The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. Yet in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK, other than THERE WILL BE BLOOD, TSN can really be compared with), Welles' clueless billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Welles, but of course now the press itself is far different: instead of yellow journalism smear campaigns between rival papers, scandal can be brought out by even the most drunk and marginalized of nerds.  

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara, shortly to be seen as Lisabeth S. in the DRAGON TATTOO remake) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned about getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 bazillion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after. If Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed. He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere, and lives in eternal orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. Mansions mean nothing if all you need is a wireless connection to keep your million friends always in reach.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle - the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to conquer. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his childhood progress to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl who forces him to confront his own immaturity.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies, and sometimes a billion friends are your own worst enemy.

Welles in Rio with his million friends

Mark Z, anywhere, with his millions friends

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which wasted money and talent and sucked. And frankly, I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies deluge, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists a sense of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere? Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC; the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The world is my bedroom, I shall not log.

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between him in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party seemed tragically sad and hollow but it's truly unusual in film and it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down at the less together mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting' --even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there 'could' be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one they're not invited to. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures. In a way this version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again which came first? The nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But as Tricky said, it's cool, that's what money's for. It's to make tall waitresses with attitude smile at you, getting that 20% tip that's big enough for your own private jet ski all by itself.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 testies! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like at 4 AM after a bad date, reminded me I had friends who liked me -- it was instant and it worked! My need to socialize in real time dropped off by half. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and my socializing dropped off to nothing. Now, on iMeds, and Facebook, and not being allowed to smoke in bars or restaurants, I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room. And he's on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of THE SOCIAL NETWORK.  Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy, maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

One thing's for sure, the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point not even a javelin will get you across it. A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. The real sled smells of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports game, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to crack your dingy snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans

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Hey Betty Blue, Come Blow Your Mind!

Beatrice Dalle: few other women have created such affectionately crazy characters. And I don't mean affectionately crazy like rom-com Sandra Bullock tangled up in wedding dress crazy, I mean batshit tear your jugular vein out with her teeth while on top of you in bed crazy. That she can make such terrifying characters affectionate attests to her charisma and fearlessness; she's like Asia Argento's SCARLET DIVA with a mild case of rabies; she's what Courtney Love thinks she is but isn't; she's hot the way only genuine (check on Dalle's private life in the UK Telegraph) insanity can be hot; she's the hot female version of Robert Mitchum in CAPE FEAR or Brando in STREETCAR; she's berserk so you don't have to be.

She's played many roles but there's three unforgettable movies that define her screen persona:  BETTY BLUE (1986), TROUBLE EVERY DAY (2001) and INSIDE (2007). Taken together they form a loose, unofficial 21 year trilogy of taboo-busting French cinema wherein our heroine evolves from troubled uninhibited full-frontal waif (BLUE) to batshit cannibal nymphomaniac (TROUBLE) to full-on female Michael Meyers / Jason unstoppable Kali womb ripper (INSIDE). BLUE kind of retro-actively launched the whole 'quirky comi-tragedy with casual nudity" French genre; TROUBLE took the always popular vampire myth to its bloody extreme end; and INSIDE fit the torture-porn mold of the late 00s, and the character threads left unresolved in BETTY BLUE got resolved through INSIDE, the way RED kind of wound up the threads of WHITE and BLUE in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy. And what a hell of a journey because, you see, this actress needs no makeup our double to be terrifying: she's got those teeth!

One thing our own Hollywood heroines never seem to have is scary teeth. This sad truth compromised the rawness of Rob Zombie's DEVIL'S REJECTS (2007) for example, with its scuzzy Manson family cannibals flashing top notch orthodontistry. In America our teeth are either perfect or godawful based on our parent's health plans or lack thereof--the have-braces and have-nots; the rich get even their minor imperfections sealed over and whitened while the poor can only watch in the mirror as their incisors and bicuspids overlap and twist sideways. In countries with socialized medicine however, such as France and England, the collapse of first rate dentistry in favor of a universal median produces a uniformity of neither very good nor horrendously bad teeth. Dalle's are definitely in this ballpark, not hideous but certainly lupine... and she is a truly brave actress and sexpot for not wanting to hide them (as say, Anna Karina and Jane Birkin used to) and for using them as a counterpoint to her stunning sexuality. Their dark crooked contours shine in all the H.R. Giger glory in TROUBLE, where they reminded me at times of the creature in ALIEN; hers are the castrating incisors that squeamish big-talk no-guts films like TEETH and HARD CANDY boast of but are scared to deliver, even on deserving pedophiles and rapists. Dalle doesn't need a reason to kill or castrate: It just comes naturally and her crazy sexual frenzy in TROUBLE EVERY DAY is truly terrifying and sexy at the same time, and puts the softcore sleaze of BASIC INSTINCT's ice pick murders to shame.

I came the long way around to BETTY BLUE in the early 1991, rented it on chick advice, was wary about subtitles since they were hard to read on VHS (sometimes they were just cut halfway off by the bottom of the screen, remember?) But - a strong gin and tonic and 20 minutes past the credits I fell 'in love' with the film, and after hitting my third or fourth drink of the morning, I was ready to fight to defend it, but of course no one was there to fight with me. Still it was like I had fallen in love with a person, a person who couldn't walk straight or uncross her eyes, maybe, but if anyone made a wise crack I'd belt them in her honor. Roger Ebert, for example, missed the point and thus decided everyone else missed the point, not him! Here's what he wrote about the film on Christmas Day in 1986:

Reviews have been written debating the movie's view of madness, of feminism, of the travail of the artist. They all miss the point. "Betty Blue" is a movie about Beatrice Dalle's boobs and behind, and everything else is just what happens in between the scenes where she displays them.

Oh Jeeze, Roger! That's a bit like saying "People say VERTIGO is about obsession, madness, and castration anxiety, but it's really about Jimmy Stewart driving around San Francisco, and everything else is just what happens at places he drives to." Oh Roger, your insecure patriarchal need to shoot the lesbians at the end of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is suddenly laid as bare as those 'boobs and behind' (even his word choice gives him away). See? I'm still fighting to defend it.

It was, I realized, the first subtitled foreign language film I really 'loved.' PERSONA and LA DOLCE VITA were both close seconds, but my love for them was like an undergrad English student's love for Shakespeare: trepidatious, intimidated, a hair out of my element. If they were girlfriends, PERSONA would be that aloof beauty you end up heartbroken alone in your room over as she wanders off into the rainy dark to kill herself and wont let you follow. DOLCE is that party girl who stays up all the time doing coke and is ultimately, once you get past the glitter, shallow and manic-depressive with Catholic guilt, maybe even still a virgin. BETTY on the other hand is the sexy girl you shack up with one drunk night and a week goes by before you realize she hasn't left, even to get her things, and by the time you notice and try to stop fucking long enough to think of an excuse why she needs to leave you realize she's clinging to you like a python and you're too hooked on her hotness to even resist when she strangles you. Unlike play-it-safe inside the lines Ebert some of us like to have our lives destroyed by unstable hot messes! What else are they for?

 

As her patient lover, the maintenance man, aspiring writer and part-time house painter Zorg, Jean-Hugues Anglade in the film can't go unmentioned. He's no mere 'beard' the way he would later become when strugglin' with English as a French cop in films like MAXIMUM RISK (1996) or as the default boyfriend for LA FEMME NIKITA (1990), by which time the shaggy edges of his role in BETTY had worn off, or else been shorn by producers and directors who didn't understand the importance of his Serge Gainsbourg-ishness. But here he's perfect as a drunken writer who loves his manic muse to the point where he can only shrug every time she goes ballistic and starts smashing the furniture and torching buildings. Zorg's mellow acceptance taught me not to interfere or judge when a hot mess girlfriend goes postal on another man, or piece of property. His Parisian "what can I do?" shrug makes us mad when we're ugly American tourists trying to get directions to the Louvre, but in the context of dealing with psycho girlfriends, well, it's genius. I mention him because it's the lack of an Anglade in the later Dalle films that would signify the madness: Zorg would know when to walk away, know when to run, know when to commit to a sanitarium. Without him, Dalle ran amok. 

Like SPECIES later, BETTY BLUE was one of the films I would watch over and over and yet never see all the way to the end, either stopping or passing out beforehand. The only time I ever got to the end was when I was too drunk or half-asleep to change the channel. The soapy taste of sacrifice and CUCKOO'S NEST regret seemed tacked on, but the reason it worked was because the giddy joy that came before, when the pair hook up with a similar nutsy, drunk couple, Lisa (Consuelo De Haviland) and Eddy (Gerard Darmon) and spend many a fun night doing 'tequila rapidos' and dancing and singing and joking about Alpha Romeos in silk kimonos (below, opening the kimonos).

This kind of 'letting go' is something that seems uniquely French. Americans never seem to get this loose unless it's just the boys or the girls or a sleazy 'mixed party' stereotype like the scene with Jane and her friend bringing boors back from the bar in COMING HOME, or that drab New Years celebration in FOREST GUMP. Here the vibe isn't lewd like an American salesman out of town or sad like some Antonioni orgy. This quartet have already had sex, a lot of it. They're just happy to have another couple to celebrate with. The sex is lived: Dalle's 'behind' deglamourized by a pair of ugly loose silk women's underwear, Anglade nakedly trying to hammer apart a couch with a lit cigarette, this is neither the airbrushed buffness of late night softcore but a beautiful offhand slacker eroticism. Zorg and Betty are a couple that would never sit still for the slow seductions of Rohmer, but rather plunge through the world like crazy screaming brakes-off banshees, but not like the abstraction of Godard or the hopelessness of Truffaut or the airlessness of Araki but rather the acceptance and in-the-moment-beauty and camaraderie of Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray.

 

BLUE divides a joyful freedom and acceptance first half with a long downward spiral second half, an arc that informed in a slew of late 90's and early 00's movies like BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), TRAINSPOTTING (1996), MONSTER (2003), IT'S ALL GONE, PETE TONG (2004); and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000), all very open about the highs and lows of drug use --that fast white light upward blast of the first Friday night MDMA-twinkle you've been waiting your whole life for followed by a long slow downward death spiral that ends with crying in the office bathroom on Tuesday morning. In BETTY BLUE, tragedy strikes when Eddy's mom dies suddenly and Zorg and Betty take over said mom's piano store in a far-off beach town. It's there they play a beautiful little motif on a pair of pianos that seems like they just tossed it off on the spot but it lingers in the mind and sums up the sense of loss that comes when we realize we'll never get that joy we felt with the tequila rapidos back again. 

If you were drinking the way I was, or just maudlin and 23 in a time before widespread Prozac usage, it was the ultimate sorrow, 1990-1992 - the nights of fun with Eddy and Lisa were gone. The band broke up and college was over and there were no jobs. The feeling was like you just got accepted by the cool kids after years of painful loserdom and sobesky-hood-- and then everyone graduated and went home -- you swing in the sweaty withdrawal symptom wind with your mom knocking on your door asking for a urine sample. 

 

It's that sweet remembrance of things past that suffuses the rest of BETTY BLUE, and lingers on in Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, a glacial, mostly nonverbal film that offers no sense of joy or belonging, only the terror of imagining your own human carnal lust leading you to a grisly agonizing doom, the fate of being ripped apart by a maniacal lover. Such grisly potential forces us as viewers into weird moral positions, like a game of Twister devised by a coked-up pope, as the slow and relentless tug of sexual desire drags lonely people to their deaths via a very long, snaking chain tied to a dropping anchor.

TROUBLE fulfills the promise of CAT PEOPLE which told of a race of humans who would turn into black leopards after making love and could turn human again only after taking a life. However in Paul Schrader's 1982 version, these killings were kind of tepid; the sex was over before the transformation so it came off a bit tame (the panther strikes while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze). None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo in her now dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat lady, the type tries to keep toying and torturing their lifeless prey long after its dead. Such scenes are few and far between, such scenes make producers uncomfortable because they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack; as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact yet prevent any actual buckling or triggering of a massive modernist earthquake. In true post-cinematic Asia Argento / Samara fashion, Dalle's sexuality causes the simulacratic melt-down bubble, wherein the covetous eye is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries.

Variously dismissed, panned or gushed over by the few who've seen it, TROUBLE never really explains itself. We deduce that Vince Gallo is a chemist of the WEREWOLF OF LONDON / Henry Hull variety, tracking down a rare plant extract cure for his malady. This malady is unnamed, but clearly causes an increasingly unbearable urge to devour during sex. Denis cuts back and forth between Dalle's LET THE RIGHT ONE IN-style handler and Gallo on his honeymoon in a Paris hotel, where his stalker-killer lust is focused not on his wife but on the cute hotel maid who comes in every day to make the bed. Dalle has devolved farther along in the disease, to where she can barely talk and spends each night breaking out of the prison her handler keeps her in, each night heading to the same lonesome stretch of road where truckers apparently pull over for sex, and are soon pulled to pieces.

Gallo and Dalle-- it's gradually revealed through incidental conversations--once had kind of a thing for each other while doing research together in Africa (where they presumably found the plant, thus linking this film to GANJA AND HESS!) and as their paths look like they will intersect we brace ourselves for what the Netflix liner notes erroneously refer to as a joint killing-spree. There are however ingenious moments like Gallo and his bride hanging out atop Notre Dame, whose spires covered in gargoyles bear a passing resemblance to both Gallo (his weird eyes) and Dalle (her demonic teeth). I'm not going to start getting into the whole reptilian conspiracy thing (read up on it here!) but Denis' thoughtful inclusion of these images brings a kind of Antonioni-esque post-modern amnesia to the events. We don't need plot exposition because we know the story and all its variations. In not laying out lots of expository dialogue, Denis--like Antonioni--allows the associations and timeless miasmatude' to form as it will. 

I wont spoil the particulars, but the key moment, the grisly highlight, is the sex/devouring scene of Dalle's with a horny neighbor kid who breaks into her locked room, and of course gets far more than he bargained for. Shots of the kids' accomplice downstairs waiting nervously for him, hearing the muffled screams of agony and his ambiguous reaction, reminded me a lot of a key scene, quite similar, in the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. And hey, that's a good thing. TROUBLE EVERY DAY has got a bad rap as being disgusting and dull, but I think, again, its this squeamishness critics have with seeing hot girls castrate their prey. I get grossed out by a lot of things, but for some reason I find female-on-male sexual mutilation to be quite positive, maybe as there's so much violence done in the other direction, I'm a big one for balance... and anyway, it's the fuckin' movies! 

Inside (2007)

Last in the trilogy is one of those 'one wild night' horror films that seem to unfold in real time: INSIDE tells the story of a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis) living in a ROSEMARY'S BABY style bubble of patronizing patriarchal infantalization that gets busted open, literally figuratively and metatextually, by Beatrice Dalle's covetous vengeance-seeker. As I wrote in 2008:

"The Netflix liner notes say that in INSIDE, Beatrice Dalle "relentlessly pursues the pregnant Sarah, determined to perform a grisly brand of C-section." I think the "grisly brand" is key here, as it implies there is a non-grisly brand. The patronizing treatment expectant mother Alysson Paradis receives from her mom, the hospital, and her distracted married man boss sets the bar of pro-life patriarchal oppression to high right from the start. There's a refreshing lack of "sanctity of motherhood" posing, which has become so ingrained in the contemporary American cinema. With this disillusioning, we are made to realize that all c-sections are grisly; birth is a cruel and nasty business which no amount of drugs, sanitary surfaces and hospital hooplah can deny. INSIDE gets to the meat of the matter, with humor and a fine sense of real time pacing.

Made only five years after TROUBLE EVERY DAY, Dalle's beauty has 'faded' more than a bit. She's no Isabelle Huppert or Isabelle Adjani--two actresses who will probably stay hot into their 80s, but so what? While both Adjani and Huppert can play super fierce and fucked-up women when the role demands, our Beatrice Dalle is something else entirely-- she is that fucked-up fierce, and if art imitates life you could take her three films as something like a portrait of supersexy evil genius insanity in the making. Hers is the evolution of a hottie nymph  from bi-polar slugger losing her shit over not being able to have a baby (BLUE); to sympathetic cannibal (TROUBLE), to a completely unsympathetic monster out to take a baby for herself, right out of another woman's womb. But is it a tragedy, or a triumph? Doesn't being the monster mean you--and you alone, get to not be afraid of the dark?

Now, the ideas on display in INSIDE were, I thought at the time, just a crazy French sensationalists' morbid imagination. But as the Investigative Discovery TV show Deadly Women has taught me, it's happened quite a few times in real life. In fact it happened in 2007, the same year as INSIDE came out! Sacre bleu!! Crimes like these prove when push comes to shove, women can be just as crazy sick as men anytime, even sicker. Of course here at Acidemic we call that a victory. Why? because again, at least in the context of our discussion, it's movies! No one is really getting killed by Dalle, and after all, by the end of the trilogy, Betty Blue gets what she wanted--a child.

By turns tragic, comic, sexy, horrifying and terribly sad, this loose trilogy of BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE form a grand and very French salute to dangerous women. In all three films Dalle's madness is triumphant; she remains unconquered by patriarchy's desperate chokeholds. Even if she's burned alive, electroshocked, stabbed, strangled, or smothered, she still wins, one way or the other. No wonder Dalle is such an icon! She appeals to the cultured European melancholic degenerate in us all, the one who sees not wisely but too far, and knows that sex and death are so close to one another along the fault lines of existence as to be inseparable; step too close to the crack and you find yourself caught in the thin slice of ground between their gaping fissures and nowhere to go but down into the crevasse. How, after all, can you go back to safe distances now that you've been so close? How could you live? To desire sex but fear death, or vice versa is to live an anxious lie, what Buddhists call samsara. Dalle is way past samsara. As a persona, an icon, she dwells in the harrowing truth beyond the wobbly front tricycle wheel of life; she's the bubble gum card fluttering in its spokes; her terrible teeth are our deliverance from the mundane irrelevance of man.

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The Terrible Fists of Uwe Boll!: HECKLER (2008)

A great movie is out on DVD called HECKLER, and if you're a film blogger or nit-picking critic you may be surprised that sub-par comic Jamie Kennedy has feelings, and that when you trash SON OF THE MASK or MALIBU'S MOST WANTED you are trashing a human being. 'Bout time!

There are two types of critics of course, and it hurt my feelings when talking heads in the film note that there was great film writing--Pauline Kael--but that no great film writing is being done today. But dudes! That's not true. What about me??

There are a certain segment of us who don't want to injure Jackie's feelings as we trash his films. Back when I was writing for a respected search engine I was supposed to review films but simultaneously not say anything negative and yet not lie. What-EVER! But it forced me to realize that not every film is out to please me, and I think that's a problem with a lot of critics -- they pan a film if it fails to amuse them how they expected to be amused, and they hate having their expectations dashed in this manner. My task of trying to find positive things to say about second tier review assignments like LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR, or BLOODRAYNE, or THE COOK-OUT, or 17 AGAIN forced me to realize there's something nice to say, always. Such crap films always seem to involve mobsters, often played by ex-Sopranos stars, and climaxes that take place at on-air tapings or live broadcasts, to ensure that judge, jury, and executioner are all bearing instantaneous witness to the mobster's confession before they fall into a vat of green slime, but hey, you know, maybe there was a single good performance or nice song on the soundtrack. BIKER BOYZ for instance has such a bangin' soundtrack the whole film was (almost) redeemed. And I liked the way the Italian mob boss in Usher's IN THE MIX doesn't even flinch at the thought of a schwartze dating his daughter.

My point is, if you're a critic, don't be a hater by nature, don't piss off people you might meet on the way up who may one day knock you back down. If you want to be good impartial critic, bear in mind your state of being before watching and plan accordingly. Make sure blood sugar is high for action, make sure you're high for comedies, and makeshshesh sure you've kept your expectations low.

For example, on behalf of film critics everywhere, let me tell you, it's one thing to love movies, another to have to feign interest in LITTLE FOCKERS just because your editor decides you need to attend the press junket so you can siphon sound bytes off Robert De Niro. If you got the job because you're a film snob it's going to be demoralizing if you're forced to watch stuff you object to on a metaphysical level, like the rote bible brainwashing of THE VEGGIE TALES. But you know what I said about the JONAH: A VEGGIE TALES MOVIE (2002)?

Adults unfamiliar with the series may be startled at first by the unusual combination of Bible studies and talking produce (as well as the high-pitched, Monty Python style vocalizing) but those already VEGGIE-savvy should get right into it. In addition to the goofy humor, there are lessons to learn about compassion and mercy, so parents might notice a lull in inter-sibling bickering afterward.

 See that? You'd never be able to tell that I spent the whole movie shuddering in a Ned Flanders douche chill. I submitted to the ickiness and actually came out of it feeling slightly more holy, even if I did have to scrub it off with a Silkwood wire brush when I got home.  Then there's Usher's big showcase film, IN THE MIX:

Director Ron Underwood takes his time going around the more edgy turns in the script, giving the actors room to stretch out and get comfortable in their characters and surroundings, and helping the film transcend its more formulaic elements (it's an obvious nod to the 1992 Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner chestnut, THE BODYGUARD). Best of all, Usher proves his game extends to the big screen, where he displays plenty of debonair warmth and easygoing charm

In this case, "debonair" and "warmth" are meant to quietly cancel each other out: "Easygoing charm" is meant to mean his charm goes away easily. But if you weren't paying attention, that would gloss right over you, and you'd never miss it. See? I stayed tru to tha game!

What's funny in HECKLER is that this is an intelligent, fast-moving film that fairly explodes off the screen, so important and obvious was it as a choice for subject. It becomes something that lives up to critics' expectations even if it is about the pain they cause. Obviously this stuff needed to be said. The talking heads here needed to get it off their chests, and it leads me back around to wonder what the critics got off their own chests by trashing their films in the first place. I think a lot of it has to do with one's perception of themselves an arbiter of taste, which is sometimes really a catalog of hang-ups.  After all, if my concert pianist uncle tells me he hated GET CRAZY then I know I want to see that film (so why isn't out on DVD?) but similarly if my classical music-hating brother tells me he really liked CARNEGIE HALL, I know he must really love the ingenious use of poverty under director Edgar G. Ulmer.

My point: film critics at press screenings can't often sneak out from really dismal films (the film's publicist is usually sitting outside the door with a shotgun) and so it's important their two wasted hours watching some real dreck at a midtown screening room isn't a total loss. Therefore they want to trash it as revenge and venom purging; to give back some of the headache it caused. But I say to thee critics 'tis far more productive to be a lowbrow holy fool and forgive and see the beauty in all things, even PLUTO NASH.

Another analogy: If you've ever been stuck talking to someone at a party who's just so annoying and enervating that you pray for someone you know to come by so you can introduce them, pawn them off or break up their monotonal sermon and you go home and even the next day you can taste the person's musty thoughts in your cranium, well, then you know why critics sometimes lash out at movie stars, athletes and so forth, as it to say 'how dare you infect my head like a bad 1980s synth pop song?' If you put yourself in the spotlight, you--as an actor, star, and person--subtextually promise that you will endeavor to at least measure up to a baseline expectation. If someone asks for a birthday clown and you show up determined to fix the roof instead then you're not edgy, just not the right man for the job. That's why I endeavor to do a little bit of everything I write about, to keep my hand in: a short film here, an voiceover gig there, a bizarre album (limited edition - four copies, unsigned) here and there, if for no other reason than it makes me better appreciate how hard these things are to do and savor them all the more when done well. Once you try and speak to a huge group of people with nothing but blinding hot spotlights in your face and the need to not sweat or shake the paper, then you no longer snarl at bad acting. Even being a bad actor is harder than it looks.

And yet the opposite holds true as well: beware hurling accolades on something that looks like it's safe to praise, i.e. made by a canonized 'genius,' set in the 19th century, etc. And write from a place where you see the forest for the trees. As you get more sophisticated as a critic, even stuff you used to love can seem juvenile and vice versa. Just because 2001 is a masterpiece doesn't mean FULL METAL JACKET is above critique,  but lauded circle-member critics don't dare be the first to say there's no clothes on emperors Malick or Kubrick.

To get back to search engine, there's a time, every once in awhile, when I got lucky, and was assigned something I was fully expecting to be as bad as LARRY THE CABLE GUY or Russia's FATHER AND SONS, and it turns out to be frickin' hilarious, dark, twisted and urgent. An example would be, of course, the films of Jody Hill, like OBSERVE AND REPORT:

Rogen projects a surprising amount of unstoppable force as the delusional, compulsive, bipolar Ronnie, while also displaying tenderness for his alcoholic mother (Celia Weston) and a genuine desire to protect the perfume-counter girl (Anna Faris) he loves (even though he ends up getting her wasted and taking advantage of her in a controversial scene). Even with such stiff competition, Michael Peña manages to steal almost every scene he's in as a lisping, sycophantic co-worker. Ray Liotta plays a "real" detective, and Hill regular Danny McBride shows up in various amusing cameos. Inexplicably released the same year as PAUL BLART: MALL COP, this is the darker one--the raging id, the heavy-hitter version--with a vengeance.

Now, if I hadn't been assigned the film who knows if I would ever have seen it? If I had been allowed to trash films in my reviews I might have figured out my negative review before even sitting down in the theater, and would have hated to have to change it. but in fact I loved the film, and it made me do a 360 on Seth Rogen, and as a critic it became my job to attempt to point out the route by which this film could be appreciated, not as a dumb comedy but as a dark twisted satire of America.

So.... HECKLER: Jamie Kennedy narrates, and calls his hecklers backstage to ask them why they do it, and even interviews his harshest critics. But the best parts are when random celebs get to fire back at their critics, and none more savagely than Germany's most incompetent director, Uwe Boll. Even critics who hate BLOODRAYNE (2002, top) will enjoy the footage of Boll beating the shit out of his snotty hipster critics (see below), especially because said critics prove by accepting the challenge that they haven't seen GUYS AND DOLLS (and thus wind up with saspirilla in their ear). Me, I've seen it thrice, so when I had to cover BLOODRAYNE I made sure to like it:

With all its swords, chained breasts, gushing arteries, and severed heads, BLOODRAYNE seems more like a welcome throwback to those great early 1980s drive-in sword and sorcery flicks. In between the slashing and gouging there are torch-lit castles, nefarious booby traps, blurry flashbacks, and aerial camera shots that swoop down through the gorgeous Carpathian landscapes. Loken, with her fangs and low-rider leather chaps, looks pretty gorgeous herself, and there's a surprising number of name actors in bit parts (...) It's directed by Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the video game adaptations of HOUSE OF THE DEAD and ALONE IN THE DARK. Cult cinema fans should take this one to--and through--the heart, especially for the chance to see Madsen's period costume and long hair.

and HOUSE OF THE DEAD before that, which was so bad it made BLOODRAYNE look like BEN HUR:

Uwe Boll's HOUSE OF THE DEAD, based on a video game, manages to capture the goofy, giddy flavor of the drive-in features and Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s. The story involves a sextet of attractive, romantically entangled Seattle hipsters who hire a boat manned by a salty sea captain (Jurgen Prochnow) to take them to an island rave. (...)  By the time the gang lands, most everyone at the party has already been killed and joined the ranks of the living dead. Fortunately, the captain is also an arms smuggler and soon the dwindling survivors are geared up with heavy artillery, blasting their way through the hordes in high video-game style. Pumping hard core techno rap fusion, swooping MATRX-style camera moves, manic editing, ample gore effects, clips from the actual video game, and a dash of nudity all coalesce to keep things lively, those who like their horror a little on the cheesy side may just find themselves in zombie-movie nirvana.

So there you go, Uwe, don't hurt me!  Though now that Muze is gone and I'm contracted to no movie search engine, hey Uwe! You SUCK!!

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Charlie Sheen's Cinematic Cokehead Ancestors

Anyone who's had to, helplessly, watch as cocaine's surge of availability in the late 1990's destroyed their friend's likability is liable to get a sad shudder of recognition at the sweaty grandiosity of Charlie Sheen's recent interviews. Gone is the unfazed lad who could get a laugh even narrating hackneyed PLATOON lines like "They're the best I've ever seen, grandma," not to mention all his HOT SHOTS films. Where did that Charlie go, the deadpan comedic genius Charlie? Now people laugh but not in the way he thinks. He's gone the same place so many of my friends went while I was first getting sober and cocaine was changing the face of an NYC party scene that hitherto had been all about fun, safe booze, ecstasy, and indoor cigarette smoking. This blog may be called Acidemic, but not all drugs are equal. Cocaine is not psychedelic, it is the anti-acid Christ.

But here's a fascinating tidbit: the whole history of early Hollywood is adrift in cocaine, especially as it was legal and even a key ingredient in Cocoa Cola up until 1914!! Hey, it's not something Cocoa Cola is proud of, and yet their advertisments of happy, singing faces all but hint there still is a bit left... but there isn't, all thanks to an epidemic of toothless cokeheads (the 'real thing'!) lingering around the drugstore soda fountains circa the turn of the century. D.W. Griffith even made a short film about it, 1912's FOR HIS SON:



Of course not everyone was so uptight. Check out Douglas Fairbanks' 1916 MYSTERY OF THE LEAPING FISH!



To explain this strange film, I turn to the distinguished Ed Howard in Only the Cinema:

The Mystery of the Leaping Fish is an absurd, utterly bizarre farce, an unlikely silent film whose hero is the drug-addicted and wildly incompetent detective Coke Ennyday (Douglas Fairbanks). This weird little short has an impressive pedigree, featuring the writing talents of none other than Tod Browning (!), an uncredited D.W. Griffith (!!), and prolific intertitle scribe Anita Loos, whose soon-to-be husband John Emerson directs. It's hard to know why all this talent needed to be concentrated in one place, though, since the film is basically a really silly, hilarious one-man show with a succession of physical gags designed to suit its star's strengths. Fairbanks drives the action singlehandedly; his exuberant physicality and goofy facial expressions are continually at center stage, and when there's something he can't do outright, a bit of subtle backwards-running film is sufficient to pull off some of the wilder gags, where he seems to go leaping impossibly into the air. The film is an unabashedly pro-drug comedy, presumably made in an era before widespread anti-drug regulation.

Lastly, let's not forget the music of the era, particularly this favorite dittie of mine and my homies:

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Somnolente Noir: THE GLASS KEY (1942)

Alan Ladd is "tired of hick town stuff" in a weird tale of brotherly love and deceit called THE GLASS KEY (1942). The "hick town" is run by racketeer Brian Donlevy as a kind of less comedic version of THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940). In fact, KEY and MCGINTY go well together, recalling a time in film when shady local politicians could still climb city hall ladders and backstab and make friends with slap-happy gangsters like Akim Tamiroff and William Bendix. Male friendship is what it's all about, as in the loosely post modern remake of KEY, the Coen Brothers' MILLER'S CROSSING (1990), but it's no-good scheming women that set the world tumbling in motion, to its knees and beyond.

There were enough rich femme fatale poor detective romances going on in the 1940s that there was even a word for it, "slumming." The detective could let go of his hardscrabble life and live like Nick Charles, presuming he didn't get double-crossed, or even worse- she loses interest in him now that he's not poor, and gets contemptuous of his sponging. Part of the appeal of THE GLASS KEY lies in Alan Ladd's stoic rejection of this destiny, via the much richer Veronica Lake. Like many film lovers, I've long been fascinated by the weird chemistry the pair exhibit, and how other similar pairs, such as Claire Trevor with Laurence Tierney (BORN TO KILL) or Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews (LAURA), lack that same chemistry, much as they may have chemistry on their own. Ladd and Lake seem to be born in a different time than those around them, a different projection speed, both blonde-haired, alcoholic and short (him 5'5" she 4'11"), isolated as a separate alien race, a pair of lost Nordic hybrids (which I've written of here) trapped in the sticky webs of human desire, villainy, and wretchedness... but never complaining or tolerating wrongness when they see it.

THE GLASS KEY is the perfect Lake-Ladd film second only to THIS GUN FOR HIRE (the same year as KEY, 1942) In GUN, they're just pals who come to trust each other in a world full of duplicitous poisonous snakes (which in a way makes it even sexier and sadder). But in KEY they have such a great sleepy chemistry, it's like they're dreaming while awake and whenever they're together they're packing or leaving or otherwise hanging out in empty rooms. You just get used to seeing one or the other's leaving trunks dead center in the room whenever they're together.  You don't have to read Wikipedia to know that both of them had hard childhoods. You can feel it in their shy delivery and wary glares. Ladd and Lake are two damaged souls recognizing each themselves in one another, and the aloof posturing, verbal attacks and avoidance strategies they used to keep the world at bay couldn't fool each other for a minute.

The normal 'sex appeal' of screen sirens is kind of transcended by Lake, a very heavy drinker who once noted "I wasn't a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie." Ladd seems a bit of a zombie himself, and together they stand as undead outsiders in a noir world never quite asleep enough to suit them.

Perhaps that's why Lake-Ladd films are, for me anyway, ideally seen when at home, sick with a cold, as I was all this past week. THE GLASS KEY goes down smooth and easy, with William Bendix's fists standing in for the effects of influenza, and Veronica Lake's smooth alcoholic tones as gentle as a shot of Tussinex Suspension.

The sadomasochistic pair bond between Alan Ladd and Bendix is also something very special, and an interesting echo of the rough and tough fight at the drop of a hat rapport between Donlevy and Tamiroff's mobster in the GREAT MCGINTY (directed by Preston Sturges who also directed Lake in the previous year's SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS). The willingness to fight and 'take' punishment is often decoded as being allusions to homosexuality, but I would disagree. I'd say it's more of a kind of code of masculine ethics ala FIGHT CLUB or A MAN CALLED HORSE. Taking a beating is what makes a man tough, fighting back until all that's left of you is fingernails. Bendix's sick excitement over 'bouncing' Alan Ladd around the room "like a ping pong ball" is contagious, and in one of the big climactic scenes it's hilarious and heartening to watch Ladd calmly, like a patient cobra, draw out the sadistic tough talk of Bendix in an upstairs barroom. Bendix hams it up, but is a delight, playing basically the same brute he'd ushered in with THE HAIRY APE (1944) and the later Lake-Ladd film, THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946). 

The Great McGinty (1940)

And Ladd's canny beating-taking for his dim-witted boss buddy is therefore a cool triumph. This, like Hammett's other novels mirrors later films like THE GODFATHER, where we're introduced to the machinations of power and feel lucky we're not involved: it's too dangerous grabbing at the big brass ring, and you have to presume your enemies have already planned six moves ahead, and you need to plan the seventh in advance or else take your face smashing-in stoic like a brave. It's not often either you see a movie where the good guys have the district attorney in their pocket, and people wage war via whole newspapers and elections the way we argue in chat rooms today.

Last interesting anecdote: I've always been upset there's really one or two films where Lake has her signature hair over the eye. According to Susan Kelly: By this time the peek-a-boo hairstyle had become a nationwide fad, so much so that government officials actually had to request that Ms. Lake stop wearing her signature style because women in war plants who were copying it were catching their hair in the machines!

Well, that explains a lot, but I still regret the abundance of skull-tightening headgear Lake wears, as it seems to all but castrate her for the bulk of KEY's running time. On the other hand, the film's really about the buddyhood of two men, and how one should never let a girl who doesn't even like you interfere with your 'bros before ho's' mentality, especially right before an election. Got that? On the other hand, I'm sick so don't listen to me, and Lake went on to drunken despair, getting kicked off pictures, and tending bar in women's hotels after the 1940s wore themselves out, but she still had her pilot's license, and I would like to know why I can't seem to find a good old-fashioned pulp-art covered paperback version of Hammett's original Glass Key anywhere and last I checked this 1944 version is not on R1 DVD. What gives... pally?

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Apocalypse-Dependent: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
  ----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted." --- Krista Now

Watching THE SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) followed by the Little Ice Age and UFO documentaries (only on the History Channel) and preceded by Libyan unrest on the news; as Portlandia and The Onion News Network make amok globalization and conservative paranoia funny again, all I can think is my knees hurt from the weird solar weather outside and how it's all going according to plan, but it's not my plan.

12/21/12 is coming, the solar storms are moving in, MONSTERS patrol the widening contamination zone between the US and Mexico; "Cyberspace is placed under federal control, formed under the protection of the patriot act," says Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), narrating from the vantage point of his California beachside gun turret, where he watches like a cross between Charles Starkweather and Bela Lugosi in GLEN OR GLENDA. Pull zee trigger!

This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang, so TS, TS!

...there's unofficial links in SOUTHLAND that are surely to make film fans recall other films about the nature of cult film viewing, like BUCKAROO BANZAI, but at times Kelly's presumption we're going to watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure clues with each other seems presumptuous in an age where an infinite amount of films and TV are available at every moment and we can barely sit still for a film once. Pre-fab camp never works, well sometimes.... and I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Boxer passes and pockets a blinking plastic orange while Ludwig Van's 9th plays in the background), MADAME SATAN (crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in the skee-ball lanes) and MULHOLLAND DRIVE (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio, singing the Star Spangled Banner, clashing against droning John Cale strings). Moby does the rest of the music and it's a perfect fit for Kelly's mood - it's the end of the world and everybody's fine with that, acting to stop it only in the most perfunctory of ways

"---Science is harnessing... wormholes... light speed.... time travel..."

I'm inserting random history channel quotes as I write to add some post-cinematic affect; the voice intoning scientific advancement playing behind my head on TV; listening to a radio in a separate room at the same time; I'm deliberately screwing with notions of actor vs. character in this essay; everything I say is a lie but this. Buffy's actress's porn stars' TV show's theme: "Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

 ----"what caused the abrupt climate shift that doomed the Vikings?"

The Nostradamus History Channel TV show proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: Americans are excited for the apocalypse. I'd even argue our whole culture is apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. If 'nothing' happens on 12/21/12, man we'll be pissed, let's not kid ourselves (unless we have kids of course, as it's dad's fault). In my childhood during the still cold-70s, it was the sudden threat of nuclear war that kept us edgy and smoking without excess guilt; kept us screwing (the expression at the time) and burning out. We secretly hoped it would come so we could go out on the roof and watch Philadelphia get it first, and even the kids would get gin and tonics to celebrate.

But what I can't understand is why Nostradamus and--apparently--every ancient civilization with star savvy was so anxious to encode everything on earth with the date that is now rapidly approaching. In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? Seven generations is a crap in the bucket when you're thinking about Egyptians and Mayans... who themselves were wiped out long before getting close to within seven generations of 2012. So why did they inscribe our date with destiny in secret code all around their architecture. Why did they care about us?!!! What about the fast food and the banks and power plants that might fall a mere 7,000 years from now!?

I think it was, in the end, they had no television, no internet; nothing else to do.

That problem is answered in SOUTHLAND by completely collapsing any notion of linear time. Even the bad guys who monitor everything on IDENT are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing in an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--with some disgust--is that he has it again -- do reprobates pop an amnesia pill after cheating on their spouses so they can't get trapped in a lie? She notes it with the repulsion one might notice the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or ring around the collar. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of. The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world," or what Joseph Campbell deciphers it to mean: "When you're falling, dive." When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as confessing to Satanism, and pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. Or for that matter endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business. Of if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers, or called him Ronald Taverner, or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia... if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die, for the kids!

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Sexy Terrorists are Go!!! - CARLOS (2010) and Post-Cinematic Airline After-Affect

If you were wondering about where the whole "we don't negotiate with terrorists" thing got started, meet the guy who ruined it for everyone: Carlos the Jackal, who grabs hostages and demands planes to safe havens the way the rest of us order tickets online, at least until policy changes. Olivier Assayas directed and continues his post-modern affect approach to film, proving he's the best on-airplane director in history with CARLOS  (2010). Capturing the feeling of the aircraft roar and air circulation inside a sealed plane, the way pressurization pops the ears; even the horror and drag of being stuck in your seat for what seems like days on end, when the government won't let you deplane! Assayas brings the 'you are there' distress where it belongs, back to the terrorists who started it all.

Divided into two hour slabs of cryptic meetings, hostage negotiations, and jarring moments of gratuitous sex, we don't learn much in CARLOS, but we 'feel' like we do. The middle slab is the best: Carlos and company take the 1975 OPEC meeting hostage and are supposed to fly to Iraq for sanctuary, but Saddam turns out to have been up to shady treacherous tricks even then. Back when 'we' did negotiate with terrorists, taking hostages was an easy way to fly to some safe haven country whereupon the terrorists would usually release the prisoners and plane -- why not? As long as they did, their demands were more likely to be met the next time. And anyway, so many of the terrorists were good looking educated, you know, white kids. But that last long, terrorists lost their sense of humor, and Carlos gets his comeuppance when his safe country's regime changes hands while he's still on the tarmac, leaving him SOL.

By the end it's a bit of a drag as Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) loses all his friends and allies and the new post-communist world takes effect and there's just no place for an airport-fightin' man. But overall CARLOS is an invaluable peek at the other side of the curtain, which few of us in the States ever imagined. At least they kept their 70s decor longer. And there are sexy girl terrorists whom Carlos sleeps with at the drop of a hat, the most noticeable of which is Nora von Waldstätten as Magdalene Kopp, Carlos' future wife. Their hook-up (top) is one of the first times I've been genuinely turned on by a seduction scene in years. Years! Maybe it's the red, or the amazing von Waldstätten, but again, not much reason for it in the long run, except to show Carlos is seductive. You can feel the drag of his attraction to him in her eyes and speech.

What's bizarre is that Asia Argento is not involved. CARLOS is perfect Assayas material and Argento was the perfect Assayas heroine in BOARDING GATE, and like that film and DEMONLOVER, there's that impression in CARLOS of what Steven Shaviro called "Post-Cinematic Affect" (a highly recommended book) and I know there's some critics that seem to miss what 'post-cinematic affect' - is all about, the best I can sum it up is two things, 1) Asia Argento, and 2) international air travel:

Next time you're flying out of the country take stock of all your surroundings, from the drive to the airport to the taxi to your final destination, as a movie with you as the star. How are you 'manifesting' your character during this journey? Do you ever feel like a rat in a TV camera-monitored trap? How many choices, actions, freedoms are available to you within the confines of the plane, the customs line, etc.? Do you feel like you're just a pair of eyes and ears soaking up prerecorded pre-flight messages, gate departure lounge CNN screens, lines and baggage checks? Do you get a feeling of adrift ennui in a preconfigured landscape of retro futurist simulacra? Don't you wish you could escape it somehow? Go off the grid without the grid noticing? Carlos thinks he can, and that's the fantasy in his mind, which differs from ours because he still wants to hang out at airports. Kind of like Charlie Sheen in those recent interviews -- you can tell he thinks he's coming off awesome, but to us he looks like a manic narcissist cokehead on a manic high detox.

For the rest of us, those who "have to wait in line like everybody else," there's a more passive way to be maneuvered through the turnstiles, a way to avoid umbrage. We turn off our ego and just tune out and take it all in--from the science fiction weirdness of the traffic lights reflecting on the rain streaked windshields to the lines and customs and clouds and electric grids--we become it all, rather than ourselves --and in so doing avoid ruffling any feathers. Next time you're going through the whole door-to-door experience of flying somewhere, ideally to a hotel, imagine you are high on glue fumes or a spiked whiskey, then you might get a glimpse of the Assayas effect.

Asia Argento was a great match for Assayas in BOARDING GATE. She has what Shaviro calls 'direct carnality.' She is "immediately present in the flesh." She "collapses the seductive distance between star and audience, and instead offers us her own hyperbolic presence... Even her irony is immediate, and too close for comfort." (p. 55).  Dude! This is what I was circling around, slowly and tenderly and distractedly, in my 2003 praise for her directorial debut SCARLET DIVA (2000). As you experience that glue sniff lost in translation post-affect disconnect at that airport, let's say you're watching CNN in the waiting area by your gate. Suddenly Asia Argento is onscreen and she looks right at you. No one else notices, and before you know it, she's coming out of the women's room, walking towards you, smiling back. You scared? Damn right. But are you supposed to recognize her, ask for an autograph, smile, mouth the words "I loved you in XXX"? Or what if she's incognito, so if you say hello her crazy ex-husband hears her name and comes running out of nowhere with a knife and/or a court order. Or maybe she's in character, and you're so method you forgot you're not actually living this movie... remember your lines and let them sound like you just thought of them. That should be easy... you can't even remember who you really are. Now, now you got it.

Postmodern affect in the States--from what I discern via Shaviro's book-- is based around the complete saturation of the image, to the point reality --if it exists or ever did --is lost, or inseparable from said saturation. SOUTHLAND TALES and GAMER are examples of this in Shaviro's book - not dividing lines so much between nations and corporate economies as between screen and person; the image and the 'real' within the film's diegetic framework collapse into one another and the world grows cold and strange and much wider than the cinema has ever before been able to conjure. The post-cinematic affect breaks down difference just as when you're in an airport you're neither here nor there, in a post-cinematic affect you're neither safe nor in danger, neither an actor nor an extra, neither on TV or in front of it. Assayas landed on the map with this in his IRMA VEP which collapsed eight ways from Sunday a visit from Maggie Cheung to a French film studio, and the subsequent breakdown of authority and knowledge about a project.

One of the first sights of this post-cinematic might well be Fellini's 8 1/2 wherein the director onscreen creates the movie we watch as a defense mechanism against nosy producers. Godard makes films that operate on this post-cinematic level, flattening the dimensions of the mise-en-scene, and boiling whole narratives down to detourned Cocoa-Cola ads. And you know why there ain't more of it? Because the terrorists--the cool, sexy, crazy international Marxist-version, not the stubbly and sandy new a-Qaeda--- lost!! They blew it. The globalizing forces of evil capitalism won. What can a poor boy do? Except sing a karaoke "Streetfightin' Man"?  In this paralyzed post-cinematic town there's just no place for a Carlos... outside a first person shooter game on Playstation.

See also: Olivier Assayas, Super Genius! (BOARDING GATE)

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