immovable immortal icons are revealed: Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus, all loom on Lana's heavenly plane like death coaches (in her video "Tropico," the Wayne impersonator babbles on with banal advice). On Val Lewton's plane, there's no need for living pop culture icons --instead all that remains after the death tide are immortal archetype statuses from Greek and Egyptian myth: statues of Cerberus, Set, and San Sebastian (above): heaven, hell, and the dark doorway between them motionless and waiting in crevices of the stone stairways abd rustling canefields and even in a calypso song. His idols are literally etched from rock; all-seeing through blank eyes, demons that are only vaguely fleetingly visible in the shadows, black on black like the cover of White Light / White Heat. Until they materialize into a sudden stray light.

So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy of Del Rey's I say hey, man, be grateful her death drive is there, in your sights, because all she has to do is pout, turn slowly away, and take a backwards slow mo dive off the Hollywood sign and through Diane Selwyn's pale blue skylight and it's YOU who die, not her. Once you can't see her you'll know she's behind you, with a gun or sharp sword. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium, or Visa Platinum. You can follow her around like Boris Karloff obsessing over the hottie Greek peasant maybe-vampire in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945), you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs reigning down torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on her; you can drip a whole nation of self-appointed sanity over her sun roof... it does not slow your rush to death one hourglass grain. And it's probably just what she wants.

Del Rey knows, like the Shadow, and she knows that memories and film are the same thing and that every home movie of happier times must speed up as you approach the black hole realizations that love has flown and death is rushing forward in its absence. She even casts herself as the bad guy most of the time, as in "Summertime Sadness" --driving her lesbian ex-lover to jump off a bridge ("kiss me once before you go" - don't mean she's gettin' on a plane, sister) while she pouts in fog machine student films and home movies that repeat faster around certain points as the weeping lover falls, finally impressing Lana Del Rey enough to fall after her, the doubling inherent in an L.A. lesbian affair fully embraced- - drowning in each other's reflections in each other's eyes, their lashes a thousand penitent memories striping inescapable facts onto Hollywood's naked back; they come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece MULHOLLAND DR. (below); hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942); Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring/sacrifice deferral in LEOPARD MAN (1943) and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

It's fate, baby. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool: there's a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal, ever so briefly. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize), she wears a fur coat that when she changes tightens in around her and, if you look close at her body lying on the ground outside the panther cage, she looks like a bearskin rug with a teddy bear's head sewn to the side, but we only see it from far off, in the shadows. In ISLE OF THE DEAD we can see, if we look very close, the way the undead Mrs. Aubyn seems to materialize out of the moonlit reflections on a stone wall, like she's only semi-corporeal but never in that common special effects way that would make it obvious.

Lewton has a Russian's love of great literature that extends deeper down than the average bourgeois tenure track, deeper even than the blood (his real name is Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon), deeper than the cauldron from which are dredged all our hopes and fears, and our tomorrows are like a thousand yesterdays. And great literature is always about death. It's where we go to prepare, to remember that a vast elevator full of blood is always a skinsuit away, and the only freedom comes in whether to ignore it out of fear, or embrace it out of courage, love, and rock and roll who-gives-a-fuck-it. This is where she's coming from with her comments about being a feminist and thinking it's cool to die young. Would you get mad at David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Hemingway for saying those things?

Now, if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. That would be different. But my dad was killed by doctors (he died, after all, in the hospital). At home with an ocean of bourbon and ginger ale he was immortal. He kept death close; it couldn't sneak up on him. But that hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirit. It opened the door right up and coasted him through while his back was turned. When we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only those for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us the only cure-all is music, literature and films. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood because she embraces the theatrical aspects of emotional anguish, with her not as the sufferer but the object of the longing; her faux-period home movies painstaking in their iconic recreations, like the accident fetishists in CRASH, and she's the car.

From top: CRASH, LEOPARD MAN

I love Lana because of her pro-death chanteuse-rock fuckitness and have no problem with it all being a persona put on by a failed pop star named Lizzy Grant. If it didn't resonate we wouldn't be talking about her, and if her story is really a confession, then so is mine, though not, apparently, Rolling Stone's and Jezebel's -- who were both once edgy in their ways, I hear. Now they're both 'institutions' successful enough to feel they have something to lose, or even kill to protect (see CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice). Lana Del Rey is a persona that has nothing whatsoever to protect, so can engage in a kind of high wire free-form self-immolation theater. Animas with respectable DSM-IV counts are plentiful but then they have kids; the persona is replaced, even grown out of --but is it really growing or just doubling and diluting? How many great sexy young actresses have we lost to their children? Even when these starlets come back to us they're not the same: their dangerous heart--that thrilling gleam in their eye--now exists off camera, transferred to vessels still into the mewling and puking into nurse's arms stage.

It shoulda been me, puking. I had to quit her, my whiskey... sweet whiskey. My sober life, that's my cross to bear, my LSD Albert Hoffman problem child, the thing that robbed me of the gleam. My lost Lenore. But I'm not a star. No one even notices.

But I notice, and I still haven't forgiven Angelina Jolie, or Liz Phair. Ladies, you broke my heart!

Never stop smoking, or drinking - even knowing both are poisons,
for you've spilled more than secrets (bottom: SEVENTH VICTIM)

Now you love your children the way you used to love the camera.
Now your love is funneled to some off-camera cradle.
Which makes you worthless to the camera! Love the camera, o favored image!
We love you back through it.
But we can't love you through your kids' eyes,
for we are not John Cusak in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH.
Then again, what else would you do with yourself once we eventually moved on?
You'd have to leap off the edge.
Like Lana Del Rey does, but she does it in advance of your gaze, and so
you will never move on
from her.
-----
In a semi-deserted Bijou n 1943
a nervous young assembly line worker uses her sick day,
watches SEVENTH VICTIM or THE LEOPARD MAN
and the shadows around her, where a boyfriend or husband would be,
 onscreen in the shadows she sees him, beckoning...

Lana Del Rey is the eyes that discern changing shapes in that darkness, and the darkness.
On digital nothing escapes notice, even the void hidden within the void.

This is the girls

That's why Val Letwon's morbid preoccupation with death is so relevant. Using deep black shadows he reveals that the thing wartime America most fears isn't death but loneliness, abandonment, being entombed --all of which is brilliantly realized by the cheap B-movie sets where even the sky seems indoors (and is)--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country with only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the bookending oceans.

And then... Frank Sinatra's voice like a phantom echo; his mastery of mic technique giving his programs an almost unworldly amniotic sound markedly different from the rest, welcoming you to join him in the pulsing warm fog between two shores: "if our romance should break up / I hope I never wake up /if you are but a dream." You are. Hardly even born yet. There in the unrealized amniotic slumber of the Stygian crossing, as Sinatra's songs coast overhead in ceaseless tachyons towards the past, you can hear your father's conception, buried in the sunken space between the words. 

The way Lana keeps her expression blank --she does it for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes --they accept our shadow's projection, just as the country as a whole during the war years became, in some smaller areas, a ghost town ripe for metaphor: the younger healthier men all drained away by old Europe's vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left are German expat directors (and actors to play Nazis) and, as stars in the B's are the tenderfoots, the old men, the crippled, the meek, the short and reedy. And everywhere, in the air wafting from Europe, the smell of death --the inevitability of it--in ways we can't imagine with our current wars and their paltry kill levels (we might lose a few dozen thousand but nothing close to Europe and Asia's combined sixty million in World War Two). Only a full scale nuclear war would even put a dent in us now. There could be a dozen earthquakes hundred of million dead, and that would still only be the same % as we lost in WW2, a spit in the bucket. Half of us could die and we'd only be where we were in the seventies, when we first started to worry about overpopulation. It's not death that dooms our planet, but life. Our blind clinging to health like panicked survivors swamping the lifeboat. If we could all just die like gentlemen, like the great Solomon Guggenheim, if Lana Del Rey can lead us by power of bad example, and if we leave right now, we just might make it.

We won't. In the words of young John Connor, "we're not gonna make it...are we?"

Echo of my undead soldier (from top) Del Rey, DEATHDREAM

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton know, too, we're not going to make it, and they see the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema, echoing like a ghost to let us know that even after our future death, the movies shall survive. Del Rey makes music for our ghost to haunt the wasteland with, but she's all alone, like any phantom. As Pitchfork notes she's "an utterly distinctive figure in popular music, not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely." There are a few artists over the years who have explored similar ghost transmissions: Miles Davis' trumpet echoing through the primordial pre-ears-to-hear-it howling of an uncooled earth in Agharta; Kubrick's "Midnight, the Stars and You"; Lynch's Roy Orbison songs and Julee Cruise... but none live and breathe within that ghost transmission - none play on the idea that even if you weren't alive to hear them sing, the sound is encoded in  the crystal receivers at the core of your DNA.  

Lana Del Rey--her "self" as persona, her videos, her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage--returns Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, down Route 66. Her music is ideal for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, long drives with tearful anorexic cutters who you love but cannot save, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dean. Without Morissey-moping but rather with hair done up and radio playing Elvis with JFK convertible top down, smoking, hovering over Marilyn's lifeless body like a wraith, hiring an actor to dress like Elvis and sneer while rubbing against the microphone stand in front of the John Wayne's rawhide coffin before falling backwards off the Hollywood sign in slow motion, falling, but never landing, to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's SEVENTH VICTIM, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway. And death + death = life.

"National Anthem" - note vivid attention to period detail and home movie posing 

while at the same time revising JFK into a contemporary-ish sexy rapper, and 

gaggle of cute biracial children. It's got nothing to do with the video narrative, which 

like so many of her best stuffkind of recalls the big final 'bells' montage 

moments of DON'T LOOK NOW, or the last seconds of 

THE BLACK SWAN spread to five minutes. 

What Del Rey has done is to embrace the sacrificial phoenix icon of the damaged hottie in ways Lindsay Lohan (who instead let Oprah set her chronically bouncing back from relevance) never understood well enough to capitalize on. When it comes right down to it, Lohan is sharp, talented, and ballsy, but not smart, one of those people mystified why they always land in jail. Lana Del Rey avoids the trap of co-dependence or prison or rehab by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, the Baby New Year of New Death Drive. She is her own exploiter, the manager of her singular vision --where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers by promising to get help, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles, but it's an act, man. She acts it so she doesn't have to be it, whereas Lindsay be's it but can't figure out that she should act it (rather than vainly trying to act "normal." If you get angry at Del Rey and think she's fake, or are worried it's real, well - all your rants and raves will do is boost her hit count --as the boost in album sales she got after her hostilely-received 2012 performance on SNL (see "Kiss Me Del Rey"). 

The Leopard Man

Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave - so he doesn't have to go for real. He has to prove himself somehow, feeling the terrible guilt reported by so many stay-at-home men during World War Two. The best you can do if you're Lewton is try to capture death's lightning spirit in a statue watching over lost souls, understanding in this the entire primal purpose behind art, a totemic sacrifice to the elder gods, a proxy, a giant burning man made of straw. And so the true artist never hides the skull in the ice cubes because when the death wish is externalized for posterity one achieves immortality, Death is pleased that you've honored him and so spares you for another year, the living ghost retina burn outline of his long ago flown-free Firebird cohering from the flames.

"Summertime Sadness" 

Del Rey trusts we're not going to kill ourselves just because she says it would a sweet gesture, would show her we really care, that we've played her lyrics backwards and prepared our pyres. That's her whole secret. How many films other than Lewton's and Lana's with this level of guts? I mean aside from THE BLACK SWAN? I sympathize with Kurt's daughter but really, Rolling Stone, it's you should be ashamed soliciting angry responses from a girl who never got to know her father any better than we did --to me that doesn't reflect badly on LDR's statement, or FBC's retort, only on your journalistic 'ethics,' RS. You who were a once mighty countercultural institution (even smart enough to be aware of the paradox in that phrase) but are now reduced to running back and forth passing gossip like some tattletale angling to be ground zero of a viral thread, leaping down the throat of anyone speaking out against the principles of bland nanny state life-for-life's-sake-PG-tedium, of rock as sanitized of genuine rebellion. Maybe you should go run another cover piece about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together again! Like all the other fallen giants, you've let 'trending' become the new version of stock market panics, all genuine rebellion trampled underfoot. Well let me tell you about another bunch of tramplers, and the shit they've come to trample is the flimsy wool over your own eyes! 

"National Anthem," ISLE OF THE DEAD

Most filmmakers and artists and musicians think largely of themselves, of their fortune and fame or lack thereof. But some of us know well that every film, post, or album we make will survive our own death, and therefore we know black magic's promise of eternal youth, of the ghost in the machine, the threading projector beam light measuring death out in still image ribbons that give the projected the only immortality there is, the phantom echo, the Sinatra ghost broadcasts still flying out into space. Compared to this eventual unearthing, any reward of fame in this lifetime is paltry. Some of us know we're dead already, some like Val Lewton and Lana Del Rey. They will not pretend that what the camera records was ever alive. They will not pretend life is just death at 24 frames per second. They know it's also the reverse, that the unafraid to die must enact rituals of death and transfiguration --for these rituals endure like the Zapruder footage will endure any memory of a living JFK. Watch THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN and a few Lana Del Rey videos in the same night (preferably the older ones--"National Anthem," "Video Games," "Born to Die," and "Summertime Sadness") and before you die, you shall see the America of ghosts. 

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Streaming Bullets: STREET FIGHTER, THE EXPENDABLES 2, MARWENCOL, DOGS OF WAR, BATTLE OF BRITAIN

Halloween is over. The gloom of depressing November descends. If it warms up and is a beautiful fall day like today, don't trust it, private! It's a trap! That fall foliage is the color of death, those leaf piles hide ninjas in autumnal-colored shinobi shōzoku! 

Stay inside, instead, with Netflix streaming. You will learn things. Did you know pink lipstick is never out of style in combat? (see Walken, driving above). War and action films are an essential ingredient in any red-eyed, white-pallored, blue-balled American male, and Netflix has enough to make any armchair general's saber rattle in its sheath. I recently spent some time with a few, picked both by me and a few choice allies. Private, hit the lights... 

The Expendables 2

Starring: Everyone

2012

****

It's typical of the series' self-effacing humor that this group calls themselves Expendables. very A-list action star (and even B-list) of the last 30 years shows up, riffing on their Hollywood personas with a wry chuckle and (probably) working for scale + percentage. As with the first there's a refreshing lack of cliche or complications: no incompetence, betrayal, sudden death of best friends, tedious, tenuous familial connection (no wives bemoaning that their husbands are never home), no moral confusion over running over innocent bystanders or any of the other crap that makes real life war and most war movies such a drag. When you send these guys in, you're not looking for prisoners or honored border treaties, you're expecting massive enemy body counts and first-rate dudes-in-a-pack humor. They'll deliver. The spirit of Howard Hawks all but lights Sly's stogie! 

Most A-list stars here show up only for a few big scenes, but Stallone carries it all on his back like a champ. He's pushing 70 but is in great shape, has a wondrous sense of self-deprecating humor. Does a man good to see his masterful ease with a smoke in the dark of deserted restaurant the night before a big attack, or to hear his tectonic plate of a body ripple with a single seismographic chuckle at zingers about his age. The camaraderie he generates around him rings as true as Rio Bravo and one feels, as a man, reborn in it. We don't have to worry about anyone getting the jump on him more than once, for he is the man. We can relax and dig the carnage. We're here because we're tired of blind realism and liberal sermons. At the tail end in age and politics of the demographic these films are made for, I can tell you I want cathartic explosions and killing, not suspense or 'bad faith' guilt. There's no need for our films to heed laws of averages or national diplomacy. They just go blasting in, blasting out, and do it all their own way, in their own plane, on their own time, with their own weapons, even their own lighters - everything is cool and black, including their badass plane. Their whole life aesthetic seems to exist in the empty space between a Jack Daniels bottle (the old kind), a pack of Marlboro reds, and a Zippo while shooting pool in your friend's basement. And if that's not ideal for an action movie I don't know what is. See it while your significant other is asleep, so you can blast it through headphones, the expensive kind with heavy bass, so you can feel each boom, bang, and breath of tough guy bonding, because that kind of Hawksian men-in-a-group lived-in overlapping dialogue dynamic is all but extinct. 

Dogs of War 

Starring: Christopher Walken, JoBeth Williams

1980

 ***

Like a prelude to The Expendables, these mercenaries, led by Christopher Walken, like to decimate their opponent with superior firepower after much superior strategizing. Though in Dogs there's also lots of planning, running, loading, and aiming. The Expendables skips the whole recon mission, jail and torture and release, the stealthy journey forth in boats that have to pass through customs with all the weapons hidden in oil drums, etc. But if you want to know the minutiae involved with overthrowing an evil African dictator and installing a western corporate interest-friendly African dictator this is your better bet.

Best of all, if you love the Deer Hunter but are dubious over Walken's character's survival on the Russian roulette circuit (which, as I've written, was frustratingly unrealistic, both historically and via the law of averages), you can imagine Walken's mercenary career as a much more logical and realistic alternative way to express a PSTD-related death wish. And when, after a whole movie worth of build-up he busts out that crazy repeating grenade launcher and practically destroys the whole compound singlehandedly, it's pretty damned cathartic. Walken is magnificent, even when he turns noble. 

Also, his NYC life is well-etched in that uniquely 70s 'when the city was still dangerous' modality, so that's another plus, since when isn't it worth it watching Walken hustle around the mean streets in a black coat with the collar up? Why hasn't he ever made a movie with Scorsese? It seems like he must have. JoBeth Williams is the girl he makes idle plans to get away from it all with, and she doesn't believe him anymore, but tosses him a hotel room lay. And he teaches a wayward local black kid to work for his living. What... eva. Time to pack up the gear and go. I remember this film well as one of the first VHS rentals my dad ever brought home. Though I was best friends with a Soldier of Fortune-reading nutcase (see: Rage of Huberty), and loved war comics, I didn't like Dogs at the time --too much plot, not enough jumping out of exploding watchtowers in slow motion. But now I need a slow lead up to really feel the cathartic unleashing.

Street Fighter

Starring: Jean Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, Kylie Minogue

1994

***1/2

Say what you want about this film, like BOMB (Maltin), ** (imb), or 13% (rottentomatoes), my girl and I think Streetfighter is delightful romp for a lazy Saturday when you can't summon the will to vacuum or go out in the rain. If you haven't seen it you might confuse it with all those first person shooter films like Doom, where everyone's trapped in a locked-down maze of drippy subterranean tunnels and breaking bones. This is a different game altogether. This one is pretty sunny and merry, especially with those divine powder blue outfits on the coded UN guys. It's got that international style, the Jackie Chan film aesthetic, but is also populated with crazy villains and stunning international portfolio of a cast: Kylie Minogue as Van Damme's right hand woman ass-kicker; Raul Julia laughing maniacally in red gestapo cap, black cape and silver gloves, demolishing the awesome customized tail fin/red skull scenery. In addition to ransoming a bin full of hostages, Cool Raul is making a steroid-pumped monster (from one of JCVD's former buddies) in the basement of his evil fortress. But the fortress also is full of high places and chain pulleys to swing down from in ripped derring do. Great lines like "General Byson, he's a bad guy?" top off the blood sundae.

In some ways it reminds me of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China only not as good. What is? Countless dumber, worser action films escape the critical hostility lauded on poor Street Fighter. Why? Is it a global conspiracy? Every evil critic in the world, my right hand woman and I challenge you! Vivat gloria stupiditatem! Raul Julia's last theatrical film, dedicated to him with the words vaya con dios. And you still deny its godhood?

Marwencol

Documentary about Mark Hogencamp

2010

*****

Not only is this a fascinating psychological examination, but it says so much about the opiate-like effect imagining combat, explosions, the threat of immanent death, desire, and most of all, camaraderie on even the average male psyche, mine included. See, I love WW2 because it was the last time our freedom really was at stake, for real. And we won by working together like our collective and personal life depended on it, rather than lording it over the poker table with our nuclear flush we were almost out of chips, so the game mattered more, and so our victory was and remains the last time we as a nation rejoiced unanimously, red and blue states one mass out in the streets, in a spontaneous outpouring of joy and relief. I used WW2 as a mantra myself, during my squirrely tween phase in the slasher-filled early 80s. Just thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury, or The Unknown Soldier or the tank corps. in All-Out War kept me calm. Seeing a film on TV like Battle of the Bulge or Force 10 from Navarone could keep me less spooked as I tried to sleep in the slasher-filled 80s. 

Mark Hogencamp shares this weird warm fondness for a time and place he wasn't at --that ties into it too, we get to play dead or unborn. Given a weird brain damage after a near-fatal beating thrown by a random cabal of douches, he's found an outlet for his madness in creating Marwencol, a fictional Belgian town occupied by both allied and Nazi forces at various times, overrun with sexy spies and good time taverns, and Hogencamp gets such a naturalized feel from his action figures, getting the right amount of dried mud on the jeep tires, etc., that it's truly astounding. He's an inspiration for all outsider artists.... just forget any notion you'll ever be discovered and lose yourself completely in your awesome art, and let it keep you sane. Follow your craziest dreams, even if they lead you over a magical cliff back to WW2 or at least a New York art gallery.

------

Battle of Britain

Starring: Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, Laurence Olivier,
Susannah York, everyone else

 1969

**

This film shuffles around an all-star Brit cast and a lovingly restored bundle of German Heinkels, Stukas and Messerschmidts tangling with the Brits' beloved Spitfires, which were light enough to bounce like rubber balls on the landing fields but had great speed and maneuverability, including absurdly strong climbing rates thanks to the Rolls Royce Merlin Engines. We see Spitfires polishing off Heinkels by the dozen, occasionally getting nicked by a turret gunner or fighter escort, bailing out over the Thames, or whatever.

The thing is, has England ever really had so much clear weather, ever? There's no more than a handful of clouds in the whole film, and no anti-aircraft guns are ever seen and only two barrage balloons show up. Across the channel, Goering rants and raves and struts while an invading army of about three guys in a raft stand around waiting to invade.

Still, this was the age before CGI and while the explosions as planes are shot out of the sky are clearly superimposed, it's because the planes are all real, restored war artifacts, and one gets a surprisingly clear idea of how it all worked. Though it's odd that after a few months of preparation the Germans bomb airfields that are a) undefended, not even with an alarm, b) totally free of ack ack, anti-aircraft guns, c) even the sound of approaching bombers or the sounds of bombs dropping don't seem to rouse the crew; they shuffle around in search of an unbroken tea cup while the hangers burn, perhaps lacking a clear direction cue from the overly-engaged director, Guy Hamilton.


Of the woman in the cast, Susannah York fares well as a high ranking air traffic officer who continually denies her pesky husband's insistence she transfer out to safer Scotland. Good for her! And what's up with her mod hair cut? No time to find out! Here comes the Heinkels for another round of battle, so similar to the ones that came before they might be just reusing whole sequences.

And after enough dogfight scenes and ground support chatter have been contrasted, Goering calls it off, takes a train back to Berlin from the Pais de Calais, and the film ends.

We win!

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