The Fury of a Thousand Bronsons!

In honor of Moon in the Gutter's Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon, here's one of my early from the 2007 Academy Award era... a bold pronouncement that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD indicated a return of the repressed wild man archetype, i.e. the force sought by the Men's Movement:

(originally posted in Bright Lights After Dark 3/08)

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they’ve been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards– we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was pouffy hair and loud jackets and closeted queers confusing straight dudes into thinking wearing eye liner was punk rock. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let’s face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it’s the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back -- how far down you hold the Nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he’s like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell boxfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin’s not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they’ve been away from Hollywood for awhile, Lewis cobbling in Italy and Brolin wandering through Ireland with his young 'uns. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beatdown. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature — this was once part of something known as the Men’s Movement, around the late 1980s--early 1990s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and howl and shed their tired sad sack personae; a time before the age of Irony, before changing times made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit – he’s returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview’s oil pumps!

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as you can tell by my vigorous enthusiasm, I was totally hoping for something that actually did happen the following year with films like THE WRESTLER and has since vanished as the Coens went back to torturing wusses and the Rom-Coms and Cera-Eisenbergs have flooded the gates, but they're out there.... come back wildmen! So later in 2008 I wrote a piece riffing on Manny Farber's White Elephant art vs. Termite Art: THE TERMITES OF PLAINVIEW:

The few critics and artists who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype–due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually–tend to be the ones who are “trying” to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers, explorers, depth-sounders and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Tarantino, Baumbach and Martel, and more to the “workmanlike” mapper precision of the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Payne–those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber’s termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers–the ungodly mess, in short–can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride as we follow the brave deep into the cinematic danger zone; we'd rather get lost in the woods than a lovely elaborate hedge maze.  There’s some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there’s some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and tittering like the late beloved Richard Widmark.

A unique example to discuss of a mapper and explorer rolled into one would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic “explorer” works: UNDER THE VOLCANO is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry’s novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man’s drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn’t put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A “classic” example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles’ MACBETH vs. Olivier’s HAMLET (both 1948). Olivier’s film (left) is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated and the deep shadow lines visible all the way in the back of the cavernous sets. There’s plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia’s bathwater, so to speak. Welles’ MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe where a good chunk of the dialogue tends to be inaudible under scratchy recording and thick brogues (Welles famously pre-recorded the dialogue and monologues and made his actors lip-sync). Just take a look below at that outrageous hat!

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day meth binge. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway. Welles shivers with horror like he's hoping if he acts like its a nightmare he'll wake up and have blood-free hands. His Macbeth bellows great lungfuls of melodious brogue, hallucinating Banquos hither an yon. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches’ bubbling pot at any second, but I’ll order Ham on Welles over Hamlet Olivier any day. There’s mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet silence. Daniel Plainview and THERE WILL BE BLOOD are like that, and for the Olivier loving mappers of the world, that's just too long-haired, indulgent, and reckless.

And God do I hate Olivier's short bangs in all his Shakespeare stuff. He looks like Sting's queer older brother, but not in a good way. HAMLET's photography is brilliant however and every word spoken goes down like a hundred dollar bottle of anything. If Victor Mature as Doc Holliday were here, good Sirs, then perhaps he could finish. I can't remember the rest! 

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Paul Thomas Anderson Blogathon: There Will Be Blood, Elizabeth!

The awesome Jeremy Richey of Moon in the Gutter and the Jean Rollin Experience, two of the grooviest and nicest blogs in the world, is--as would befit a nice and groovy writer--hosting a Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon. In sympatico, here's a remodeled version of a Feb. 08 Bright Lights piece comparing Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD to ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE which came out the same year (2007).

Thrilling and underrated is how I find ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE. I’ve read some of the reviews and probably waited this long to see it because of them, but now I’d like to blow those critics back to the Spanish Inquisition-themed S/M dungeons they came from. Yes it’s true the costumes and set design and CGI ships are all a little too fresh off the romance novel cover, and all the colors have been retouched to the point that even Edgar Burne Jones might urge restraint. But coming to it after watching THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY THE EIGHTH I realize that this is how it’s done when depicting the Monarchy: the characters need to stand very still, like tarot cards, while lighting technicians fuss over them as grooms of old.

Call me crazy, but with ELIZABETH, all the over-doing it kind of works, mainly because at the heart of it all is a great actor who nails the royal spirit down to the last nuance while still being “real” and alive with wit and sauce. Cate Blanchett! Charles Laughton brought a sprightliness to Henry, Blanchett brings sultriness and stealth warmth to Elizabeth, and each without ever breaking their painted poses.

What does this have to do with THERE WILL BE BLOOD? Indeed, consider that both Plainview and Elizabeth eschew sexual partners in favor of becoming the stuff of legend. Each gets to smite down with DOGVILLE-style vengeance the rabid dogma of those who would convert them from their own narcissistic perfection, in Elizabeth's case the Spanish Inquisition. In Plainview's case, a pisher of a preacher trying to douse him in the blood of the lamb.

I say this as a decree and a challenge. Cinema rides with Elizabeth and Daniel ride against Joseph Breen and his Censorship Armada!

I love a good whipping as much as anyone, but not from Joseph Breen, who used Catholicism’s mighty power to inflict a state of cinematic censorship so barbaric and stifling as to be akin to the Inquisition itself. In 1934, all the hitherto free flappers and sexually promiscuous lady aviators were tortured into submissiveness, chained in ugly skirts and pregnant to homey stoves, wed to sullen bullies like George Brent. Struggling for a moment’s happiness, they’d have to be killed at the end if they dared have sex out of wedlock with someone flashy. Emphasis on the lock in that last sentence!

At last there are movies like THERE WILL BE BLOOD and ELIZABETH, which are free of censorship enough for their leading characters to skip sex altogether. That is true subversive power, like the eunuchs in Shaw Brothers Hong Kong films. In order to learn the last and most deadly secrets of Kung Fu, you must castrate yourself… quickly, before you chicken out! Then you gain the freedom from desire and the magical power that comes from being beyond sex and gender.

Though neither preacher nor virgin queen, I too have known perfect happiness in platonic love affairs with phantoms; Cate Blanchett as she rides out with long red hair flowing over cool body armor on a white horse is one such phantom. This is spirituality and love united and the flame of cinema shall never die. Now that all the world’s a screen, Cinema is the only place perhaps where perfect love can happen. Oh ye repentant sinner, will you join hands with me in demanding, for the love of god and Elizabeth, Daniel Plainview and freedom from censorship, a DVD release of the 1982 Italian trash classic, HEARTS & ARMOR, starring Tanya Roberts? Amen.

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Favorite Film Critics: Michael Weldon

It's hard to remember a time when the internet was still over a decade away; VHS rentals were mostly found in backrooms of local appliance shops, and books mostly at mall chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. As far as film guides, well, there was Leonard Maltin, period. But then, in 1983, as if smuggled into B. Dalton from some strange alternate universe, was this weird thick, expensive ($25!) silver book called the Psychotronic Encylopedia of Film. Life as we knew it would never be the same again... is a cliche Weldon would never use.

Back then please recall, Quentin Tarantino was under the legal drinking age, and the Times Square grindhouse era was only beginning to die. I was 16 and my few grindhouse experiences had been traumatic: boredom trumped good sense and we NJ teenagers would take the train to Times Square the way farmers used to go to freak shows, to soak up the depravity from behind the protective barrier of our teenage alienation and sense of suburban invulnerability. All I remember is the awful stench of this one, the Roxy, showing films in at least three different shoebox size second floor holes, we came in at the end RUBY and left 1/3 into some Jackie Chan thing -- all on projector video: a mix of really cheap weed, freebase coke, urinal cigars, homelessness, unclean sex, and god knows what else in the air. I can still smell it after 25 years.

But my morbid acuteness of the olfactory senses didn't stop me from relishing the experience, and continuing to soak up the seediness from the safety of my beige wall papered tract home bedroom, and no one was better at conveying the lurid trashy glory of the unseen cinema than Michael Weldon. Psychotronic became my bible, my source book, my security blanket. I still have my original copy--bought with money begged from mom--and the page edges are black with my endless thumbing.

The best is the brevity of his prose. Most of the time there's not really an inkling of if the movie's good, sometimes he confesses he hasn't seen it. Most of it was written from memory, before the advent of home video. Instead of sitting around in the suburbs, Weldon was in two punk bands. He still writes but it seems to be more along the lines of pop culture criticism as in this editorial essay I found online:

"Some people have been complaining about pop songs being used as commercials since the 70s. I always loved The Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun,” especially for the brilliant falsetto harmony ending and Sly And The Family Stone’s “Hot Fun In the Summertime.” And the intro of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” (featuring the drumming of Soupy Sales son) has become the new “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (or the 2001, Elvis intro theme) of TV ads. Key parts of all three are now being used for cruise ship TV spots. Music from an LSD casualty, a coke casualty, and a long time heroin addict to attract mostly retired couples to take overpriced vacations on ocean polluting ships that a record number of people have been puking their guts out on. Brilliant!  (Psychotronic #38)

No, Mr. Weldon. It's you who are brilliant for spinning it that way! I don't think Weldon comes by these observations via some Guy Debord détournement-recuperation angle, and that's why he's so cool. Well one of the reasons. His sense of the absurd is poker-faced in a way that would make Bunuel drop a woman's shoe in salute.

In 1998 I got one of my first steady freelance film criticism jobs, working on search engine entries for a vast director canon project, condensing all these classic films (given out by director) into 200-250 word capsule reviews, up to 20 a week. Some--like D.W. Griffith and Edmund Goulding--had over 30 or 40 films to cover; they taught me a lot about film history. Others, like Roger Corman, Jess Franco, and Edgar Ulmer had even more titles and taught me how to bullshit. Who would have imagined that my endless obsessing over Michael Weldon's tight-lipped style in Pyschotronic would come in so handy? His deadpan stressing of random details and gift for collapsing mountains of impressions and factoids into one smooth, hilarious, joke-free punchline was my boilerplate. I had absorbed some of his style, like the blob!

Here's some random samples: For his review of THE FLESH EATERS (1964, above): "... (Kolsek) was a bottom of the barrel villain at Universal during the '40s and played Joseph Paul Goebbels at least three times. The film's other standout performance is Ray Tudor as the jive-talking, shipwrecked beatnik Omar." (p. 246)

What makes that pair of sentences such sublime poetry? Note the inclusion of Goebbel's middle name or the way Omar's whole groovy hipster shtick is collapsed into a three adjectives. And you could trust Weldon to understate, so if he says "the film's other stand-out" that means Kolsek and Tudor are better than the rest of the cast, but since it's Weldon you know it means more than that, Omar is AWESOME, and the rest of the cast isn't bad.

Then there's his quiet meta-statements, made all the more powerful by their rarity, as in his capsule for I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF: 

"Young Michael Landon (real name Eugene Horowitz) will never be forgotten as the troubled high school student turned into a snarling drooling hairy monster by Whit Bissell. No full moons or crucifixes are involved. Hypnotism causes the retrogressive transformation whenever Landon is startled." (p. 355).

Again, nothing jaw-dropping first-off, but note the way he just drops a weird word like 'retrogressive' in there, like it's no big deal, or the anachronistic mention of crucifixes (for werewolves?), or the lack of commas for 'snarling drooling hairy.' Savor the deadpan solemnity that's wittily undermined by the inclusion of Landon's goofy real name in the opening sentence.

Weldon's magazine has gone out of print, and so has the original Psychotronic Encyclopedia. His 1996 follow-up, the Psychotronic Video Guide is also essential reading, though by then internet and endless film guides had made it hard to stand-out as starkly as the original had 13 years previously. DVD has polished up a lot of these films poor Weldon had to see on streaky fuzzy faded dupes or in sticky Deuce seating, so that we could be free. It's up to us now to keep his flame alive, just as he dedicated his second book to 42nd Street, meaning "the" 42nd Street, as it used to be," so too should we dedicate ourselves to Weldon. I really need to rediscover this book, now that it's sitting in my lap, and order some of the magazine's back issues (at cover price, still!) from the Psychotronic website. Check it out here.

In the end, Michael Weldon is a bit like the Velvet Underground in that he never became super popular so much as hugely influential; every kid who read Psychotronic apparently became a writer or filmmaker. Weldon taught half-suffocated, tragically bored mid-1980s suburban punks and poseurs how to see deeply into even the most opaque 42nd Street garbage and find the shining gems within.

For the 25th anniversary of Weldon's landmark original Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Hollywood Bitchslap's Ron Gonsalves noted:

A note on the back of Psychotronic Encyclopedia reads, "Warning: The author of this book has been watching these movies obsessively since the age of 6. He is now unfit for conventional employment." Well, conventional employment's loss was our gain. I ache for a third volume of psychotronic angel-dust — maybe you do, too. (It's been twelve years, almost as long as the gap between the first two books.) But for now, we can simply raise a toast to the original gray brick's 25th birthday, perhaps take it off the shelf and swim around in it all over again, and give props to the man who was there before everyone else, without whom there wouldn't have been a Grindhouse or a Tarantino or a Film Threat... (10/08)

Writers, filmmakers, and artists can go to school all they want but in the end they learn by reading other writers. In other words, we're sponges. Many fiction writers spend a year or so trying to write like Hemingway or Raymond Carver, so do we film critics of a certain age and interest range spend a lifetime trying to capsulize like Michael Weldon.

But Michael Weldon is not just another big brother guide who led us from passive to active, from viewer to maker, from reader to writer. In his dry unobtrusive way he's also the grinder of the lens through which all the sleaze of yesteryear is re-evaluated as art today. So thank you, thank you, Michael Weldon!  In transforming schlock appreciation into a literary art form (of brevity and wit) you not only supplied expert guidance for our strange viewing interests, you taught us to how to fucking see jewels in the trashy street.

(See also Favorite Film Critics: Kim Morgan)

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When the Doll is Inflamed: SUGAR HILL (AIP, 1974)

FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB SELECTION December 2010!

(This month-5/14 on El-Ray). The rare and precious Sugar Hill is back. This AIP gem from 1974 is a wry, clever blaxploitation New Orleans zombie urban revenge film with great zombies summoned up from the swamps where they were dumped by slave ships in the 1840s; with silver ping-pong ball eyes, a dusting of gold glitter and cobwebs, slave shackles, and brandishing machetes., they're fun and effective.

The enchanting Marki Bey stars as a sweet, sexy, witty fashion photographer Sugar Hill. When her voodoo-themed nightclub-owning boyfriend won't sell out to a bunch of syndicate thugs and is beaten to death in the parking lot, Sugar has a motive to return to her ancestral swamp homestead and see about getting some old-school voodoo revenge. Thankfully, her grandmother is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), and her demon familiar is the laughing Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), who shows up in different 'stereotype-satirizing disguises during the elaborate juju sting operations. So bring on the voodoo doll leg cramps, snakes, and human-hungry pigs ("Hope they go for white trash!").

I love any movie where a smart take-charge woman trusts us to ride with her into the moral abyss with her, especially if she's smart and badass enough that I don't have to worry about her getting beat up, sexually assaulted, imprisoned, outsmarted, or turning soft at the last minute, etc. as so often happened to Pam Grier in FOXY BROWN, and which traumatizes for me weeks after seeing something like GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, as if my unconscious is led by it into a deep trough of male/self-loathing. That trough is blown up by Sugar Hill, a stone fox who puts on an endearing Morticia Adams-style thrill in her voice whenever she's moving in for the kill! It's great to be finally rooting for a murderous voodoo priestess and not have to worry she's going to develop a conscience or let love weaken her resolve.

You know the deal. You know what I mean. Someone like Jodie Foster in THE BRAVE ONE, by contrast, is a one-woman vengeance machine and yet some dopey cop wants to stop her because, um, it's wrong... it's not the law? And then it ends in a big showdown when she's about to shoot the bad guy in cold blood like he deserves and the lame ass cop is all "Listen to me, Sugar! It's not worth it! Let justice take it's course!" So she puts her gun down and turns her back and has to wait until the bad guy suddenly stops cringing and whips a pistol out of his ankle holster... like the kind of moral straining censors require to not 'send a pro-vigilante message to today's impressionable youth.'

Then there's the element of some revenge films I think of as 'inequal distribution', wherein a woman is traumatically assaulted and the assailants spend the movie doing more evil, and finally they just get shot at the end, Bang, the End. So what? That's an imbalance of pain to pleasure for me the viewer because seeing someone get shot doesn't carry the same cathartic charge as seeing them beaten up for ten minutes and then shot, or eaten by starving pigs, or thrown into a tub of snakes or hacked up by zombies, or Michael Caine, or struggling to escape as zombies caked in cobwebs grab them and feed them to the voodoo gods. I much prefer the reverse: Let the syndicate crime boss kill your man real fast in the beginning, and then spend the whole rest of the movie kicking the crap out of him, EC comics style.

SUGAR HILL falls into none of the above traps to deliver instead a series of comic book style death traps involving zombie massages ("Treat me easy, easy,"), attack of the severed chicken foot (a peak AIP moment), burning voodoo dolls ("When the doll is inflamed you will pick up the knife and use it on yourself!" Sugar tells her honky victim, with a grin in her voice like she's Morticia welcoming guests),

How lucky AIP still has gems like this floating around in the air still unseen by so many of us (also seek out CULT OF THE DAMNED).  I hope Halle Berry sees it one day, because after the mousy way she ruined Storm and Catwoman, she should be forced to watch the ballsy brilliance of Marki Bey in this film at least ten times. Bey's no taller than Berry and has an even smaller nose, but can order around whole rooms full of zombies, gangsters or cops and make it work without ever being anything but super cool, super sexy and the smartest person in the picture. In fact she works it so well it took me awhile to even notice it! Not that it should be, or is now, or will be. Zamboona never fails.... Coffy may be the color, but Sugar Hill's got the soul, and silver painted balls.

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The Kinski Precipice: Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.

I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you won't play it?) Then there's Herzog's titles, which are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? That's the title of your film? Why assume they wouldn't?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old PAL VHS of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. Nothing personal. I was just a dumb Yankee at the time, and knew for example, nothing of the rest of the world and the little creatures in it.

But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced, and more tolerant of my naturalistic German side, I'm perhaps better equipped to recognize my own issues tainting the clarity of Herzog's hallucinatory nature-phobic naturalism. I am growing up/into appreciating his mix of German sturm und drang and lysergi-bucolic mysticism and how his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness turn his narrative into a static panorama. I can't help but admire and love Herzog's willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same. Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out emptied.

Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a theater production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline, and brings Peru into it. Of course. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was born to preach the gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub plays the face. Brad Dourif is a dead-on Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle with a Samurai sword stashed in his shed. Chloe Sevigny is the girlfriend who tries to channel Brad's madness by bringing him into her theater group.. but you can't shrug off holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Arsenic and Old Lace or Bye Bye Birdy. 

 Lynch regular Piper Laurie plays the mom, dead even before she dies-- she's the middle-aged version of Mary in ERASERHEAD. An inner voice warns Brad not to go kayaking with his hippie friends in Peru (they all drown, offscreen). Awakened and chastened, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception; loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront, gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his meds into the broken-glass covered street of messianic schizophrenia. Back at home his clinging mom won't stop feeding him jello. And so what can a poor man do once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries? As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"

 On that note, I think the part of Herzog's quest to find the holy grail of pure madness may be a smokescreen for his private worry he already found it and lost it, namely in the eyes of the late, great Klaus Kinski. For the recent BAD LIEUTENANT--of which MY SON is almost a sequel thanks to similar cinematic patina and supporting cast (Shannon, Brad Douriff, Imra P. Hall, and Michael Pena)--Nic Cage brought his own line of insanity to the collaboration. There was little room left for Herzog to project his post-Kinski stress disorder, but without a strong lead to delimit him, Herzog's liable to forget that it helps our appreciation of onscreen derangement if we first see someone else in the film act normal, at least once or twice, to get our bearings.

In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, period, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy; he's a charismatic actor doing a fine job of capturing the full spectrum of the manic-messianic complex, but there's no charm to his insanity, no reason we can think of -- aside from his attractive bearing -- for anyone to put up with his tantrum-esque ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him into the holy light.

Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog wanted to anyway: Kinski is a wild man, archetypal and one-of-a-kind. He's a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE. I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness, which is, as Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, the 'only performance that truly makes it." Good as Michael Shannon is, he just doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg?

Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe plays the homicide detective who tracks Brad back from the crime scene to where he's holed up with hostages, demands for pizza, etc. Udo Kier shows up as the theater director who was putting on Elektra with Shannon as the star.  Since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior.' And that's the problem, a) why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care, and b) if they weren't going to help him, why endure his holy madness if it's not fun or fascinating to be around? c) Wasn't he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.

As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with a mix of the resignation of an old queen indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy and the genuine fascination artists feel around those rare souls more fucked-up than themselves, and the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to try and make a film with someone who's completely delusional. But as with Shannon, Kier doesn't project the maniacal charisma that would possibly ground a loose wire like Brad. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a champion! And vice backacha!

Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own baggage, he gets whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And you sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part (he's great)--that Kinski is there, working ghostlike machinations, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows to give Lynch and Herzog time to become Kinski with each other. The issue at work here may as well be too much respect and not enough spittle.

The collaboration between Cage and Herzog in BL2 had a reckless, exhilarating momentum, the Lynch-Herzog collaboration doesn't have immediacy, perhaps as it neglects the 'glue' of normal 'strong' grounding characters like Eva Mendez's prostitute, or a Lynchian heroine like Naomi Watts or Laura Dern. Willem Dafoe tries to be grounded as the homicide detective on the scene, but Dafoe will never be able to play 'grounded' --the more he tries, the creepier he gets --and I mean that as a compliment. He's too nice and sweet a soul to play one on TV. He's warmer when he's colder.

In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's auteur-like motifs? He's either crazy himself, super enlightened, has done psychedelics, or--most likely--all three, in addition to hanging out with a lot of messianic schizophrenics, otherwise he'd never get so many details of the horror of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess other so very exactly right. There wouldn't be the terrible realization that the hallucination of a giant mantis alien sucking the psionic marrow out of your third eye isn't actually a hallucination but the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of aching skin walking down dangerous streets and hurtling in steely cars towards crushed oblivion is no easy thing to bear. 

 Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, generally, an order which has no way to process the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place...  coherence through artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper and he's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.

Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? Here's what else I learned from MY SON MY SON:

1. The only way to channel holy madness without causing destruction and misery is art but that has its own problems, as a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out, ala Michael Shannon's Greek tragedian. Don't think it doesn't happen! MACBETH has made plenty of actors into mounds of raving jello, and they say the Joker killed Heath Ledger, and mom's jello kills them all... served while Jack Benny smiles from afar...

2. No matter how bad things get, the old country blues and/or gospel can make it okay. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery,  I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips' (seen at left, with his double zither) who's "What a friend We have in Jee-ee-sus" has made it onto dozens of my mix tapes. For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD Frisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster than the songs of an old, dead, black, blind singing preacher. What a friend we have in Jesus!

3. There comes a special moment when even artists realize they need to break away from their urge to write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge, but unless we let go of the rope, we'll never see the bottom... never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners. 

Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with our full vision, or instead of silently watching a movie or taking in a vista in rapture, find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and speech/writing rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak.Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to feel because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will never come back, but it does, a new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip.

4.  Shannon in a Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table: a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted, all else gone to shadow.

 

The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of god, try not announcing how spiritual you are to your horrified other, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.

The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity. The longer you ignore it the sweeter its songs. But your ego's sitting on a cupboard full of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows. The person who is deemed mad is the person who who surrenders and silences the ego in a sudden snuffing so the cupboards can open and light pour out. He is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge responsibility to keep this holy state going as long as possible, rather than knowing to surrender even that goal he runs about shaking the lapels of those still asleep, but maybe they don't want to wake up, and why should they, just 'cuz you say so?

A few incarnations later, he learns that unless he's cared for by a dozen attendants and speaking daily at the ashram, he better keep the ego around, and he can balance all that in art. Within art you can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. We dismiss ideas that challenge our egos outright, but we'll always stop for a good movie, one that stealthily addresses ideas of madness and artistry and newly minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Where are the damned lepers in San Diego?

 MY SON MY SON has a lot of that kind of inner problem, the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn you into a raving lunatic. When the House is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all; roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away, unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? Whohin bist du, meinen rattemessias!? Ich liebe, Ich liebe dich so... 

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Great Acid Cinema: ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (AKA Cult of the Damned, 1969)

"Screw anyone who hates killing!"

Netflix streaming has just delivered unto its subscribers a vast wealth of MGM-owned AIP and independent horror/sci fi titles from the 1960s-90s (many unavailable on DVD at all) just in time for the trippiest of all seasons, autumn, as in fall.. as in fall down and down we.....go.... If you have Netflix, drop everything and stream CULT OF THE DAMNED! No Jim Jones (but there is still some Kool-Aid floating around, if you know what I mean).

In fact, CULT turns out to be a counterculture 1969 AIP gas(ss) filmed in Los Angeles, California that might even be better than PSYCH-OUT, almost as good as HEAD. So whether you're an AIP fan or just a cinematic "experience seeker," take the CULT trip and instead of pinching yourself to see if you're dreaming, you'll be pinching your mom, shouting obscenities at passing pigeons, and howling; your lips frothing, your pupils wildly dilated, meaning to say hello but instead just laughing insanely. You will definitely have, as they say, totally lost it, and then you'll know, Bogart's mad vision of an America that's eaten itself down to the overweight health crisis bone has come to pass. The man is a prophet.

CULT OF THE DAMNED originally had the much more sensible (relatively) title, ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO, referring to one of the psychedelic rock songs performed by said prophet for the gone generation, the skydiving rock impresario, Bogart "as in the real Humphrey!" Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher). He's thinking of calling his new group 'Rabbit Habbit,' a trio consisting of skydiving hipster freaks: stone cool Lou Rawls ("Everybody knows black is better, baby!"), a cute blonde flower child ("Birth control can be controlled by the mind!") and Roddy McDowell! ("I heard alcohol is coming back!") The songs are full of groovy organ and funky but non-slapped bass lines I could totally play if my bass wasn't so far away, and written by the ISHTAR-ish song-writing team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, clearly aping the oft-aped style of the musical 'HAIR.'  Since the lead is obsessed about her weight issues and there's an uber bitch-control freak pill-head former glamor girl mom, it becomes a kind of HAIRSPRAY/HAIR mind-meld, sans the terrible smell of permanents, but with the pungent incense of the Manson killings to come ("My mom always told me the next war would be between the blacks and the whites!")

The film begins, still trying to make me think it's about GUYANA (it was originally mixed up under the GUYANA image above on Netflix, so I spent a good hour wondering when these hippies were going to move to Guyana). There are lots of jungle noises in the beginning to bear out the assumption that we're watching the right movie (at least for me, who always thought Guyana was in Africa). But as it goes on it gets very Joan Collins plays Mommy Dearest as written by Valerie Solanis channeling Oscar Wilde. There's first person-narrated childhood of debutante, Tara Nicole Steele (Holly Near) who hallucinates disturbing collages of her riches-to-riches life story, where "everyone dies on schedule, beautifully." Jennifer Jones is the faded mom, who shouts at Tara: "You are a fat girl, you idiot! I don't know why anyone would even touch you!!" When she throws Tara Nicole a coming-out party it's like a champagne bottle missile... aimed straight at the head. Yo, that's poetry.

All through the film, I presumed Tara Nicole was going to go off to Guyana and join Jim Jones to escape her mom's cold clutches, or something, and that an angry reel of camp atrocity footage would be tacked on at the end, intercut with Tara Nicole freaking out in close-up so you couldn't tell she wasn't really there. But then, left turns start and go, baby, go, until you're freaking out in the best free love acid flashback kind of way, with just a little dab of Manson-esque foreshadowing to keep everything from getting too Partridge Family.

Bogart lays Tara by the lake; she fantasizes weird Freudian melt-down bloody Bluebeard forbidden stained-key-style. Bogart's friends show up and sweep her into their world of forbidden pleasure and love, love, freedom, mama angel! Pillows and purple gel accent lighting and a groovy old LP player and reel-to-reel. He even records a song to his new love about how "growing high and going wide gives you lots of 'room' inside." Tara gets confident with all this attention and learns to dance free and easy like Mama Cass and tease her mom about her obsession with expensive jewelry. With a little research Tara learns that fat used to be the height of beauty and that "Twiggy only dates back to Buchenwald."  When Bogart decides to get with Tara's pillhead mama ("maybe you'll adopt me, maybe I'll adopt you, but oh crazy lady crazy lady!") Tara freaks out and starts crying up on the ceiling. Mom hangs by the pool and notes: "He is the sort that makes you take all sorts of tranquilizers before breakfast, isn't he? And wash them down with bloodys." Cheers, Mrs. S.! "You drive, I dive! We all die!" With Bogart around, bloody's always for breakfast.

Needless to say, Mom gets her own song, too:, in a slow grinding bluesy vamp:

I just met a mother -
ain't gonna tell you her name.
I just met a mother
she puts us all to shame.
Well the bigger that they are,
the harder they fall.
Looka here, what do we got?
the biggest mother
of them all!

Bogart can just magically come up with some cool thing to sing and instantly move the whole cast in and out of his recording studio to belt it out, sometimes with the pre-recorded version, then actually singing it, then just listening to it, then having it play in the background as they drive around in his groovy car, all within the course of a three minute song. Meanwhile, photos everywhere, on all the walls, keep it all weird, man, like below:

So, if you haven't seen ANGEL AKA CULT on Netflix (where it's mislabeled GUYANA) streaming, you haven't seen it. See this stone groove motherlover timeless remembrance of the days of cults and parental anxiety about drugged-out rebels that talked too fast and sang too much.

For Squaresville adults it was like looking right into Medusa's hazel blue eyes. Mother Lover!

Perhaps this film isn't as well-known as its other AIP psychedelic brethren due to bad timing, i.e. the Manson murders. That little event broke up negotiations between the generations like a bomb at Middle East peace conference. Suddenly an innocent film--full of song, freak, and flag that just happened to be about killing your parents--was seen as something very dark, which the film's satirical tone was maybe just too frazzled to support; so they changed the name to CULT OF THE DAMNED. If four people count as a cult then oh, crazy lady crazy lady. So stuck in a limbo where BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLL fans can't find it (they'd love it), the film's been rolling around in a time warp obscurity ever since, ever since now, crazylady crazylady!!

So remember, the only way to find this film is to look for another film on Netflix under the similar title, GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED -- and somehow, that makes the actual film even better, for even if they never actually get to Guyana, this damned cult's Kool-Aid still packs a 'Lovely Sort of Death' in every sip, so drink up, tune in, and dive, cannibal America, dive!

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Acidemic 6: Sex and the French / Now online!

ACIDEMIC Journal of Film and Media

#6 Sex and the French

(September 2010)

Editor's Note: Blood and Roses and Jerry Lewis:

"As Americans adrift in a consumerism-gone-wild simulacrum, we're so wrapped up in the chasing and desiring that fuels economic growth that even the 'actuality' of sex itself pales in comparison to the erection of consumerism, an erection which must always be rising and getting stiffer and is never allowed a final end-all release, until finally it collapses and Madoff goes to jail and we realize the erection was never ours, and were just getting f**ked the whole time."

Todd McGowan on Contempt:

"The idea of the soulmate penetrates the most cynical veneer, and Hollywood plays an essential role in sustaining this idea. More than providing spectators with a sense of social stability and meaning through narrative, Hollywood cinema supplies them with the ideology of romance."

Kim Morgan on Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone:

"... a hair grabber that drags you around the muck and pushes your face into its world so far that -- and this is rare with such hard cinema -- you'll experience moments of such bizarre, hideous beauty that you're left significantly moved. "

Our French correspondent Severine Benzimra:

"Sexual scenes aren't supposed to, on this side of the ocean, attract the audience. They represent a part of the life of the character that it is necessary to represent. They aren't meant to excite. Sexual excitation is linked to imagination..., Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature."

Ethan Spigland on Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire:

"Gilles Deleuze spoke about the emergence of a new kind of actor in the French New Wave--a mutant who becomes a detached observer rather than an active agent in their own stories...  Both Rivette and Rollin have a fascination for pulp novels, romantic literature, and the pulp serials of Feuillade, yet Rollins films are far less self-conscious. His films merge the intellectual and sensual in a way that the nouvelle vague rarely achieved."

Erich Kuersten on Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard:

"We associate the color white for virginity and purity, we also use it as as a symbol for absence, a tool of amnesia, so we can forget that red means the alchemical opening up of that purity into the raw bloody violence of procreation, and so be able to move onto what the third color of the French flag, blue, the color of the titular beard, represents: the cooling rescue of death--or rather as symbolized in the 'bloody chamber' where all the previous brides are stored--a suspended animation, a sleeping beauty stasis wherein the enslaving agonies of childbirth and old age are forever kept at bay. In short, the blue represents decadence, pleasure an disruption of the natural enslavement process of patriarchy."

PLUS!

John Bredin on 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her

Samantha Charlip on Joy and Joan

Erich Kuersten on L'amour Braque  

Severine Benzimra on Jean Marais

 David Maxwell's Shark Report - Meg: Hell's Aquarium 

Artist in Residence Audra Graziano: Three Times a Lady

Erich Kuersten on Clint Eastwood's Breezy

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