Pre-Code Capsules 10: DAMES, BEAUTY AND THE BOSS, THE DARK HORSE, SVENGALI, THE MIND READER

DAMES
1934 - ***
Unlike breezier selections from the Gold Diggers series, Busby's DAMES suffers from a hefty share of cornball humor. As the allegedly fuddy and assuredly duddy Uncle Ezra, Hugh Herbert's schtick--his giddy titter and little hand claps--has not gone quite gold with age. One of those sexophobic millionaires who likes to form abstinence societies, Ezra promises to award his cousin-in-law Guy Kibee ten million dollars as long Guy refrains from tobacco and alcohol and behaves like a kiss-ass toady during Herbert's stay in New York. Kibee's wife, Ezra's cousin, Zasu Pitts seems uptight enough with her spindly walk and wavery voice, but Herbert is way too hiccup-ridden to convince as a reformer. Much shrill bowing and scraping ensues, especially since   the daughter is Ruby Keeler, which means her beau is Dick Powell, and neither is about to bow and scrape to some old corny duddy when there's pettin' in the park to be done.

WC Fields might call this "a double bargain..."

Ezra's also a hypocrite who cries for Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir whenever he gets the hiccups, apparently oblivious to the fact that it's 77% alcohol. And thus vice, as it so often must, takes the long way around, cuts through the pharmacy, and penetrates the guarded heart of the morally uptight.

Small wonder - DAMES came out in 1934, the year real-life versions of Uncle Ezra killed the spirit of louche cinematic insouciance in its cradle, i.e. ending the pre-code era. While Busby undoubtedly detests Ezra, it's no fun watching him suffer nincompoopery; we came for breezy laffs and psychedelic dance numbers not Tea Party-style hysterics. It's too close to home, man. Too relevant.

Meanwhile the fact that Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell take a ferry to Staten Island to sing while they're supposed to be bringing Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir to Uncle Ezra who is hiccuping nonstop and driving Zazu and Horace into a frenzy of anxiety leaves an odd aftertaste in the minds of we sensitive viewers, as does seeing Powell gets ripped off by a sleazy producer. Joan Blondell is the much wiser chorus girl who gets her hooks into Horace for the show's budget while on a train to the city from upstate.



It all comes down to Herbert hiring some goons to trash the show, and though it all ends happily enough Herbert's attitude lingers in the mind. Thank god he gets arrested, takes a shine to Blondell and announces he has officially given his old fashioned moral code the raspberry.

The songs include "Dames" and "I Only Have Eyes for You," which gets real post-modern meta with the opening of the number taking place in the crowd outside the theater and winding up on the subway -- it takes on the feel of an SNL opening sketch with the host running backstage or out onto the Rockefeller Plaza as the cameras follow him out of the studio. It can be very confusing until you remember Busby bows to no one when it comes to blurring the fourth. As always he makes the show within the film is a hundred times more like a movie than the stagy off-stage action. Soon Ruby Keeler is shooting up through a hole in an eye, and there's psychedelic flower leg shows, the fogeys are having a blast guzzling 79% alcohol by volume elixir (that's 158 proof!), profits, publicity, and credits ensue.

BEAUTY AND THE BOSS
1932 - ***1/2
 Warren William is in his lascivious wolf prime as an Austrian business tycoon who avoids the temptation of his secretaries by firing them if they catch his eye... then inviting them to stay for drinks and arranging them as mistresses. In his own way he's a Prince Charming forced by expediency to be his future bride's fairy godmother, doling out pink slip glass slippers and six month salary stipends instead of ball tickets.

Enter a Cinderella to make George Bernard Shaw light up, the button-cute Marian Marsh (Trilby to Barrymore's SVENGALI the same year). A worker of the starving class, she's super efficient, methed-out on hunger and moxy. Showing the same ease and playfulness here that she had with all those long bearded old painters in SVENGALI, Mars gets taken to Paris on business and transforms into a wide-eyed jubilant sprite in a sexy evening dress. David Manners as the brother tries the earnest pretty boy approach to win her; Frederick Kerr ("Here's to the house of Frankenstein!") tries the lovable duffer approach; but only Warren has the louche captain of industry approach this Ayn Randy popinjay craves. She even gleans tips on being sexy from one of Warren's other mistresses.

You can tell by the breathless dialogue pace, continuity and its relatively few sets that BEAUTY AND THE BOSS was once a play - so think Lubitsch in froth and Hecht in pace as well as Shaw in the terms of capitalist philosophy and Brecht in its unflinching narrations of life as a starving poor person who gladly becomes an office machine automaton if it means eating regularly. As in that film, the great Anton Grot did the sets.

Marion Marsh and wolves (Top: Beauty and the Boss / b: Svengali)

SVENGALI
1931 - ***1/2
There's three reasons to see this weird, lilted pre-code: John Barrymore's florid hamming as Svengali; Marian Marsh's sweet face and alabaster beauty as Trilby (cute in an oversize Parisian officer's topcoat;) and the crazy Anton Grot sets. The latter includes super wide doors, a nicely dilapidated Moroccan night club and Parisian rooftop miniatures seen in an extended crane shot from Barrymore's eyes to Trilby's apartment. For all its stodgy slowness it has a special magic, if for no other reason than these three ingredients and the bizarre inconsistency of tone as Svengali clowns around with his Leperillo-ish companion one minute then sends a foolish housewife to her death in the next. Killing makes him hungry apparently so he heads over to do some mooching off Paddy and the Laird, more humor, then stealing Trilby and proclaiming her mouth has a roof like the parthenon! Billee (Bramwell Fletcher) is her earnest, naive young lover, smitten and thinking of marriage until he sees Trilby posing in the nude for Paddy and his painter class brethren, and then runs away in horror. Good riddance! As Barrymore's own Oscar Jaffee might exclaim, "That eliminates the lover!"

Barrymore's great of course, but even for fans he relies an awful lot on his old schtick where he clutches his heart with one hand and extends the other out before him like he's trying to find the light switch in the dark, crying "Ack! Ack!" One wonders what Warren William would have done with such a part! Actually one knows exactly. Directed by the one and only Archie Mayo.

THE DARK HORSE
1932 - **
Allegedly a comedy about a random rube (Guy Kibbee) chosen by some shady power elites to run for New York State governor, DARK HORSE is really more a polemic against impulse marriage. Warren William is the ingenious PR man who sways the hick vote but he's dogged by a vicious ex-wife who hounds him for astronomical alimony. She later tries to seduce Kibbee into a frame-up of the "love nest... with singer" variety. Except she ain't no singer. At Warren's right hand all the while is Frank McHugh noting Kibbee's ready for the KKK when he peeps him in his long johns.

 A lengthy scene at campaign headquarters with the ex-wife having a tantrum and threatening to call the cops if he doesn't cough up four hundred smackers for alimony is kind of not what pre-codes are all about. In real life we have to deal with coughing up dough to people we hate, we don't want to see it in our movies. And Kibbee's not as endearing here as one would expect. He's playing the stupid hick a bit too broadly, flashing his terrible teeth and awesome belly like we didn't notice them the first 12 times. Meanwhile Bette Davis has a pretty thankless role as Williams' girlfriend and right-hand woman. She's still good and spritely... but really --WW scrounging for money to pay a gold digger? It's not right we should have to see that.

 THE MIND READER
1933 - ***
Williams starts out this NIGHTMARE ALLEY-esque fable as a sideshow dentist, but he and his pal Allen Jenkins get a load of a fortune teller on easy street...and Chandra the Magnificent is born! Jenkins is right to be aggrieved when "Chandra" falls for a gorgeous local girl (Constance Cummings), whose mother 'loses' her handbag to Jenkins' nimble picketpocking. Williams marries the daughter, even though she's clearly not too bright since she falls under the spell of a cheap carny hack so easily.

With the spooky subject matter and Williams as a star, THE MIND READER should be better; silly bits of plot waste time when the real story is in the dialogue (rather than the action) which runs counter to the grain of the approaching code. Jenkins makes a good case for why it's better to rule in hell than slowly starve to death selling fuller brushes in a desperate bid for moral character, but Williams is trying to reform! Why again? It's still 1933, after all. Jenkins meanwhile gets a posh chauffeur job and pays the other drivers for addresses of where the husbands are cheating on their wives and passes the dope to Williams, who tells the ladies of the husband's infidelities from his ball, and everyone cleans up but the husbands, who are soon coming in to see Chandra themselves, with murder on their minds.

In the end, Williams turns to drink and reveals his tricks onstage, disillusioning and slur-sobbing uncontrollably to the assembled rubes, "I've broken my home!" Williams playing drunk is like James Dean playing drunk in GIANT--in other words, doubly slurred to the point of true incoherence. And the crowd roars!

While it may sound trite, tasty insights into the lurid lengths men went to get laid in the 1930s are coded in chocolate and sprinkled all over the salty dialogue in THE MIND READER, saving it from being too contrite by the end. When Williams originally says he's going to marry the girl, Jenkins asks, "Legally?" If you wonder what that means in pre-code parlance, it's where--as seen in WAY DOWN EAST (1921)--you dress a friend up as a preacher so your girl thinks you're legally wed, then fuck and run before she gets wise. Just more grisly evidence of the fall-out from archaic 'important' concepts of 'virginity' in brides. There's also prohibition repeal references: Jenkins gets the best last word as his pal heads off to Sing Sing: "Sure is tough to be going away just when beer's coming back." Amen bruddah.

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Bellamy the Deflowerer: THE WEDDING NIGHT (1935)

If you want to see the cruel extreme barbarism of the sudden implementation of the Catholic Legion of Decency's enforced production code (which overtook Hollywood in 1934), look no further than 1935's THE WEDDING NIGHT, starring Gary Cooper, Ralph Bellamy, and Anna Sten (the 'other' Garbo). It helps when considering the Christian backlash hooplah about the morning after pill to see a film like this, and realize the extent of female subjugation in pre-industrial European culture, and the way it survives today in xtreme Catholicism, fundamentalist Islam and with some Mormons.

Ralph Bellamy with his wild hair, expertly applied peasant-stock eye-liner, and traditional Polish farmer garb actually gives Cooper a run for the money here in the god-like looks department. He's way too good looking to be so dumb, and what's this brood of crafty tobacco farmers doing up in Connecticut in 1935 in a place bordering open marriage-minded drunk writer Cooper's get-away lodge?

While Cooper's wife stays in New York City, he moves up there for inspiration, and decides on Anna Sten and her family's provincial Polish culture as the subject of his next book. The film thus sees the code mandate of 1934 as a property dividing line, between the home-grown social 'dissolution' of the post-WW1 Depression era of women's equality and hurrah for the next who dies, and a very fundamentalist old world patriarchy proletariat. A dissolute neighbor next door is demonized as brutally as the Nazis would later do the Jews; meanwhile the property-greedy tobacco-farming Poles and their outmoded values then can be read as the very reason for the barbarism inflicted upon them. As The farmer says to his daughter when she refuses to harness herself to the Bellamy plow, "stop making me hit you!"

Cooper's never been too convincing as a writer, but here he at least is convincing as a self-hating intellectual for whom literary 'research' has been the rationale for seducing women for so long he can't remember whether the book is in service of the affair or vice versa. Sten is a damn... good... actress and Sig Rumann is properly terrifying in an unusual role (for him). The code shock is of course that Sten must die, because her father pledged her to Bellamy, and was paid the dowry, and she refused to run away from the ceremony before saying "I do," which is the only proper thing for a bride standing on the lip of the 20th century. That she loves Cooper instead but still goes through with the Bellamy wedding spells her death under the draconian rubrics of the code. But if she'd just run out to the car and driven off and grabbed Cooper and fled to the city before saying she did, well you could roll the credits right then. But the post-34 censor had his eye on adulterers, even if they'd been forced into a marriage that was only minutes old.

And so... in the post-34 world of Hollywood, once-free women starting dropping like flies. At least they had time to take long Garbo-esque death scenes, but there's a thin line between good death scenes and the bitter aftertaste of deaths being forced by a code no one making the film has any faith in.  Religious censorship bleeds into the nature of the post-code era's stories -- where women marry even knowing it means their death, because marriage is the ultimate validation of woman, and then she may breed and create more Christians who can carry forth this fine, wretched, evil tradition of yoking the women to the Bellamies. Imagine the tale of Little Red Riding Hood if the Catholic Legion of Decency decided to update the story so that Red gets a chaperone through the woods, and the woodsman--her husband--regularly belittles her in a smirky way when she's caught talking to wolves. That wolf would be played by Cary Grant... the woodsman? That's right! It's no accident Bellamy is in THE WOLFMAN playing just such an impotent hunter.

To drive the point slamming home, the titular night of the film is a long wedding party for Sten and Bellamy at Rumann's house, with the Sten being 'prepared' for deflowering by the glum matrons of the clan upstairs, while downstairs Bellamy gets drunker and his cronies (and even Sten's father) encourage him to get up there and lay some pipe like they're the sloppy seconds-craving would-be-rapist brothers of the groom in Peckinpah's RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The message is clear: the boys get to drink and goad each other one in lusty eggings-on below while the women, depressed and apathetic as if dressing a deer, prepare the next virgin for her code-sanctioned marital assault. Again, the message is that not only does marriage legitimize sex so you can have it right under your parents' roof, it frees you from the uncertainty of 'taking possession' of your spouse in copulation. In other words, she doesn't get to say no --only the dad does. Even screaming for help they'll just laugh and roar below.

Fundamentalist Christian adages against a woman's right to choose her own mate seem barbaric to most free thinking people these days but after the WEDDING NIGHT you may understand its origins better. It's not really the fault of the Bellamy - he's not a bad guy. He's been led to expect he will get a wife handed to him via her father, and his confusion when it's otherwise is not his fault --empathy takes the ability to think outside one's own immediate social mores, which he is mentally unable to do. Though many conservatives are desperate to pass bills that would revert woman's rights back to the patriarchs, nowadays at least, they can't get very far. The best they can do is close an abortion clinic now and again as they lament the loss of their old property, the Fertile Womb, so squandered in the hands of its wasted young women owners.

So yeah, drooling sexual relatives are written into the rocks of Plymouth but when a sensitive poet soul like Sten's comes along, that kind of violent burlesque of socially controlled reproduction is shocking and un-American. It's one thing if the girl is plain and not very bright and maybe can't get a date on her own. But then comes along a smart, poetic beauty and the Bellamy will crush her like an orchid under the plow. When choosing between the Bellamy for life (in Albany too!) vs. Gary Cooper for a just one weekend in Manhattan, is there any other choice, for a free woman, than the latter?

 

The worst that can happen is that they'll wind up destitute and abandoned on the streets of the East Village, and that is nothing in comparison to being kept down on the farm under the yoke of Bellamy's unconscious, never-been-outside-of-the-box sense of entitlement. Just ask One-Eye: (see: Bob Hope Vs. The Canadian Svengalis).

Thus the Coopers and Grants are like missionaries of pre-code enlightenment, bringing hope to the dark areas of the New England tobacco belt. Now more than ever, we need to ridicule our Bellamies, ban the incoming burkas of our immigrants, and rescue Mormon girls before they're married to lecherous cult leaders. I don't blame the Bellamies, or even the Rumanns --this is all they know. But the chain's gotta break somewhere. For too long our tall beautiful men and fast-thinking wabbits have held back, given the Bellamies and the Elmer Fudds the benefit of the doubt, presuming their old ways must have some merit. Our reward has been a trail of broken Stens. I say no more! Not one Sten, Bellamy! Not one Sten...

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Gimme Cockaigne: MELANCHOLIA (2011)

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." –Don Quixote

When true doomsday comes perhaps the manic depressives and bi-polars amongst us will at last have an opportunity to shine in calm perfection while walking through slow motion rain --that seems  to be the message of Lars Von Trier's latest, MELANCHOLIA (2011). Until then of course the ordinary madness of our civilization and all its unconscious munching, adherence to unexamined cultural mores, and slow death momentum--will have to be endured. Lars, I feel ya.

MELANCHOLIA makes me nervous because I don't want to lose one of the best auteurs of our post-art house age and the film has the earmarks of a cinematic suicide note, a message from someone planning to be dead by the time you read it. His whole post-Dogme 95 life is flashing before our eyes and on some level he's reached the frontier from which no traveler returns. In order to keep going into the wilderness the film ceases to be about a frontier, or returning, but about endurance - the inability for some to handle normalcy vs. others to handle apocalypses. And Kirsten Dunst has never seemed more Nordic, as if she's spent her life scowling through meaningless sex and animal fat-enriched meals solely to get to this one vanishing point.

For in MELANCHOLIA, Von Trier dives headfirst into the same abyss that Terence Malick only wades up to his knees for THE TREE OF LIFE.  There is no real comparison between the two other than their ponderous linking of 2001-style classical music-scored outer space vistas with close family relationships but it's fun to compare them anyway: a tale of a woman's depression coming to life in the form of a wedding and world-destroying planet named Melancholia is the suicide note to TREE OF LIFE's faded funeral notice. TREE mourns my dead father but MELANCHOLIA mourns for me, and the son of my unborn son, and the ground beneath our unborn feet.

My girl and I saw the film this past Saturday night at the charmingly dilapidated Brooklyn Heights Cinema with its blaring, distorted speakers rumbling the seats with Wagner's aria to Tristan und Isolde as Kristen Dunst and company writhed in Bill Viola-style (see above) slowness. It was so loud I had to cover my ears. But rather than be the one to complain to the ticket taker, I tried my best to accept it. And then suddenly the music stopped. I missed it soon after.

The 1st chapter is a long tres chic wedding for our melancholy heroine Justine (Dunst) over the course of which the bride flits with ecstasy before dissolving into a deep depression. The sight of a distant star unnerves her. Soon she's telling off her boss (Stellan Skarsgard), losing her groom (Alexander Skarsgard), sleeping with a kid on the 18th green, pissing off her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her sister's rich husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), infuriating the wedding planner (a great Udo Kier) and drawing gasps from everyone but her loving drunk of a father (John Hurt) and psychotic mother (Charlotte Rampling), who makes the toast "I think marriage is a crock of shit."

Handhelt verite for large social gatherings is by now almost quaint: Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Vinterberg's THE CELEBRATION, Baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. But unlike theirs, LVT's is a picture of a cold planet bathed in warmth but unable to feel warm, and if you can survive the whiplash handheld camera nausea in these scenes, you can move on to the next course. The bride, however, won't be there as she's upstairs, catatonic in the bath.

After some portions of the reception are over, Justine ducks into the library and  changes the open art books on display from abstract geometrical shapes (put there no doubt by John as they reflect his dull patriarchal-modernist tastes) to archaic pictures of female suffering, death and peasant post-wedding debauchery: ""Land of Cockaine" and "Hunters in the Snow" by Bruegel; "Ophelia" by J.W. Waterhouse; and "After the Hunt" by Bogarde. As in DOGVILLE and ANTICHRIST, this book swap seems a full rejection of the flat, dull left-brained scientific rationalism championed by Sutherland's materialist know-it-all in favor of a return to the mythic unconscious where every day is your last so you better get connected back to your Jungian roots, and hammered, before the whole tree of life goes up in flames.

John rejects such Dionysian nonsense, but his own left-brained thinking falls apart, unable to to deal with the loss of his empirical toe-hold, deluding and denuding-- as DaFoe did in ANTICHRIST-- via smug dismissal of Gainsbourg's intellectually eroticized 'feminine hysteria,' and the neglect of their co-owned horses. Dunst's depression is never fully explained so we naturally look for clues and there are plenty if you hate the fact that a rich razzle dazzle, the 'very expensive' fairy tale wedding is the closest we come in the modern era to keeping 'myth' alive. In going for high class in a materialist bourgeois competitive manner, the wedding becomes a Bruegel land of plenty fairy tale combination control freak's dream and overload nightmare, where the more money spent the less fun it's possible to have.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Luilekkerland" ("The Land of Cockaigne"), 1567. Oil on panel.

Cockaigne is a medieval mythical land of plenty, an imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasures are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. Specifically, in poems like The Land of Cockaigne, Cockaigne is a land of contraries, where all the restrictions of society are defied (abbots beaten by their monks), sexual liberty is open (nuns flipped over to show their bottoms), and food is plentiful... Writing about Cockaigne was a commonplace of Goliard verse. It represented both wish fulfillment and resentment at the strictures of asceticism and dearth (Wiki)

Justine prefers dearth

So a ceremony that should be mythically enriched with archetypal energy is stifled by the trivialities which the wedding planner (a marvelous Udo Kier) and the host couple cling to, insisting on guesses from guests as to how many pebbles are in the foyer vase, for example. John's outrage over Justine not coming down to cut the cake relates to her boss's slimy demands for a tag line, his weird head games resonate meta as the producers of MELANCHOLIA were no doubt hoping a tag line to this film would occur to Lars (the image the boss shows being like a Vogue cover premonition of mythic poses Justine herself will assume later in the film).

While we struggle to not get nauseous from whiplash shaky-cam, the heavy breathing Dogme sound keeps the wedding unbearably intimate: we hear every cut of the meat and every clang of cutlery on the china plates, every breath and wheeze from the gathered throng, amplified like we're tripping our faces off and boiling over in claustrophobic anxiety, trapped in this crowded dining room with all these acting actors talking over each other all at once like real people do in groups. At first we don't know why Justine is losing her grip, but we feel it's something to do with the oppressive worry of her sister ("Don't ruin this!") her brother-in-law ("this cost a fortune") and the insane ravings of her mom. The wedding is a public de-pantsing of artistic success, wherein the best riches and opulence can be is thrown up as buffer against the onslaught of Lars' depression, and crumbles like fairy dust. 

It is only in Justine's subsequent sad melt-down and later ecstasy over the approaching doomsday planet that she blossoms, for the planet is her true groom and its destruction her true union. I was reminded of my own strange exaltation on the day of 9/11 as I went racing up deserted 2nd Avenue at midnight, brain thrilling that it might the world might end any moment. New York City was a ghost town - I managed to find one cab, and me and the the cab driver were like the post-apocalypse, like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! HEY!  I knew my exaltation was not 'proper' but also, later, learned I was not alone in feeling it, especially at the uptown AA meeting I attended in the weeks that followed. We have a lot of firemen and cops up there and we felt the pain and grief, but we were strangely calm. In this apocalyptic moment, we were at peace because our constant existential dread, so useless in normal life, was suddenly the norm. Now that the world was blind, our impoverished vision made us royalty.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

                 –Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time”

 

John however, will have no such apocalyptic acceptance, and in the period after the wedding, he belittles and dominates Claire in a vain effort to allay her anxiety about the approaching planet. In his bland pretense he resembles past Von Trier male characters, authority figure wannabes who do their best to dominate the women in the room but come off sad and impotent. 

In TREE OF LIFE we saw the dawn of the earth, and the first vague gestures of compassion, leading up to some beach-side dream jazz heaven cast party. That's the kind of soiree Claire wants to have as the planet looms, a Cockaigne-style acceptance of the end through drink and song and togetherness. From her new husband's picture of an apple orchard he's bought for her, to 'rest' in, to the pebbles in the jar Udo Kier wants everyone to guess the number of, everything but the strange request to 'build caves' from the son, to return to Werner Herzog's CAVES OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, perhaps, and to the mythic inner reality of Jungian archetypes of which we are the shadows on the Platonic walls, is contemptible. 

Von Trier shows that all the money in the bourgeois world of wealth and rationalism won't allay or abet this impending cloud, only Justine's resolutely transcendental delusion is some kind of salvation. Hers is the peace of the twisted, the women and men who have writhed backwards through time due to years of enduring the stale, hollow pleasures of Cockaigne. Like Jack in the 1920s New Years eve picture at the end of THE SHINING, Justine moves backwards into the representations of the past until she's as indestructible as the planet Melancholia itself. I hope Lars doesn't mean to follow her quite yet, though at this point he's running out of language, image, and time. Every new film shows a little less sand in the hourglass and MELANCHOLIA shows the hourglass itself breaking into slow motion splinters. Soon he will have nothing left but sand, unless... May I suggest an Effexor + Wellbutrin + Neurontin cocktail, sir? It works wonders! Cockaigne is for suckers, as Bruegel, and Lacan, well knew. When life gives you only lemon orchards as far as the eye can see, no amount of lemonade-making can allay the soul-curling sourness. One must burn and run, even if there's nowhere to go but deeper into the ash crevasse.

POST-SCRIPT (12/7/12): As Justine gets out of the limo to head into the reception, she spots the incoming planet--still just a dot in the sky but she recognizes it--and five days after seeing the film it dawned on me that even so far away she recognizes it as our onrushing doom and her deliverance. So fuck it, she tells off her boss and dumps her groom. But isn't that what depression is all about? She doesn't bother to share her realization though, knowing perhaps that in the house of a coddling imperialist like John it's useless to bring it up. Considering this, the film suddenly comes into sharper focus for me, so thought I'd add it! 

Special Thanks to Jennifer Boyer,

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American Horror Hotel California Story

 Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'we are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers, They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast - Eagles ("Hotel California")

The Eagles' 1976 song "Hotel California" and the awesome new FX show, American Horror Story are two peas in a grisly pod--along with Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon--that circumscribe the broken longing of Los Angeles. Hearing it as a kid (I was nine when it debuted on the radio) the dark eroticism of the song carried a queasy black magick power. Whatever those L.A. people were doing, it was evil, dark, and underscored by a sexual longing I felt deep within my polymorphously  perverse childhood soul.

 The song's lyrics painted a grim portrait of what might be called the Land of Hungry Ghosts, the Buddhist hell where everyone is ravenous with hunger and cursed with tiny mouths at the end of long, painfully thin tube-like necks. "Stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" might very well be an illusion to cocaine, with the knives being used for the flat ends to distribute coke bumps, but no amount of coke able to kill the beast, the jones for more that ever threatens to turn success and fame and endless groupies and booze and drugs into a living hell, as easy as a still drunk from the night before morning gradually grays into a cruel, blue condition. Worse than an average Christian hell, where one at least is allowed to suffer loudly and unabashedly, in the California hell one must act as if they are always having the time of their lives, for if they fail the whole scene could implode on them, the veil pulled away to see that the glitterati at your back porch Laurel Canyon party are all grungy ghosts who bought their way in with mountains of coke and are already telling everyone you're their best friend, and it's too late you already got rid of your wife and kid so you could party 24/7 - it's too late to admit the mistake, the blindness, so you just snort and shoot and drink more and hope to blot out the grisly alien demon look of your joneser entourage which has gradually, without you knowing when or how, become all strangers. As Lili Taylor said in Abel Ferrara's THE ADDICTION, "We drink to forget we're alcoholics. We seek relief from the addiciton, but the addiction is the only relief we can find." Or as Taiyu describes it in "Buddhism and Recovery:"

"In Buddhism there is a myth about a hell-realm populated by beings whose appetites exceed their capacity for satisfaction. Their stomachs are huge but their throats are tiny. No matter how much they try to eat, their hunger remains. In ancient India, they are called hungry ghosts. We call them alcoholics and drug addicts... We eat and drink and smoke and use and gamble and love and lust and shop and exercise and obsess about anything that resolves the sense of incompletion, imperfection, or suffering we find inside."

The Hungry Ghost blueprint fits perfectly over the great new TV series on F/X, American Horror Story, which indulges in the 'post-10 PM sex-and-violence' slot trend to weave a multi-generational yarn about a large haunted house in the heart of Los Angeles that's acted as a focal point for a whole history of Hollywood murders--from the Richard Speck nursing home to the Black Dahlia's killing floor. In this week's episode we have the haunted-looking Mena Suvari playing the 1947 murder victim Dahlia, whose history became an emblem of the evils of 'Hotel California,' the sun-baked sin city where slimy predators take advantage of pretty, starstruck youngsters as a matter of course. Here we learn the truth is far less lurid, just a cover-up by a shaky dentist after he dies in her chair from an allergic reaction to his gas. But that's par for the AH course -- all the sordid evils of our LA nocturne imagination are simultaneously more mundane and more supernatural than we could e'er imagine.

But imagine we do, here in the rest of America, wherefrom we view the kind of druggy, sex-saturated, fame-whoring lifestyle L.A. indulges in as a vacuous fantasy. Middle America has families to worry about, they don't have to worry about the despair of those whose vacuous rock and roll fantasies are realized. L.A. rock stars like the Eagles can actually get enough drugs and sex with their rock and roll that it it's a fantasy no longer, and so it no longer keeps the lonely terror at bay, and they realize that while they checked in any time they liked, they can never leave. Guitar solo! BrawnabreeEEeaoum brau-brewarrrooooomm-rip!

The Black Dahlia became the pin-up girl for those who'd tried to make the dream come true and almost died as a result, or were abducted into a cult, or whatever the hell happens to those too wide-eyed to notice all the vultures gathered for the feast. And there's a meta charge to the casting of Suvari since in past years she appeared to be under the spell of some kind of eating disorder in the wake of her sudden surge to fame via AMERICAN BEAUTY (1997). On a subsequent SNL appearance her wild eyes, bird-like mannerisms and darkened teeth, all indicated something just not right; she's come out of it super strong in recent years and has been active in pro-women's esteem-style causes. Luckily for us she was still able to capture the sense of needy desperation in her portrayal of the forlorn ghost of Janice Short last night, bringing a ghostly sexuality that is so needy it simultaneously arouses and spooks us.

 

The hungry ghost / sexual sacrifice on the tortuous wheel of insatiable lust motif permeates American Horror Story. It is so L.A., and the actors playing desperate Hollywood fortune seekers broken on the rocks of skeevy casting couches clearly tap into their own experiences before finding their footing. The house maid Moira (Frances Conroy) is a ghost who appears as a young hottie incarnation (Alexandra Breckenridge) of herself to desiring men - clouding their perceptions, exposing them to judgment from their daughters when they're seen fooling around with a woman old enough to be their grandmother in the library. We in the audience are forced into a very creepy realization by this one-two switch: all hot young women become old and unsexy eventually so our desire for their young flesh and revulsion toward the old is suddenly revealed as a kind of fever dream grab at immortality. And most of all, we're faced with the question what is more important - that our friends think the girl we're shagging is hot, but we find her hideous - or vice versa? We can't overestimate the idea that the value of beauty in women lies largely in our status amongst our peers for 'having' them. Even in bed with a goddess we may be doomed to savor it not, imagining only instead the high fives and admiration to come the next day amidst our inner circle, being anxious to get to that. In other words, even in the moment of our ultimate desire's realization we instinctively pull away -- already reflecting on what it will be like to have had our desire realized. And Lacan smiles knowingly at your disillusion. He shouts, "Now! Now take a look around you and see things as they really are!" But you are already staring at a hot chick sitting down to dinner in the master's chambers.... with the Eagles. Lucky bastards.

Last night's episode showed that this clouding can be broken through via a man who is able to refuse his desires for a purpose other than fear or guilt. In this case Dr. Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott) is able to refuse not one but two seduction attempts that are created straight out of the Penthouse forum pages, and Ben--who we know from earlier episodes is pretty weak-willed and considers his sexual needs a priority over all else-- has good reason to act on his fantasies: his wife and daughter out of the house (we never see the daughter in the entire episode), and learning of his wife's infidelity as the perfect excuse. 

That he does not, even with no strict moral impetus hanging over his neck, is what breaks the spell. Buddhists call this 'moksha' or the ability to transcend ego via the abandoning of the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, tedium, etc. The realization whatever we run from chases us and whatever we chase runs, therefore we find pain always hot on our heels and pleasure always just out of reach. Or as the Eagles song goes: "Some dance to remember, some dance to forget." And it's the same dance either way. The pain of remembrance exists only in relation to our resistance, just as pleasure exists largely in terms of its delay. Ben's big breakthrough this episode was a refusal of the hungry ghost appetite even though fear of being caught became no longer a factor.  In other words, even with no witnesses and no possible reward for his asceticism, he chooses it anyway, and this is the only time it's ever worth a damn, for morality under the gun is only obsequiousness, itself a kind of sin. To thine own self be true, but is lust true?

That said, a lack of appetite for illusion has no place in haunted Los Angeles. The ghosts in his house, such as his ex-mistress student Hayden (Kate Mara), long and pine and remain trapped in perpetual hungry ghost longing. But on the other hand, they don't have to pay rent! They don't have to sleep, or eat, or go to work, or face rejection by the outside world. As the song goes "this may be heaven or this may be hell" and in Hotel California the difference is erased, just as the dance is both to remember and to forget. Either way we play it we can still hear the voices calling from far away, waking us up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say "thanks for coming in but I'm afraid we're looking for someone just a little bit younger."

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