All Hail the New Flesh Keychain: ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

Sticking it to the Walt Disney Military Intelligence Complex by inverting its 'Lächelnd macht frei' ethos, newbie writer-director Randy Moore's black and white chronicle of the last day and night of a family at Disney World, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW is the first sign the the apocalypse will involve enforced smiling and animatronic vampires holding hands around the world. Beautiful to look at in 16mm handheld on-ride stolen shots (the movie was filmed on the sly without Disney permission), ESCAPE's camerawork delivers surprisingly little whiplash jerky motion sickness and instead offers comedic cognizance, great AMERICAN BEAUTY / LOLITA obsessive midlife crisis-ing, David Lynch post-modern artifice-surrealism, and Guy Maddin black and white fuzzy basement expressionism as we watch a nuclear family implode as dad's (and eventually mom's as well) perceptions of reality, fantasy, and papier-mâché facsimile dissolve into one throbbing archetypal hydra.

As this dissolving father, Roy Abramsohn is a perfect blend of guarded and agape; thrown for a loop by an early morning phone call (wherein he's fired) taken out on the hotel balcony to not wake the family, sets him off, especially once his little boy locks him out of the room where his family is snuggled up asleep together. Their day at Disney finds the dad haunted by a pair of nubile but clearly underage French girls (Annet Mahendru, Danielle Safady) who giggle amidst themselves, make flirty eye contact with his children, and express vibrancy in that perfectly self-contained way that heralds any sex-starved 40-something father breakdown, leaving him powerless to resist ogling them like a school boy bewildered by his first hormone surge. And why shouldn't it? The mom (Elena Schuber) won't even accept his most rudimentary physical affection, for no reason she can really explain, other than perhaps sensing he's overcompensating --though for what she's too stressed to bother finding out.

Equating the eye of older men being drawn to younger women as analogous not to cougars but to older women being drawn to other people's very young children, the film becomes a reflection of the differing gender drives (one protective/nesting the other seed-sowing) and how one is considered holy and the other vile, each a reprisal against the other; so which came first, the vilifying of the man's attraction to younger women or his wife's treating him like a rotten kid rather than granting him any power or respect as 'the father'? Shut out of the closed circuit of a child-mother pair bond and unable to raise so much as his voice against them, the dissolving father is sabotaged by negative portrayals in the media on his role as ultimate signifier. Instead, the father is himself put into the Oedipal exile originally reserved for his son, emasculated by the mother-son rejection and so both weakened and freed from the responsibility of his own actions. Why wouldn't he be drawn to a woman still young enough to think he's not a child, who is equally cast out of the closed circuit mother-son pair bond? The older man grants the younger woman a rare chance to try out her seductive powers on a 'safe' target (a wedding ring signifies both a dare and a freebie) and to feel like she's correcting the Elektra-exile she has herself suffered since she came of age to compete with the mom for status as the hottest bitch on the block (think Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE). Rather than recognizing her role as its instigator, the mother sees their shared secrets as a priori justification for her coldness.

This post-70s change in husbandry was instigated by huge films like THE EXORCIST and E.T. with dads not even present for the trials suffered by mother and children. Family men were and are depicted as either wimpy-voiced second class females or else gangsters, thugs, rapists, molesters, Satanists, sell-outs, government flunkies, pimps or psycho loners, OR simply not around at all (they only return --with their unique sets of skills--when their daughter's been abducted or killed by a man who IS around, thus negating the father function except en absentia); older daughters meanwhile are Lolitas, jailbait, white trash short shorts eye candy harlots out to tempt weak-willed husbands 'just because they can' or sexophobic virgins able to forge a sex-free friendship only with some similarly disabused and immanently dead older male, such as a sad-eyed cop, lawyer or mining engineer. Even then, mom glowers, as if the only role their man should have is as a devoted spectator to her perfect bond with their young son (ala Jennifer Connelly in LITTLE CHILDREN). Raising children on their own, these moms are elevated to saints with no time for smiles or joy as they work two jobs to put food on the table and swat away questions about why dad left with tearful displays of eternal devotion that all but ensure the son never grows up, leaving the post-pubescent babysitters and any remaining fathers to drive back to her house alone together, with mom's curses and suspicions by way of adieu. C'est fou, eh, Pierrot?

But that presumes a certain midlife crisis-level case of bad judgment, the sort only spousal scorn/frigidity and no place or time to masturbate can bring. With that bad judgment comes an inability to correctly read a scene - to never know if the son has black alien eyes or if those teenage French chicks really like you or are just creeped out. From there it's a short skip and a jump into the abyss of delusional paranoid schizophrenia AKA Imaginationland! Does Disney World's all-consuming devotion to fantasy encourage this escape, or actually enforce it?

Some critics complain that we never quite learn what the hell is really going on in ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW. By now you should know I am not one of them.  I applaud any movie that dares blur the line between daydream, fantasy, hallucination, nightmare, and paranoid reality. Once some parameter is set up as to what's a dream or fantasy I lose interest, which is why I'm no fan of BILLY LIAR, for example.

Ambiguity might or might not rule!

Along his embryonic journey, ESCAPE's dad gets into a fight with his bitch wife, runs into a sexy nurse whose tears and veiled worry about some contagious disease rocking the park make her seem both starved for attention and desperate to seem 'open' to seduction (as soon as she's waved them out of sight with she breaks down - it's okay since no one is watching). Dad also runs into a spooky Maleficient-style witch (Alison Lees-Taylor - the sexiest craziest witch since Deborah Reed in TROLL 2!) who hypnotizes dad with a sparkling jewel, luring him into a midday tryst at the presidential suite while his daughter sleeps in the other room and the witch's son watches TV. The witch's post-orgasm sad eyes reflect sad desperation. She tells him that rich Japanese businessmen pay thousands of dollars to sleep with the Disney princesses --and she was one of them, and that not being able to register a single negative emotion all day at work gradually drives every Disney employee insane.

If this all plays a bit like EYES WIDE SHUT, well, old Walt was a 33.3 degree Mason and the enforced smiling signifies tier-two Monarch programming. Is the witch some kind of manipulator/ trigger sent on by the forces of darkness upon sensing his vulnerability? You'd think getting his rocks off would lessen his frustrated weirdness, but even when the boyfriends, replete with obnoxious long curly hair, of the girls show up he can't get them out of his mind, or the camera's vision. From there, it just gets weirder, approaching flume chutes down which only the brave Cinemascope funeral snakes such as David Lynch or Bunuel dare plunge. When you can no longer tell what's real or illusion, you are finally free, finally getting your all-day pass's money's worth. Monsterdom begins at home and if you look farther than the mirror to find your mortal enemy, you never really had one to begin with.

Little CGI flashes of animatronic fangs, blackening pupils, shining hypnotizing jewels, and fairy wings all do a bit to cement the equation of madness with Disney's subversive use of archetypal psychology, enabling the idea that, in order to appreciate a fake wonderland, your schizophrenia has to supply the missing details. Having never tripped at Disney World I'm not sure if this is what it's like, but I'm guessing it's like the classic SIMPSONS episode where the kids go to Duff Gardens and Lisa ends up drinking the water under the log ride and hallucinating wildly, and eventually declaring "I am the Lizard Queen." And little moments like the pre-fireworks pool scene, wherein both the girls and the wife seem to be both pulling him towards them and away at the same time until he seems trapped in the center of the pool like a spooked Marilyn caught between Gable and Clift rodeo lassos. Lifeguards pull him out of the water thinking he's drowned; has he? Is this what it's like in your last hours on earth? Are heaven and hell really all commingled in a land of fake castles, expensive witch costumes, make-believe, costumed freaks, and nubile woodland fauns with braces? Considering all the photos being taken in the park it's hardly surprising that a guerrilla film could be pulled off but it's still an audacious move, throwing legal safety to the wind (Disney is a notoriously rigid enforcer of their copyrights) along with any semblance of sanity or logic, and aside from a few missteps, such as a scatalogically unfortunate climax (I went into the other room until the gross noises stopped) it's pretty tight with the ambiguity. Even the shots that are obviously filmed against a blue screen of park footage ring with an absurdist post-modern unease.

If ESCAPE ends up being slightly less than the sum of its parts I for one shall not complain. I've always felt the French are far more clued-in about how to balance work and play. If you go to the beach for a month you never feel the clock ticking on your space for enjoyment. You never feel the need to not waste time, to have 'more fun' than you are having now (the family rapt before some display of fireworks or whales, and mom or neutered father going "isn't that wonderful, Caitlin?!' or "isn't this fun, Caitlin?!" unable to shut off her motormouth thought babble even before a spectacle that overwhelms any rational need to comment). Instead of this (socialist) cognizance about the inability to have fun under a time clock, America surrenders to the idea of the one week vacation, the trip to Disney World as being some sacred ideal to aspire to and hold holy as you slog away the molasses hours at work the rest of the year, waiting for that one week off in July, saving money and deferring all joy in life for this one expensive dream week, until you're finally there, and any sense of spontaneity or fun buckles under the pressure.

But old Walt is too canny to not understand this basic problem, hence the all-inclusive package stay, which makes the unlimited access to all rides and accommodations a liberating freedom from any imperative to enjoy, though some moms stick it in anyway (like the one in ESCAPE). Here's an example: My dad traveled all the time for work so hated going on vacation with us. He needed a break, so my mom took my brother and I by herself to Bermuda one year and then Disney and Epcot (shortly after it opened) the next. Going to Bermuda without him made me feel I had to step in, even at 13 years-old, and be the man of the family, which meant worrying about how much everything cost (I wouldn't go snorkeling since it was $23 an hour per person, so my mom and brother went and I sulked in the room) but at Disney my oldest man of the house status didn't compel me to take on responsibility. We had already paid so it was about getting as much as you could out of it.

I mention all this to draw the conclusion that fathers are superfluous at Disney World. Their dreams are never meant to come true, because their dreams involve being single, childless, and young. And since they can't go back in time to being 22 they are unable to discover what in advance of seeing it. Once they see a way back into the past, a chance to dive onto the passing train, they take it. They get drunk, dance around, buy a motorcycle or a fez, and let themselves be seduced by younger women. But beware giving up your adult father power, Papa. This move will only confirm mom's treatment of you as just the oldest child, the perpetually 'in trouble' oldest son as the mom more and more surrenders to an inner animus-domination that has her convinced she's the sole voice of authority in the family. You can try to be free while she glowers and nags, but soon even there the thrill will be gone, the bloom will be off the rose, and the new flesh mouse ears grown so deep into your brain as to be irremovable. And when you finally look for the treasure map that leads to your buried balls you find it's been torn, frayed, and scattered Osiris-like to the far corners of the REKALL amusement park. Lucky for you then, there's a facsimile souvenir offering proof you ever had some, and photos. Look, you're smiling!

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CinemArchetype 21: The Ego

When I made the last cinemarchetype, the Holy Fool, it so influenced me that I became a holy man for five weeks, even starting a whole new website and accompanying cult, Pswar of the Saints.  That's why I've been scared to approach the ego, which is the true apocalypse of the archeytpes, representing a paralyzed stasis, a black poison of insecurity, doubt and the need to control others, even kill or destroy to protect your 'interests.' This is perfectly expressed in our modern world via things like Big Oil, Republicans, and crazy cult leaders who prefer to force their congregation into suicide rather than lose them. It's a hard habit to break, just as the Holy Fool is a hard habit to keep. Naturally, as it is the polar opposite.

Of itself, in its proper capacity, the ego poses no threat and is vital to survival. When we move into life or death situations we need 'one ring to bind them all' so we can act quickly and not be confused by an abundance of empathy and mellow vibes. But without calamity to justify its continued overlording, the ego must make some, like a military leader creating a state of national emergency so Congress won't cut funding. Bush's tightening of power and invading Iraq after 9/11, meanwhile giving Bin Laden a two week head start, is a perfect example. Once the threat is taken care of, the sympathetic nervous system is supposed to relinquish control to the parasympathetic, and take it back again only under 'fight or flight.'  Yet most of us live our whole lives without ever even getting more than a taste of the parasympathetic! Ego would rather sink the ship than let go of the wheel.

This is why the best way to film our ego's hostile relationship to the collective unconscious is by making our ego representatives inhuman, nonspecific symbols, outside alien intrusions into the DNA spirals of the natural world.

1. HAL 9000 - 2001 (1967)
A perfect artificial intelligence, it's telling that HAL's emerging paranoia comes with the first glimmers of self-awareness, and time on his hands. He also has to cover, as ego's do, for his mistakes. HAL falls into the Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome of the firemen who, when he has no fires to fight, has to start some. Later, when HAL is being unplugged, he goes out singing "Maisie" and then "Happy Birthday," hinting that it is perhaps with birthday celebrations our egoic consciousness manifests. Indeed, aren't birthdays a kind of simultaneous celebration of our difference from others? We're inevitably disappointed, like on Xmas, but there we're all disappointed together. The birthday computer sulks alone.

Once Kier Dullea silences the egoic voice of HAL, a long-hidden briefing tape comes on, letting Bowman know his mission. This represents the ultimate goal of meditation, the silencing of our egoic chatter, the HAL voice, finally illuminating our ancient mission: to go 'Beyond Jupiter' --to expand our consciousness and attain the stars.

2. Lord Sauron - Lord of the Rings (trilogy)
If the constellation of Middle Earth's peaceful races mirrors the unconscious archetypes of the whole soul, the unvarnished psyche, then Lord Sauron is the intrusion of ego, of the illusion of separateness leading to fear and the desire to control, to harness or enslave or destroy all others. As an alcoholic in recovery I know too well this feeling - we are like ex-gollums, gradually working our way back to hobbit form. But if we relent in our quest, keep the ring for ourselves, or bring a bottle to our lips, we sink instantly into the mire of cozy-warm evil.

That Sauron is reflected by a giant all-seeing eye is telling because when we're ego-dominated we get an unshakable sense of constantly being watched, of thinking there are microphones in our teeth sending out signals to the CIA. If our Sauron ego gets too far in its plans to conquer our other archetypes, it will destroy us ("in order to save us," it would add).  It's a poison which we project outwards in mistrust of the same external authority we slavishly bow to. If we can lessen its control our lives flower but if not, we squirm under the lash of a persona that would destroy us rather than set us free. If the very thought of meditation or going to AA or a therapist makes you squirm to the point you would rather die than ask for help, Sauron has got you.

3. Orson Welles as Citizen Kane (1941)
Maybe it's my impending sense of mortality but that long slow pan along all that expensive junk at the end of KANE suddenly seems super tragic, as do lines like "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" - the little boy treating the world like his candy store, yet never finding a favorite flavor.  It's telling that this film aroused such ire in William Randolph Hearst as it's not just about him but about all egos, Orson's included. But Hearst's outrage over the film implicates him in and of itself. A too-dominant ego makes true artistic inspiration impossible.

Ego-dominated people long to be artists and writers because they're desperate to prove they have the unconscious--the fount of creativity-- under control. But everything they produce is hack work: contrived, stale, meaningless, and we can all tell the difference. Only the ego-dominated producer gives 'the people' no credit for seeing what he himself can't in his own work. What Kane can't get around is no matter how many papers he has, he can't change public perception of Susan Foster, can't buy her into being a great opera star.

Susan Foster Kane's suicide attempt, the thing that finally ends his bullying, is what people so often resort to when the ego leaves them no other option. If they can't break free from its micro-managing suffocation long enough to get some perspective then they just might mistake the ego for the whole of consciousness, as if there was nowhere else to run, and this is just what the ego wants us to believe.

4. Boris Karloff as Dr. Janos - The Invisible Ray (1936)

The saddest element of this downer of a Universal sci fi film is not just the wasted opportunity to make something spooky and fun but a glum sermon against nothing in particular. Janos' huge ego demands that the mysterious radioactive compound he discovered in darkest Africa be only for his personal use. He gets super mad when Lugosi spirits some off to Paris and begins healing children. His ego becomes so toxic he starts to glow in the dark; he learns he can kill people with a single touch, as fine a metaphor for the choking power of the ego on creativity and art as your likely to find in 1936.


Janos's egotism manifests also in his terrible treatment of his wife, and his servants and the hired help in darkest Africa, whom he threatens to destroy with his death ray if they dare run away on him. So... the whole world is supposed to come to a halt while Karloff loses himself behind lead protective shields and fiddles with something that as far as he is concerned is solely to make himself more powerful. Damn, what a self-centered prick. While it's great to see Bela play a good guy, a healing benevolent doctor for a change, it's also boring. Lugosi wouldn't have wasted a part like Janos with glum seriousness. Lugosi would have hammed it to high heaven and made the film a hit. B-western director Lambert Hillyer brings--as he did the year before in Dracula's Daughter--an odd mix of rich Universal horror atmosphere, humorless depression and naiveté.  In short, ego...

5. Bob Geldoff as Pink Floyd - The Wall (1980)
I wrote my big essay on this film in 2010 and I can see in my post-illuminated state the hungry ghost ego running through me that made me blind to both my own and Pink's hungry ghost neediness. Remembering what I learned from a hot art therapist at Bellevue, the open scream mouth poster should be a dead giveaway, the gaping mouth of the needy, first chakra-trapped addict ... but such is the blind rage of the one-ring-to-bind-them that the terrors of ego are invisible to the ego-terrorized: In 1997, though, the film--directed by Alan Parker and written by Roger Waters--found its way to me via a big VH1 premiere marathon. It was on 24 hours a day and I'd done recently done a voiceover for a Curve Perfume ad ("Curve for men, Curve for women") which VH1 and MTV were playing--also around the clock-- during almost every break, so I watched THE WALL over and over, in a drunken haze of self-satisfaction - See what a mad ego I have?

A wall itself of course is a grand metaphor for the ego -- that giant Hoover dam of a construct wherein rudimentary 'take-take-take' hungry ghost consciousness seeks to exploit and harness unconscious archetypal powers, to define, to create linear lines and divisions over the unmeasurable chthonic circles.

6. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri - Amadeus (1984)

[addressing a crucifix]
Salieri: From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. (imdb quotes)

7. The Blue Meanie - Yellow Submarine (1968)
Silencing the music of the spheres, of God, in favor of its own ersatz imitation, Salieri's music is the classic example of the musical ego, the one who desires to 'bind them all' to its ego-dominated ring of power, yet winds up only painfully aware of his lack of connection to the untamed wilds of true creativity and genius, is i.e. a hack, a Susan Foster Kane, an Invisible Ray.

Luckily unlike in Amadeus, the Blue Meanies never permanently kill anyone, and are brought back into the fold at the end, now right-sized and in love with the Nowhere Man.

8. Robert De Niro - Jake LaMotta - Raging Bull (1980)
9. Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele - In a Lonely Place (1950)
(From Bride of Bogartstein (8/11): The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his star charisma can be made ugly by vain antipathy. As Dix, even his proposal of marriage comes off like a threat, providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp, temporarily calm but... really, the rest of your life with this thing? As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental."

This same description applies to the similarly abusive Jake LaMotta, wherein De Niro also buries his natural actorly charm to show us the ugly, violent, twisted face of the glorified savage animal male ego -- the smashing force of the repressive instinct, the need to control leading to paranoia, suspicion, and the unquestioned feeling one's own violence is always justified, even if its against your own fists.

10. Burt Lancaster - Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

"When he insulted me he insulted all forty million of my readers."

11. James Mason - Lolita, Bigger than Life, North by Northwest, Mandingo
Mascon can't ever really be lovable in a straightforward way but as a rogue and scoundrel, a god or a demon, he is charming without peer. Take his slippery bad guy in North by Northwest, and imagine him like the later version of Humbert Humbert, Lolita having driven him insane to the point he not only killed Quilty, but her husband and child, and Lolita as grown up to be Eva Marie Saint. Makes sense, right? His is love only in the sickest sense, as with his grandiose mania in Bigger than Life, he really never sees anyone else but himself.

12. Emperor Palpatine - The Star Wars Trilogy
Lucas' films (post the original trilogy) may be blandly acted and overbaked but as myths they nail a great middle ground between the political, the social, and the psychological. The emperor is the ultimate in political leaders / ego / tyrant - uniting the archetypes whether or not they agree with the uniting, creating whatever problems may be required for such a unification's continued necessity. This is the Ego in its dark splendor and existential sadness.

---
Of course there are other definitions of the ego, as the central figure of identification in any myth:  Luke Skywalker, Nina in The Black Swan, but for the reasons of this series I'm focusing on the negative aspects, as from an eastern philosophy perspective rather than a Jungian hero's journey per se. The egos here in this list have exceeded their authority, forgotten their place as an evolving force in the constellation. Rather than the secretary taking down the unconscious archetype's inspirational dictation, they have become censor, judge, homogenizing editor. May we all be so lucky as to utilize their lessons in our own inner dealings, to become wise and tolerant rulers of our archetypal kingdoms, allowing each aspect of the Self its vote, like the wise, chaste kings of old!

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LSD Godfather: Don Fanucci in the Vestibule

Mobsters and LSD, don't doubt they mix! But forget about Scorsese's mobsters for a minute--they're the cocaine generation --let's sink down into the swampy dark studies full of fissured old faces that was the 1970s, the LSD generation, and the Godfather Part 2 (1974). As Chico Marx would say, Ahsta mana gatsa - Aye shalom!

He's got Giuliani's Smile

The key figure in it all for lysergic resonance is not, as one might suspect, Michael (Al Pacino) or Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), but the original padrone, Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin), a monstrous yet vaguely comical figure who extorts local businesses as an alleged finger of the shadowy organization known as the Black Hand. In the TruTV.com Crime Library, Anthony Bruno lays it all out:

At the turn of the 20^th century in America, Italian immigrant extortionists used the mysterious name, the Black Hand, to scare their targets into paying their demands, lest they incur the wrath of some vast underground society.  In fact, these Black Handers were freelancers with no affiliation to any criminal organization.  Nevertheless, the innocent Italian immigrants they targeted believed that a Black Hand organization existed and knew very well that these extortionists generally followed through on their threats when they didn't get what they wanted. (more here)

 For frightened immigrants with no grasp of English, a figure like Fanucci could easily step in as an arbiter of the law, a go-between. What Godfather 2 did was re-invent and destroy the ties and traps that still snared lesser men, like Clemenza, like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977 - more here ), that led them to seek protection against the unfamiliar, or to pay their $100 to Don Fanucci, to cower from the machine without even giving it a second thought. The 1970s young turk movies operated outside the illusion of government; the anti-establishment attempts of Easy Rider (1969) were the only law. Captain America and Billy maybe never made it to Florida, but Friedkin, Scorsese, and Coppola did. They pulled back the curtain, took one look at old Frank Morgan as Oz, and popped a cap in his cheek (and a tab on their tongues).

The bullet holes Vito makes when shooting Fanucci in the infamous vestibule scene seem absurdly tiny for his massive bulk. When shot, he whirls around like a puppet whose master has tangled his strings; his mouth all a- grimace, a bit like the evil servant of Sarastro, Monostatos, in Mozart's The Magic Flute. Like Monostatos, from a mythic archetypal vantage, Fanucci is an 'evil servant' - he's chosen personal gain over altruism and what's worse, he thinks that all he wants is a little love, a little respect, just enough to whet his beak.

In the muddy 90s this section of the film always seemed to be popping up late at night when I was reeling from the effects of some mind-bending substance (I think it came on after 'Psych-Out' on my VHS), and Fanucci's face looked on my blurry VHS like a grotesque theater clown; his last gasps a mix of profound awareness, surprise and seeming attempts to react in a macho, heroic manner are all undone by his rapid loss of blood and bodily functioning. He tries to snarl and chokes on it. Like this encounter with death, brilliantly conveyed by Moschin, the LSD state is one wherein one is suddenly confronted with mortality's terrifying limits, thrust outside the reach of the linear space-time guardrails; unable to give full expression to the intense sensory input one is experiencing in the dark auburn Gordon Willis lighting of the hallway that is the late night of our lives. We all have our Fanucci moment, a death of a loved one, a brutal break-up, a car accident, or taking a whole tab when you should have taken a half, the question is, what do we do with it? Do we cower, or do we stand up and dissolve into the ether like a man, a blood-soaked, pain-wracked but still standing mobster?

It's interesting also to note how Fanucci's death scene mirrors the opening of the segment, at the theater, with the poor Italian immigrant opera singer threatening to kill himself (above) because he just learned his mama is dead back in Naples. In the scene immediately following, Fanucci steps backstage and threatens Vito's paisan's alleged girlfriend for her papa's box office money.  Meanwhile the character onstage in the play has lost his mama, but what's really got him down is the realization his tie to 'home' in Italy no longer exists, Mama Mia! We never see the mother die - it is only a letter, a signifier of something he'd otherwise not know about, just as the idea of 'the Black Hand' doesn't really exist beyond the imagery conjured up by Fanucci. Note that this scene may have been based on a real life case involving Caruso:

It wasn't uncommon for a child to be kidnapped and a severed finger delivered back to the parents to convince them to pay the ransom.  In 1905 a Brooklyn butcher was gunned down in his shop for ignoring an extortionist's demand for $1,000.  The famous opera tenor Enrico Caruso paid a demand for $2,000 when he received a threatening letter signed with a black-ink palm print.

There's the Black Hand cultivating wives' tales with their propensity for violence and then there's that old wives' tale of the LSD user eating a live cat for the 'experience,' a fable I'm not sure I believe so much as remember from my halcyon days. Not that I did, but while you're peaking even a stalk of celery can seem like you're eating a live cat. You can hear the screaming in the crunch, feel the claws in the severed tendrils of the inner stalk. The piece in your hand is like Rhode Island being unmoored from the North American continent, like Jupiter adrift in space; every gesture leaving trails that make it seem like you're wielding a dozen arms, like Vishnu on a bender. In the amber dimness of the apartment doorway where Fanucci is gunned down, a similar collapse of time and space occurs, making my many views of it under the influence in past decades no mere accident. What collapses is not just a man, but the distance between the busy throngs of Manhattan and the Catholic ceremony going on outside in the street; the old world theater, with its constant shuffling of crowds in and out during performances all collapsed into itself like a dwarf star, shrunk away into nothing but a few red holes in a white suit. Every time Fanuccie dies I feel the bullets; I burst out laughing from my chest at his grotesque expression, at the bewilderment and anger pulsing out of his face and mine, the realization in the second before he dies that he'll never get to make his last macho boast, his last beak-whet, his last salut.

Thus the Fanucci murder sequence is  the LSD breakthrough moment, the hinge on which turns the wheel that cuts off the head of the imprisoned delegates of the old world, the quintessence of what I like to call "The Dissolving Father" of 1970s cinema.

The concept of the dissolving father is best elaborated in two stages, before and after: the before is the Mad Men era of JFK - the authority figure as one who enjoys the finer things --smoking, women, and martinis-- but who is also a family man at a time when that meant being a provider to a housewife and children, and maid, and maybe gardener. He must be a benevolent and canny ruler who can mix business with pleasure while asserting his dominance without tapping his manly reserves. His womanizing is part of his charm and so he is always partly exposed to judgment, but society hasn't caught up with him yet. He is silver fox-stage Cary Grant or Gary Cooper, mixing drinks in their state of the art Manhattan bachelor pads (the wives are up in Westchester) for girls young enough to be their granddaughters. 

The after, the historical finish of the dissolve, occurs in the1980s, with all such behavior in our leaders thought of as suspect and the attention turned to an endangered child--poor Vito alone on the boat to America--vulnerable to predators because both his parents work or are dead and so en absentia, the grotesque 'anal father' of Freud and Lacan returns from the shadows, a patched-up Fanucci unaware he's about to get re-punctured by his hockey mask-wearing bastard (or Cimmerian barbarian) 'other' son, the lost prodigal who's been in gladiator school all the while dad's been at the love-in. The only survivor of this 1980s purging is the 'final dad' - he mirrors the slasher movie 'final girl' in his sexless androgyny. To survive he makes his voice high and effeminate when he talks to his kids, deferring power to the mom in all things, a meek co-breadwinner terrified of being rejected by his offspring to the point they have no other choice.

The dissolving father is the tragic figure of the 1970s, his once inarguable power now slipped away - the institutions he used to signify now little more than meaningless totems.  Of course this is supposed to happen anyway if you are to fully mature and become the father (regardless of gender or age) and learn there is no there there. In LSD parlance, you become 'experienced' and hip to the whole cosmic flim-flam. It's as if there are two--you and pops-- in a sealed room, and then just one. But like Poe's William Wilson, or, say, Scanners, it's not like you are still there, and yet neither did you leave. So just how did you become the other person? What was the alchemical formula that dissolved the father and left you in charge? When you put a murderous old world Italian and an innocent new world upstart into a vestibule, only one emerges - a now-murderous upstart. Or didn't you realize, until this very day, it was Barzini all along?

Historically the father dissolved as a result of changing dynamics in the workplace and at home; as the suburbs became more and more isolated, the nuclear family was more and more cut off from older generations, the outer world more hostile from the family's lack of direct participation in it. Since both mother and father go to work all day, the children grow up watching TV, and if the father comes home the best he can do in the way of demonstrative mastery is change the channel from cartoons to the news - an effective display in the 1970s when there was only one television in the house - but by the 1980s we all had at least two. It's mirrored brilliantly in the arc of the Godfather, as depicted in the images above with their use of cleansing fire: Fanucci is the old world father - making a grandly conspicuous show of his connection to the people down at the crowded festival, the celebration of fire as a cleansing spirit, giving rebirth to the community spirit; above him stalks Vito Corleone, along the empty rooftop, alone, the grim battlements like a graveyard that tell no tales, where all traces of pleasure and decadence, anything to cloud a man's judgment and purpose, have been excised. The last fire Fanucci sees, is cleansing him.

To bring it back to The Magic Flute, the murder of Fanucci is akin to the passage of the lovers through the test of Sarastro, the journey through the underworld with the writhing figures menacing from all sides, but are they even really there? No. Vito realizes the same thing, that in a sense Fanucci's threats are 'not real' just as the phantoms of the underworld only seem real to Tamino, who then becomes the new Sarastro, for he inherits the burden of authority, the status as ultimate signifier --he has been given the secret which is of course that there is no secret.  There is no special power that comes with the job, only the offering of the self as representative of order, someone to stand in front of the chaotic void and assure the people there really is a man behind the curtain when old Oz has actually been dead for years, and you know that because you're the one who shot him! You see the blood on your hands, or at any rate, in your hands, swimming through the blue veins, ever ready to come out and turn red in the grimy air of the LES, and the darkness always waiting to engulf you, always just a broken bulb away. 

LSD reveals all these things, because it draws back every curtain and if you cling to outmoded morals and fear, pay Fanucci or get all paranoid about the passing cops, you're headed for a bummer trip, little better than the kid who's afraid to cross the street against the traffic light even though there's no car for miles, or refuses to jump off the cliff when all his friends below are splashing away without him, citing the lack of a lifeguard. Authority is a placebo, as all the LSD kids know this, and so does Hyman Roth. Michael, we're bigger than US Steel. You'd never guess Roth was rich the way he lives, or that he hates the Corleones by the way he acts. There's no need to be mean or a braggart.

Fanucci is the old world type of deep oak patriarch, the one called 'the terrible father,' the odious ruler who makes a spectacle of his own enjoyment, who insists on being seen enjoying, as in his conspicuousness and little bits of attention grabbing at the Sen Gennaro festival - who insists on being loved as opposed to just loving and shutting up about it. There's a great moment at the puppet show for example, that is the epitome of the anal father, when he makes a joke about it being "too violent" for him, and turns around expecting the whole crowd to meet his gaze and break out in approving laughter. When they don't there's a flicker of shame that passes over his face, before he blocks it away with a smirk and moves on. This grandstanding exposes Fanucci as an easy target for a man as streamlined and rid of all personal pleasures as Vito, who has developed the mix of exterior compassion and the canny ability to use the granting of favors as a kind of paperless, untraceable, untaxable currency, who has mastered the ability to repress anger and then kill in cold blood. This is the 'gift' of bravery, and it's what any successful space cowboy also has, for he must keep a straight face when, for example, his walls are crawling with mutant tentacled wallpaper pattern demons and has to walk past oblivious parents in order to get to the sanctuary of his bedroom, and they're bound to come in and pester him with banalities.

The look of a cobra, couched

CODA: What takes the old world's place? We never really know until it's too late, and Vito's son has distilled the teachings of his father into a remorseless sociopathy.  Thus our world is forever shrinking, dissolving and dissipating, and the father as ultimate signifier dissolves with a few shot from a flaming napkin. The shots of red dot blotter that set you free and threw back the curtain on the bullet-riddled corpse of your paternal Other are now wearing off; you're coming down, down... and somewhere, far down the street, some angry youth is making is way towards you, still up, along the rooftops. When you see him admiring his dilated pupils at the Blues Traveler concert, all young and stupid, don't snort in derision. He's about to pull back your wizard curtain. So comb your hair, get out the gift bag, and pass him his diploma, and let him pass, and then die like a real Fanucci!

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Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. IN CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Rip Torn as Big Daddy and Lang with a ferocity and cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry, so it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee). Maybe I'm off the mark (there's also the stapled-on-by-the-code happy ending) but for me this isn't a romantic drama as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes later on, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson when he finally lets some tears show in his voice it's such a shock and he seems so honestly frail in one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze. Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, ice cream), it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated.

The family basement is packed with souvenirs and statues from a Cook's tour to Europe Big Daddy took with his wife, who takes after the mendacity side of the family. What could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole basement becomes a mythic underworld, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king, and cobwebs on tall lamps draped to resemble stalagmites. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most - genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that to Williams a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from that truer, grimmer reality, the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends now, you're fucked. And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging  human, ever trying to escape his future by ignoring his present, and you see yourself that way, too, and if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her one-note voice. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no neck noise stops. It's that 'click.' Brick was waiting for it, and now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, gays are now the opposite of the depraved lunatics they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win?

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation, involved in the Apollonian. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Apollonian. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eyes or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, gets to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone. And as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level, I relate. And I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land with their unconscious brutishness. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, like Maggie and Big Daddy, and Brick, Blanche, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era--the late 50s-early 60s--when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes and whiskey made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive of the future.  Maybe one day we'll again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives; someone to have the guts to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just dressing them up as breeders and aping the most banal of suburban values. Til then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS or Brooks' evil Tom Berenger hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or bang that shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like real adults?

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