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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Acidemic Best Films of the 1980s

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and I found one --the past.

In fact, goin' back thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s! NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. And now skate parks...

To me, it begins and ends with the VCR.

I had to assemble this list to combat the best of the 80s lists on the web that all either include nostalgia-invoking propaganda like Ferris Bueller (which I loathe on principle) and Raiders of the Lost Ark or acts of admittedly brilliant pop like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment.  Don't think I don't love some of them too, in my fashion and can quote them endlessly (because of the VCR), namely, Tootsie and Raiders: Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed. Blow it up! Blow it back to God! That is one nutty hospital. Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them! I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company. Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, right now? Michael, I begged you to get some therapy. The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around. Wait, that's Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated it. Much like most of that decade, at least until 1987 when we discovered we didn't have to live in it at all. We could hide in the 60s.

10. PASSION (1982)Directed by Jean Luc Godard

We invariably come to any film with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography. Godard assumes this and intentionally screws with our narrative-based expectations. We're made aware of how dogmatically we're conditioned by a lifetime of filmgoing and story hearing. When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, we have cliche; when a film deliberately screws with them we have Godard: a medieval knight on a horse is seen trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden while racing a horse around a circular spinning scenery wheel --thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will we see this chick being carried off? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense, used to a thousand permutations of the same violation. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera; the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman; he rides after her; she climbs up into the lighting rigging to escape; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke... (more)

9. AKIRA (1988)

Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira occurs in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe and peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, flying vehicles, telekenetic mutants, and teddy bear hallucinations, all so gorgeously illustrated that time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and HDMI-ready flesh tendrils reach out, connecting your tongue directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between misfits, one of whom goes crazy, but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse as government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in the crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode.

8. MOONSTRUCK (1987)

Directed by Norman Jewison

Does a mainstream film like this really belong on a disreputable site like mine, you ask? How dare you. What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but seeing it on TCM a few weeks ago showed me it hasn't aged well. We've grown hipper about patriarchal subtext, thanks in large part to Molly Haskell. Dustin Hoffman's whole schtick, that he's a better mother than Meryl Streep in Kramer Vs. Kramer and that that he knows more about feminism than all women in Tootsie; and also that awful Stephen Bishop song ("It Might Be You") by itself is enough to keep it off this list. But Moonstruck looks to the great Italian operas for its soundtrack, and it's the best Cher role ever; her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles. He was a relative unknown at the time but brings such mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "I'm going to take you to da bed" that we all would have fallen off a cliff for him if he asked. Between this and Raising Arizona (also 1987) and The Vampire's Kiss (1988), Cage's effect on us was akin to what Brando in Streetcar must have been 30 years before, same mix of madness, heat, wit, beauty, and ferocity all unleashed at the right time to electrify an entire generation. Interestingly enough, all three are dark comedies, though Jewison's is dark literally, a beautiful palette of black clothes and nights, which makes overflowing with color and character balanced without need for animosity, climaxing in a family breakfast where all grievances are aired, love declared, and Olympia Dukakis steals the film with little more than exasperated but resigned sighs. Forget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating back-to-back Italian-American chicks at the time. If you have to hate a sweet optimistic comedy from the 80s, hate Tootsie! Telling me it must be you / telling me it must be you / all of my life / RIFFS! / YEAH, RIGHT!

7. MATADOR (1986)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

His fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodóvar from post-Franco celebratory punk shock cinema anarchist to something infinitely darker, yet more tender and compassionate as well. After a disturbing credit sequence involving masturbation to a slasher film highlight reel, we find gored ex-toreador Diego (Nacho Martinez) lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) killing her lover in just such a way. A disturbing juxtaposition of imagery to be sure, but then as it plays out Almodóvar adds a small minor key piano motif and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level melancholy reverie. These two sick fucks need each other in ways that make the suicide pact of Romeo and Juliet seem a second tier booty call. Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, a solar eclipse, and oblique fashion show commentary on Spain's post-Franco identify crisis all pave the way forward to a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores your faith in cinema. Dub it downer if you want but then you'd best run back under the censor's skirts for protection, puta madre, because cinema's true heart is darkness, not sentimentality. With: a jovenes Antonio Banderas as Diego's repressed, psychic, vertigo-stricken protege; Eva Cobo as the model girlfriend who dresses like a red cape men follow to the sword; Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave; and the astonishing Bibi Andersen as a Titania-esque flower girl. Almodóvar himself cameos as a fashion designer. They're all great but the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and Serna's luxuriantly bloodthirsty femme fatale (Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast). Most American fans of Almodóvar came around with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000) but rich, hilarious and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador, to the bloody grave.

 6. EXCALIBUR (1981)

Directed by John Boorman

Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few dozen viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it on a pan and scan. Thanks to the beautiful blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, but even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the natural magic, and inklings of how desire and jealousy can wreck the noblest intentions, and the stirring manly grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide. See it again and bask in its Jungian archetypal richnesss. Director John Boorman stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players (incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry) all drinking the same Wolfram von Eisenbach-laced Kool-Aid through glistening lenses that make the armor gleam like mirrors. See it again and become a fan of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Ring cycle, which I love so much because of this movie it made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).

5. L'AMOR BRAQUE (1985)

Directed by Andrzej Zulawski

L'amour braque is a 1985 gloss punk-style French action movie of sorts, falling between Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990 (with which it shares the amazing Tcheky Karyo) while helping itself to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, cocaine snorted off the legs of whores, Brecht-fast emotional eleven scale butoh Panic Theater frothing at the mouth, and smashing of stuff, all in all a high-octane end game for the entirety of the European nouvelle vague, with actors raving and cavorting, trashing the sets and badmouthing the bourgeoisie while rolling around in the street, twitching herky jerky. Typically 80s synth stabs invoke Hong Kong and Mondo Vision's subtitles keep up brilliantly with Zulawski's poetic post-structural dialogue. For relatively un-intoxicated bros expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity, finding the end frenzy of Antichrist stretched to feature length. Action fans who wondered -- as I did -- if Karyo was just a dud actor after his stone-faced blank of a performance in Nikita will cry for joy as the man tears it up like a dozen Oscar Jaffes on a cocaine and whiskey bender one minute and care about his suffering, on the next. 

The story finds easygoing Czech refugee Leon (Francis Huster) spontaneously adopted by an insane bank robber (presumably) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of gibbering, joking, Shakespeare-quoting Arab terrorists. The beautiful Sophie Marceau is their mutual obsession, yet another Lynch pin in Zulawski's string of love triangles. She's rich, damaged, nymphomaniacally insane, and proceeds to destroy half of France while pursuing her ancient vengeance against a ritzy conglomerate. Meanwhile Leon's hot cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean) competes for his attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull". (more)

4. BLUE VELVET (1986)
Directed by David Lynch

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found it disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek that helped me unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't mere anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to occupy mom's breathing rate on a whim.

Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell lip syncing Roy Orbison while Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their abuse. Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open,' his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment.

3. THE LITTLE MERMAID (1989)
Directed by Ron Clements

If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, it reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time. Voiceover work is uniformly strong (the congested kid bad-acting the voice of Flounder being the only exception) espcially the glorious Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll like a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Elaine Stritch, Margo Channing and Ethel Mermen. And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth since The Wizard of Oz. It's universal, yet we all feel it belongs only to us, that it's about us, and that's what myth should be.

2. THE SHINING (1980)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary to itself discussing the film's myriad meanings (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby), and I've got my own each new viewing uncovering new layers of meaning and madness. The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrance family each falls into a separate madness. With no direct link to the social order present to keep them anchored--whether to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds who are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing!) Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack goes off the deep end; in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy' he's compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can escape into the past; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' response from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).

1. COME AND SEE (1985)

1985 - Dir. Elem Klimov

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.

As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our relative humanity. Politics, sides, none of it mattered compared to the horror of the camps, the sheer monstrous scale of it. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound us non-Nazis together. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted leer of a horrified face, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema.

2. CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

Directed by John Milius

Fuck it, I'm putting this in. We now know that 1982 was the single greatest year for sci fi and fantasy, giving us Blade Runner, The Thing, Road Warrior, Cat People, to name just a few. But of them all, for me, Conan has best survived the winds of change and become a classic as enduring as that ancient king's sword. The dead set opposite of many of the artier films in this list, it uses all the narrative tricks modernism eschews but brings such a heady focus, such an enraptured attention to even the smallest details, that repeat viewings just continue to reveal facets--especially in beautiful widescreen anamorphic and with some cut scenes restored. And best of all, surprisingly enough, is the love story between Valeria and Conan, one so touching it's been making fanboys of a certain age weep for the last 30 years. (more)

  3. REPO MAN (1984)

Directed by Alex Cox

Long before there was straight-edge, goth, emo, and granola, we just had the one thing - punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. Alien conspiracies, oblique metatextual greek chorus TV commentary, Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody ('generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and a Lou Reed Live video I had, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "let's just go do the job" when going off to score booze, and "I blame society" when we failed. The Criterion blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic. I still write within its kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on blu-ray just because he's in it and it's almost a prequel.

 4. PLATOON (1986)

Directed by Oliver Stone

It's impossible to describe the effect this had on America and me at the time but I'll try: I was a sophomore in college in 1986, in upstate NY, where psychedelic molds and tie-dyes grow wild and free and my hippie-ish posse and I were all in the class America in the 60s (which PS- I failed). We had to see it while it was still in the theater, as homework. We called for a cab, piled in, smoked a joint with the driver at his request -- and the mushrooms we'd taken an hour earlier were kicking in by the time we sat down in the dark - our heightened sense giving the amazing jungle foley work an extra 3-D surround boost: every humming bug and footstep dripping with possible ambush menace; humanity's potential for raw violent evil about to be unleashed palpable in the jungle shimmer. We howled with relief when Sheen finally finds some a tent where everyone's smoking weed. Later, my buddy Jason had to leave for awhile when Bunny says those immortal words, "Sarge, did you see the way his head busted open like that?" But I was enthralled, the psilocybin in my brain giving me rare access to the feeling of "hell yeah kill 'em all!" like I was channeling the madness of Mai Lai, the mushrooms short-circuiting my pre-set empathic response, making everything I saw seem brand new and sans social sermon. The soul fear terror of the jungle was so palpable to me that the soldiers' level of sociopathic anger and violence seemed the only way any kind of courage might manifest. If you ever took 'too much' of anything maybe you know the feeling: without a warrior howl, a game face, courage screwed sticky side-down, you'd wind up strapped down to a gurney, or freaking out your parents.

and his hair was perfect.

Seeing it later, on VHS, over and over, zonked out on whiskey and 3' graphix, was never quite the same as that magical afternoon in 1986, but I still have sympathy for the hardened Tom Berenger character and think Dafoe's hippy sarge is way too naive. Some elements are downright racist, (the Asian characters are all extra-alien and inscrutable, though that works for creating paranoia there's no excuse for making the black soldiers mostly cowardly and the first to fall asleep on guard duty) and Sheen's tacky voiceover ("They're the best I've ever seen, grandma") is almost as bad as the one, now excised, from Blade Runner.

But I'd heard of vet's cathartic reaction to the film, and I actually saw a sobbing vet-age man in the audience on the way out of the theater that afternoon, and even in the low house lights I could see he'd been crying, a cathartic wave of inky aura was fizzling around him like a fading wall of gnats, replaced by a pink light. He'd clearly been keeping a dark secret venom up in his nervous system for the last 15 years, and it was now broken open, leaking all over the floor. I must have been staring as he looked up, but the shrooms saved it from being awkward. I gave him a small salute he nodded, and I walked out on rubber legs. I'd know that feeling too, in about 10 years, being able to admit I had a drinking problem, and feeling the black iceberg within my soul melt and drain all over the floor. With Platoon, the horrible secrets of a nation seemed at last exposed to light as if some glorious combination award ceremony and drug intervention. This wasn't some dumb Russian roulette gambit, or Hearts of Darkness, or a hippie Jon Voight. this was what it was like being in, as they say, the shit. The kind of low-to-the-ground pulp story only a writer-director who was there at the time could tell. The last time we were graced with such a survivor's eye view was the 50s, with Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets and Steel Helmet. --each of which made a comparable, if less publicized, mark on a generation of vets struggling to unpack their collective traumas. But those boys had been heroes; before Platoon, these guys had been outcasts. Now, at last, we could begin to welcome them home.

5.  RAGING BULL (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

I remember hearing a WBNC talk radio review of this film (I would have been 13) on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower and I was trying to think of a good illness to feign so I could stay home from school. The way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to crack open the world. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.

Flash forward a decade, Seattle, 1990: my girlfriend coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache; me loafing in front of our tiny TV, drunk; LaMotta in a Florida jail pounding the wall shoitng "Dummy! DUMMY!" over and over while I drank; her raincoat angrily dropping onto the floor; I was hoping La Motta would stop beating the wall soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But he kept pounding and screaming, and our apartment was too small to escape it. On and on the pounding went, breaking our relationship apart. I was to drunk to defend Scorsese's choice, or to find the remote and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on from past (also drunk) viewings.

We broke up. I drove to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back to get my shit she was already dating a jackass hippie whose claim to fame was that he curated an open mic at the O.K. Hotel. He whinnied like a horse when he laughed and danced arms akimbo when he walked. But he was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted. Come 'eah!

Sure, despite it breaking up my relationship, Bull is a towering masterpiece but it's not fun, or perfect. And after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years, Scorsese's inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away) and his over-reliance on manly violence rather than exploring his castration anxiety head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, the bullshit, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything except lines, coke or poetry - makes no difference; they're the same, ain't they? Come 'eah!

The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from paranoid derangement brought on by consistent head trauma. One last thing I remember from that relationship: trying to sleep at her place while I was in the midst of a terrible fever (Syracuse = always sick). She was in the other room, painting (VPA). I got up and in my delerium accused her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I knew he was under the bed, I looked there too, nothing, but then I knew he was back in the closet. I kept looking in the closet over and over. I knew he was there even if he wasn't. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice, even though it was just a Billie Holiday album. I heard males whispering about me, laughing quietly with her about how easily they could snow me.  So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.

That's no excuse though, and either way, the film is certainly rich enough with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy it doesn't need great psychological insight, and yet... there's Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as in any other movie on this list, .

Aside from Valeria's of course. DUMMY! 

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