Lost Without Your Texts: THE CANYONS (2013) and Lohan's Big Brown Body

Deep in the liason dangereuse-drenched Canyons dwells the only reason we'd want to see it (unless we were Paul Schrader devotees):  Lohan's voluptuous, bruised body, and it is on full display, and it is marvelous. In between shots of her or other pretty youths on their cell phones, Schrader cuts to abandoned west coast cinemas to remind us we're not seeing this movie there, but on our iPads or TVs. At one point a character even takes a long Van Sant-like stroll through Amoeba Video, to remind us it still exists, but who goes there in the age of streaming? Meanwhile a nonstarter slasher film role is coveted by a hunky rent boy looking to 'make a dollar in dis business' before he blows it all for the love of the producer's swing partner (Lohan). But it's only Lindsay's coming-and-going older girl curves, her various minor hard living bruises, that remains when that dull meta-business melts away. It's the last thing standing, or lying, in a field of vision that's slowly being sucked into a tiny glowing square. In a film about vanishing media, Lohan's body is the one thing that won't be airbrush-pixelated.

Which means I care enough to spend $4.99 on Lindsay Lohan, to do my small part in resuscitating her career from its woozy downward spiral, approving with my 'vote' her plan of hitting bottom and launching herself off the bottom of the pool via short zero-budget springs on the backs of disreputable names like Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis, the way Robert Downey Jr. launched off similarly debauched-and-guilty-about-it James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy in 1997. It's a chance for mutual symbiosis: older established artist dudes who make artsy and disturbed visions of druggie youth that never make money find a budget via the casting of a genuine drug-addled youth who always makes money and unafraid to play a dark alley version of their playa selves. Younger and older LA debauchees meet and collaborate. None of them are at the top of his game here, but who is? He's more on his game than most of his old Raging Bulls-era coke buddies. And when you forget even what you're using sex, drugs, and intrigue to escape from, you're in real trouble, Schrader steps in like a wannabe savior, urging you to descend into the crevasse and out the other side rather than try to climb out. Maybe Jesus is down there, or a dropped Xanax bottle

Old man Schrader's been subjecting us to this post-Calvinist morality slip-and-sliding since the 70s, this being the man who gave us Taxi Driver (1974), Hardcore (1978), American Gigolo (1980) and Auto Focus (2002), each in their own way about the evil lure of pornography: runaway daughters being sucked into the sniff film trade; Cybil Shepherd losing it (that is, her cool) at a screening of Sometimes Sweet Susan; Bob Crane's molasses slip from beloved TV star to amateur pornographer to a messy murder victim; a narcissist who sells his body to rich old ladies. Similarly, novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote the source novels for American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less than Zero, all awash in cocaine-fueled casual sex, suicide, murder, pornography. Together with Lohan they generate conspicuous attention: two older coke-head LA insiders trying to be all up to code on the disaffection of pre-debauched youth. As Schrader said in a Salon interview:

My generation — we thought we could make a difference and make the world better. Bret’s generation thought they could make money. I don’t think that this current generation has any real aspirations. They’re making money, but I don’t think they’re that crazy about money. The characters make movies and they don’t like movies that much. They’re hooking up and they don’t like that much. The difference is, my parents and I always believed life would be better for the next generation. The current generation believes life is going to be worse for the next generation. It’s such a change for the future of humanity — the future is not something, now, that guarantees a better life."

That's pertinent of course, but might also be prurient, like the old pastor who works himself up into a sexual froth ranting about the devil as he ogles some girl's halter top. Or there was that film by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Dreamers (2003), wherein you had to wonder who old Bernardo thought he was fooling by having these gorgeous naked young entwined beings haunting the la Cinémathèque Française and pretending to understand Cahiers du Cinema so he could feel he was getting away with something naughty, stapling art film posters on the naked poles, so to speak. Like Canyons, Bernardo gave equal shrift to shirtless boys as befits the semi-invisible hand of boymonger film geniuses like Gus Van Sant (who appears in The Canyons as a therapist) and Larry Clark (Kids) who together have made some great films about their boy obsessions, mainly they have bothered to plumb the depths, such as they are, of the skater and homeless kid cultures the way most do not. I have to say though, in a way, I admire Schrader and Ellis more for not plumbing in this instance. Why do their heavy lifting for them?

Lohan is only 27 at the time this film was made, but the constant hounding of the paparazzi furies have left her as scarred as a hot bitch Orestes. Even so, by 27 you should be beyond letting yourself get sucked into menage-a-quatres just to flatter the closeted vanity of your rich cretin boyfriend. If she likes it she should let us know, instead of moping through apathetic oversexed and drugged ennui in search of a new bon-bon to distract her from all the strewn wrappers. Such lurid behavior should either be a turn-on or turn-off (Two Girls and a Guy, for example, was both) or far enough over the line to be either profound or traumatic (Two Girls was neither),  but instead Canyons strives for meta resonance with those empty cinema shot connectors as comments about how nobody goes to see movies in the theater anymore ("premieres don't count" - LL says) and showing the subterfuge when characters are so busy arranging intrigues on the cell phones they don't know one might be happening right in front of them. They even watch their own messages on "Text TV." Do they even intend to watch their own film? I can imagine them all at the final cut screening room barely looking up from the cell phones except when they're onscreen, to make sure their hair looks right.

James Deen, and a portrait of... Herbert Marshall?

The lead rich kid douche is a porn star named James Deen, and he does a grand job of playing an insecure shit, of course you can't really do a bad job of acting badly 'on purpose.' The film's best scenes are strained bouts of he and Lindsay lying about where they've been, as we're meant to muse on how sharing each other with strangers is okay but actually falling in love with someone else is unforgivable, and lying about it is grounds for psychotic tantrums. I guess that's understandable for porn stars, as any long term relationship they have must come with a complete lack of sexual possessiveness, naturally overcompensating on the emotional, on 'love.'  But this is nothing new, again, or particularly traumatic. It was a similar weakness that brought Valmont/Sebastian down in Cruel Intentions but here there's not even a cathartic Verve Pipe-scored coke-cross bust!

I remember partying with these sorts of people in the 90s; I could feign a strained pose of Adonis-like disaffect with the best of them; my every pithy comment a dying faux-carefree butterfly. But just because you can capture that misery doesn't mean you're inventing it. Meanwhile even Lindsay is too old to know if kids are still putting out for bracelets, or ever did. Everyone's hiding something, even in this film. Did LL's court orders that ensure we only see one little coke bump snorted over the course of the whole film? Take it from me, orgies are impossible without either coke or ecstasy. Did I already mention the thing about the coke thing maybeyouknowherewecangetsomeIknow! Iknowcallthisnumberokayokaythisisgoingtobegood
butweshareitonlywiththoseofuswhoputin, okay?

I was always too uptight, too British, to ever fall into orgiastic abandon, no matter how drunk I got or how much coke or ecstasy I did. I was always a gallant gentlemen. And I don't miss stepping over the myriad entwined forms on my loft floor on my way to the bathroom at four in the morning during the days I was detoxing, trying to sleep to the incessant thud of terrible Euroclash from my roommate's in-house turntables. Coming out of my bedroom to plead for mercy and seeing only his coke-black shark eyes looking back at me without a shred of empathic connection. It was I'm sure fun, and still is, but unless you have a tolerance and money for coke, a loose sensual disposition, you're just a bystander. Even when deep in the orgy you're often just a bystander. I don't miss it, and so I feel sorry for everyone involved even as I applaud their freedom. Luckily the music in Canyons is amazing, full-on retrolectro tryptahol courtesy Broken Social Scene lynchpin Brendan Canning, moodily pretending like the 00s never happened.

I don't miss the 00s, or orgies, but I do miss places like Amoeba and Kim's Video and the time when theaters had no bedbugs or texting-addicts. But since I tended to go to music and video stores when I was lonesome and agitated, I associate them now with the depression that Effexor took away for good back in '04, and now I have Amazon Prime, and cinemas these days give off an unsettling feeling of a shared dream with deformed fellow earthlings who have lives and bodies and gastrointestinal problems all their own, which they now carelessly reveal to their fellow audience members, accentuating how we here in the trenches are vastly different from the gods and goddesses out in LA, especially in The Canyons.

Luckily there are still a few demographics who go to the movies: packs of single ladies at a chick flick on Friday night (+ one or two spooked pony straight guys on dates), and kids who can drive and who consider any hour spent not in school or at home to be pure bliss. So as you sit down as a family to rent The Canyons be glad you don't have to live alone, hustling from one easy mark to the other. Even working on a movie, it seems, is no escape from the inescapable pull... of loneliness. Theaters have become a reminder of what we're trying to escape from, our sad aging husks, our burdensome bathroom-bound humanity that once was golden youthful and the perfect goddess we once sold our soul for grows old and cheap and sad, she says Johnnnyyy Johnnnny come back to me and her once firm and upright fan club dissolves into a hydra of a million nonstop texting blue lights laid out before you in the seats like a blanket of frumpy stars. She once helped us escape from the hell of life even if only for two hours at a crack but all the time that shining rectanglular white witch had a hook deep in her feathery bustier. She can be as frumpy as nature dictates now because you're hooked. And there's no need to struggle, little fishy. You've already evolved as far as you could go in such shallow surf. Time to belly up, or else go deep.

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LL/LL: Through the Peeping Glass

Mining a bit of the sleazy tabloid feel of STAR 80 and WONDERLAND with the lost Lenore/Laura Palmer surrealism of FIRE WALK WITH ME, the images from the "last of Lindsay" photo shoot (see below video) for the in-development INFERNO are disturbing in their implications of an as-yet innocent Linda Lovelace being roped into a hotel g-bang by her rough trade husband, Chuck Traynor. When you consider that poor Lindsay was on her way to jail when this photo shoot occurred, prior to any actual filming of the story, and that scraps of the sexually turgid script are apparently all over the internet, I get uneasy, doomed, wretched feeling we're all going to hell, just from a video about a photo shoot! In its own way, this little video teaser is already a perfect slice of Hollywood at its most self-reflexively turned-on and remorseful about it at the same time.

Considering he's done only one other film, 2008's YOUR NAME HERE, its perhaps unintentionally revealing that the first thing on the poster you read is "Mathew Wilder's Inferno," as if implying he's the impresario-exploiter of the piece, the Chuck Traynor to Lindsay's Linda. And what does that entail? Maybe he's just distinguishing the film from Dario Argento's INFERNO; I hear the script's good, but does that earn Wilder his headliner marquee status?

The big star of the video of course is Lindsay; her expressions in the photos betray a staggering talent and a wounded soul: regret, excitement, ambivalence, and even disinterest in her own welfare. Anyone who's ever been in love with beautiful, young, tragically self-destructive woman will inevitably have that familiar feeling of their heart dropping to the floor and breaking into a million shards. It's almost enough to make you go and sin no more.

Life imitates and heals art as, right in the middle of a photo shoot re-creating this ground zero of lost innocence, two smart, talented ladies sit and talk, capable lionesses in a den of wannabe poachers and hyenas, the sidelines a blur of slavering and snapping paparazzi. Supplying the light to the shadow, the always amazing Kim Morgan does the interviewing as Lindsay--her voice raspy and thoughtful-- explains how she reads the character of porn star Linda Lovelace. On her own blog, Sunset Gun, Morgan notes of the experience:

Thoughtful, funny and good, Lohan depicted her shoot, which were essentially, stills from the movie (written and to be directed by Matthew Wilder), with impressive, shifting emotions, gritty strength and intense poignancy. As photographer Tyler Shields snapped the dramatic pictures, based on an especially sad moment in  Lovelace's life, it was fascinating to watch her go in and out of character.

When it was all done, Lindsay sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things. (Read full piece here)

Like myself, Kim Morgan is a staunch defender of Lohan's right to be wild, pointing out that the same bad behavior in men (like Colin Farrell, for example) only gets a winky smirk from the press, while a girl like Lindsay is crucified and condemned as if by a nation of tut-tutting moral committee matrons:

I don't care what so-and-so movie writer from whatever newspaper or Web site feels about Lindsay's partying or sexy lifestyle (there's a strong strain of misogyny in this kind of critique), the real question is, can she act? If critics assessed Jack Nicholson for his off-screen behavior, he might not have the Oscars he so richly deserves. (KM)

That's a good point, and the answer is yes, she can act up a storm. The misogyny thing is tragically true. In her own way Lindsay is the Richard Burton of her hour, but girls aren't allowed to be bedrunken titans, only coy and pretty and if they want Oscars they have to wear false teeth and shoot skeevy Florida johns; they have to bow and suffer before the pervy desires of evil men rather than looming tall and true and as fucked up as they wanna be. All phoenixes must first be ashes and these days they use special phoenix-retardant urns to keep the vengeance from spuming forth.

Thus INFERNO could be Lindsay's THE WRESTLER, or it could be her I KNOW WHO KILLED ME PART TWO, and maybe a lot of that will depend on sexist preemptive judgment and maybe not. Either way, Lindsay's due some respect from the sneering hordes, whatever the role. And who will play Lindsay playing Linda and re-enact this photo shoot in 40 years? Will the self-reflexive merry-go-round of glamorously tawdry recreations of scuzzy moments in adult film history ever come to its crashing halt or will it just get more dizzying? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

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Revenge of the Lohan

Hearing poor LL's Rehab of Doom options being bounced around by all the bitches in the country ("We just want to be sure it's going to be very, very strict and tough with her," yes yes, and will there be much "ahem" spanking?), it's clear they've made LL the Joan of Arc of our day, the Frances Farmer, the scapegoat absentee parent proxy lamb to the mediated slaughter.

Dudes, she's just a hot fucked-up chick in L.A., capital of hot fucked up chicks! Why can't they just let her make her movies and party, as god intended!? By the time that rehab lets her go, she'll not only be burnt at the shock treatment stake, she'll have discovered Jesus and gained 20 pounds and they'll lead her to the set in chains like Grace towards the end of DOGVILLE. Is that you want, America? Then America, it is YOU are who not a true Christian!

Kim Morgan has written a beautiful piece on LL's ancestor in LA glamor-system face spitting and well-deserved court contempt, Frances Farmer, "Come Back as Fire and Burn all the Liars."

Speaking of Nirvana, I wrote a defense of Lindsay back in May called "Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle."

Kurt, wherever you are I'm sure we don't have to tell you. Ain't a damned thing changed. You stay up there and we'll let you know when the flames start falling from the wings of the FF/LL phoenix! We wouldn't want to see Seattle burn to the ground with anyone else's ghost at our side.

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Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle

The public in its infinite judgmental prurience loves to symbolically burn witches at the stake via their tabloids, and if you don't count bimbos like Nicole or Paris or Britney as being really "in the game" as far as stretching the boundaries of public eye debauchery to crucifixion-ready levels (and you shouldn't) then that leaves just one knife-wielding bi-sexual hot mess incarnate to drool fire over, Lindsay Lohan. She's a lot of things, but nobody's bimbo... now.

I don't need to regale you with what she's been up to. How can you not know? It's all over the place, it infects and informs our entire tele-cine-visual-trasho-wunderland! So then, what's the deal? Is she gonna go to jail? Or is it all just a fantastic wonderful show? Even if it's real, what is reality, anyway? Beautiful starlets like Frances Farmer (right) getting the rough treatment from a brutally repressive patriarchy that punishes beautiful, brilliant women when they get out of line, that's sure real enough. But can even that be made into kind of a show, like pro-wrestling?

Consider Andy Kaufman and the way he would stage big battles, say against the wrestler Bill Blassie, and make it seem like they couldn't get through a talk show without trying to kill each other. Consider Andy's alter ego, the bullying lounge singer Tony Clifton (left). Was it just an act. for shock value, or something more artistic and genuinely subversive? To call attention to the way media hypnotizes us into believing and feeling things and having opinions on issues where we don't even know 90% of the story, this is to show us the way to freedom. Is this not the appeal of professional wrestling? We love to remember fake fighting as a child, the cathartic freedom and love that develops when you "pretend" to be mad, to fight, or to otherwise expose negativity as a fraud. Unlike the brutish mugs on wrestlers and thug mechanics, we believe the person with the cutest face and most pleading voice, unaware they could be the killer the whole time. But just from our cliche'd expectations, we'd be willing to shoot a giant dude in red spandex tights and a black mask if we saw him chasing her in the forest, when in fact it could all be an act, and he's just a one-trick Mickey unaware she's setting him up for MURDER!

If you go back in time even earlier you have the famous feud between Fred Allen and Jack Benny, or WC Fields and Charlie McCarthy -- fights that basically provided writers with material and made great press and headlines, and no one ever thought they really were going to kill each other or anything. Then Take Mr. Fields' drinking. Since he was old and a man it became a source of much comical merriment his booze problem found a home in the cultural canon. Lindsay's drunkenness has no place in that context, because why? She was once a Disney girl? Oh come on! 

Before you judge, try hanging out with those kids sober, see how long you hold out.  Have we become even more repressive a society than we were in the 1930's, when Mae West was banned from radio for daring to play Eve in a saucy Adam and Eve sketch? The man who wrote the sketch, Arch Obler, wasn't banned, he was later praised for his show Light's Out, and even then was one of the first to regularly get on air credit for his work.

But instead of Mae or Fields we have LL, and her downward spiral. Well, I've downward spiraled many times and I can tell you this: she'll either die or she won't, but unless you're a traffic cop and she's swerving down the road, or you're a relative planning an intervention. or a producer who's already paid her an advance on an upcoming role and the insurance company is demanding her plug be pulled then it's really none of your frickin' business if she wants to drink herself into an early grave, sneak off to Cannes and promote a film barely in the preliminary stages of casting instead of going to out-patient rehab, or blow holes in her own car with a shotgun like Nina Simone, or set herself on fire like Richard Pryor. It has nothing to do with you, or your appreciation or lack thereof for her music and movies - unless the flames of fires she starts singe your hem or otherwise effect your actual physical space directly. If you're only connection to her is via words on a screen or in a newspaper then your reactions are due to a journalist pushing your buttons to get you to keep reading and want to read more. If it gets you in a self-righteously indignant "burn the witch!" tizzy, then you should look at your own self in the mirror and realize that all you need is a pitchfork, a tri-cornered hat, and a torch and you could go chase the monsters and virgins around with the rest of the frightened peasants.

What's the difference between a middle-aged mom of five getting all schadenfreude excited over reading Lindsay might serve jail time vs. say, Ken Starr making Monica Lewinsky describe every hand motion she makes during fellatio live in court or the hysteria of Salem and the early 1980s that led to my great x 8 aunt Mary Easty being hung as a witch? Is this not just a macro version of the bratty sister who can't wait to tell mom how you got in trouble at school?

My friends, why not stop projecting your inner worm squirm guilt and fear and desire onto brave little Lindsay and just grab that vodka bottle out of your husband's or parents' cabinet and down a huge shot and then start hitting golf balls off the roof, or flicking cigarettes out the window at the passers-by beneath your second floor West Village apartment like Courtney Love? Be the sibling who helps the in-trouble brother deal with the parents, be the Barney Frank who patiently talks the Lewinsky affair into a non-issue, the breath of sanity in an insane world, see the light at the end of the tunnel and stop--as they say in AA--confusing your insides with other people's outsides.

It's a nice zeitgeist coincidence that the Stone's kickass classic, Exile on Main Street, gets re-released this week. When the Stones nod off and light themselves on fire it's art - when someone like Lindsay goes for it--gives the social order the finger and goes careening through life with a cigarette and Jack Daniels bottle it's not art, it's a shame. Burn the witch! You want to destroy the person who's free in order to reinforce your decision to stay cowering in your cubicle! See Lindsay, cowering in the cubicle is the only way to avoid being burned! I'm right to cower, see, taste the fire!!

The thing is, when you live vicariously through, say, the excesses of Tony Montana then you revere him as a genuine badass even after he's shotgunned in the back by that bald guy in sunglasses. But since LL is a cute waif-type, you want to throw stones and bedeck her in a burka.  

 There's a saying in AA about when you're a down and out drunk there's only three outcomes: Locked up, sobered up or covered up --- with a sheet in the morgue. Like any true drunk, LL is taking her time to decide which of the three she prefers. It's no easy question. She's been wrestling with it for awhile but the mind has great ways of hiding the harsher truths from itself. Whatever path she takes, we will lose a great rager and we will miss these days of crazy headlines and shocking paparazzi booze pics. While she's alive we should celebrate her every self-destructive moment as if she had been dead 20 years and now considered an icon, a rebel at a disease and despair-infused time that compares only to the 1950s as far as hysteria-driven moral conformity.

For Lindsay is more than another ditzy sheep in fake tanning oil and peroxide, moving from one dumb boy to another, ala Britney or Paris. Lindsay is a titan of self-destruction, like Keith "Just one drink / and I fall down drunk" Richards.  Lindsay is a queen of drunken coke-whoring righteousness; she's Courtney Love with a better singing voice, and cuter, and doesn't have a Frances Bean around to create any real concern about the safety of a minor while she gets her self-destructo freak on. I say rock on, little Lindsay! Rock on! And when you want to come in from the cold, call me and I'll show you the best  beginner's AA meetings in NYC and hold your hand during the serenity prayer!! Certain we will!

Meanwhile, for the haters out there, I wouldn't worry too much about the social order toppling under her wobbly heel. The  constrictive force of our quasi-repressive society wont weaken from a single millionaire wretch peeing on it. But... if the rest of us can rise up and follow in her wake... if we can show the same casual disrespect of our national system of constraints and punishments as she has, what dirty victories we may win! The 1970s shall return at that time, and instead of Bruce Lee, Farrah Fawcett Majors and Cheryl Tiegs posters, the kids will have Lindsay Lohan up on their walls, not for her music or acting, but because she's the hot thin female Richard Burton / Keith Richards of a new era. She's Queen Jippo! Top of the world, Ma! KABOOOOM!! God bless the button-cute hammerhead!

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