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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I know why the entombed mummy sings...

In the late 50's-early 70's there was a deluge of marvelously British horror films from Hammer Studios, you probably already know that. But did you know that while they sucked on UHF TV with their washed out prints and bad editing and pan and scanning, they look damned great on DVD? And did you know also that being British and smart as paint the filmmakers often enriched these pics with colonial and class issue subtext, including a sub-subtext linking buxom beauty co-stars with pre-Christian paganism? Jolly brave and true of this upstart little studio, and damned British. When I read the words Pinewood Studios in end credits now I get all tingly... be it early James Bond, The Avengers, or lovely Hammer.

Many of the Hammer films have aged well; maybe it's that the DVD spit and polish really brings out the deep reds, maybe it's the pre-Christian roots and rigid class system creating far more sparks than would similar situations in the States; Britain's longer history of international third world exploiting and economic inequality makes their horror films--which after all deal with the 'return of the repressed'--- so much more "rich" than ours of the same period. For weird old America we have Edgar Allen Poe ("the divine Edgar") and maybe Ambrose Bierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then we run into a wall. But England has a whole Victorian era to plunder; the monsters generally come from the wealthy class, and the peasant girls are the first to get it, the nobility last to be suspected and by far the most decadent. Hammer horrors invariably include a cozy tavern scene full of comic relief hypocrite doctors and priests, agitated innkeepers who won't let their daughters divulge information ("Hush up, girl!"), witnesses who no one believes because they're tipplers, and a cowardly populace who bar their door at night.

But the one I want to single out as exemplary in its completely Britishness and gutsy approach to monsterness is Hammer's THE MUMMY (1959), expanded from the 1932 original to include the Victorian equivalent of a Middle Eastern terrorist, an Egyptian Egyptologist (the nerve!) named Mehemet Bay (George Pastell) who dares suggest that ancient burial relics should stay where they are, undisturbed, or the very least stay in Egypt and not become mere curiosities for the swaths of unwashed gawkers at the British Museum. How dare this fez-wearing heathen even suggest such a thing?! But the even-keeled screenplay lets this Mehemet Bay off with plenty of sympathy; he even prays to Karnak, the god of said mummy, to release said mummy's spirit at the end of his vengeance spree. And his house is pretty nice-looking. I'd rather live there than in Cushing's wearily formal mansion. The two actors play well of each other, and their climactic battle of wits--- with Cushing blithely baiting the Egyptian into a confession by dismissing Karnak as a second-rate deity-- is truly a unique sociologically ambiguous moment in horror.

Of course it's not perfect, unless you believe Brits have way too much faith in guns over supernatural juggernauts. Every night he gets a visit from a seven foot-tall mummy who smashes doors apart and barges through rooms like a freight train, and--even after two shots from his revolver did nothing the night before-- Cushing's sure his shotgun will do the trick. What saved him the night before was the late inning presence of his worried wife, as usual the spittin' image of the mummy's dead love. And of course, Cushing insists on sending her away during the mummy attacks, so she'll be "safe." Ah so brave! So blind. So British.

Feminist-wise the film fares little better: the beautiful, cat-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (Carole's sister in REPULSION,  Marcello's clingy girlfriend in LA DOLCE VITA) is the 'living image' of the dead high priestess, the point where if Cushing had a brain he'd just ask his wife to tell the mummy to go back and kill Mehemet. Instead, even after she saves her fey and disinterested husband's life once already, Cushing sends her upstairs, "like a good little girl." Even more brainlessly, at the climax, he has her wait out in the bushes with the inspector so "she'll be safe." And of course, the cops stationed outside fall like dominoes and she's spirited off, as we all know she must. Then again, we don't watch these films to see how to smartly deal with the undead, we watch them to see heavy-breathing beauties walk down dark corridors in their foxy Victorian era negligees, and then get carried into bogs by lovesick corpses.

And man, what a girl. Slim old Peter Cushing looks like he'd be crushed in the sack with her, frankly - she's like twice his weight in this film, and he seems to be implying his characters' secretly queer by the way in which he coldly dismisses her affection; he'd much rather wrestle with a manly mummy! Oh those lads of British theater! Christopher Lee is great as the bandaged (and in flashback unbandaged) high priest, getting to use only his expressive eyes and lumbering gait; you can feel all the horror and anger of being entombed alive for centuries in his sad, lovelorn expression. Hey, if I had been buried all those centuries, I'd try to carry Yvonne Furneaux off to my swampy lair too. If I was unable to speak my love (since the cats back in my home epoch cut out my tongue) or write her sonnets (since my heiroglyphic-writing hand was paralyzed) I'd have to demonstrate it in other ways, like obeying her commands with a shambling wordless courtesy.

I love Cushing! I love this mummy more than all the Universal sequels to the Karl Freund original combined. Which says exactly nothing. Is there anyone in monster fandom who loves the mummy over other monsters? Who is like a 'mummy' fan? To me, the mummy is right at the level of the Wolfman, who leaves me kind of nonplussed, though WEREWOLF OF LONDON has great atmosphere. I love DRACULA (1931) the most, and the Hammer vampire films--with a few tedious exceptions--are my favorites. Still, Hammer's MUMMY is a mummy to be reckoned with, a juggernaut that wastes little time in moving from the door to your throat. Even the lengthy flashback to Egypt is creepy, with long ceremonies of death, death and more death, the strange props that make it associatively linked with Kenneth Anger's unforgettable LUCIFER RISING (1972).

And lastly, one can't ignore the vein of rich critique to be found in exploring the fey way Brits claim Egyptology as their own little playground in these films, seeing Egyptians themselves as having little to no right to their own artifacts, and also even after it's clear Karnak is a badass god who can help mummies live through untold centuries, he's still considered a pagan superstition compared to the god of these fey British scientists, and Mehemet Bey's way cooler and sexier than Cushing in the film. (coming off the best, actually is the American accented Eddie Byrne as the inspector). When the white patriarchal reps see this giant mummy resist bullets and crush larynxes with ease, they still refuse to believe in him, even when he walks off with their girl! I root for the mummy every time! Go mummy! This time you shall be free, shall be free. Even if freedom means a mucky swamp grave, there to float and dream until Jimmy Sangster writes you into life once more. Kharis, you magnificent bastard, I read your scroll!

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I like big bugs and I cannot lie

Even children can get a handle on divining subtext and collective symbolic anxieties through the television, especially when it shows 1950's giant bug movies. I love them giant bugs... TARANTULA is tops, THEM the coliseum and even BEGINNING OF THE END the start of a full on pawty. Of course not all the big monsters of Atomic Age America are bugs, i.e. BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS or IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA but since an old girlfriend once termed them derisively "those giant bug movies," i.e. "ugh, you're not going to stay up all night drinking whiskey and watching those giant bug movies again, are you?" I think of them that way, oh so fondly.

One of my earlier memories: I'm three, in a Philadelphia hospital for a minor operation, scared out of my wits by the cold clinical strangeness of it all and my parents abandoning me there for the night; the television in my hospital room plays EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1959) and the older kid, a teenager I think, in the other bed insisting on changing it because I'm too young. Too young? I would have killed him if I could. The dickhead didn't understand, I was scared of the hospital and of him and of everything else and the only source of comfort, of relief from the anxiety, lay in the image of a giant black tarantula creeping around a 1950s suburban neighborhood, in glorious black and white. Nowadays I can conjecture that my feeling of powerlessness as a three-year old lost in the hostile uncaring world of rectal thermometer-wielding nurses was allayed by seeing those humble creatures that man in his snobby superiority squashed grown now large enough to tromp on him in just as callous a manner. If I was the size of the AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957) I could find that evil rectal nurse and break her in twain and ditto that kid who turned the channel from EARTH VS. THE SPIDER. and I can't remember if I got him to turn it back or not, but I remember my outrage and horror that he would dare to change it. If I knew where that kid was today, I'd swear upon him an oath vile enough to raise the hairs on the necks of men.

Later memory: living in mid-town Manhattan over a Pita Grill in the mid 90s; my only cure for the drunken blues was a Leadbelly CD and a six-hour SLP video tape I'd made a decade earlier of TARANTULA followed THE DEADLY MANTIS followed by IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA followed THE GIANT CLAW. My roommate had his models and his coke and soon his cool million dollars in the dot.com bubble, I had my whiskey (and his when mine ran out), a 25K a year / four day a week art gallery job, three tapes of Simpsons episodes, and the giant bug tape. The warmth of the whiskey making the repetitive black and white sense of authority united against a purely abstract foe as comforting as TRIUMPH OF THE WILL probably is to Rico's Roughnecks.

I love these bugs now for their abstract destructive force. Bugs are innocent; you can't hate them even as they smash the building down upon you. They don't have the brains to be evil. At the same time you don't need to have sympathy for them. There is no saboteur working for the giant bug. And as a twentysomething struggling to stand out in New York, I longed for the kind of playing field evener a giant bug attack could provide. All you had to do to be a hero and shag a buxom 50s research assistant was be cool under pressure, which all good drunks are. Watching with my hand over one eye to not see double, I would cheer every attack, on either side, over and over, warm and amniotic and safe.

But they're now each in a DVD set and seen all clear and restored, and I'm sober, and so the films are missing the fuzzy static they needed to seem 'alive.' They're still soothing, but not fuzzy warm soothing. You can see clearly now the sad ghost town emptiness of the sets, the smears of make-up on once-manly men of action and science, the gaffer glove left unnoticed in the corner of the frame.

So why go back? The drinking amniotic sac days are gone. Why stick with the 50s' atomic age anxiety? Having learned in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) that for God there is no zero, no high or low - the life of a dung beetle equal in scope and importance to the life of an emperor, I know that my giant bug hospital moment will come again. And for me at least it's essential to have a fantasy escape wherein a common enemy unites all peoples, especially one that has no vocal chords with which to defend himself in the courts of our nation. Without such an enemy, Uncle Same must dress up its own foot as a sneaky terrorist and blow of its own toe like that old campfire tale. More than just a symbolic manifestation of atomic and sexual anxiety, the giant bug is a good, wide target. Would you like to know more? 

There is one film that I like even more now that I can see it in a theatrical aspect ratio: THE GIANT CLAW (1957). Jeff Morrow--with his hair of slick oily blackness-- is my new cranky idol. And that amazing bird / on a wire is no longer laughable, but truly psychedelic, wondrous and eternal.

Not to make this all about me, but I look at that face below, and I see a little bit of myself, and maybe, of us all, even that rectal thermometer-in-the-middle-of-the-night-trauma-inducing nurse. As the atomic bomb's loving father, Robert Oppenheimer once said, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." He was quoting the Baghavad Gita, but I swear he was looking right into the New Year.

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Great Acid Shorts: BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929)

You can draw a thin but prominent line after a certain moment in jazz history, and BLACK AND TAN FANTASY could be the pen, when jazz split into sanitized radio 'sweet' music ala Benny Goodman or "the old Maestro" on one hand, and Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives on the other. But in between raged Duke Ellington, using the big band format to craft elaborate, beautiful, wistful, dark, surreal and elegant yet raw and bluesy compositions that sound fresh and new to this day. Perhaps the only jazz artist to really follow in his wake is Charles Mingus, who turned the big band style on its ear, like a broken octopus ride at Coney Island.


Duke's first film appearance, a short from 1929 called "Black and Tan Fantasy" reflects this mix of surrealism, elegance and social commentary. Shooting by in 20 minutes or so, it begins as a piano rehearsal, segues into dance numbers and a star female dancer already exhausted, killing herself, red-shoe style in a drugged-out shimmy, finally dying in a shadowy backstage dressing room as her last request, that they play her "that Black and Tan," becomes a bedside serenade, kind of like the dwarfs singing to comatose Snow White in the Disney cartoon which was still some years off.

Alas, the above clip is only the music segments edited together, so you miss the drama of Duke, his dancer Fredi Washington (below) and his trumpeter (Arthur Whetsol!) bribing the collection agency piano movers with a quart of bootleg gin. And you miss the backstage drama of the doctor warning Fredi not to dance because of a heart condition, and her psychedelic collapse, but the more complete version can be found in the highly recommended Kino compilation at left.

Along with Satchmo, Duke is the perfect guy to wind down with after a long crazy night of psychedelic colors and angry inner demons devouring the soul. But while Armstrong focused on the cheery and fun, Duke never shied from plunging down into the abyss with you, and you're glad for the company, because when it comes to locating the redeeming angel of mercy at the core of the dark and lonesome blues, Duke was like a magic bloodhound.

The film also offers a rare and precious glimpse of the kind of stuff white patrons would see at the Cotton Club where the Duke often held court, and lithe black Venus-style flappers gyrated in a manner that might be too shocking even for pre-code Hollywood. But Harlem was Harlem, and in this marvelous little 20 minute film, you see just why it mattered, and still should.

Standing at the dawn of the sound age with few surviving peers, BLACK AND TAN FANTASY still crackles with weird, lysergic power. That muted trumpet in the beginning can light up your spine like a Kundalini serpent if you're chemically open to it, so open up! As they used to say at parties when the guy arrived with the suitcase full of bootleg booze for sale, "that man is here!"

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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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From Russia with Adamantium Cheekbones: SALT (2010)

I totally dig the idea of Soviet "sleeper" agents, second only to covert Satanic networks in their possible omnipresence. Think about it: any (or all) of your friends could be a Russian spy and neither of you even know it. You might be one and not even know it! One day you just go to get your shoe fixed and an old Russian shoe repair guy looks in your eyes, startled: "You want sole replaced? Five Dollars." You suddenly blank out and find yourself saying, "The hole is too big for that" He nods, reaches under the counter, and gives you a gun, which you accept without a word. Or wait, was it just a receipt for your deposit?

I'm a real-life sleeper agent, but for booze. The old Russian shoe repair guy would be any bartender in any bar; all I have to do is drink what everyone else is drinking and my trigger is pressed. If you ever 'activate' me, i.e. somehow get me to drink even one drink, I will turn into Laurence Harvey seeing the queen of hearts on the table in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). I'd become a black-out sleeper drinker of such catastrophic power that my bank account would be sucked down in a week and I'd vanish, leaving only a trail of empty bottles and ATM receipts. My intended target, programmed into my brain from birth? Myself. There isn't a target in the world so ironically deserving.

Making the audience connect to such insanity is the goal of the existentialist spy film, like THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, wherein working for any one side turns out to be a bad idea; all values are turned upside down and intimacy -- even with family members -- is always up for questioning. The good guy, your boss, is using you as a chess piece to get your own KGB moms killed by her own people.  The only way out is with humor, and that's why the best moments of SALT aren't so much the BOURNE or OCEAN'S twists as much as Evelyn's use of a taser to spur on the near-dead driver of a police vehicle while she's handcuffed in the seat behind him, or the no-nonsense way she goes about fulfilling tasks in the most direct, outside the box manner.

This Evelyn Salt falls into a long line of super spies that are fun to watch as they're usually a few steps ahead of the audience, which means we can relax and not worry about their safety: the J's Bourne and Bond are key examples, but based on the frequent use of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS framing (i.e. a close-up of a face, eyes staring right into the camera in the middle of the screen with dead space on either side of the frame) I'd say we're also supposed to think of Evelyn as 'Hannah Belle Lecter.' Is old Lecter just the true antecedent of these indestructible genius types? Not just, Clarice, what did they do to you in that Korean prison camp? Leon, What's the first thing that comes in to your mind when you think about... your mother?

It's now common pop mythos that the "super prowess" of these sleeper agents stems from their being trained from birth at a remote and clandestine spy school, usually in Russia, where it's cold and harsh and there is no mercy or child protective services, only vodka. Through this relentless training they master endurance, marksmanship, martial arts; they are fed cutting edge body-healing-enhancement drugs and so were their parents so they were already born gifted superhumans. This is all so it's more believable that girls with thin limbs can kick the shit out of bulked-up army men, SWAT guys, and street brawlers.

The idea that you can craft super soldiers if you get them early enough is something that's long been a staple of Hong Kong cinema, with many of its action stars coming out of the draconian Peking Opera School: the whole 'brutal training by a stern father figure' thing often happens around the opening credits -- ala NAKED WEAPON or AZUMI or THE PRINCESS BLADE -- or comes in flashbacks, ala ELEKTRA (below), and ALIAS, and KILL BILL.

It's implied rather sweetly, that women are man's natural superior, needing to absorb only our Wu Tang sacred men's club scriptures (ala Jade Fox in CROUCHING TIGER) in order to beat us at even the most violent of our manly figthin' games. In a way it's a kind of guilty payback to the woman at the center of this sort of film, who is in a man movie, a pawn avatar juggled between the fanboy writers and fanboy viewers. Men love to see themselves kicked around by hot bitches and I shudder with 1980s liberal arts major-Peking Opera-imbued shame to admit I'm no different. One look at that picture below and I feel like I've already been kicked in the gut. That jawline with those bangs, that straight long hair, those lips, good lord.

And then to add to the 'believability' of a girl asskicker it helps to bring in the Russians, or some 'Other' from far away.  In America we get an overall impression or Russia that's icy and bitter on all levels, unlimited vodka being the only sorth or warmsh. It stands that no one is afraid of death there because A) life sucks without American commodities and B) death's not scary when you're loaded on vodka.

Americans have only the sketchy concept of 'freedom' as an asset in lieu of all that fuzzy drunken tough guy stuff. And we all have been bred from birth to know that Russian women are so tall, red-headed and ice cold ruthless they'll suck a schmuck they meet on the internet clean down to his penny stock portfolio and kick him to the curb before he can even finish typing "I'm wiring you $1800 for a plane ticket, my love!"

The vodka aspect of Russian superiority is not to be overlooked in the crafting of superb fighters, either: as the DRUNKEN MASTER (left) could teach you. To be drunk is not just to have courage, to be drunk is to be loose of limb, flexible, relaxed even in the middle of life or death stand-offs, able to survive falls from fifth story windows twice.  If you have the genes, alcohol even makes you more coordinated. I know. I have the genes. I am the sleeper agent from the Kung Fu school of Drunken Monkey Claw.

The advantage with being one of these super drunks is you can fall from the off-ramp onto a speeding truck below and not even be aware you've fallen. You might not even spill your drink. Poor Angelina is not so lucky, I mean she drinks only one or two shots of vodka so she can 'ahem' with the bottle. And yet, after numerous hits to the face, the only thing at all puffy is those bee-stung lips; her cheeks don't have a single moment of puffiness. Adamantine, like Wolverine's, perhaps but worryingly fragile-looking nonetheless.

We're used to it by now, but still, in a weird masochistic voyeur way we "feel" the pain of body blows much more keenly and sharply when they fall upon an older woman and Angelina has lost her baby fat almost everywhere but those lips. Banged around from her moving truck leap-frogging or ledge diving, we realize she's not Gia anymore; we suffer for her from the bumpy safety of her simulacrated womb. We're her alcohol; we absorb the pain and punishment like an audience of opiate tea bags. And with Jolie the pain stings extra because she has become thinner in bone and meat since tearing through those Laura Croft movies. I kept worrying she wasn't getting enough calcium. Her hips could cut glass. We're not looking at a buff young killer, no Russian gymnast with the Bond larynx-crushing thighs. @e're looking at a woman facing the onset of osteoporosis.  

With males action figures like Arnold Schwarzenegger it's different: buoyed by his puffy gym muscles, he hath bore no children from his womb; he hath bones made hard from large amounts of amino acid and milkshakes as a German youth, and estrogen en absentia. Plus he's a bad enough actor (in a good way) that the more he strains to look hurt the less we believe him, thus cutting the masochistic chord and filling us with good cheer. Jolie makes her pain tangible if fleeting, eyes dilating with tears, and occasionally ennui. I still have sympathy splints from watching her run in those high leather shoes.

SALT's biggest drawback isn't it's lack of originality--that it seems like it was made after screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (the poet who brought us ULTRAVIOLET) watched ALIAS and fell in love with the way Jennifer Garner changes wigs dozens of times an episode, then forgot all the other things that makes that show good (for the first three seasons). For one thing, this is one film foolish enough to think we still care about averting yet another nuclear meltdown. By now there have been so many near-misses in action films that we just want to see one bomb go off, just to see what would happen. The first half of SALT has some ambiguity that holds the attention--is she good or bad?--but in the end we just don't care which side Salt's really on as the nuclear threat plot is trotted forth, and is so dusty at this point even the president seems like he's forgotten where ye auld Def Con Red button is. Nuclear war now has an almost nostalgic twinkle about it: we never did get to have that mushroom cloud senior prom moment back in the existential days of the Cold War. All those decades of tense nuclear posturing were just a tease. Now we just have very old bombs lying all over the place -- vintage nukes. Isn't it kind of a waste? Kind of un-American when you think about it? Let's press that button, Mr. President, for old time's sake, for the Gipper and for that most American of reasons, why we come to films like SALT in the first place, escape from boredom.

Thusly, with a romantic impetus as hackneyed as one of Leo's recent slew of dead wives, and no clear cut person to root for, you can only wince.. and wince again as Jolie falls two stories to land on her hip bones on a hard metallic surface, or grabs onto sharp metal elevator shaft corners by her delicate fingernails, then gets up and runs off, unscathed, onwards--ever onwards--her wig not even crooked, just pleasantly grayed with the dust of an exploded mid-town landmark. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's L'Oreal.

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Remote in Reach: THE WALL (1982)

Believe it or not, there was a time when I despised all stoners. It was 1980-83 in central Jersey; nothing personal to Eisenhower Middle School -- a few evil schoolmasters aside -- and nothing personal to the stoner kids, who were all nice enough in their brusque monosyllabic working class way. Just too loud, too dumb to know how dumb they sounded; too comfortable in their dirty denim and unkempt hair for my 13 year old's new-kid-on-the-block super genius morbid acuteness of the senses shyness. I kept waiting for one of them to bully me, but only one little rat bastard named Matt Muniz ever bothered, and even he only a handful of times and generally only picking on one of my weaker friends while I trembled and debated switching loyalties on the sidelines. But he was on my bus and on the way to school I'd hear him and his buddies in the back singing: "we don't need no education / we don't need no thought control," and I'd whisper to myself "yes you do, Matt Muniz."

Pink Floyd's The Wall album was then -- and maybe still is for all I know -- the unifier of all stoners, dumb or genius; its pen-and-ink cover is their stoner flag. I fantasized about killing them all back then, like a good republican, and blowing up the school... at the same time I hated that Matt Muniz and his pals were already singing about doing just that, and I felt uninvited. It was their song and therefore never to be mine, and I hated hearing their fake British accents all through the hallways between classes: "Hey! Teach-ah / leave them kids alone."

A mere five years later in college I loved Floyd like the rest, but The Wall records were still a problem area due to these past associations--that included the film, which I naturally painted in the same contemptuous colors as I painted Matt Muniz. Especially grating was the "We don't need no education" song, which I would skip even if it wasn't my record player, much to my fellow freshmen's consternation.

It's absurd to think I would be dumb enough to waste my time disliking a song because it triggered mental associations with slack-jawed Jersey thugs all long gone, yet the pain, if that's the word, lingered on. I eventually owned every single Floyd album, except The Wall. And of course, I preferred Syd Barrett-era Floyd more than late era, blah blah zzzzzzz.

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, taking a heroic swig from my 1.75 Ten High bourbon bottle every time the Curve commercial played. In the process, THE WALL became mine,  associated with my big Curve perfume glory and whiskey exaltation. Matt Muniz, adieu! I never looked back until... now.

Because now I understand: THE WALL, for all its midnight cult cache, turns out to be one of the few movies that, to me at least, works noticeably better with commercials. Ads and station breaks help metatextualize the film's repetitive jumble. Ads are part of the whole meta thing, man... since a big part of the film is about selling out, and about... watching... TV.

Though it clearly steals the show, there's only about 15 minutes of animation so psychedelic as to make YELLOW SUBMARINE look like RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP. animation. The rest is montages of real people footage strung together in associative and movement/color-related fashion, stretching and collapsing time and space, rather than narrating action in a linear-time movement, so there's nothing to glue you. So for example we see the riot shots over and over and the wandering of a laddie this way and that way through the train station envying the kids who's soldier dads do come home, over and over; The grotesque Mrs. Waters looming like a carnival attraction; a vacuum cleaner whirring in the hallway; Pink ignoring his wife then getting furious when she leaves him; a sexy groupie Pink ignores; other people he ignores, etc. No one ever laughs or has a good time, unless it's gluttonously, ala the mom at tea and crumpets, or Bob Hoskins as the Cristal-sippin' manager (if this were a musical version of DEMENTIA and it kind of is, Hoskins would be the Bruno Ve Sota).

Back to the idea of TV commercials helping the movie work better, it's very telling that there's also that thing with Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939). Floyd goes well in mash-up, and THE WALL is a mash-up art waiting to happen. It's a great thing to flip back and forth to/from, especially with a World War Two documentary or movie similar to the one Pink's watching within the film itself (THE DAM BUSTERS).

Last night I was flipping between aged American veterans talking plainly and humbly about the gore and mass slaughter of D-Day at Omaha Beach on the Military Channel. These old dudes were just grateful to be alive and to have been spared--and then commercial! For a "catheter that hurts less." So back over to VH1 I flip and there's old Pink smashing the telly because he's too famous and fucked-up and nobody loves him.  I wanted to send the ghost of Winston Churchill to kick him in the bum.



But the animation sequence above will illustrate that, despite the rampant solipsism, the movie kicks it most acidly. As with "true" psychedelic art, the animation captures the way sensory perception, metaphor, dream symbolism, fantasy, and the horror of mortality all collapse into a single unbearably chthonic flower. Medical science might dismiss this kind of close reading of reality as mere hallucination, but it's the other way around! If we can see the apple decaying in the pantry, or bursting with health fresh from the  the tree, see it breathing in the sunlight; or see flakes of skin and waves of electromagnetic energy rippling around our face and hands, are we 'hallucinating'? Nope. It's just that our blinders are off. We're only seeing what normal people screen out, for good reason. We see that everything is vibrating energy, rising, decaying, rising again with every breath and death.  It's the sense of "permanence" and completeness from second to second that's the illusion that helps us function in the world rather than just sitting there with bugged out eyes at the awe of it all. The blinders help us plow from goal to goal and meal to meal like mother with her crumpets, and groupies with their hair and nails. 

Another thing the film gets definitely right is the whole confusing "warm thrill of confusion / that space cadet glow" that comes from being all fucked-up in a giant sea of fucked-up people at some packed, fucked-up rock show, where you can sense the violence seething in the hormonal ebb and flow of the crowd. One of the very first scenes of THE WALL is a bunch of stampeding, rioting fans plunging into the darkness from a broken chained-up door.

Here's another story of the past -- it was 1987, before the Curve commercial, after Matt Muniz. I witnessed and was almost part of a truly horrible-to-behold-while-on-acid mass stampede of ticketless Grateful Dead fans roaring up the side entrance ramp of a West Virginia amphitheater during spring break. I was in the head of the charge. "There's only one old lady taking tickets at Gate seven!" noted my friend when he returned from scoping it out. My whole posse took off at once, me following. But as we went from a walk to a run, and everything intensified and became riot strength, I found myself walking off to the side of the herd mere seconds before I would have been trampled if I had waited.

My heightened fear of violence and general lack of interest in seeing the Dead trumped my fear of being alone so I was able to witness--in full on acid-just-kickin'-in hyper-real lysergic intensity--a huge explosion of violence as the crowd smashed through the gate, security guards and cops chasing and clubbing bloody hippy faces; cops grabbing kids by their tie-dyes; cops grabbing their long dreads in a balled up fist; screaming and yelling by everyone about everything; cops with clubs and the heavy sound of bodies smacking into pavement and then... just as quickly, it was all over and forgotten.

I couldn't believe it. Even the cops with hand-cuffed hippies in tow seemed to just go back to laughing and standing around. One busted kid had a broken nose which was why all the blood was all over his shirt, so no worries some kid explained in passing me as he slunk back down the ramp, just a nose.

But I was by then super high, and the violence I'd just witnessed went deep into my psychic tissues and stayed there, twisting like a bloody animated nerve - my hippie flower within was pulled out by an ugly metal flying eagle in that moment...Goodbye Blue Sky, and blue sunshine violent hippy freaks...

I imagine old Roger Waters had plenty of similar altered state traumas while touring with the Floyd , and probably--as I did that day--found his faith in his fellow man forever shattered by seeing riots of fans crashing gates, and was appalled by the animal ugliness of a stadium full of drugged up Matt Munizzes, all willing to stomp all over their fellow man to get closer to the stage, the whole thing taking on the form of a giant sadomasochistic carnival of torture and degradation, moths to the flame of hell, a vortex of evil from beyond the searing red heat of the stage lights, draining the youth and beauty of the throngs in a giant hoover, leaving toothless old junky sages still shouting out that they don't need no education and waving their dying lighters. And let's not forget the infamous 1979 Who concert trampling, still fresh no doubt in Roger's mind--as it was in all of ours--during the writing of this film.

And that's the rub, for by far the most interesting aspect of the non-animated stuff in THE WALL is the whole bit of mixing lysergic 'horror' rock stadium mentality with Nazi-meets-Communist (two hammers, no sickle) pageantry. It's interesting in that respect that the only time Pink isn't a total asshole, the only time he seems at peace, is when he starts leading his little rock-and-roll Nazi rally, lifting children and kissing mums on the forehead and singling out various inferior races and orientations for persecution from his lofty podium. Smiling, hugging, saluting his gathered throngs and otherwise firing up the engine of mobilized violence, he's finally happy. Hey, Teacher! Dig those KKK witch hats!

Perhaps THE WALL then is acid cinema for those to whom acid means being a bug-eyed witness to the ugly souls of men. Compare Munch's "The Scream" with the the agonized face on the WALL poster, each a howling witness to the massive cruelty that is every day on earth as we munch and crunch each other into bland extinction. If you're an acid dealer you need to avoid falling into this zone because it's your job to guide people on dosage when you sell it to them.  But no one maybe tells you, the dealer, how much to take when you initially test its strength so sometimes you end up taking more than... am I the only one who sees these giant insect ghost cops crawling on my leg?

 If you can make it through something like that without Thorazine or Benzos, or screaming to be rushed to the hospital or the chill-out tent like a little bitch, then you finally come down and you have the thousand yard stare. And only then do Buddha and Jesus write your name down in 'the ones who know' section of their date planners.

THE WALL is only acid cinema, then, for those who know the pain of having taken far too much of it.  Those of us who find themselves longing only for the "comfortably numb" feeling of being left alone at last to watch old war movies on TV in the dark, fumbling for one's half-empty bottle on the ashtray-and-empties-covered table, unable to ever fully dim the sensory overload that's sending you into madness without killing yourself just a bit in the process - taking gladly the bargain of long-term damage for temporary relief.

On that level, whatever else you want to call it --insipid, self-pitying, grandiose, gloomy--THE WALL is an undeniably effective work of both psychedelic art and agenda-less propaganda. In uniting the doom-bent punks, posers and metalheads with the hippies and acid lovers, Waters probably could have mobilized them all into an army--what Craig Finn calls a 'unified scene'--and incited the Matt Muniz's of the world to rise up and kill their teachers and burn their math books, this time for real.

Roger didn't do that of course. Instead he bickered with the rest of the band and finally left the Floyd altogether. Nowadays, instead of inciting riots, the big rock bands all organize grassroots efforts to "keep it green." Nice thought, but has anyone asked the animals of the forest and the fish of the sea whether or not they're tired of killing and eating each other and being eaten over and over again in an endless chain of masticated violence? If animals could talk, maybe they'd beg for an end to the cycle. Maybe they like the antidepressants we piss out in their ocean, like we like cigarettes, and perhaps THE WALL's secret is that it  alone addresses the possibility of that existentially fucked-up request, to end it, the choosing of slow permanent death to endless living in a world where you have to go to school and fight the Mat Muniz system. In its rocking apathy, THE WALL applauds every stoner's decision to stay under the influence, in the dark, watching old movies on TV and coming down or drinkin' up, forever, no matter how a nice a day it is outside. If you don't like THE WALL, maybe it's not because it reminds you of Matt Muniz or your past rock glory and boozy drift into oblivion; maybe it just reminds you that remoteness is just another pose. A remote in reach is an oxymoron. You might flip between rock shows and DAM-BUSTERS, but no remote reaches far enough to flip from that fat old sun in the sky / that's falling / right down on your shaved-ass head.

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