The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily the locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. To these beautiful people, enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, he's just another Yankee, which is to say, accepted by them despite his inability to accept them or himself. Over the course of two 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, Cera trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, and wakes with his face in the bush, so to speak. Brave, foolhardy, invincible, he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson, but he does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, Jack loucheness, Hopper dementia, and Fonda remoteness. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe only by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, his beady little eyes are in front so he can judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's paranoic-critical method' to pick at these films paisley scarabs:

According to Dali by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially we can count Sebastián Silva part of the Darionioni Nuovo, which is an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, to 50s Hitchcock, in the process baking up a beast that has Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Robertson Davies' manticore "tail," and a single-first-person keyhole crystal ball eye passed amongst its three gorgon hydra heads: Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche (a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators): each young artist devoted in his and her fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores, the unsettling feeling of conspiracy that comes when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges like a strange, rotting fractal fruit that becomes, with a blink of the eye, a rotting parrot corpse.

Magic Magic taps into that Polanski mid-60s rotting-on-the-vine paranoid feminine, finding the dead pigeon under glass on Judy Berlin flatware in a Yellow Wallpapered room surrounded on all sides by Lynchian buzzing, fecund jungles and horny dogs, because while the Crystal Fairy film is, for all its mystic leanings, more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where you're so bound up in your own petty thoughts and sexual frustrations that maybe you're depending far too much on the trip to cure all your ills in a single flash. But the San Pedro cactus-derived mescaline (in this case) only forces you to experience the full feedback squall of your own DSB venom --no one surrenders to the mystic without first a great deal of terror as the bearings one has in reality dissolves and the horror, the horror, emerges as the wide-screaming abyss of the impermanent --and the ancient Mayan gods demand full existential dissolution before the rapture comes. The farther we are from this baseline awareness the less 'alive' we feel, so breaking out of the faerie bower has to be that much more violent, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun and superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark murky underside of the ship longed for like a Linus blanket.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy, compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if like me you've ever been stuck tripping with the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, hairiness, den mother need to treat everyone like kindergartners and so naive as to lecture South African black people on Apartheid because she 'once took a class') or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, "I'm getting off are you getting off yet?") you may wince, but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy progression; I can imagine freaking out grandly with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving George "Magnificent" Anderson of a psychedelic seeker just as I would hate to trip with him. Cera handles it all well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Magnificent Ambersons - a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a big cookie filled with delicious arsenic, but they forgot the sugar so why eat it? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes, and isn't that why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds, but rather the mind of Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, cuter, played by the great Juno Temple. She's upon a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation where instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and demons in your cozy London flat) it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. No sooner is Alicia is getting off her flight from L.A., in a foreign country for the very first time to visit her pal Sara (Emily Browning) then she finds only to find a car full of other people, including Sara's boyfriend Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American, speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable, picking her up for a spontaneous holiday to some remote island, not the kind of thing an exhausted probably bi-polar L.A. girl getting off a ten-hour flight wants to hear and it gets worse, suddenly Browning's nurturing pal is called away and there's no one to hide behind to avoid Michael Cera, the only one who can talk with her since she speaks no Spanish.

Things go downhill fast, for her, anyway, and we go from feeling her pain to theirs, because sometimes shit be America's fault. She can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I dig it - because I know well the feeling: tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people up to party all day and all night, at ease in their skins, seeming to be taunt you with their niceness, but sleeping on the couch means you have to get up with the early risers and stay up with the night owls and so the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in and you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse after I'd graduated; they all had cats and I'd be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely depressed and paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations: some girl in the kitchen says "can you pass me that Pepsi?" I'd hear it as "you can't sleep with Erich --he has hep-C."  Which I don't!  I totally would have slept with her, too. Bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi. Such great crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it, seek it out - dive into the madness rather than running from it, then the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared. She's free, hacked clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond time's Ulmer barrier.

But for the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film - then mix them up together in your mind - because the preview makes it seem like a Most Dangerous Game meets Svengali meets Funny Games horror movie but it's more a Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity, a hard thing to pull off really well but Silva pulls it off and the photography by the amazing DP Christopher Doyle only justifies his reputation as a leader in his field with his stunning lenses and uses of color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea) in a way you can imagine the mid-sixties Polanski trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac, would look like if in color. Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton both would love Magic Magic.

Not sure if I'd want to see either film again but I bet I would have been pretty happy on the shoot for these - there's a sense that vacation vision quests on the part of the actors are well incorporated. Then again, all their relaxed and spontaneous but higher educated bonding might have really got on my nerves if I didn't feel their nerves were worse. Vacations tend to fill me with an overall ennui that can't be shaken for several days, so I have to fake it. The addiction to language is like a thin rope hanging over what your ego tells you is a lake of fire but if you let go anyway and just fall down backwards, laughing at your own fear, it's really a warm, amniotic feather bed. Your fears are still waiting at the lip of the pit trying to tell you hey you're burning, get out of there, you'll die, you'll go insane, but you don't have to listen anymore; you can wander away, leave their voices fading in the distance, ignore the urge to run back up and apologize, ignore their tears and screams, and run towards that dizzy high you feel the first nights of waking up somewhere other than your own bed because if you have to go looking farther than your own backyard, well go! 

You can't run but you can hide, from at least the volume of your ego's pleading desperate din - if you couldn't, you'd still be stuck with your very first, second, or third girlfriend, the one who cried and demanded long twisted apologies when you tried to break up with her, and so you stuck around for six more miserable months until finally you let go of the ledge and landed that feather bed pit she'd convinced you was fire --you can still hear her cursing and threats and vile oaths from her window as you make it down to the street, and you're glad you had the good sense to bring your bass  and amp when you ran out of there and back to the party.  

At any rate, producer-star Cera and the writer-director co-star Silva make a good combination, and taken as loose sequels the two films progress almost of a piece, with one casual encounter leading to another, so if the drawback to feeling made up on the spot is not knowing when to end, that's a sacrifice I'm glad Silva and producer-star Cera are willing to make. In playing such a shitheel in these two films (and in This is the End), Cera earns my respect in ways he failed to do as the neurotic Bluth boy-- but at some point you can't just destroy your good graces, it's a movie, after all - we're stuck with you for over an hour. You got to do more than simper and snivel. What would Richard Widmark do? 

I've been the Cera character, desperately hoping a psychedelic trip will bring me out of my self-absorbed shell, wanting to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seems and not being able to get there no matter how high I get. The ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy and through self-expression, or you can have it flayed off you like skin. Drugs don't always work but writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the special-K I had snorted was working or not, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World; even with all that it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me-- but THEN some people from Britain or Germany or Ibiza or wherever would blow through town. The sun would come out and these cool, beautiful souls would brighten our scene. So it was a double bonus --my roommate would jet off to Ibiza all August leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death and then in September or October, when New York City is the best place to be on Earth, whomever he'd crashed with would come crashing over at our place and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous.

Then they'd be gone again... 

Well, it could have been worse, what if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

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Tripping to Tortura: IN A WORLD, ADULT WORLD (2013)

Two worth-your-time 2013 films with similar themes, color schemed posters and even titles, recently made themselves, like whores, available at home: IN A WORLD is a semi-autobiographical female voiceover artist trying to make it in a deep-voiced man's game tale, written and directed by and starring Children's Hospital hottie Lake Bell; ADULT WORLD stars Emma Roberts as Amy, a Syracuse University undergraduate poet who finally realizes she's not 'too good' for her job at an adult bookstore and is written and directed by men (a detail I will be addressing) and bearing a tacky tag line (make it out in above poster if you want, but I warned you). Both 'girl' characters start their films living with their parents, rent-free, and the films chronicle their respective launches into the real 'adult' world, reaching down for the big brass rings, stooping to conquer, and finding help along the way, mostly from sensitive boys and/or male mentors, like whores craving pimp slaps.

Why do I mention one film is made by a woman about a woman, and the other is about a girl made by men? I happen to be a pretentious Syracuse English major / poet who applied at one of the city's many local XXX bookstores ("the endless trains of the faithless" - spouts Robin Williams on the TV commercial playing behind me, advertising the Chevy Silverado, "Find new roads!") so I see deeplier (!) than most to this story so I can swear in court that Amy's adventures in that accursed city may look right (the film was shot there) but just don't add up. She says she's an over-achiever with a straight-A average and is a virgin, yet she is also hot, and yet she wants to be a furious poet?And she's an idiot! She lets her car get stolen and then admits she has no theft insurance because she spent the money her dad gave her on SASEs, confident of her imminent fame as a poet, which in itself is very suspicious for a supposedly straight-A student, this being the age when most submissions are done via e-mail. Alas, a great many people are willing to believe real life girls living alone for the first time are idiots like this, ala Juno and Frances Ha! --neither I've been able to see more than five minutes of at a time due to their complete cluelessness. (1)

But Amy is just the sort of girl a sexual anxiety-prone male closet-macho writer would imagine, i.e. one who needs a man who's good at organizing, so said writer can toddle in her wake making exasperated sighs and treating her like a child. That's fine if you're not trying to show someone adapting to the real adult word, the reality of which is that there is no earthly or celestial way a girl as hot as Amy wouldn't get published, laid, and invited to endless readings, even if she shouts her stanzas like a sorority pledge on her third Molson.

Although it's never clear if Amy's in school or out of it, she latches randomly (by finding his book in someone's car) onto a disillusioned middle aged semi-success poetry teacher mentor in his -nth mid-life crisis named 'Rat' (John Cusack). This clown does his own sewing, wears a ski cap indoors, and uses the word 'cray' (for crazy), but Cusack is a pro, and clearly had some input into his character. He takes a page from the Bill Murray playbook and modulates his usual cool aloof warmth to include a complete ambivalence towards towards nearly everything including his own sexual desires. The pleased smile that comes across his face after Amy trashes his apartment has few equals, you have to go back to the 1982 Betty Blue to find another guy as laid back.

And yet he can't even be bothered to take her virginity, even as a favor to her. Jean-Hughes Anglade would never stoop to such petty morality! He'd sleep with Amy even knowing it would destroy her respect for him and lead to blackballing and hushed whispers in the dean's council. He would do it because Amy needs disillusionment and to fathom that sex needn't be earth-shaking to count as experience--all good lessons that a truly good mentor wouldn't refuse. To paraphrase Wilde, the only thing to do with a cute student protege is make love to her if she's beautiful, and to someone else if she's plain.

At least that element of ADULT is not overly cliche. But alas, there's a tall drag queen who lets Amy crash at her squat, and teaches her how to smoke weed and dance. Thank GOD she also doesn't get AIDS halfway through and give Amy a parting monologue about reaching for the sky. Even worse is that Amy gets a job at a homey mom and pop XXX-rated video store (an idea lifted from an old Mr. Show sketch) here she falls for the cute stockboy (Evan Peters) and lets the sort of bait-and-switch sordidness occupy the poster and tag line without adding up to anything truly subversive.  If XXX store had at least one sleazy element the comedy might have had some bite. If there were rats in the squat, or she had to step over junkies to get up the stairs... something! Adult World, yeah RIGHT.

I applied for a clerk job at a XXX store when I was studying up in Syracuse and let me tell you, it was not a mom and pop operation. I remember filling out my application and talking to the fat suspicious owner who loomed down at me from the tall counter, while what sounded like a woman reaching a lengthy orgasm or else being tortured with hot coals echoed from the back room. I knew I would go insane having to listen to that all day so I began to not try and seem reliable. "Ever take a polly?" he asked. He meant polygraph test, to assess whether or not I had stolen from past jobs. I told him I would try anything once, but I think he could see I was turning pale after only ten minutes of listening to those shrill, echoing moans. He probably had applicants stand there talking as long as possible, to see if they could hack the toxic vibes and nonstop moaning from the peep booths for more than ten minutes (there's no such booths in this mom and pop place, don't worry, honey). See, Adult World? That idea could have been a movie, call it "Ever take a Poly?" but every edge set up for cutting latent baby teeth in Adult World comes to us already sanded possibly through rewrites and second-hand sanitization: Cusack's mentor won't seduce her; the adult bookstore is really just a sweet homey place where everybody knows your name; the drag queen bestie (Armando Riesco) is just a droll nurturer ala John Lithgow in World According to Garp; the cute stock boy supports her and straightens her out as needed, patiently waiting to bust his move until at least an hour of running time and 'growth' has elapsed.

I like a lot of things about Adult World, but it makes me miss another film, Art School Confidential, which is unofficially set at Pratt, where I reside now. Think Jim Broadbent or John Malkovich in that movie would have been so rude as to refuse m'lady's request for de-virginizing? The very idea of refusing such a hottie is hateful to Americans!

That's not a problem for Carol (Lake Bell ) in In a World. She goes right after fellow Children's Hospital star, Ken Marino, a successful voiceover artist who her father (Fred Melamed) has taken as a protege in some twisted effort to have a son (his only other child is played by the always amazing Michaela Watkins). Ms. Bell has always been my Children's Hospital favorite and here she ably carries the film in the tricky role of being both a success and a little disorganized, struggling to make it AND making, and getting by with a little help from her friends, and dealing with a dad who doesn't understand why he so desperately wants to keep her from being a success. Dimitri Martin is nice guy sound engineer who helps her get breaks but is too shy to bust a move -though he in turn is helped by an actually cool lesbian wingman, and when Carol does get a break it's from a woman producer (Geena Davis) who has her own problems with sexism.

Many comedies featuring ditzy women have been made as well as about ball-busting career gals, vain actresses, and doting moms, all idling around until some pasteurized thirtysomething hunk with soft eyes materializes in the midst of a shopping cart collision. But In a World moves forward three squares, to capture the awkward phase past the 'ditzy klutz in search of a man' phase, to chronicle the 'what goes on between the lucky break and established success' period. Every time Carol woke up I was worried she had slept through some big gig, because I've been conditioned to believe that if a film shows a woman waking up alone on the day of a big career-making event, she will wake up late and have missed her chance. I won't spoil whether she does or not, but I think it's interesting that I assumed she would.

Much as In a World seems remarkably astute in these areas, Adult World never feels quite real, quite set on a tone or era or even able to depict Syracuse as it really is: Amy's apartment is way too clean; there isn't adequate representation of how everything gets crusted over with salt, or the way frozen slush rises up in a dirty brown wave at passing cars, etc.  I did respect that her walls just had a Sylvia Plath poster above a mattress on the floor and she was half-trying to commit suicide (very Syracuse), and I like Emma Roberts overall and she's game to go the distance here, but she's still coming into her own as an actress of real gravitas --even when smashing Cusack's guitar she seems like she's just trying on emotions. Of course at that age all poets are too young to realize they can't bum-rush greatness, so she's either she's an amazing actress or else just perfectly imperfect. Her dad is Eric Roberts! Julia Roberts is her aunt. See, that kind of thing would be cool to see in a movie. Why not play herself?

It's that sense of playing herself that makes Bell score so much more points de la resonance. She takes risks and shows us things that might make her friends and employers mad if they think the characters are based on them. Of course In a World has problems too: Carol must be making money, so why she can't afford her own rent in a place as cheap as L.A.? She winds up getting a windfall of work, which is exciting, but a subplot with her sister cheating on her husband with a handsome Irishman doesn't really add up to much compared to the riveting central drama of the father screwing over his own daughter, who in turn is screwing the guy the father's screwing her over for. But half-baked side plots are not something to holler over, and the bitchy voiceover artist party at Ken Marino's house is worth any price of admission alone.

The ominous Hall of Languages at SU

Moving back to the idea of men (and women) being uncomfortable with movies where women move ahead without men approving and helping them (a theme central perhaps to the strange hostility towards the movie Scarlet Diva -- see "Her Body, Her Ashtray"). The year was 1987: I scored big at a Syracuse poetry reading, won acclaim and the plum spot opening for Allen Ginsberg when he came to town. Unfortunately circumstance were everything. For my big debut I had been drinking sangria with a lovely girl who had been letting me do all the talking - everyone before me at the reading was nervous and wobbly but I was a huge smash. I decided to always be drinking before readings from then on. In hindsight I realized it was the flirting.

But for Ginsberg, a semester later, I had drunk way too much trying to get that magic back, and now I had a legit girlfriend, no more flirting so I was nervous, the auditorium was packed, and I drank too much and couldn't get a buzz. My hand still shook holding the paper. I didn't stick around to go to the diner with Mr. Ginsberg after the show, as I had been invited to, citing my then-sick girlfriend as an excuse. I bravely ran away / away.

Flash forward: I didn't just leave it at not getting the XXX job. I also tried my hand at an erotic novel, figuring money might be found there (as Amy finds in Adult World). Mine chronicled a disturbing vision I had the year before at a Rochester Dead Show, tripping and having a major 'too many people' bad one, of a gigantic carnival of S&M torture, where people huffed laughing gas while chained naked to a merry go round in the middle of an array of robot whipping arms.

A housemate had an old LP called Tortura inherited from a crazy uncle -- and it was a very disturbing thing to listen to--mostly just the sound of whip cracks and impassioned screaming and moaning-- while tripping your face off, and it probably effected that vision. It was hilarious too, but on acid took its toll, and since we always had guests who wanted to hear it and we were always on acid, it seemed like whole cycles of death and rebirth and endless torturing jail sentences of moments passing and time stopping for this deeply-felt soul torture, and that I had been tortured in the past and would be in the future, and the album just ripped open soul scars I'd had far longer than my current incarnation. That uncle also had a lot of Zappa, and "The Torture Never Stops" was also in rotation, and seemed to be confirmation and extension of the grim existential cruelty that the LSD-enhanced Tortura, an apt summation of the painful truth behind 20th century first world existence's curtain of blasé painless decency. My opus, Shroomsadoplasticism, was, never finished, and typed on a manual typewriter, so there's only one original - with the first and last ten pages long ago fell away... and now the pages are even out of order... so symbolic, man... hell, I'm not even sure I still have those soul scars.

A few years later I realized I'd never be a real poet anymore than a real erotic novelist, because I couldn't get into Hart Crane or Marianne Moore --trying to understand their poetry was worse than tripping to Tortura. I did a bunch of open mic nights over the years but all that came of it was that the long-haired hippy freak M.C. of the event stole my girlfriend. I soon realized I just could not endure the terrible onslaught of bad poets SHOUTING / in this same /STYLE / every other  / WORD / of their / POEM. I'd really hoped Roberts' Amy was going to rant her poetry in that style. I'd be TALKING and THINKING in that STYLE for DAYS afterwards. Didn't Emma Roberts even GO to a POE-etry reading to reSEARCH how to SLAM like a BAD poet?

Then in 1996 I lucked into voiceovers, mentored by a cool older lady from an ad agency that shall go nameless. Then I was told I needed to join AFTRA to do any more. I joined - then they told me they weren't using AFTRA people, because of the strike. I was on the road again... (my demo reel here).

A few years earlier, in 1994, after I'd been graduated and loose in the uncaring world for five years, (working as a freelance direct mail copywriter), I read that our beloved poetry teacher Stephen Dobyns was suspended from Syracuse for using 'salty' language in the classroom. His suspension was picked up in the NY Times as the exhibit A of the new PC fascism taking over college campuses everywhere:

No one suggests that he offered to trade good grades for sex. He is not accused of sleeping with or propositioning students -- one says he tried to kiss her at a drunken party -- or of the focused protracted hectoring we might call "harassment." The allegations all concern language: specifically, what the committee calls "salty language" used outside the classroom at graduate-student parties. They involve attempts to be funny, and to provoke. There was one cruel sexual remark about a professor who wasn't present, and the suggestion that another might benefit from a "salty" term for a satisfactory sexual encounter.

Is this sexual harassment? Not in any clear sense, but those clear borders have been smudged by university policies that refer to "a hostile workplace," to "patterns of intimidation." "Hostile" and "intimidation" are subjectively defined, as they were by the student who testified (hilariously, I thought, though, again, no one seemed to notice) that he felt intimidated by my friend's use of a "salty" phrase. He felt he was being asked to condone a locker-room atmosphere that might offend the women present.
There was much talk of protecting women from blunt mentions of sex. And the young women who testified were in obvious need of protection. They gulped, trembled and wept, describing how my friend yelled at them in class or failed to encourage their work. Victorian damsels in distress, they used 19th-century language: they had been "shattered" by his rude, "brutish" behavior. After testifying, they seemed radiant, exalted, a state of being that, like so much else, recalled "The Crucible," which used the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for the Army-McCarthy hearings. --11/26/95 

My fellow students from his class, Abbe and Laurie wrote a letter to the Times citing as an example of Dobyns' scathing honesty all three of us remember: there was a seething frat boy in class whose poetry was so seething with misogynistic sexual frustration that even though there was nothing sexual per se in it, just the phrase "huffing and puffing to her house on his Huffy Spitfire" brought waves of douche chill torture to our liberal arts cores.

"What do you think," Dobyns asked, "should we try to help this poem or just take it out into the hall and shoot it?"

With that phrase we loved him. Out of politeness we refrained from applauding but most of us laughed. He didn't need guide rails from some PC Volturi to uncover a misogynist frat boy when he heard one. Times were different and poetry, at least in his class, still had a violent, dangerous edge. We went to learn poetry not to have our hands held on the road to incompetency's supportive slaughterhouse. Tall, cold, like a Howard Hawks and Max Von Sydow mixture but with no accent or drawl, he taught us Chekov in a measured way that showed us one might be both masculine and sensitive, serious but with a self-effacing deadpan humor, quiet but with the kind of deadshot aim that means you don't need to waste words (or bullets), and an inflexible personal code that meant tolerance for everything but unconscious misogyny and mediocrity.

This Adult World, then reflects a PC dead zone of safety bars and bloodless ambivalence; even discovering promisingly sordid or 'authentic' real world experiences -- squatter drag queens, XXX video stores, older poet mentors living alone and with darting eyes -- leads Amy no closer to the disgust, disillusionment, the soul scars, she needs. Some PC chaperone herald gets there first, shaving it all down from an R to a PG-13 like a furious Olympic curler. The drag queen doesn't even smoke pot in a joint -- it's bad for the lungs! --but uses a vaporizer - and has to let us know that it's medical. The XXX video store is just a friendly family of genial eccentrics, they all but sing "Lean on Me" in perfect harmony to encourage Amy to run after Evan Peters as he saunters off into the midnight rain to catch a flight. And a guy named Rat refuses to take advantage of a willing, hottie protege as if his name meant nothing whatsoever. This the Adult World ain't! 

In a World by contrast is blissfully long past this kind of naïveté. Carol uses sex and the lack thereof with an adult's savvy of the world, knowing how sex changes things for the good and bad every single time; her scatterbrained aspects feel real - she still makes it to her big jobs, she knows how to not mess up good things, and to mess up the already bad because who gives a fuck? Best of all she's a real artist, fascinated with accents and determined to master them and to capture real dialogue and the naturalism of speech. Take the above scene for example - her sister's tearing her heart out like here is some big cry into your ice cream and talk about boys moment, and Bell is quietly pressing play on her recorder to capture her sister's emotional tonality for future use in voiceover and dialect coach work. That's the real trick to becoming a success, not to keep your eye on the big prize but on each successive small one and to never put boys over art, or even the craving for success and fatherly approval over it either, and not to succeed from sheer neediness but because artistic interests and career goals have coalesced and nothing can stop she who is already arrived. 

Cusack says as much in Adult World, but it's one thing to have an older man explain it to a young girl and another to see a girl just fucking doing it for herself with men telling her nothing of any value whatsoever. Cusack even tells Amy to make mistakes, to 'fail better' but the film overall fails failing. There's something a little off about a joint written by a boy about a girl taking life lessons from another boy, and then not even following that advice, delivering a stale set of characters that only the strong acting of the players can freshen (unless you find the nurturing gay male bestie of the frazzled heroine thing still subversive). If not well, PC chaperones can clean up 42nd Street all they want, can ban smoking and nanny state a poet's life into irrelevance, but in the real adult the torture never stops. Suicide isn't just a joke, it's a real option many take. If Adult World Amy ever wants to really want to find out what that sort of true life experience is, what true poetry is, she'd best make some genuinely bad decisions, fast, like suffering through the voiceover of Prozac Nation, listening to Tortura on acid, or dying accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation (as out guitarist did, two weeks before the Lockerbie bombing!). Finding a career writing erotica before you even lose your virginity doesn't really count as truth, he said, knowing of what he speaks, gesturing vaguely at the 'world' from the vantage point of his filth-encrusted podium of flies (all green and buzzlin'), rose thorn whip welts, funerals, and whores! (my voiceover demo reel here --interested parties contact erichk9@aol.com -- and weep). 

NOTES:

1. Strangely enough, those two films are highly praised yet I can't stand them, but I love Jennifer's Body, Margot at the Wedding, and The Squid and the Whale

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Mater Testiculorum: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA, CARRIE

"Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day.
Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."
-Camille Paglia

"Son? I wish I had one! He's a bum!"
--Mama Mantana (Scarface)

 You can argue that gangster cinema began at Warners with Cagney and Robinson, but a few pre-code masterworks aside, the gangster never hit his grandiose peak until it became an Italian-American story was directed by an Italian-American. Robert Evans knew this, and so insisted on Coppola for The Godfather (1972). An Italian director for an Italian story. Defamatory? Maybe, but the Italian-American Anti-Defamation league was founded by one of the heads of the five families, Joe Colombo, so who can you truss? Me, 'ass who.

And an Italian-American director is going to ideally bring in a sense of Italian flair and artistry, the Scorsese drive and odd streaks of compassion, the Coppola darkness, and the De Palma operatics. And just the word opera should make you think of Argento, an Italian, straight-up, whose films have such elaborate beauty, brutal violence and strange rhythms (check out my 10/2009 companion to this piece, "Nightmare Drive-In Logic, Italian-style) they transform the work of everyone who sees them... whatever that work that is.

The Italian-Americans don't all love opera but it's emblematic of their artistic genes, along with the poetry of Dante, the art of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the masochism of Catholicism (each centurion lash upon the wrecked torso of Christ fantasized about in excruciating detail). All this and more pumps, drives, twists the flagellant Italian heart, consumed by "original sin," which stretches its exposed raw nerve beating-heart history back through Roman orgies, gladiators, court intrigues, brutal inquisitions, the plague, the Mafia, and so on. Thus the murders in Argento and De Palma and Scorsese and Coppola play out like operas of the damned, in which every emotion is heightened, and played out in full, wringing every last drop of blood. They present characters who are adults, who sometimes joke around but never about business and when violence occurs to or through them it's always painful business, always transmitted across the screen with time for the victim to scream, or scrawl a note on the tile steam, or be crucified by butcher knives, or crawl away or bravely stare into the eyes of their killer, shouting "Fack Yew!"

In the good Argento and De Palma films, death may be cinematic and beautiful at times but it also hurts and no one dies easy; characters get time to register the horror of realizing their whole life is about to end, suddenly and with no good reason, and so much left undone, like a cloud of screwdrivers twisting vainly to the sticky in their widened eyes. They see death coming, and if they live they make sure their opponents get the same luxury. There's a feeling of what's really involved with killing people. In normal gangster films people just get shot, blammo! Whammy! But when being true to Italian operatic rhythms, one needs time to die, a lot of time, while Ennio Morricone strings play a semi-mocking eulogy overhead and you look at your killer with a slow turn from pleading to fear to anger and oaths, to resignation and then downwards or up into the infinite abyss. And if you can't make the turn all the way, the way Lopez can't, for example, can't kill your own enemy but got to hire it done, then you don't even deserve the top shelf bullets.

It makes sense then that De Palma has no real interest in capturing Latin culture, filling the score instead with the boss Italian synths of Giorgio Moroder, and the gaudy pre-fab architectures of the Italian disco. Hawks' 1932 Scarface bounced around with merry good-cheer and a mock-Italian comedy-team rhythm that made a stunning counterpoint to the violence; Paul Muni showed that thing we all love about our one Italian-American friend: their positive life force always on, never wavering, comical even at their baseline. Even when breaking your thumbs for not paying your debts they can joke around and make you feel like a regular guy and ask you how's your mother. And if you dated one then you know how nurturing they are, cradling your head when you throw up, and only crying and freaking out when they realize you are never going to stop drinking long enough to be much of a take-home-to-the-parents-style boyfriend.

Scarface's ice princess blonde, played as a bundle of nerves snaking themselves through sheer brass will into the shape of a svelte cat-eyed bombshell (Michelle Pfeiffer, making the grade) is the opposite,  so trapped in the narcissist mirror she can't wait to clear the lines off it, the better to see herself with. But if you can get her to laugh, a woman like that? Ah Manolo, she break her contract for you. Plus, she's forbidden. That's the boss's lady, ogay? But Tony values only that which he cannot have because he's too dumb to know in advance that attaining it will bring him no satisfaction. Instead he has to look closer to home, towards Taboo 2. He falls for his sister the first time he sees her as a young woman and that he's been in jail for five years in Cuba excuses it somewhat at first but then he makes no effort to reign in his incestuous impulse.

As Tony, Pacino is filmed first in long shots, his musky tan face paint dripping off when he's hot which is all the time, or being bathed in Angel's blood with a gun to his head, the blood and brown make-up swirling together to form a muddy rust. In the early scenes where he's bluffing his way up into Lopez's good graces he seems to fold into himself, like a sullen teenager, all terrible bangs and loud shirts, short frame and hairy arms, a peasant trying to cover up his innocence with tough talk and bravado and big cigars (see below). De Palma's camera doesn't circle but rather observes him from on high. As Tony increases in stature and drive, De Palma's camera moves in for close-ups and low angle shots, such as the shakedown from the narcotics cop, and Pacino quickly but imperceptibly mutates as well, oscillating back and forth between tough guy killer and loyal clown, gradually losing the clown aspect along the way and replacing it with self-absorbed money-obsessed paranoiac.

We learn from books like The Devil's Playground that De Palma knew something about cocaine, and if you look at this movie and the bloated satire of Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Untouchables (1987), as a trilogy, you get a saga of desire, loss, and how empires might be built on the underbelly of America's endless attempts to inflict the morals of senator's wives onto America, the importance of not getting high on one's supply is understood so deeply you can feel De Palma's good judgment slipping away as the film goes on. But that fits both the operatic paradigm I've drawn (especially La Traviata, which begins in a beautiful party and a rich paramour's baubles and ends with her broke, all her stuff being carted away as she dies in bed, alone but for a nurse who wonders if she'll ever be paid.

Despite all these problems, Tony lives on today, twenty years later, as a kind of living demi-god. As a character he has aged less well than the the emulators might think, however. If there's something heroic about his "say 'ell to my leedle fren!" last stand, it's tempered by his blindness to his monitors, his letting his security team get slaughtered, his own impulse killings of Manny and Alberto the Shadow. Mired in cocaine and confusion, he pulls the plug on his existence by blowing the hit, letting his coked-up ego and repressed love of kids and guilt over his mama--"sensitive weakness"--knock him into a winner-lose-all fugue state. His final shoot-out can be read academically as a zero point tantrum of grief and self-absorption. He doesn't know how to handle success, but blazing shoot-outs? This he knows. And like Tony, and Tom Hanks in Bonfire Capone's unlimited wealth doesn't compel him to hide his working class roots, such as the pic below where he's getting shaved by his old barber in a beautiful palatial space under twisted dark manly flooring. This is wealth spent by the man, to realize his aesthetic, not to placate some rich wife's drive for respectability. No flowers, white tiles and dinner parties with all the best snobs. This is instead the nouveau riche bachelor in full flower, wherein the dark sleek look of the Corleone compound, the Italian aesthetic, free of female meddling, allowed to flower in its own dark orchid fashion, and it is beautiful, because darkness is.

Fade to Black, from sun to setting sun image to dark marble death

Looking back at it now on an anamoprphic DVD, Scarface looks shoddy in spots, badly blocked: sets seem to end a few feet from the side edges of the screen and the backdrops often look like freestanding drywall in the midst of waterlogged-curling. Loepz's BMW dealership back office with its tropical sunset (above, middle) cuts off into a blackness on every side, with the setting Miami sun wallpaper giving off that flat chintzy feel of a direct-to-video porn film or travel agency. We start the film sensing this will be a big budget panorama: Cuban refugee stock footage, crowded sweaty scenes under-highway encampments, dishwashing, stabbing, twilight phone booths, the wild Colombian chainsaw set piece, but then the gradual tightening noose of opportunity boils it all down to that La Traviata garrett. As Tony "makes his own moves" there are few places that are seen twice in the film, and fewer actors stick around as the scenes tighten up in a forward Apollonian arc that begins to wither into a fecund limpness: real Miami sunshine devolving to that car dealer image of a sunset, hot disco ladies devolving into some dorky dancer dressed like 'El Gordo' and more and more mirrors diluting Tony's vibrancy, as if the vast empire of Scarface merchandise was already draining his snarl of tragic meaning. The architecture eventually turns to gold trim and black marble (a symbol of death like the 'X' markings in the 1932 version) that Gina enters like a ghostly echo with her flimsy negligee open and gun, daring him to come over and make love to her, like the fish-eyed demoness at the climax of Suspiria. I'll go even further on a limb and say that Suspiria borrows quite a bit in color and nightmare logic pacing from De Palma's big break-out Carrie which came out the year before (1976 -though Carrie was still in theaters, and drive-ins by then, as it had become such a cultural landmark even parents were going to see it. It did for proms and telekinesis what Jaws had done for sharks and the ocean two years prior).

But this crazy "Fuck me Tony" scene with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and her nightmare black halo and temple of Dionysus sacrificial dress is where De Palma truly comes to life: mixing that queasy, death-saturated Argento color scheme and slowed-down time (which he mastered with the nightmare pace of the prom queen stair climb in Carrie) and the queasy sense of post-modern sexual displacement of his idol Hitchcock (i.e., he can't realize he's in danger until it's 'on TV'). Not until this final bloody incestuous kiss-off does De Palma find the pitch black death rattle wide-eyed in the face of horror wit that Hecht and Hawks understood better than most, though for them the preparation for facing death was great, the actual death a bit of a joke, whereas with De Palma death comes before there's much time to fix a game face, but the actual process of dying stays as felt and faced as in the grimmest of Italian horror films.  

From top: Suspiria, Untouchables, Bonfire of the Vanities

To get back to the sister, Tony doesn't really understand the way desire for her as just another hot young stranger is all amped up by brotherly love, paternal instinct, and narcissism. I know the effect of seeing your relative whom you've only seen every five or six years suddenly showing up in your neighborhood as a bona fide hottie. It's so so wrong, and for the mentally aberrant, like Tony, it's the ultimate. Just as it was for Caligula, another crazy Italian powermonger, Tony sees all taboo as dares.

Carrie

The only real separation between Italian-American gangster films and Italian horror perhaps is that death is where the gangster film stops, but horror has a few more places to go. And the brutal circumstances of that trip, the violence of going out, is everything. If you look at non-Italian American horror of the same approximate time, death doesn't dawdle. Even most slasher films, the American ones, like Halloween, are really about the stalking and POV camera: when death comes it's almost a relief, since as I pointed out in "A Clockwork Darkness", we now know where the killer is so there's no more worrying from where and when he will strike, how the person will die or if they will escape. No onscreen death can match our dread of the potential for it. But Argento's murders, Depalma's or Scorsese's or Coppola's first two Godfathers, are the exceptions: the moment of the first bullet, stab, or slash doesn't necessarily end the escape chances of survival, or mean a close to the episode. Death throes might go on for a full reel of near escapes, feeble cries for help, and forlorn looks up at the uncaring sky or (as in Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling) busy highway, pleading for someone to stop...

And architecture plays another part in prolonging the sense of helplessness. In the apartment building where the first murder goes down in Suspiria, the multiple reflective frosted windows, the bizarre wallpaper, strange vertical angles, unholy lighting, and the howling, strange music and create a sense of complete alienation, an inescapable interior 'Hotel Overlook'-style space (though far less recognizable) we feel we recognize it from our own nightmares. We're never sure what is a mirror and what a window; the smoked glass of the bathroom shower stall seems to look right out on the hallway elevator! While De Palma is more rooted in the concrete at least in Scarface, and his vision less baroque, De Palma has a natural tendency to use crane shots and the architecture itself to create a mood of unease. In the climax, it is Tony himself who is the Mater Suspiriorum, or rather Mater Testiculorum Fide and the Bolivian hit squad is Jessica Harper sneaking in with her sewing scissors. 

In the above quotes at the top of this article I wanted to exhume the roots of the Italian artistry as the constant need to escape from mama (or even kill her symbolically, as in Suspiria). In the end of Scarface, Tony realizes even a macho endeavor like criminal empire management can turn him matronly ("Got tits," he drunkenly laments to Manny, visualizing his future as another complacent Lopez, "need a bra"). I say unto thee, blessed is the filmmaker who can recognize his own mom-haunted apron-string slashing anger as art and not feel the need to apologize to both women and the social order in general for his venting. As long as he's conscious of it. And both Argento and De Palma revere strong women, but fear them as well. A strong woman can make a man feel outgunned at every step, emasculated (since nothing he can do--even killing--- will ever measure up to the raw violence of giving birth) but if he can stare death square in the face and say hello to his little friend --this is balls. And balls alone can deliver us into the sad twisting architecture of the last breath, the byzantine nightmare realm where reality and dreams switch place, and life disappears like you just woke up and forgot everything about it like we do so often with dreams.

Mom would pull you back from that void, she's afraid you'll fall. If you heed her, you no longer have your balls, just your word to be good. Being a safe distance from the void may please her, but bores the rest of us stiff. God bless the director who says mama, back off a me, and then dives right over the ledge with his camera

He who chooses hell over heaven, death over life, he is alone truly free of those apron string jelly fish stingers. He looks at the modern reverence for life, health, the family, and winces; knows these gym rats and granola moms are all just scaling heights to nowhere, preserving their mortal husk on entomology's display board in vain  or vanity (or that old excuse, 'for the kids'). We men are from birth trained to apologize for our own measly drives, even our desire for death, and to follow some vague plan of being 'good' or even 'true' -- yoking ourselves ever further beneath the plow to compensate for our inexcusable appendage. Missing the brass ring circle of light on the swim out of the merry-go-round abyss we may and probably will wind up permanently trapped in Lucifer's pool filter. All we can do when that happens is throw some of our magic seeds out onto the grass over our heads and hope it's enough to leave some kind of stain on the earth in our name. All we had in this world was balls and words, but this world didn't want either. Our writing is still ours, unless-a someone pays us for the rights, but our balls are yours, Cook's Tours! Take them around that womb globe. Sow their seed like Set sowed Osiris's chopped up body, or get stuffed, into the palatial tree coffin, the polluted womb. Marry well and often and love your chil--no, don't do either, just run! Run before she gets here she .../// Vito! Where are you going now, you silly boy! 

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Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

Why do so many people "hate" Kristen Stewart? Note the quotes. They don't really know her so how can they hate a projected fear from their own repressed subconscious? It just means she's doing her job. The only explanation is that these are the same people who were stoning adulteresses and burning hot young naturalists at the stake (and still are in some Islamic backwaters, so the headlines scream), in ye olden tymes, or driving innocent kids to suicide through their malicious scandalizing gossip, ala PEYTON PLACE. But who are these schadenfreude-addicted bitter old gossipy finger-pointers? Do they even exist?  Does the Huffington Post and AOL just cater to them as an imaginary reader, a middlebrow projection?

I'll confess: I am the "they" who thinks the other "them" "hate" Kristen Stewart. But I can only go by what I see in the Huffington headlines, and angry feminist blogs, which with all but scream "Burn her!" in their coded subtext, and my paranoiac feminist's desire to protect the maiden faire clouds my judgment. Plus my great/x8 aunt Mary Easty was hung as a witch in Salem, so perhaps I'm her reincarnation, sworn to avenge all the women who've sacrificed on the altar of mob prudery.

For the hit SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN (2012), the mainstream critics did loudly trumpet their ambivalence, as if on cue: too much snow, they wrote, too much pouting, too much CGI. Kristen Stewart's British accent alone generated an a blighted orchard's worth poison pen letter apples. The evil snow queen, played with understated elegance by the great Charlize Theron, could not hope to match this type of sneering evil. If they were just badmouthing Stewart's acting it would be shameful enough but a new scandal erupted shortly after the film's release that proved a Pavlovian trigger for the press to devolve into a horde of foam-mouthed stone-casters, their viciousness so appalling it basically drove Robert Pattinson to forgive her (she cheated on him! With the director! Who's married! tutututututututut) Calling Kristen names usually considered the height of bullying or rat-fink treachery in the high school cafeteria, the critics went way too far, way too fast, as packs of fascist bullies are wont to do, and hopefully they've had pause since then to think about their own ye-without-sin-first-stone-tosserness, the bloody tossers. I mean, what had she done to deserve such bitchiness? Seriously, Popular Press, what? Answer me! She thought you were her best friend! O Popular Press, did her minor--but to you at the time unforgivable--trespasses not provide you with the juicy gossip you so crave? Everything she do.... she do it for youuu....

Well, the release of SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN on DVD corresponds to the release of the final chapter of TWILIGHT, and in each lies the answer -- Kristen Stewart plays young, vulnerable, awkwardly beautiful women very well, and that in itself concerns critics. Mainly it's her look. Not her looks, but the way she looks, outward, her gaze like a boundary-dissolving laser beam. She looks outward from the screen and weighs and judges and forgives the hearts of those watching, and so those who think themselves impure, beyond saving, recoil from her absolving gaze. These secret wretched watchers-- who pretend in public to be happy and normal but deep down consider themselves odious gollums and troglodytes--blanche from her gaze's awkward but unabashed hold. Her forgiveness hurts them the way sunlight hearts the C.H.U.D. She is Esmerelda, freshly born anew like a colt onto the barn floor, watering the rows of wracked Quasimodos with her gypsy wineskin. The Frollos up in the rafters, clutching their yellowed press passes like a rosary, are disgusted by this openheartedness. They never thought her beauty should be shared with creatures more loathsome even than themselves.

And I would argue that calling Kristen Stewart a terrible actress is like calling Marilyn Monroe a terrible actress. Monroe was more successful at preserving a sense of vulnerability and precognitive absence/presence onscreen than as a dramatic thespian of the Eve Harrington variety, she was more method, and legit crazy so she seemed crazier playing sane than vice vera. Critics and audiences were more attuned to their own Freudian repressions in the 1950s so they knew the difference between an actress able to convey a sense of vulnerability to male attention and a "common slut." Now we're 'liberated' and so no, there is no difference since we can't see it and to prove we are not nearsighted must burn her! In 2050 the old patriarch critics of the day will laud Stewart's vulnerability the way they laud Monroe's now, and be crucifying some new tart, the way parents are encouraged now to ransack their kids' rooms for bath salts because Fox News told them it was a thing.

Call this prediction crazy, but Stewart shares with Monroe more than a gift for conveying shyness onscreen, both of them love, or at least 'feel sorry for' the creatures most of us have cast off. MM felt compassion for the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and didn't even mind flirting with Tom Ewell if it got her some air conditioning. Hey, princesses have kissed worse frogs for far less incentive than air conditioning. That's what it boils down to, and boiling is the correct word, froggy Tom. Stewart is like the first girl you kissed, ever, though she didn't know you, hardly, at all. She was the starlet of your Middle School's Bye-Bye Birdy who let all the cast members kiss her on the lips in the doorway of the ladies' room before the big premiere, for luck, and in your case, transcendental romantic ignition. Can you even now admit it was your first, and last kiss until you were a senior in college?

To make we Quasimodo-esque viewers remember that kiss, or anticipate it, the fumbling awkward magic of it, Stewart has her own wine skin full of little facial tics and micro-lip quivers, eye dilations, the looking up at her lover's lips to his eyes to the snow below in a series of deep breathing feints and attract-repulsion micro-movements, her eyes going in and out of focus, hand on fire with twitchy, muted minor key exhilaration.

Perhaps it is because through this minor key she upsets more classical-conservative critics. Monroe's exhilaration, her breathless deleria, was most definitely major key... and it helps them that she's conveniently dead, her womanhood no longer an active threat. Stewart is alive, young, coiling and uncoiling with a thousand breathy tendrils, and growing larger. By switching sexual presence to a minor key, Stewart alters our genre paradigms. She dissolves whole wings of Hollywood sexuality with her Medusa glance. But that too is an illusion. She too shall age and become a legend, shall occupy some wing in the Hollywood sexuality museum and then her magnetic attraction-repulsion divisiveness will be understood, and only then. Or maybe if we look back past Monroe and all the way to Hollywood's infancy, to Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford-- who had to convey their girlish amor in flickering silent films with mixed emotions fluttering over and through their eyes and lips like butterfly micro-change vibrations--we can place Stewart's gifts in a less sexual, more timeless context. Gish and Pickford were the first women to show the world the difference between Acting, as in grand operatic gestures meant for the back row of the theater, and cinematic truth, vulnerability, intimacy, the strange sense that a camera right up in their face is no more or less terrifying than just being alone in a room with the boy they like. That which they looked on with favor become beautiful, like their gaze was a love potion

Lillian Gish

It's only natural with such silent ancestry that Stewart speaks with words usually halting and unsure. She fumbles for eloquence and grace rather than ever, say, babbling like she's a bourgeois Woody Allen shopgirl. For HUNTSMAN, she surprises with a rousing, Joan of Arc-esque speech toward the climax, after her true love kiss awakening, rallying her seven dwarfs and coterie of knights to a climactic attack. Starting out soft and wafting, a little wan and undernourished, she slowly coils her Kundalini in a serpentine ascent that cute, clipped British accent rises in pitch and deepening in timbre, conveying an urgency and sense of exhilaration fused to courage in the face of terror that we seldom get outside of novels or Henry V.

Even without Stewart, there's a lot to like in SNOW WHITE. Like few other adaptations of this fairy tale it seems to totally fit--with a Lara Croft treasure solving gear-aligning click--into the archetypal unconscious Jungian rite of passage / heroine's journey pantheon. Chris Hemsworth's (he plays the Huntsman) youthful gravitas activates some special hormone in the nitrate of Hollywood's unconscious; he's the hero we've needed and if there was almost no romance or connection between her and Stewart in the film, why should there be? They barely know each other. With female heroines, romance doesn't just happen in a dissolve.

What we have in this instead one are some psychedelic bad trip-haunted swamp visuals; poison gas belched out by some rotten spores abounding in the swamp makes Snow White hallucinate black snake branches; "the swamp feeds on your weakness!" The evil duke looks like Max Von Sydow in THE SEVENTH SEAL or THE VIRGIN SPRING. I like the weird fairy forest with its beautiful hart, and the tender effect Snow White has on all life around her, including a big ugly troll that in a movie for boys would be slain with thunderous 3-D sword swings before it has a chance to even declare a side. Instead it's all elegantly done and if some of it is overdone, as in the dwarf's Brit character actor business, I forgive them, as the spirit of Snow White forgives me, even as I write this, and forgives you, even as you read this.

If SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN never strays from its archetypal Jungian template resonance then all the better to entrain its frequency to the experience of teenage maturation, the dangers, pains, triumphs, heartaches, and treacherous currents all of us face, or have faced, on the road to the fullest bloom of our adulthood, my precious.

So back to the Stewart gaze: I know some of my regular readers can't stand Kristen Stewart and maybe I'm blinded by my affection, but I think her appeal is deeper than just hipster hotness. She's never really been marketed as a sex symbol, wisely, and in SNOW she looks pretty bedraggled throughout. First she's a prisoner, then a half-drowned swamp rat tripping balls, then she's dead, then reborn. It takes its toll on her make-up. I don't think she gets more than one bath or shower in the whole damned film, erotic or otherwise. But like most of her fans I don't go to sleep fantasizing about dating her anymore than I think oh man Lillian Gish was hot. Rather, I identify with her. I admire her pluck, and feel protective --I love her through her own eyes. To open up to a blue screen and trust a monster or giant hart will be inserted later so she doesn't look like a homeless mime, that takes courage. Anyone can be removed and aloof to a blue screen (Angelina Jolie for example). But it takes true courage to be open-hearted and vulnerable even when you know the closed-hearted are going to send slings and arrows at you to validate their own fears about opening. We've seen coltish young starlets gambol around enchanted countrysides before (STEALING BEAUTY), but aside from her occasional moments as a side player (as in INTO THE WILD) Stewart's seldom cast as a LOLITA sex object. She is the caster.

Into the Wild

My undergrad liberal arts PC feminist brainwashing made it hard to not hate my own gender, but I find forgiveness in myself for being a man because Stewart's openness feminizes my own viewing gaze. Perhaps that's why the bourgeois critics rankle and rear like startled stallions at the mention of her name? I like that the Twilight movies are not made for me, neither my gender nor my age. Like, FINALLY! I like the Twilight films the way Kathryn Bigelow likes war movies, as a chance to morph my gaze into a complete reversal of its gender-assigned specifications, to understand that my 'eye' informs and entertains my shadowy anima unconscious as well as my masculine ego.

A classicist may prefer to follow along as a woman like Janet Leigh is gradually driven mad or sliced up by our male gaze desire and think he's understanding the male gaze's destructive drive even as he indulges it, hey, we all do that too, but it's Kristen's gaze that has the power and it actually reverses that devouring destructive Norman's mother gaze like she's flashing an S.O.S. mirror at Medusa. Her gaze may devour and objectify the male, but in a feminine, open, compassionate way. She stops the pendulum swings from phoenix to ash and back again and focuses in on some genuine romantic gazing, back and forth slowly, gently, like calming a spooked horse. And that's such a shock for some viewers they can't get over it; no matter how patiently she whispers to them they just won't gentle. They've got burrs under their leather shoulder-patched tweed suit jacket saddles. How dare Kristen Stewart, in a sense, look back at them as they stamp and snort and kick the back of their stalls in outrage, unable to shake that burr no matter how vitriolic their reviews.

Hey hoss, you can fight it all you want, but the young, vulnerable feminine awkward bravery Kristen Stewart conveys onscreen is here to stay because it never left, just dormant, ready to be awakened at the close of the century-long witch's spell. Still semi-sleepy but ready to fully flower any moment, Stewart is our Lillian Gish on the ice floe in WAY DOWN EAST. She's Mary Pickford leading her fellow orphans through the gator-filled swamps in SPARROWS. She's Judy Garland about to throw that bucket of water in WIZARD OF OZ. She's ANNA CHRISTIE, slouching and mumbling towards Brooklyn to be born again, not as some twisted version of a farm girl or milk-drinking lady but an abused and still triumphant, whiskey-drinking woman. You may moan and kvetch and sign up on the next tramp steamer out of town but it's far too late to change the tide--your gaze has lost its power. Her gaze reigns and is neither as good or as bad as you think it is, it's just a harbinger of your own spectatorial dissolution. Don't blame the messenger if she points out you're meltingggg.... oh what a world. Be kind to it, Kristen, it's only our cheap tin 'testimonial', and now its breaking.

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