Let the Right One KILL, BABY, KILL (1966)

The Right One, you already let her in, and good for you. But now who's gonna creep you out... tonight?  I'll be coming at you with ideas all month, so relax and let it happen.  This is KBK's own Stevie Wayne wishing all of you in Antonio Bay a very merry... Keep watching! Keep watching the skies, the tube, the fog, and KILL, BABY, KILL, a 1966 Italian spook show with class appeal and atmosphere that's cozy warm fire perfect from maestro Mario Bava.

It take a few viewings to really appreciate KILL BABY; it's not as highly regarded as some of Bava's other work, which is probably due to a history of bad prints and title changes. A Victorian Gothic Italian rural villa ghost story, KILL, BABY, KILL's Italian title was OPERAZIONE PAURA! (Operation: Terror!). We don't blame them for changing it, but why make it sound like a giallo spy thriller? The similar sounding film FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL came out the previous year, and was a film that set the bar for outre grooviness, but grooviness hadn't even been invented in the BABY's Victorian Age setting. Instead there are beautiful 'old master lighted' bowls of fruit, great wind effects, sedatives ("give her 20 drops") and an array of strange and wonderful women, including an Anna Magnani-ish bruja (Fabienne Dali), a terrified innkeeper's daughter (Micaela Esdra), a stylish and terrified med student named Monica (Erika Blanc), and Melissa Graps, a ghost girl with blonde hair (to tie the film even deeper into RIGHT ONE, she's played by a very spooky boy, Velerio Valeri). She's so weird, like Italy's Victorian era version of THE BAD SEED times the SHINING's murdered twins divided by Norman Bates in "wouldn't hurt a fly" drag.

It's interesting that the hero and heroine of this film are the most puddin'-headed when it comes to the supernatural, making it the opposite of DRACULA, where the smartest guy in the room believes in vampires and the victims and dupes cling to out-finesse'd medical science. Here the two outsiders refuse to budge from their skepticism even as it costs the lives of everyone around them and they themselves see some real gone daddy freak-outs. Hey, I can dig it; that's how science rolls, and it makes sense. Exclusion-based ideologies will always dismiss or ignore what they have yet to incorporate, and when it comes to the supernatural, a refusal to believe is actually a pretty good defense.

The film's only fault (if it truly has one) may lie in  the way Bava's slow pans and zooms around cobwebbed villa interiors and moonlit exteriors can be a bit too lulling and repetitive for the easily bored viewer expecting visceral thrills and cheap shocks. But a visionary like Bava deserves to indulge himself fully since every foot of this film is pure visual poetry, and the score and the wind sound effects are as soothingly eerie as October itself! Who needs be riveted when you have this much atmosphere? It's the ideal film to fall asleep to, almost like a white noise machine.

In fact, I've seen this movie five times now and it gets better every time, even when it does put me to sleep. In order for a film to be 'hypnotic' on its fifth viewing, which this certainly was, first it has to first be 'boring' - that's the  nature of hypnotism as I've come only recently to realize. Since BABY tells only one story, it's not as relentlessly scary and blackly comic as Bava's 1963 trilogy BLACK SABBATH (Which will have you and your viewing comrades calling each other "Stanka!" for weeks on end). KILL, BABY, KILL  can seem padded here and there with repeated shots of bells tolling and gloomy ghost-eye exteriors. Cool scenes of victims returned as undead servants of the evil spirit, foreshadowed all through the first 2/3 of the film never materialize. Did Bava run out of undead make-up? Is that the reason the film is so slow, and yet over so fast?

It doesn't even matter, honey. It's the right one so let it in. Just make sure you get the Anchor Bay DVD version, in Italian with English subtitles and colors so beautifully autumnal and dream-like you feel like you're walking through the Italian Victorian Gothic wing of a museum on a crisp fall evening. Look at the painterly lighting of this creepy scene below:

That's painterly, right? You can barely see the old lady in the right-center of the frame. And watching the film itself seems to attract spiritual energy if you have any ghosts in your apartment, as I do. Right as I was thinking the ghost girl Melissa should be represented by one of those bouncing white orbs I'd been reading about (orbs turn up in a lot of 'ghost pictures'), her little white ball bounced down the stairs and rolled past our stunned hero. I got creeped out. Dude, what is with those orbs? How did Bava know to show the bouncing ball right at the very same moment I was pondering this unexplained mystery? Dude, if you don't believe there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in mere coincidence, then it's you who are superstitious. Accept the truth: the spirit world is all around us! I feel them! They are restless this month. Sleep tonight in a barbed wire nightshirt, for your mother's sake, and for Tura Satana's sake: Operazione Paura, begin! Again!

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Are you serious? The terror of ambiguity

If March starts with a lion and ends with a lamb, October starts with a sinister wind and a touch of orange in the leaves and ends with blood in the streets and monsters in the hall. But hey, people! Are our horror filmmakers ever going to get back to being actually scary instead of just gory/intense? And that brings me to the topic of today's sermon, BURNT OFFERINGS (1976), and its justifiably famous pool scene, which I don't want to spoil, but will say it may have been lifted from LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), and/or, for my book the single freakiest scenes of violent and death ever, in Sam Peckinpah's BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970).

The thing is, often in real life scenes of (potential or actual) violence, there is a bizarre "is this really happening or isn't it?" feeling, and if one is being threatened, an "are they just kidding or not?" aspect. A bully's first defense is often, "I'm just fuckin' with ya." This strategy plays like a drunken drummer upon our deeply rooted insecurities from childhood about "reading the situation" correctly. We watch the way anger, lust, humor and resentment all swirl around the banal conversations of our parent's bridge game. What the hell do they mean when they say stuff? Who knows if the dad driving you home from soccer is actually kidnapping you?

The opening scene in HOGUE is about such a misreading, as Hogue is fighting over the last of the water with his two prospector buddies, and Hogue gets the drop on them only to lose it when one ingeniously makes Hogue think they're all just joking around. Peckinpah excels at creating these vibrant, terrifyingly enigmatic situations where sudden outbursts of violence seem ready to erupt at any moment, but none of the characters really want it to happen, or know quite when it will. Peckinpah was the master who reminded us that in areas where lawmen have to ride days to find a suspect, everyone needs to keep a gun handy and be ready for the unfamiliar face to suddenly make his move, smile of innocent friendliness still firm on his face.

For example, lets remember the scene LETHAL WEAPON 2 when Mel Gibson charges onto a film set to foil an assault because he didn't realize it was "all pretend." Now reverse that idea, and have Mel charge onto a real crime scene and convince the perp he's making a movie. One certainly doesn't want to retaliate with brute force if there is a way the assailant can be made to re-imagine their assault as merely "playfulness." This is also a key to dealing with drunk aggressors, as they may be able to be convinced that they themselves are only kidding when they weren't (to begin with). Living in Brooklyn, you learn these tricks early, since any false move or betrayal of fear or panic can get your head smashed in during what might otherwise be a relatively harmless mugging. It's the first punch that is the hardest to throw, once the melee is on, even the scarediest little punk in the gang can find the nerve to run up and give you a kick in the ribs when you're lying there bleeding and unconscious.

I bring all this up so idiot horror film makers will stop just marching in each others' boot prints and realize they need to branch out and look deeper in the woods for scares because at this point, hockey masks and chainsaws aren't even worthy of a nostalgic shudder. HALLOWEEN used to be the scariest thing there was a kid could imagine, and now it plays on the Disney channel (1). This weird nebulous realm of violent ambiguity is one of the last barely explored frontiers of moviemaking. The fantasy of pure good vs. pure evil is gettin' old, we got art now, we got to unearth ambiguity where we left it in the graveyard of the 1970s, put a sledge hammer in its hand and bring it back to the head of the table.

Action movies like AEON FLUX, RESIDENT EVIL and assorted comic book and video game adaptations usually suck when they forget this ambiguity, making movies that instead create distance so the bloodletting is no more exciting than watching someone else play a video game. In reality, violence is like fire, it's hard to start it, and once it starts it spreads indiscriminately, almost a relief, covering the terrifying inability to know your neighbor's heart and allowing your inner killer to finally come out and eat your mind. That I can only think of these three films where this ingeniously terrifying ploy is used (2) shows the filmmakers are either afraid themselves or just don't think enough of their audience that they'll 'get' it.  Maybe we should kill them! You know I'm kidding, right?

NOTES
1) Not really, just fuckin' with ya! 
2) Though I can't remember particular scenes, certain actors like Richard Widmark and directors like Howard Hawks and Quentin Tarantino are master of it. 

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Nearer my Templar to Thee: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, BECKETT and THE BLIND DEAD

I never thought I'd be glad that parental over-protective hysteria is so rampant in this country, but thanks to widespread anti-Catholic demonstrations and the recently released documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN  there's finally a real answer to "Won't somebody think of the children!?" Hopefully the protests and awareness will spread amongst the uppity parents of the nation and gain force in showing up these protectors of incompetent, dangerously apathetic teachers, papal pedophiles, and other abusers and saboteurs of our children's welfare who hide behind tenure and other outdated legalities that protect the guilty and champion the mediocre.




And another thing: none of it's at all new! Let's take a look at BECKETT (1964, above), for example. Richard Burton is the jaded intellectual pal of Peter O'Toole's happy-go-lusty King Henry. Henry appoints Beckett (Burton) the archbishop of Canterbury in hopes of continuing his lascivious ways unhindered by marital rigmarole, but it all boils to a head real fast when Beckett gets all pious, giving away his fancy clothes and then protecting a pedophile priest! O'Toole wants to do right by the locals and send the priest out to be hanged, but Burton insists the priest go to the Vatican, for 'um', whatever amount of rosary-related penance the pope sees fit to assign.

Time for a quick personal anecdote: Of my 'group' from college, friends of friends who have since gone on to become doctors of psychiatry, professors of social work, professors, etc., a good portion of them were total flakes in undergraduate college, and it's hilarious to hear them solemnly and sanctimoniously preach the same stuff we used to make fun of... ala Burton in BECKETT. I'm not saying I'm any better but if I was Peter O'Toole I wouldn't trust them to screw in a light bulb and yet they're the one's with the degrees and certification higher than mine... and I'm jealous! An...an... and I blame society!

Tomb of the Blind Dead (1971)

Hey, another reason I'm not a doctor is that I hate studying and going to class, but I know something about the embattled world of academia and the difference between real thinkers and educators vs. professors who just protect their little niche: a lot of times they just sort of follow in some (long dead) real thinker's footsteps (see my "Kill All Jonesers"), and appoint themselves 'experts' on people like Wordsworth and Whitman and yet, were they to meet them in person, said profs would probably run away in disgust (Whitman I bet you smelled really bad). I used to see these types in AA, touting how program-perfect they are and while no, they never actually got drunk or liked to drink, they're sure they would have had a problem had they ever started down that road to ruin! So now they're fucking experts on sobriety and so glad their "nightmare" is over!" Dude, what nightmare? We used to joke about how leaving behind half-full beers was alcohol abuse, and on that level only are they 'problem' drinkers.

A lot of this problem could be solved by taking the status and dusty immunity of academic, medical and religious positions away, and adapting a broader socialist system, like Argentina's.  Last I heard, a doctor made around $400 a month, A MONTH, in Buenos Aires. A cab driver, maybe $125 a month, a teacher, $250... and they get by, cuz it's socialism. Here we're blessed with a capitalist system, wherein doctors and lawyers are supposed to be robbing us all blind; we're supposed to not be able to afford our rent. In Argentina, the doctors make house calls! They come over to look at your tonsils, have a mate', smoke a cigarette with you in the kitchen, use your phone to call in to the office, get the next address of a patient in need, and they're off, like firemen. Imagine if your house was on fire but you had to go the firehouse and fill out forms and show your insurance before they'd go out to your house? Absurd, right? Imagine if before a cop would come investigate your robbery you had to show him your police insurance card? Why is that more absurd to us than hospitals where patients die in the waiting room or are turned away to bleed to death in the streets? Imagine having to pay the cops for them to arrest a burglar in your house? Actually, if that was bribes you mean by paying, that would be Argentina, too. But why is that different than health insurance? Why are doctors and lawyers chosen more from rich parents who can afford medical school vs. true humanitarians and gifted healers who may have something to offer, but are too lazy to study and think cadavers are gross? 






Now let's move over to the priesthood and the issue of celibacy. I understand the motivation behind the vow of celibacy, but the celibacy thing should just be a natural result of being close to God. When God is near, sex falls away like a booster rocket, but only if the subject is truly dwelling 24/7 in the conscious grace of perfect love. Being called a priest does not automatically lift you beyond sexual desire, anymore than graduating college means you're an intellectual. If you're forced into the priesthood by fucked up parents and are horny as hell, not even allowed to masturbate by Catholic consensus, then you are a like a ticking time bomb. Why are celibate priests expected to somehow abstain from a basic human need? There's a reason straight guys get with other guys in prison - and a priesthood's no different. What I'm getting at is, you can't expect a dickhead to suddenly be a saint just because his parents paid his way to get a degree from the Sainthood Academy.

Here's a personal anecdote: as a child I had a lot of trouble learning to tie my shoelaces. I heard other kids and adults say that everyone knows how to tie their shoes by the time they are five years old. As I was already four and a half I just figured I'd wait it out. So on my fifth birthday I actually expected I'd just miraculously know how to tie them. I ran into the bathroom during my birthday party, untied my shoelace (which mom had tied, of course) and just assumed I would now magically know.

Needless to say, I didn't know how to tie them just because I was five. But I learned something even more valuable: you can't think that a socially-conferred title (like 'five' or 'professor') actually has any 'real' power to change you - "all children should be able to read by the time they're seven;" "all graduates from medical school must know how to fix a hernia;" "all teachers in the union are great educators" -- yet this is the party line towed by deans and union officials the nation over.

 Being five doesn't mean you can tie your shoes any more than being chosen as a priest means you are miraculously free of all sexual desire. If you have said desire and repress it, then look out, because all the praying in the world is only going to prolong the pressure cooking of your libido, like thinking you can hold a Nerf ball under water for 30 straight years and its never going to pop up and smack some poor kid in the face, just because he has a certificate that says 'No Nerf.'


Now it's easy in retrospect to forget that plenty of children grew up going to Catholic school without being molested. There are plenty of great humanitarian doctors and excellent teachers, and teachers' unions are a good thing as far as assuring reasonable pay rates and so forth, but once in place, the union should be ready to get out of the way and let bad teachers be fired, unions should not be championing incompetence, or forfeiting across the board raises in favor of being granted more control, which our union recently did, the equivalent of your boss saying 'your wife and I agreed you would take a pay cut but she'll get to control your life."

Now I'll even go out on a limb here and say that most teachers who have tenure are awesome in every way, which is why they get tenure, but a very small and certain few got it by chicanery, string-pulling and just applying every year for decade after decade until a dean is overly forgiving and just gives everyone who applies tenure, and now there are 2-3 teachers who never should have gotten it and you can't get rid of them; or they get tenure and are great but then they let a little taste of power turn them into litigious, self-righteous grudge-carriers, kind of like old BECKETT. He was great as a teacher/drinking buddy but turn him into an archbishop/union rep and he's a menace to the public interest. Huffington's Kelli Goff writes about this in her review of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN: 

In a scene that will make every person's skin crawl, Guggenheim interviews a former superintendent who recounts attempting to fire teachers who were caught on video reading the newspaper as their students sat waiting to learn, and another who placed a child's head in a urinal. After firing the teachers in question -- like any normal person would -- the superintendent and district were forced to rehire them -- with back pay -- due to tenure. (Kelli Goff, Huffington Post, 9/28/10)

Peter O'Toole's Henry is pretty sure old Beckett's just fallen in love with his new sense of power and is not actually believing all that holier than thou business, but he's wrong, Burton's Beckett has bought into the rigmarole hook line and sinker. And that's the problem with power in the wrong hands whether in Beckett's, tenured faculty, the clergy, or the unions. O'Toole's nutty king is worthy of power because he wears all his evil up front: he's good inside with an evil shell. Burton's Beckett hangs back and looks pious, but he's the real danger in the realm: he's evil inside and pious/good outside. Give him a title and he'll be crazy enough to take it seriously. Such people are dangerous to all concerned, blind to their own absurd sense of inflated self-importance, dead to the compassion their role demands, afflicted with what Lacan might call "signifier-blindness" (1) - BLIND DEAD, in fact!.

The first of a trilogy, TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1971) involves ghost-zombies of old Portuguese Knights Templar chasing and killing all the sinful locals who trespass around their old Malta stomping grounds, wrapping their skeleton hands around all the lovely ladies and gigolo boyfriends,  most of whom behave in such a dumb, unassuming way as to be ridiculously easy to kill. It's a perfect metaphor for our current situation: we may be aware that these pious undead union Templars are out there, slowly shambling towards us on their slow mo horses, but unless we stop behaving like easy prey and start rising up en masse to demand radical reform of the tenure system, unions and the church, we'll be slaughtered by Templars, Draconians, and Freemasons, and our children will be abused systematically until the last spark of life drains from their dewy eyes. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!??

Until we take drastic steps like the above and/or failing that, getting out the torches and pitchforks, we're like those vice-engorged Portuguese in TOMBS, jetsetting ourselves and our children up for a royal trimming by the Templars. The idiocy of the humans in this movie is appalling. They're all alone out there and surrounded by zombies, and the guy goes: "Honey, you wait here. I'm going to go check out that weird screaming noise out there in the dark," leaving her of course completely vulnerable. Is this not what we say to our families, still trusting in the decency of the status quo to protect us? Honey you have to go to school - you have to listen to your teachers. And the teacher is always right, no one believes the kid in a me vs. him argument. Cuz they're teachers. They know things, until of course they're caught seducing a child - then they're hung out to dry. But what about boring a child? What about ignoring a child?




NOTES
1. Like snow-blindness, rather than like being blind to signifiers.

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Excuse me, Miss, but Haven't We Died Somewhere Before?

Much as I love and admire VERTIGO (1954), I don't love love it the way I love THE BIRDS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, REAR WINDOW or PSYCHO. It's not riveting, it's existential and sometimes plodding (as a kid I was bored silly by the endless shots of Stewart driving around the block and spying on Kim Novak in a flower store); It took a dozen viewings before I was able to appreciate the modernist freak-out of having Jimmy Stewart--our soft-spoken American son--acting like an obsessive misogynist dickweed. Speaking of which (SPOILER ALERT) but if you haven't seen it by now, well, you should be seeing it now. What if you die before you get a chance to see it? Or worse yet, what if you see it and realize you are already dead? Oh my god, that's what happened to me!

I've been watching BAND OF BROTHERS and in one scene a rough tough NCO tells a shaking, traumatized young private that the trick to overcoming fear in combat is to just know you are already dead. If you're afraid of losing something, you haven't got a chance. You have to act 'as if' it's all gone, and from that comes a relaxed sense of fearlessness, like Tyler "It's only after we've lost everything that we can do anything" Durden.

But what if you're not in the 101st Airborne, or Jack's personal razor, what if you're just Jimmy Stewart adrift in late 1950s San Francisco? What if, instead of having to fight Germans you just have to climb a step ladder? What if you're a woozy, romantic playing at being a San Francisco gumshoe and just aching for some femme to get fatale? Then brother, it's VERTIGO. Black and white is over, Mr. Narrator Grade-A Chump Fall Guy! It fades away in the first few frames announcing 'Vista Vision,' like the whole post-war noir haze has been lifted, or rather, yanked off a roof down 40 stories to its death.

It's not that our Scotty (Stewart) is a coward; it's just he looks too long into the face of the gorgon. Looking into Medusa's face is best done via a rear-view mirror or a quick coy glance, like one gives a hot lady or gentlemen going the other direction in the subway rush. If you gawk, you shall be ensnared, petrified, arrested. As Scotty stares too long, he winds up a statue, which gradually crumbles and melts like the end of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM.

The key element of 'unease' that prevails through VERTIGO, though, is that Dali melting-watch out of time frozen-by-the-gorgon sensibility (hence the boredom). We never actually see Scotty rescued from his opening scene cliffhanger predicament. This leaves us with a queasy feeling he's about to fall, and the queasy about to fall feeling stays with us all the way through the movie. After we fade out from the roof scene, he just suspiciously now walks with a cane and strings along with Midge, a bespectacled fashion sketch artist. But whenever he looks down from any great height we gets a mysterious 'uncanny' glimmer that maybe this is all happening in a 'before his eyes' kind of instant before death, ala Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET, or TWO SECONDS starring Edward G. Robinson (1).

Or maybe he is already dead. Now here's another thing that recovering alcoholics and addicts who were 'low bottom' (1)  and soldiers recovering from post-traumatic stress all know, the feeling that you 'almost' died so often that in many of your parallel lives you did die, and your quantum immortality options have dwindled, i.e. you are approaching your total death, when all your quantum options run out. This is in fact a good thing as you will--finally--be able to remember your own death, which means you are completely whole; that's when you 'really' die, the complete and total soul death, beyond the grasp of any soul collector's pan-dimensional clutches.

If you don't believe quantum immortality is real, here's an experiment: next time you 'almost' get hit by a bus or something random like that, close you eyes and feel with your auric tentacles into the dimensions to the right and left of you... are they still there? Can you 'almost' hear the distant shouts of ambulance drivers to clear the way, the feeling of being lifted into stretcher, the smell of hospital disinfectant, as you go on about your business in your dimension proper?

Of course this all speculation, though I personally feel it to be very real. As nobody remembers dying (all the way to the end, as opposed to NDEs) it's obvious that we will never 'experience' it, hence it can't happen. Even people who remember past lives have a hard time nailing down what goes on between the births and deaths. If we are in a purely dead state we become, in a sense, experience itself, depersonalized intelligence, a free-floating locus of identification very similar to the way our identification shifts when being at the movies, the free-ranging narrative focus that Hitchcock suddenly seized control of and stabbed us with in the middle of PSYCHO. The only difference between movies and real death then, is one of morality: Watching sex from the point of a Beyond the Grave (or BTG) point of view can be dangerous in that you become hypnotized (the Gorgon again, I call her Mecha-Medusa!) if you look too long at the copulating bodies, and can wind up trapped like a fly in the amber of the womb, forced to reincarnate once again. If you look too long at violence, you can make some new friends, like pulling dead characters up out of the screen/swimming pool/mirror in Cocteau's ORPHEE (1950, below) and inviting them to play cards. It's opposite land!

But as with BLOOD OF A POET, Cocteau makes the mistake of assuming that BTG surrealism needs to function in cinema as it does in painting or theater, which is to say, as a shortcut in lieu of outdoor sets or tracking shots. Cinema moves far deeper far faster than a white elephant and if you want it to sell a lot of tickets your film shouldn't stop too long at the zoo, or art museum. Staring into a painting too can be a kind of sticky amber flytrap... as in Carlotta Vance's black hole hairdo (below). Death has all sorts of dangers, presuming you want to stay dead (i.e. safe in the center of the mandala). For wherever you let your gaze and interest settle for more than that rear view mirror second, that's what you become, so look wisely and never stare at something that has the power to stare back, unless you want to suddenly remember that you've been staring into a mirror.

ORPHEE's a good example of these BTG perils in its depiction of passing through the water of a mirror as entering the underworld. There is no translation of this motif on a metatextual level in Cocteau the way there is in, say, Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA (2). Instead, Cocteau displays a continental contentment with the whimsical  proscenium arch-style magic of Méliès (3). For VERTIGO Hitchcock's psychedelic jumping-off point is the gritty San Francisco detective story, film noir, which in its femme fatalism offers a critique of desire that subverts the structure of the carny pitchman ("Is she alive or is she dead? Trashy or Classy? All I know is hubba hubba!") into a No Exit deathtrap of rear screen projection, matte paintings, real paintings and boring flower shops. There's no noir edge to the Can-Can film cannisters clattering merrily up and down Cocteau's safely contained stage, but in Hollywood every skirt is just the red velvet curtain before a grisly death scene (or life scene, if you're dead) spilling off the stage and bloodening your tux until you realize you've been the corpse all the while.

In that way, ORPHEE and even some Bunuel is a little bit like the painted Greek statues in Godard's CONTEMPT, an old-school white elephant refusal to make eye contact with the terrifying black hole Medusa sun blinking back at them from the screen. It's what la nouvelle vague was reacting against, even as they loved the Fritz Lang, one of Europe's classical formalist masters. If a Lang or Cocteau wants to make a black hole of death they make a big black hole, Hitchcock just styles your hair. Ironically Hitchcock's actually is a back hole of death, it sucks your narrative locus of identification clear out through the other side of the screen. Lang's hole is just a hole, filmed from the side.. one that by now looks too familiar to ever be our own. 

NOTES
Special Thanks to 1000 Frames of Hitchock from whom I filched the above screenshots! 
Thanks to Robin Wood, who's writing on Vertigo in Hitchcock Revisited, inspired many of the jumping off points of this essay.
1a. Low bottom is an AA term for what's low enough to hit before you get sober and rise back to normal, i.e. almost dying of DTs or alcohol withdrawal, or living in that terrible space wherein you can't drink enough to stop your withdrawal symptoms because your body is so poisoned by alcohol you can't even get the bottle within a foot of your mouth without choking and vomiting from the smell, let alone keeping alcohol (or anything) down.
1. Cocteau's film occurs in the space between when a small brick smokestack blows up, and when the dislodged chunk of tower falls. Robinson's is all a flashback in the two seconds before he's fried in the electric chair.
2. I admit that could be because I'm much more libidinally 'fascinated' by Bibbi Anderson than Jean Marais, it might be the opposite if I was gay, female, or French.
3. Georges Méliès is one of the French pioneers of cinema at the turn of the century, a magician, he used film at first as a feature of his stage act.

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The Lacan Hour Series #1: the Objet petit a

Damn, I thought I had posted this, but apparently not. Anyway, here it is if you missed it. My long-awaited sequel of sorts to the acclaimed LACAN HOUR, comes to you special in a sneak preview -- it features more claymation and more high strangeness as Erich asks the difficult questions about Xmas and defames rollercoasters. Special Tribeca appearance by Mr. Negativity! Claymation by Meghan Wright. c. 2010 Acidemic Films

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Favorite Film Critics: Joseph A. Ziemba & Dan Budnik (Bleeding Skull)

When I was around 12-16 I made a lot of super 8mm films with my friend Alan: lots of stalking and combat and little kids from the neighborhood outfitted in my dad's giant worn out suits, and fireworks special effects. I drew the explosions in with a pin on the emulsion, the old fashioned FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE way! On my super 8 projector you could do overdubs onto the finished celluloid. I'd que up the right section of CAT PEOPLE (1982) in the background as I banged pots to get the perfect Giorgio Moroder score. Alan's job was the guns, the casting, the dummies to throw off the roofs. We filmed for a week at his grandparents. His grandparents loved our movies, unconditionally. We could have shown them home movies from Mars and they would have adored them. We showed them over and over and they never wearied.

Good movie criticism then is about being a grandparent, not a snark. One should arm their reader with the insight/angle of vision by which you did enjoy or possibly could have enjoyed the film, for it becomes your job as a critic to enjoy films, to have a base-line to your rating curve that rests on your uninhibited enjoyment of all types of films (unless it's your job to warn your narrowed demographic of readers what not to waste money on at the multiplex that weekend, ala local paper journalists). If the film is a dumb sex comedy you could applaud that "for whole lengths of time the image is gloriously in focus," for example, and get laughs and applause where if you mentioned parts were not in focus, you'd stir butterfly tsunamis of bad karma.
But when the films get so bad that not even Alan's grandparents could love them... then you are in trouble.

That's when Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik come in.

No one seems to embody that beautiful gandparent truth in their film criticism more than Joseph A. Ziemba, in whose eyes the most appalling, haphazardly-shot cheapo horror pic can finally become the CITIZEN KANE it was meant to be. Ziemba's all about pulling away from any sort of expectation, beyond even the Brechtian meta-textual realms of Godard at his dullest, beyond Stan Brakhage abstraction and beyond even EXORCIST 2 level odiousness and into something Ziemba calls "grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment."

He'll still be there, til the last of the credits have rolled.

Bleeding Skull  started in 2004, had a hiatus, and is now back. I'm still digging around their archives, so might not even have yet found their recent stuff.  I particularly like their old VHS reviews, with their relishing of horrible blurred, faded color and unholy contrast levels, blurry tracking, and muffled sound. For Bleeding Skull, it is all part of the artistic meta-experience.

More matter-of-fact but just as insane, Skull's co-creator Dan Budnik focuses what you should actually bother to see rather than just read about. Budnik isn't afraid to tangent off on the step-by-step process of falling back in love with the final girl in HE KNOWS YOUR ALONE. Budnik is the Jon Stewart to Ziemba's Stephen Colbert, the Paul to his John, the Wyatt Earp to his Doc Holliday.

I didn't even go into their flawless choices in screenshots, and the dryly hilarious captions... Hell, y'all need to just go there with me now, to the source of some random quotes, first from Ziemba :

The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies...

What's that spell? Imagine Serge Gainsbourg meeting up with The Chordettes at a showing of The Weird World Of LSD, then stopping off for sno-cones at Coney Island before heading off to sleep." 

 Dark Night of the Scarecrow:

Although the template-driven plot and extended runtime can't match the taught anxiety of Bad Ronald, Scarecrow still consumes you. Performances? Definitely flawless. Imagery? Repeatedly frightening. Fat guys running through a field? Slightly humorous. The Halloween party and warbling synths enriched the Autumn aura and paved the way for a cryptic climax that could only leave a smile in its wake. 

Satan's Storybook (1989): (image atop)

A small void exists between "Super Mario Brothers On Ice" and an evening at Medieval Times. Consider it filled. Satan's Storybook is meant to be taken seriously. I think. Therefore, by the power vested in thine camcorder, the defective structure, theatrics, and presentation run tantamount with that sincerity. This unlikely collaboration leads to an experience that originates on Mother Earth, but clearly ends up in galaxies unknown. And that's what we want. While SS is nothing compared to the prodigious sweat-psych of Boarding House, the constant close-ups, grim tone, and ambitious-yet-crappy costumes resonate with that familiar stench. Even when you're half-asleep.

Blood and Lace (1971)

Ellie, the lovely mod. Tom, the drunken handyman. Colby, the horny cop. And, of course, "Old Man Mask", the burly hammer-killer.

I think I'm in the right place.

That's what it's all about, isn't it? The right place. The right time. The right feeling. Collectively, that's what we search for. A perfect B.L.T. at lunch, an evening headphone session with "Nilsson Sings Newman", a late-nite tryst with The David Steinberg Show; they all pave the road to many Rights and very few Wrongs. Of course, that depends on who you are. Do you have a thing for hammer POVs and rubber-limb gore?

Blood And Lace knows the answer. Welcome to the right place.

 Sinthia, the Devil's Doll (1970)

So there's the gist. When you add the frequent triple-exposures, warbled easy listening LP music cues, and a reliance on confined spaces, Sinthia reveals itself fully. Aimless. Dumb. Pretty boring. It's a superb example of grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment. Of course, that's the very reason why it's worth experiencing.

---------------------------------------------------------------- 

And Now, Dan Budnik... who blew my mind with this:

Demons of Ludlow:

"A haunted piano is delivered to the town of Ludlow just in time for their bicentennial. Of course, when the men deliver it, they don't say "Here's your haunted piano. Where do you want it?" The haunted part is a surprise. It's a gift from the man who founded the town. And that man was a jerk."

The Hungan

I mean, here's a beautiful example: the guy throwing the party introduces Cry Wolf. They start playing a song, pure-80's hair band. The camera sits on the other side of the room pointed at them. The song starts and folks begin to dance. In front of the camera. They all move in front of the camera. You can barely see the band. This goes on for two minutes. The great thing about the film's length is that this scene will not preclude something like this happening again in ten minutes. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where the campers chat amongst themselves (sometimes incoherently) as they stroll to the campgrounds, with a strong whiff of Blood Lake  mixed in. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where some waitresses' chat about a date one of them had. It means we get it all. 

And, it's all great. 

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Dude, BLEEDING SKULL is all great! Even if (like myself) your natural decency doesn't permit you to enjoy these sorts of films, you owe it to yourself to be informed. May Cry Wolf and Sinthia have mercy on us all in the future. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, Just drop by when it's convenient too, be sure to call before you do (read that sung by Nilsson) and goodbye burdensome sanity.

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Jones Comin' Down: THE EMPEROR JONES (1933)

Robeson felt "O'Neill had got what no other playwright has--that is, the true authentic Negro psychology. He has read the Negro and has felt the Negro's racial tragedy." As for his performance, "As I act, civilization falls away from me. My plight becomes real, the horrors terrible facts. I feel the terror of the slave mart, the degradation of man bought and sold into slavery. Well, I am the son of an emancipated slave and the stories of old father are vivid on the tablets of my memory." (Musser).

Intellectual, actor-college football star; master of the universe who used his incredible creative energy, charisma and vocal power for the good and love of all men (and was thus persecuted and demonized by capitalism's power elite), Paul Robeson has become a larger-than-life heroic figure: John Henry the steel-drivin' man and a bass-baritone black golem, too brave, tall, smart and talented to safely ignore. They had to silence him, take away his passport and give him holy HUAC hell.

THE EMPEROR JONES (1933) became Robeson's big 'signature' film/role (and his last, at least in the US), written for the stage by Eugene O'Neill. Jones the character is himself controversial, a dark mirror to Robeson's quest for dignity and justice for all. Brutus Jones was how we assume white conservatives imagined Robeson, i.e. a strapping 'buck'-wild monster who can't be stopped except with a silver bullet while Robeson was far more political and idealistic. Robeson was a communist while Jones is the dark Col. Kurz-style heart of amok capitalism. Even the name 'Jones' spells out an insatiable hunger for momentum, which wouldn't last long once caught in the sluggish quicksand snail's pace of political and social reform. A name for addiction, "jones" is a hipster phrase for the early stages of drug withdrawal, re: The Last Poets' hit "Jones' comin' down." - "I'm jonesin' for a hit." An "Emperor Jones" is when the early stages become 'King Kong' size.

Nearly 70 years later, JONES still has stuff to offer, and still suffers from misunderstanding and snap judgments on the part of both its critics and champions. I frankly love the film, and have seen it a dozen times, on the old scratchy print the used to show on PBS, and even saw the Wooster Group version with Kate Valk in blackface back in 1996 (below). I can understand how offensive the 'black' language and expression (i.e. "sho nuff!") remains, but at the same time one must remember O'Neil wrote all sorts of 'hick humor' plays with equally colloquial dialects-- as was they style of the time (I don't mean that offense isn't justified). Part of the appeal for me stems from the way THE EMPEROR links the sounds of the rural blues which I love--ala Blind Blake, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, etc.--to pre-code Universal horror aesthetic. JONES reminds me a lot of the 1931 DRACULA from Universal, and it turns out they had the same set designer, Herman Rosse, and JONES director Dudley Murphy co-wrote DRACULA! It makes sense, I can feel both of them in my bones each time I watch either.

But mainly the film is great for Robeson, an actor of extraordinary, almost supernatural power. When he gets mean, he turns almost subhuman like a Mr. Hyde, when he's happy, he radiates like a sun. He embodies for me what I think of as a 'peak' human being, radiating out into mythic dimensions.  It's the voice. He's almost like the weather; you tremble underneath his sky. Without such fire, his Jones would be just a sociopath, 'stead of God and the Devil rolled into-one-another-bled. Check out how Satanic he looks below:

To get back to the horror comparison, I'd have loved to have had an Emperor Jones Aurora model kit in the 1970s to go along with Godzilla, Frankenstein, the Phantom of the Opera, the Wolfman, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon! Like the pre-Chicago rural blues preserved on Yahoo records, and Universal pre-1934 horror flms, the JONES has a pleasantly surreal quality about it; a mix of eerie dislocation and folk-bluesy comfort, a morally dubious antihero (which gives you ten extra points) and a sense of elasticity in its narrative.

All this makes Jones' gradual disintegration perfectly analogous to the 'coming down from psychedelics' experience or opiate or benzo withdrawal as he's regularly presented with brutal, embittering quandries completely foreign to us as viewers, and he continually solves them through bravado and fast thinking, until finally he's all out of sass and the only person left to make a sucker out of, is himself. Dum bum BUMMM

Shot on Long Island Studios (where the Marx Brothers' filmed ANIMAL CRACKERS and THE COCOANUTS), the EMPEROR JONES definitely did not come out of Hollywood, and thank the old devil sea for that, Anna. There's nary a stock cliche of Tinseltown to be seen, and instead that cool mix of the avant garde and New Deal realism that made New York City pre-codes (Like Max Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoons) so edgy. "New Yowahk" accents and edgy art poetry combine here the same way they do with Lou Reed or Patti Smith, or Duke Ellington's BLACK AND TAN FANTASY.

The first half of the film (not in the original play) finds Jones leaving for a big job as Pullman porter and saying goodbye to his Baptist congregation and his woman ("Moms" Mabley!) No sooner has he run off to the train than he's getting into scuffles; winning at craps; fighting over vamps, and blackmailing industry bigwigs ("'Sho would be a shame if word got out 'bout that merger!") He does all this with such finesse that the corrupt white men around him can’t help but be impressed. Pretty soon they’re lighting his cigars and floating him stock tips. Then, like all Monopoly players eventually, Jones goes directly to jail. After a chance to sing "Water Boy," with his shirt off, Jones murders a guard and hightails it to a remote island where he soon craps his way to a dictatorship, shootin' strings of lucky sevens. Before you can say Jack Robinson he's trading economic advice once more, this time with a British importer on the island, Mr. Smithers (the only other character in O'Neill's original play). Jones lays it down real clear: 

“Looka here, little man! There’s little stealin’ like you does and there’s big stealing like I does. For little stealing they get you in jail sooner or later, but for big stealing they make you emperor and put your picture in the hall of fame after you croak.” 

For the real Robeson, an honest man in a world of degenerates, it would be long after, but there's a plaque for him in Somerville, NJ, where I grew up! Nothing for the Emperor Jones himself, though: he remains stuck in a weird limbo between offensive caricature and archetype, John Henry the Steel Drivin' Man spot-welded to Mr. Hyde. That's why that Wooster Group production was so gutsy crazy: it genuinely risked alienating the bourgeoisie... you go, girls!

I often fantasize what would have happened if THE EMPEROR JONES (1933) had been a big enough hit that its archetypal poetry and power was recognized and it became a genre unto itself ala the Dracula or Mummy for Universal. Each film could end with him falling into a volcano or seemingly trampled by buffalo, only to return in the next installment, with a serial-like recap and prologue. Titles might include: THE EMPEROR JONES IN ISTANBUL; JONES VS. THE TIGER WOMEN; THE CURSE OF BRUTUS; JONES ON THE LOOSE; BRIDE OF JONES; JONES VS. THE WOLFMAN; and then later a short-lived TV series. Rival studios could do their own knock-offs. They tried to so similar things all the time, as with the old Adventures of Harry Lime radio show, or the short-lived Bold Venture, based on the characters Bogey and Bacall played in TO HAVE AND  HAVE NOT. 

The real selling point 'money shot' for the series, akin to the vampirism or other 'grotesque' selling points of the Universal horror series', would be the equivalent of what frontal nudity was in the 1960s or cannibalism in the 1980s, namely the long overdue sight of black-on-white violence. EMPEROR JONES has two controversial and very subversive moments of this: 1) when Jones smashes a guard in the back of the head with a shovel, and 2) when he throttles Smithers for waking him up and breaking bad news. The lone surviving EJ print  was--until recently--missing these scenes, no doubt sliced off by squeamish censors hoping to avoid riots in the south. It's refreshing to see them included in the new Criterion edition, for these are key moments that supplied the precedent for what as to become (as Kim Morgan notes)  "the slap heard round the world." during IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1959).

Such  a JONES genre might have been created had not Robeson come under federal scrutiny and been forced--like so many of his pinko brethren--to head to Europe for his creative freedom. Over in England he did in fact star in a series of unique-to-himself genre films, like SANDERS OF THE RIVER, JERICHO and SONG OF FREEDOM, but the 'edge' that JONES had is not there, no gutsy stab into the heart of old Jim Crow; no racist stereotypes inflated and exploited until their meaning drained all over your antique sofa. Without O'Neil to supply the brazenly nutball scenarios, there was only stoic communist-flava, ala THE PROUD VALLEY, a tale of Welsh miners and labor organizations. It might be uplifting, but it's got no hook, no draw... no darkness... at any rate I didn't see it. Let's move on!

EMPEROR is actually a bit like BLACK CAESAR or AMERICAN GANGSTER (which I compared to JONES here), or even THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING or STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE in the idea of a charismatic amoral scoundrel at the center of gravity; a villain who is far more interesting than the sanctimonious straight edges around him. It must be remembered after all, that this is how it should be and has always been in great drama. Audiences enjoy gangster movies because they themselves are not gangsters, and the movies let them get a by-proxy taste of what only looks good from across a glass shop window. Up close it's stagnant and poison, so they get the best of both worlds - the fantasy without the actual danger and incarceration. The feel good social sanctity movie is the reverse: it looks stagnant over from across our tinted window, and the film is about convincing you to hold your nose and endure! All for the good of the worker! For the good of the poor! Let zem eat you! There's no hook, no excitement in seeing a pro-labor unionization movie, unless it's got some great action scenes and/or method-acted corruption, ala ON THE WATERFRONT. I don't argue the brave heroism of the first union men who stood up to the raids and scabs and breakers, but it's not fun, Tony. It's strictly business.

Meanwhile we've also grown cynical about social activism after its failure to do much about Vietnam (1) and even less about Iraq. Maybe social change can be effected a lot more by satire and active disengagement with modern society. James Cagney played lots of morally ambiguous tough guys and the man was a saint. So why not Robeson? The saintly defender of the downtrodden is an admirable role, but it sets one up for easy toppling; it signifies a complete misunderstanding of viewer psychology. Playing 'already toppled' characters is the equivalent of what theorists might call 'strategic transparency.' That's why Bush was so popular and Obama with his rational intellect and calm demeanor makes average Joes want to shoot holes in the ceiling.

THE EMPEROR JONES remains, then, a true work of art because of its flaws. It's George Bush in blackface setting himself on fire for the good of the people. It's utterly unique unto itself. It's an avant garde howl of racial fear and confusion; it's a celebration of black power, even as that power is--before our eyes--broken down, crushed, frustrated and torn apart until the terrifying roots of slavery are exposed and below them even until life itself is revealed as originating in a bloody whirl of black skin and primordial anguish. Moby Dick isn't Greenpeace-friendly and JONES isn't PC, it's literature from an age when literature didn't mean snoozing in the Merchant Ivory section.  There's a little something for everyone in THE EMPEROR JONES: horror, action, spirituality, island beaches, and great bass-baritone singing all the way through. It's messy, it's complicated and it's retroactively racist, but real art doesn't leave you pious and ethical and with arms of hand-printed socialist pamphlets. It kicks you in the groin, knocks the pamphlets out of your hands, and then tells you it's sorry, with a song that gets you too teary-eyed to resist when it steals your wallet.

JONES would be a good double-bill with RUNAWAY TRAIN, for example, if you wanted to move away from the race issue altogether and just compare character studies of men who have transcended fear and cannot be beaten as they escape jail and run for freedom or pursue power, hindered only by short-sightedness and inability to 'stop' running once they've been given too much power and luxury and don't know what to do with it, a problem which similarly defeats Daniel Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and the Hammer in Larry Cohen's severely underrated BLACK CAESAR (1973) and everyone else in the AMERICAN GANGSTER genre. American gangsters don't know how to grow old the way they do in, say, TOUCHEZ PAS GRIBISI. It's cuz America still aint old yet!

It's in this fashion we should especially view the second half of the film, as if Robeson's mythic archetypal warrior is totally having a bad acid flashback of the whole black diasporic experience over a hundred years into the past and beyond to the basic suffering root of life, ala William Hurt at the end of ALTERED STATES, racing along on a psychedelic train ride that makes me think O'Neill--an alcoholic--may have based some of those hallucinations on his own bouts with delirium tremens! It's also of course, hugely apt in its prediction of the next fifty or so years of the diasporic experience as poverty, drugs, AIDS and other legacies of Antebellum dehumanization linger on.

Emboldened by his contacts within the black intellectual community of Harlem, O’Neill was surely confident his good intentions compensated for any unconscious racism he may have had when writing JONES. So if the strokes he paints his Brutus with are harsh and crude we should endeavor to see this as an expressionistic affect common to depression-era theater. This was modernism, and Jones was both a character and a folk-tale mythic archetype, a symbol of the entire African-American experience plunked down into a savage gangster-ghost story. Plus it helps that Robeson’s huge form is so thrilling to look at: his broad and shirtless black body is held in vine-wreathed medium shots through the long trek around the jungle set and you can see the sweat glisten. All his visions and terrors are posed for as if an art deco sculpture.  If O’Neill and Robeson couldn’t quite transcend the quagmire of African American stereotyping in the 1930s at least they could depict it as an actual quagmire, with vines, quicksand, ghost crocodiles, and a fade-to-black cynical enough for Billy Wilder.

(parts of this essay originally appeared in Bright Lights After Dark, 2007)

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