Butler of Orbs: THE MASTER (2012)

 "The only performance that truly makes it is the one that achieves madness" - Turner (Mick Jagger) -  PERFORMANCE) 

What was true in 1968 in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's countercultural mindfuck classic is still true in 2012's impression of 1950 in Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER. Blocked rocker Turner (Jagger) says the above quote to a working class brute named Chaz (James Fox), who's been sleeping in Turner's basement, on false claims of knowing the previous tenant. Turner wants to kick him out, but isn't sure quite how -- the other half is drawn to the danger he feels emanating from him, for Chaz does performance too via intimidation, beatings, vandalism and destruction for his boss, Harry Flowers. Turner just makes music but if you can't see the element of violence in the Rolling Stones then you never saw GIMME SHELTER. Eventually the psyches of the two men merge like Alma and Elisabeth Vogler in Bergman's PERSONA (1966). No such merging occurs between the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and deranged alcoholic sailor Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) in MASTER, but that's the point, I think. They try to. All writers and artists are warmed by true madness like its some crazy kind of fire. Ideally we don't get burned, but them's the breaks if we do. We never regret it, even if we end up permanently scarred.

Freddie is reminiscent of that old Buddha saying: Do not seek enlightenment unless you do so as one whose hair is on fire seeks water.  When we see him first peering over the front of a landing boat, his helmet shining in the Pacific sun making him seem almost Buddha bald. Next he's gamboling about the beach making cocktails by pouring paint thinner into a cocoanut. Next he's screwing women made from sand, cooling his flaming hair with anything that's around. If you've ever convulsed with the DTs or been stifled by writer's block then you know what scorched hair tastes like and you'll do anything to avoid it, including applying some Devil's Springs 162 proof scalp ointment, hoping somehow you can just have a few thirst and burning free moments in between unconsciousness and the misery of the day.

So when Freddie wakes up from a black-out on a ship heading out to sea, the master and commander of the vessel, Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) invites him into the fold, recognizing a Chaz when he sees one, and Dodd's budding Scientology/EST-esque Cause needs a wild man in its deck. Instead of dosing him with shrooms like Turner and Anita Pallenberg do with Chaz, its Dodd's experimental hypnosis techniques. We're given to understand that normal ink blot-style testing didn't work on Freddie;  he just sees vaginas and dicks in everything, but that's cool with Dodd. This stowaway alcoholic sex addict is a perfect storm of flaming hair issues, and Dodd likes to drink the crazy chemical cocktails Freddie's a genius at whipping up.

Holy Robes of the Magi - Top: Performance / Bottom: The Master

Anderson's films have always dealt with wild men and shamen father figures, helped no doubt by his own childhood as a son of the original Ghoulardi! It's practically a given Anderson's films will have repeat viewing cachet, rewarding deep study instead of providing mere escapist immersion. Most people I know who've seen THE MASTER have already seen it twice. I didn't like it the first time but it was hot in the theater and I had to pee, and it was very long. I can only wonder if it will improve on a second viewing, or in 70mm which I presumably will never get a chance to find out. And I trust it will, like all PTA's films, continue to expand in meaning and tone as it ages. And certainly it would help if I was more of a cult person, which I'm not despite eight years as an active AA member. I certainly belong to the cult of Paul Thomas Anderson, and Orson Welles, a cult Anderson seems to be a member of as well. Imagine if Orson Welles started a mind-bending sci fi-ish religious cult? Would you join? Even knowing what a charlatan he is? Certainly Hoffman seems to have incorporated a bit of chicanery-espousing MR. ARKADIN-era Welles in his Dodd, which is interesting since Welles is a titanic auteur who's acted in his and other people's movies, just like John Huston, who Daniel Day Lewis incorporated into BLOOD's Daniel Plainview. Heavy subtext prediction, Paul's getting ready to act in a future film!

Cults work, I think, because (sometimes) in life and (always) in Paul Thomas Anderson's oeuvre, there is a 'second' father needed to complete one's journey to maturity and there's a woeful lack of second fathers around in real life, and as a result few men ever become mature enough to be one. This father is what poet Robert Bly called the 'Iron John' archetype -- he may be a monster or a preacher or a boss or an AA sponsor, but we need him and he's been missing from our a cinema where every man is either a whiny whipped pretty boy dutifully sloggging through some rom-com trip to Bed Bath and Beyond, or a hulk with a machine gun in each hand, jumping from an explosion in slow motion.

But Anderson's films all have their Iron John second fathers to such a degree that his films feed the soul through deep Jungian IV tubes, bypassing messy subconscious resistance and going right into archetypal maturity rituals our growing boys and near-men need. Most of the time.

First in the Anderson canon of second fathers was Phillip Baker Hall as an aging gambler taking John C. Reilly in as apprentice in HARD EIGHT (1996); Burt Reynolds found a XXX home for hung lostboy Mark Wahlberg in BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997); in MAGNOLIA (1999) said patriarch was dying, played bravely by Jason Robards, the world around him collapsing because he was a shitty father now reaping what he sowed; PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002) has Philip Seymour Hoffman as an impresario of blackmail, extortion and phone sex bullying Adam Sandler into standing up for himself; Daniel Day Lewis is the ultimate in dark powerful fathers of course in THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) and there you are. Burt Reynolds in BOOGIE was the first time we noticed the strength of this nurturing second father character that marked PTA as a unique auteur able to fuse dark masculine energy with warmth. That tracking shot through the first pool party set to "Spill the Wine" by the Animals, that moment when the camera follows that girl into the pool, that may be the happiest moment of my cinematic life. To dream there's a party of accepting, sexy people waiting somewhere, with a pool, and a jacuzzi, and a blender, wondering where you are, needing you to complete them, ready to make you a star, is that so wrong? Naturally, it all turns to shit in the 80s, but without that warmth there'd be no mourning the loss thereof. That's one of the things that makes an artist, the ability to craft a group of characters to care about, and create a vivid warm place, then have the crazy guts to trash it.

What makes THE MASTER unusual in the Paul Thomas Anderson canon is that the masculine 'Iron John' energy lies in the scoundrel outsider "son," Freddie, instead of the 'Master' Dodd and his clan, and though hardly anemic himself, Dodd--a charlatan as well as a mystic-- recognizes the need to incorporate this wild hair-scorched outlaw drunk sex addict into this oeuvre. Dodd has some anger management issues of his own, though nothing compared to Freddie's. Whenever Dodd's unusual psychoanalytic/hypnotic methods and philosophies come under scrutiny by smug skeptics his repressed rage comes bellowing out in huge gust of Wellesian thunder and childish cursing, and I wished it happened more; I was the only one who laughed in the theater during these outbursts, I found them liberating and familiar to my own holy rants where I'm filming myself pontificating about peace and love and then the phone rings and I erupt; but while Plainview radiated demonic fury, real evil in a huge burst of madness at the end that's among the most splendid pieces of acting ever, Hoffman's Dodd has his greatest acting early on, and then fades away, high and outside on his cult adulation, until the best way he can communicate all he feels about his lost connection to Freddie is through singing how he'd love to get him on a "Slow Boat to China," i.e. he'd love to tangle his neurons into Freddie's raging alcoholic madness, to lock into and siphon off some of the kinetic in-the-moment pit bull brilliance of Freddie Quell, but his mom, I mean his wife, and his flock by extension, won't let him.

So yeah, I'm squarely with old Lancaster Dodd's "Cause" even though for all his charismatic free association, pasts-life regression, and science fiction mumbo jumbo he's pretty rooted in consensual reality, like a Moses who can only guide others to the holy land yet himself never enter. But with Freddie we never know for sure what is 'real' to him and what is 'an illusion' and that proves he's already got the goods Dodds is aiming for. In several scenes we can't be sure if he's dreaming or what he sees is real: a song and dance number the Master performs is seen by Freddie with the women all naked but the men still clothed. Sexist and strange, we are bound to wonder if its real since the ladies stay naked for the rest of the song, like Quell is X - THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES but with more of a selective vision (no penises). Later he receives a phone call from the 'Master' while passed out in an all-night theater, only later we learn it was a dream. Freddie also perceives lascivious come-ons from every girl he's interested in, and later we hear those same women remark he gives them the creeps. These are common effects of long-term sexual addiction and can lead to restraining orders, the receiving signals that aren't there - women appear to him to smile invitingly the way an emaciated anorexic still looks fat in the mirror. Such divides between the real and the vividly imagined are what partying and cinema should be all about. To paraphrase Jimmy Stewart at the end of BELL, BOOK AND CANDLE, Who's to say it what's real, so long as you're really tripping?

And I personally think all of us know, deep down, that most of what Dodd says is true -- reincarnation is real; it's been proven over and over in several different scientific studies and examinations of children who can remember details from past lives they couldn't possibly know otherwise. James Leninger, for example, and all the names and places they talked about have been confirmed through their parents and physician's subsequent historical research. Skeptics can deride all they want from their safe accredited distance, but a few hours of investigations into recorded cases (investigated by academics from established universities) may change even their minds.

Photography through Time, Top: The Master / Bottom: Birth

Still, mainstream science is understandably wary about letting the eerie evidence of reincarnation into their lexicon. It could change everything, for example: property inheritance. Imagine being able to secure your past life property (or debts)! In the future maybe you can take it with you! Remember when every girl in post-WW1 Europe claimed to be Anastasia?  As Peter Tork said in HEAD: "The mind cannot distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." Skeptics latch onto this as proof reincarnation isn't real, which makes no sense since there is plenty of 'hard' evidence when dealing with hypnotically recovered past-life memories, so they're the cranks not the believers. Then again, the believers may be failing to understand the slippery slope they're sliding on. In fact Dodd uses the exact same argument I've used against skeptics, that they believe Egyptian pyramids are real without necessarily having been there so its just insulting to publicly doubt and decry something their own senses have never directly experienced, like a politician lecturing on the dangers of drugs he's never tried. A true scientist wouldn't deride the possibility just because there are some alternate explanations. (5)

Sean (Cameron Bright) in BIRTH (2004) for example, plays at being Nicole Kidman's husband back from the grave, and maybe he is, but there's also some evidence he isn't. It's surely no coincidence that Freddie from MASTER is a portrait photographer and the last time we see Sean (from BIRTH) he's getting his class photo taken, and he seems happy for the first time in the course of the film, willingly dissolving into the frozen sea of amnesia which helps foster the illusion of linear time and lets us 'start from scratch' with all our Monopoly pieces back in the box and a big stupid say cheese smile plastered on our infant kissers.

Even if it's all just science fiction, I still cheer and applaud Freddie's tightly coiled rampaging against the Master's critics. But at the same time I sympathize with the rest of Dodd's family and their disgust over this scrawny, violent, twisted creature who's invaded their sanctuary. The important thing Dodd never quite owns is that it's pointless to even talk to or try to help alcoholics if they're not at least semi-sober since they won't remember a damn thing you say. Oh the shame I'd feel when some guy or girl had to explain to me that we talked all night about all these deep things and I promised this or that or we were supposed to go the zoo or whatever, and I had no idea who they were... and was way too hungover to deal with a zoo.

Bill Wilson - "Master" of AA

To be drunk is to be mystic
then trashed,
with joy as but a brief rest
'tween ordeals of ideals smashed to bits, 

O Whiskey, wife, I sacrifice 
my only son, tomorrow's light,
to God's dull, hungover knife
just to get Him off our case
for one more glowing drunk tonight 

 --Abraham Drinkin'

But at the same time, Freddie earns his keep just by being unbearable. Such monsters are the test of any holy man's mettle, like a bed of nails for the swamis. How do I know? There was a kid, we'll call him Tim, in my AA group, a huge Fat Albert kind of kid with a stutter who laughed too loud and harshly, and he blurted out misogynistic 'jokes,' and his sexual frustration and neediness was like a fungus. No one liked him, but he hung around me and my clique like he knew we had to accept him, since it was AA, after all. This was in the fall of '06, when I was enlightened; my third eye was lit up and with my eyes closed it glowed like sun right above my head between my eyes, and I could predict the future and was never afraid and I was in no hurry and always nice to strangers and able to drink things I never could before without an allergic reaction, like carrot juice. Also I had auric tentacles. If you imagine Dr. Octopus if his metal arms were invisible spiritual energy, then you have an idea of them. I could wrap the tentacles around, say the ends of chairs, tables, subway railings to support myself for balance, they could latch onto the flowers and trees and open up interspecies communications on a level I couldn't entirely consciously comprehend.

But then, after only a month or so of this rare bliss... Tim showed up. My inner God voice told me I had to be nice to him, to accept this crazy violent freak, that it was a test of my nonjudgmental brotherly love. He was my leper. Here's a sponge said God, go wash that big dude's feet. No thanks, said I. END. End of enlightenment. The third eye shut, my window on the future closed, all because I couldn't accept this uncouth hulk of a clingy little brother stand-in. For me, having grown up with an annoying little brother (named Fred, coincidentally) who copied everything I did and followed me around nonstop, the reaction was out of my control. I could never be a cult leader like my dad wanted, not with that attitude!

I have no regrets. I'm happy to be back in the shadows. Enlightenment is a pain in the ass. If you ever achieve it 'early' like that then you know what I mean. You have to follow it around like a butler in charge of a glowing orb of light. Your free will is more or less jettisoned like a booster rocket - there is only love, only the orb, so there is always only one decision, selfless love seeks its own level and you just ride along. The orb comes first, like those eggs you carry in high school to imagine being pregnant. Jesus couldn't suddenly decide he wanted to get drunk and abusive and tell his apostles to take a flyin' leap, for example. Jesus did drink a respectable amount of wine but I haven't read of him getting drunk. He was too busy butlering that damned orb.

clockwise from left: L. Ron, W. James, G.I. Gurdjieff, Bill W., Aleistar C.

Court fools like Jim or Freddie are clearly meant to challenge this universal love practice; they test patience and humility like a personal trainer for mystics, like in the famous story of Gurdjieff's teaching as told by Pema Chodron:

There was a man in his (Gurdjieff's) community who was really bad-tempered. Nobody could stand this guy because he was so prickly. Every little thing caused him to spin off into a tantrum. Everything irritated him. he complained constantly, so everyone felt the need to tiptoe around him because anything that might be said could cause him to explode. People just wished he would go away."

   "Gurdjieff liked to make his students do things that were completely meaningless. One day there were about forty people out cutting up a lawn into little pieces and moving it to another place in the grounds. This was too much for this fellow, it was the last straw. he blew up, stormed out, got in his car, and drive off, whereupon there was a spontaneous celebration. people were thrilled, so happy he has gone. But when they told Gurdjieff what had happened, he said, "Oh no!" and went after him in his car."

   "Three days later they both came back. That night when Gurdjieff's attendant was serving him his supper, he asked, "Sir, why did you bring him back?" Gurdjieff answered in a very low voice, "You're not going to believe this, and this is just between you and me; you must tell no one. I pay him to stay here." (Pema Chodron)

 Gurus admit these sorts of wild jokers into their court only when they are strong enough to stand the test of embracing the abject aspects of themselves; they are the leper's feet tied to a wild Judas goat with the departed soul of Chaz / Turner / Borges in its horns. One look at the crazy eyes, one smell of that noxious alcohol sweat, a sense of the unending animal fury of Freddie Quell and any sensible person will get away fast. If you don't know how to feel about him you're not 'getting' the  joke, that his inscrutable, twisted mask is meant to baffle you. He's a brute, an alcoholic sex addict, in short he's the iron man competition for gurus; he's the spiritual Olympics.

What many who have not seen THE MASTER want to know is, is it as genius as THERE WILL BE BLOOD? The answer is no, yes, and maybe. The indoor cryto-hypno-regressive exercises of 'The Method' are not as cinematic as BLOOD's mostly outdoor oil drilling and wildcatting. But it's perhaps as a result more mature - not to say it is mature. Part of the appeal of PTA's work is that- even all alight with craftsmanship and period detail--the rough and gutsy boy genius energy still pulsates. He'd rather make a towering mess than a good safe little drama and thank god because we have far too many of the latter. In a field full of stuffy bourgeois-kowtowing academy-courting craftsmanship pictures, Anderson moves like the rock and roll bad boy genius, and this is his CITIZEN KANE, with L. Ron Hubbard instead of William Randolph Hearst.

AA stressing the Anonymous part in a rare press photo

My original title for this rambling post was 'Perfection not Progress,' a play on the AA adage of 'Progress not Perfection' since at first I felt the film was kind of inert and rambling (much like this post, perhaps). More so than BLOOD or MAGNOLIA. THE MASTER is 'perfect' but it doesn't resemble progress. We all know how Scientology will mature from the end of this film, becoming a billion dollar mystery cult, and we're never really convinced one way or the other to go along with the Cause's giddy momentum, nor Dodd's jovial king of fools charade. The ultimate difference is that while Dodd may be a true mystic, so are most drunks, as we learn in this quote from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience:

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality. I refer to the consciousness produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. (XVI - Mysticism)

]Man, isn't that always the way? The metaphor so unique and beautiful in its depiction in BLOOD, the drilling into the flesh of the earth, so to speak, and drinking its 90 proof blood, here becomes internalized. Freddie makes his own near-toxic fire water. Freddie builds his own perfect woman, made of sand, as ephemeral a symbol as you're likely to find. What the Cause helps Freddie realize is that those feelings of warmth and contentedness of being with a giant mom of the sea can be duplicated anywhere at anytime. It's all just sensory impressions and if we can master enough of our emotions we can manipulate them, and keep that sandy sea broad in our pocket.

After all, why struggle with your chairs and coolers on the train to Long Beach for the day if you can (as I like to do) stay home and lie by a window with the sun in your face, close your eyes, dab some suntan lotion on your nose and play wave sounds. That's all the beach is anyway, whatever comes through the five senses that paints the beach picture - and if you can get three out of five you're doing all right-- especially smell and hearing. Sometimes my beach experiment (4) is so real it gives me that vertigo pelvis chill feeling that I'm still in the waves.

That vertigo chill feeling isn't just waves of course, it's the nervous system 'remembering' perhaps my own birth, the connection between the ocean and the womb... so if you remember playing in the surf, and being in a womb it's only natural your body can deliver the same shiver via a mere handful of external cues. Without looking out of our windows we can know all things on earth, and we can method act our way into Oscarville and Paul Thomas Anderson is the closest thing America has to a modern titan of cinema, so I should go see THE MASTER again, on 70mm, even if I have to go back to your old neighborhood, the theater across the street from my old fifth floor walk-up, 12th Avenue and 2nd, home of a thousand painfully sweet memories.  Leave those memories at the door...

Manhattan, I'm sorry I haven't written, or called, or returned. I got mad when all the record stores closed. Brooklyn doesn't understand me the way you did. Help me, take me away from all this safety..

PS (from 4/13) - I never did go.

See also my entry in the Andrew Sarris new American Cinema canon on Paul Thomas Anderson (over at Jeremy Richey's peerless Moon in the Gutter)

NOTES:
1. I was the only one laughing in the theater, though. Too bad, hipsters. They probably didn't laugh in joy to see Mickey Rourke rampaging through the supermarket aisles in The Wrestler either. 

2. See also: My Night of the Iguana

3. the objet petit a, as seen in my Lacan Hour sequel. 
4. A. Huysman's A Rebours (Against the Grain).
5. (see my Divinorum Psychonauticus piece Zealots of Doubt: Why Skeptics are the New Cranks.

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Terms of Endangernent: KNIGHT AND DAY, HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE

I finally saw KNIGHT AND DAY (2010), mainly because I learned it was directed by James Mangold, who's been slowly losing artistic weight since his groundbreaking HEAVY (1995) but is still an auteur (I loved HEAVY) who could possibly add a few layers of fatty subtext to even a rote 'rom-com/action' hybrid film. And while it's bad, as expected, it's not as horrible as the similar THE TOURIST (my review here), or Jonathan Demme's TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE (2002). I hate to say this, but Cruise saves it as a variation of his MISSION IMPOSSIBLE series, like he was just in the process of choosing to accept a mission when some hottie wiggled into the room and self-destructed his train of thought. Trouble is, I just can't see that hottie being Cameron Diaz, not anymore. So his train of thought is never quite destructed. He accepts his new assignment of pretending she's hot. And it nearly kills him.

But these things hinge on chemistry, and as Cruise proved in EYES WIDE SHUT, there's only one person who has chemistry with Tom Cruise, and that's Tom Cruise. He and Cameron are a long way from the Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint meet-cute-on-the-run chemistry in NORTH BY NORTHWEST nor do they have a shred of the more age-appropriate Pierce Brosnan-Rennee Russo mature chemistry of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, nor is there even a touch of the cold professionalism breached by a sudden rush of adrenalized vulnerability between Brangelina in MR. AND MRS. SMITH. There's not even the Melanie Griffith -Craig Wasson chemistry of BODY DOUBLE! Instead it's the Pierce Brosnan and Selma Hayek trainwreck non-chemistry of the insufferable AFTER THE SUNSET. J'accuse!

So what's up with this need to wear navel piercings and short shorts into your forties, ladies of Hollywood? Cameron was so jaw-droppingly gorgeous in her debut, THE MASK (above, 1984) that she could have just talked into her cell phone through the whole movie and we would have sat, agog in worship. She was dynamic and fun and there were no cell phones then so double bonus; she had to pay attention. Now, well, she should be taking a good, honest look at her UV-damaged, collagen-depleted midriff before donning a slutty halter top. A bit like Jolie, trying to hide how tired she is in action films such as TOURIST and SALT (my review here), Diaz is stranded by a Hollywood that does not remember how to segue youthful bombshells into mature actresses. If they win an Oscar they might get to make some dull prestige pics like CHANGELING or the HBO remake of MILDRED PIERCE but they probably have to put up some producer money, paid for through their conscription to the action genre. So even though we can see how calcium-depleted their birdlike bones have become we're supposed to believe they can fall five stories onto moving trucks and not shatter their fibulae. Can you imagine Bette Davis or Joan Crawford doing that shit? They'd just surrender, and see you in court for lengthy flashbacks, and wind up taking you for your fortune, shirt, trousers, and life. That's how a lady conquers the bad guys.

Tom Cruise used to annoy me but as I lose faculties to the old devil of age I've come to respect his amped-up vaguely nonhuman HE who must be obeyed agelessness. For KNIGHT however his momentum-addiction becomes a problem: he can't tolerate either being rude to, or slowed down by, Cameron's dopey boy-chaser. When the bullets start flying and she keeps getting in the way of his firing line he just drugs her. BOOM! She wakes up in paradise, or her apartment, or a helicopter. Was it all a dream? How convenient! What a way to travel and to wallpaper over plot holes! Go to sleep in the middle of a gunfight and wake up in a hammock on a private beach where Tom Cruise is cracking your cocoanuts and preparing the marital hut. Guys like me meanwhile can barely get it together to look at travel sites without having a panic attack but here's the thing: we won't drug you, unless you ask, and anyway we're all out of roofies, because we ate them already, ourselves, alone, and because we know that drugging your date as a way to shut her up is as wrong as it is for any other reason. Yet here it is, the weird subtext angle of ick in KNIGHT AND DAY, the roofie-slipping.

Meanwhile Diaz is stuck with the kind of nagging attention-mongering dull void of a character that used to drain all the fun out of post-1934 romantic comedies.  She's jealous of the bullets! She's mad Cruise is looking at the guys who want to kill them instead of admiring her hair. While bullets are flying all around their heads she's wrangling for his attention like that live-in girlfriend who only wants to fool around when you're deeply absorbed in the climax of your video game. If you don't think any of your man's gunfights are as important as your manicure, why not just let him be? Just look at the photos of Cruise and Diaz together above and atop: Cruise is looking outward for danger, guns at the ready, while Cameron moons behind him, staring intently at his profile or his trigger finger like she's thinking of a new way to nag him to be more intimate. In the pic above it's like she's thinking "why won't he put those dumb guns down and notice my new highlights?"

Of course she must--and does--become a warrior by the end of film, moving all of a sudden from annoying LA puer aeterna narcissist to drugged to competent spy all in a single dose of truth serum --but at no point does she seem anything more than a once too-pretty girl whose youthful sex appeal allowed her to coast through life without developing any survival skills or even basic intelligence. While her character allegedly restores vintage 70s muscle cars for a living this characterization is never convincingly developed because for one thing her nails are spotless and another Diaz doesn't seem to give a shit about conveying an interest in cars or anything else. Her character is presumably meant to evoke those sirens in Michael Bay movies who used to date Nic Cage before he went to prison and now work as a bartender or knife thrower, but in reality Diaz is more like those frilly dames who used to chase William Powell around, trying to trick him into marriage while passive-aggressively fouling up his murder case (i.e. STAR OF MIDNIGHT, which I discuss here). Scud missiles of marriage, these broads have no other goal in life but finding, seducing, and trapping their man. The man knows we bought tickets to see him solve mysteries and get into danger, not wrestle out of wedlock headlocks, but that's show biz. 

For all their alleged appeal, how on earth are we expected to find such nagging women characters anything but suffocating and sad? And which gender wrote them? And for what demographic?  I can see any self-respecting girl getting pretty mad at the thought they're supposed to find Cameron's ditziness cute. For men it's only valuable just to see how blind beauty makes us, because if the Cameron Diaz from THE MASK were acting this role, same script and all, we wouldn't even notice how shallow, myopic and self-centered her character is -- our eyes would be glazed over in rapture. Our discomfort and alarm at seeing her trying to pull off the same shit after the bird of youth has flown, is the fall-out from that indulgence. Imagine if we had married her, how miserable now we'd be, a mere 25 years or so later.

For all their faults, these kinds of  romantic misadventure movies have been a staple since the silent age, when DW Griffith would pawn his young lover Carol Dempster off as various island-raised innocent flowers falling in love with handsome drifters, and learning her dad brought her when she was a child to escape murder charges so don't worry bro, she's really white, just really tan, so go ahead and marry her. The miscegenation-negation was offensive enough, but Dempster being uninteresting didn't help. It's important directors not let their vision get clouded by personal relationships. They need to see if stars they chose or received from their backers don't have the chemistry hoped for and pull the plug, recast one or both, immediately. Chemistry is all-important in these films and you can't just 'hope' for chemistry.  Not unless you want a vacuum of cringe-worthy moments surrounded by what amounts to nothing but a lot of the kind of impersonal travelogue details you see on airplanes when you're waiting to take off, telling you about various restaurants and shows and 'hot new' destinations: Of course now that you're in Spain you must take the time to drive a nice car through zee running of the bulls; while in Paris don't forget to run along the rooftops with Peter Sarsgaard taking potshots at you, so classic! Oui? and of course if you're in NYC, the place to be is the Brooklyn navy yards and perhaps the Lincoln Tunnel. If there's no one to chase you up the nose of the Statue of Liberty, it's only that Mangold  (rightly) fears being compared to Hitchcock, the undisputed master of the lovers-on-the-run genre.

Ultimately the fault of films like this-- as opposed to the 'good'  romantic meet-cute adventures--is their inability to closely read the sexual politics inherent in the classics they mimic. They capture the exterior style but not the interior motivations. In NORTH BY NORTHWEST, Eva Marie Saint is the super spy, not Cary Grant. She saves him continually just so she can put him in danger later. That's an important detail filmmakers forget when mining its riches. If Diaz turned out to be the Keyser Soze mastermind, feigning nincompoopery to get close to her target, endangering him to try and actually prevent his success, that would be awesome; it would make her klutziness suddenly relevant. But KNIGHT is never even close to that level of high-flying paranoia. Diaz is just a girl, flash frozen but already a tad decayed, permanently not yet a woman, standing before a guy who by now seems like an ageless Napoleanic superman, asking him to prevent her from getting immanently shot, but preferring that, anyway, to being ignored one minute longer. What she should be doing is watching old films wherein older stars like Jill Clayburgh and Goldie Hawn show how one can get older and stays sexually desirable on camera. One thing they don't do is act desperate. They don't act like those drunken moms who crash their son's Saturday night basement sleepovers with a bottle of wine and too much lip rouge.

In HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE (1965) Jack Lemmon tangles with a similarly needy lady but she's young and hot like MASK-era Diaz, so his treatment of her as a suffocating drag makes no sense. A comic strip writer, nationally syndicated ("The Adventures of Brash Brannigan" - a character similar to Tom Cruise in KNIGHT) and living the bachelor dolce vita, Lemmon winds up married to hot Italian Virna Lisi after she pops out of a bachelor party cake and he's too drunk to understand she's misunderstood his proposition. Still, Lemmon could get used to her if his agent's shrewish wife wasn't brainwashing her to be a jealous harridan, instigating her crashing his gentleman's club because she's sure he's with another woman -- the kind of thing she might do when she's Cameron's age in KNIGHT, but which makes no sense in her present 'pristine mint' condition.

Another the problem is, Lemmon is no suave ladies' man super spy, except in his own mind - while Lisi is the real thing, a goddess. She's present. And that can be unnerving for a man who lives most of his life in either his imagination or an alcoholic fraternal fog. Its unnerving for her too; she's like a bee trying to get nectar from a plastic flower.

The title, incidentally, springs from Lemmon's 'acting out' all his Brash Brannigan adventures / fantasies while his knowing butler taking photos from which to draw for the strip. But Lisi reads the latest edition wherein Brash plots to murder his wife, and she thinks he wants to get rid of her, so she vanishes. Lemmon winds up on trial for murder thanks to the strip's murder plot, and from there it gets really misogynous, as in his closing statement:

"Gentlemen, I address you not as judge and jury, but as a fellow American male. The crime that you have just seen Harold Lampson commit in his imagination I have been accused of committing in reality. Too long has the American man allowed himself to be bullied, coddled, and mothered, and tyrannized, and in general meant to feel like a feeble-minded idiot by the female of the species. Do you realize the power that you have in your hand here today? If one man - just one man - can stick his wife in the goop from the gloppitta-gloppitta machine, and get away with it! Whoa-ho-ho, boy, we've got it made. We have got it made. All of us." 

 The trick of course through which to avoid murder trials like this is to not let women get the upper hand in any movie scripted by George Axelrod in the first place, and that requires a certain danger and unpredictability in your actions. Girls love a mysterious bad boy, and if you're mysterious enough you don't have to be bad, just seem bad. For example, if she wants you to cut the grass, go out drinking. If she wants you to go out drinking, cut the grass. If she wants to know where you are at all times, then leave telltale signs your having an affair in such a way as to make her crazier and crazier so she bursts in on you doing something innocent, in front of witnesses. Collect matchboxes from strange clubs and leave them in your coat pocket for her to find; keep a locked drawer in your desk and when she pries it open there's a single envelope, and in it is a single note that reads "you should be ashamed of yourself." Hide a single woman's earring under the bed in a slipper, a splash of perfume on a crushed Kleenex in the bathroom trash can. Write down the things you left lying around in a hidden notebook you can pull out when she confronts you, to prove you were setting her up. Sound devious? It works, though, and will steer her into a career in criminology!

Believe me, you're doing her a favor. If she's paranoid and you don't supply her with clues and evidence trails to occupy her time you're not doing her any favors. Believe me, I know....

Perhaps the best thing you can do is to just relish the squabbles; a lot of women just need to sharpen their claws, to punch at you and scream and yell and enact the archetypal tug of war that is one man and one woman tied together like cats on a clothes line (gay marriage has its own, different archetypal chronology). Woman, capital W, will never be satisfied for longer than a few days with any of Man's attempts to appease her: furs, jewels, bridges, water works, steel mills, circuses --none of it has ever worked permanently. If he lets her pick out all his clothes she'll lose all respect for him; if he dresses himself she'll wince in embarrassment. The truth is, she's testing your mettle; she wants to fight. She wants to know you're stronger than her, or at least as strong, so she can relax and not feel she has to be the dominant one in your pack, to use Dog Whisperer parlance.Many men make the mistake of trying to appease Woman's wrath, to supplicate, but such spineless behavior in their men is what makes wives into nags, which they resent you for, and they should.

Still, I don't mean this as a knock. Without woman's continued dissatisfaction would civilization have ever happened? Understand the deeper currents at work and admire Woman's rage and discontented howling for its vigor rather than wincing at realizing you're more than likely its target. There's no need to drug her or murder her or cave in to her demands if you're down to fight... for you're right to par.....

Oops, the ball and chain just yelled out from the bedroom... it's 2 AM, on a weekday.

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LOUIE ("Late Show: Part 2"): David Lynch and the Pupkin-Headed Teleprompter

Anyone at all concerned with comedy TV in this country knows that LOUIE (Thursdays at 10:30 on FX, parental discretion advised) is what matters in this moment. It's 'real' yo - it's how reality is, maybe. And if it ain't real then it's certainly surreal, especially after this week's episode. Before this it had always gone deep into the abyss of sexually frustrated, mildly overweight middle-aged white male angst within us all, now it goes further, to the Rupert Pupkin within us all. And of course I'm referring to Scorsese's itchy 1983 exercise in comedic torture, KING OF COMEDY, because Louie has a shot at replacing Letterman (within the show, that is), and of course he must follow that opportunity, even if it goes against the grain of his depressive sloth.

And in my apartment, LOUIE hits close to home, literally. We've seen them shooting scenes for an arc where Louie go into the bookstore across the street from our 7th ave and Garfield Apt. in Park Slope, to pick up Parker Posey as a cute employee who, we must discern on our own if we're able, is bi-polar. Having the bookstore so close conjures many thoughts: is Louie supposed to be living here? Why on earth would he come down here just to go to a bookstore? I've been in there and it's very nice, but books are cheaper on Amazon, usually, so it's hard to buy things there, or anywhere, any more. This all has to do with the LOUIE episode with David Lynch by the way.  It's relevant, bear with me.

At first the casting of David Lynch as "Jack Dahl" -- an ancient executive assigned with grooming Louie for the slo-- seems like just stunt casting. Without warning, he times Louie with a stopwatch while his agent shows a cue card of a joke written during the Nixon administration, and Louie thinks the whole thing can't even be real and if he just acts bewildered and dumb enough he'll escape, but he can't and he'll have to do better. Oblivious to Louie's awkward reticence and feeble blamecasting about the datedness of the material, Dahl announces Louie will need to wear a suit. When Louie refuses Dahl stares at him in bewilderment then sends him off to a boxing gym for a well-deserved beating.

But during Louie's second visit to Dahl it all starts to take shape, as the old man demonstrates technique by standing before a curtain on camera and waving and gesturing to nonexistent audience members as an applause and laugh track plays. Whole books have been written about audio mimesis as utilized in Lynch's amazing MULHOLLAND DR. (at the Club Silencio), and the eerie ghosts of 20th century sound recording still echoing across time.

Top - Louie / Bottom - Mulholland Dr.

Basically what this 'mimesis' is, as far as I can tell, is a study of how we let electronic reproduction take over for our own voices, becoming more and more aligned with the machine, so we become more and more like cold machines, our voices nearly always spoken in phones instead of in 'real time' - our music coming from iPods rather than live bands, it all adds up to make us alienated from the text of our own lives, to become passengers on the ship of ourselves while streams of ones and zeros do the talking to and for us. How do I know? I designed this poster for a guest lecturer at Pratt a few years ago and not to toot my own digitally-encoded horn but I'm good at seeming to know about weird new academic subjects without really knowing shit. (I never go to the lectures, why go hear someone actually speak when there's podcasts?)

One thing I do know: if you want to imagine David Lynch's acting in this LOUIE episode without seeing it, know that he was either consciously or unconsciously channeling the Weenie King (Robert Dudley) in PALM BEACH STORY! (in video below, FF to about halfway through).



So what Dahl is driving at in LOUIE is that hosting a show with millions of viewers is a matter of  surrendering to a kind of mass hypnosis common denominator existence, like AVATAR in reverse. All your rough edges must be sanded away because you are being welcomed to the machine where after the cigar you are reduced to ones and zeros and sent across vast cable distances and there is no place for modern slacker t-shirts and jeans when the men you have to impress still consider poodle skirts the height of sexy, as Lynch clearly does in MULHOLLAND DR.

Louie's TV talk show guest appearances reveal he's funny and perceptive and on point, so why not give us some of that guy, don't we--and Dahl--deserve it, in this season? LOUIE is still brilliant as a show, but as a character--as a semi-fictional version of himself--he's stagnating through a kind of dopey everyman cluelessness. Compare him to Seinfeld or Larry David who both kept their intellect as fictional versions of themselves on their shows and Louie is found wanting. He finds his comedy lately by breaking simple rules of common sense and intrinsic understanding of how to avoid unpleasant situations. An earlier episode found him sticking around a Florida hotel after already saying good-bye to the cool friend he made, never imagining it won't be awkward or pointless; calling the cops to find his lost daughter rather than checking her closet, where she goes to read all the time; agreeing to babysit some skeevy kid who likes to throw other people's stuff out the window (and other things too gross to mention); agreeing to help a truly insane woman on a trip to the brutal, soul-crushing, waking nightmare known as IKEA, then declining her proffered fellatio payment; accepting a fellatio offer from a drunken insane truck driver lady but not reciprocating; buying a motorcycle on a whim without a clue how to drive it, then crashing with nothing but a blank shrug as an apology to the lady stuck watching your kids; letting rival comedians (Chris Rock, Jay Leno) know he might replace Letterman leaving when he signed a confidentiality agreement not to tell anyone. No one this self-sabotaging and dumb could make it as far as Louie has, even the scaled down fame within the show. He'd never make it one week on the road with his helpless schmuck schtick, they'd beat the tar out of him in the parking lot, with good reason. They'd be doing him a favor, like Dahl is by having beat up in the gym.

Jack Dahl is the first character in Louie's show to be adequately annoyed by him. Hopefully next week Dahl will hook him up with some Adderall and Effexor. Clearly the casting of 'king of post-modern audio mimesis' Lynch in a role that requires him to wave to an invisible applause track for two minutes is genius, but one must ask why Louie CK reserves no genius for his own character. He is not Buster Keaton and he is not Cary Grant. He is not comely, yet he acts the way a comely maiden does... if he dropped his handkerchief he'd stand there helplessly, expecting a rescue from a tall dark rationalization. And that's not cool. Only young hot chicks can get through life in this kind of bubble, not middle-aged comedians with famous friends and TV deals - they clawed their way up for that shit, with brains, talent and relentless pursuit of bigger and bigger audiences.

So it begs the question: does Louie think we would identify with a character who won't even identify with himself? We would be paralyzed too in these surreal situations with Dahl and that's just one reason why we didn't pursue a show business career. I remember auditioning for a voiceover agent and since I wasn't able to snap into brilliance in a crowded office after waiting around for ten minutes and dealing with the subway to get uptown she declined representing me, since I was dizzy from lack of sugar and dry in the throat and hungover I flailed. I took it as a sign. My nerves just couldn't handle being expected to snap into brilliance on a dime. So instead I stay home gazing into a conglomeration of electricity, plastic and digital code shining in big rectangle, like the Evil Queen hallucinating Snow White in every crack, every glowing ball a mirror showing a deformed face I won't claim as my own. Ideally the guy in the mirror would claim it as his, but as LOUIE progresses, it's pretty clear not even he wants to own up to his puffy visage.

(see also Roger Cormier's Splitsider recap from which I borrowed yon images)

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Creedence and Ivy's Eco-Terrorist Revue

When it comes to environmentalism we're pretty short-sighted...we shout save the old growth trees and the endangered species as if that's really enough. Make sure at least a handful of a certain frog endures and these trees don't get cut, and then let the corporations do what they will to the rest. Man, it's way complex and nature can be a bitch, too, just as ruthless as people. Plants are nice and all but sometimes they can kill you.

Two hot babes in critically panned but so-bad-their-good films made a bold attempt to spin us around and face the triffid, as it were, in the 90s. And they represent dark funhouse mirrors bracketing the entire tree-hugger experience. In TROLL 2 (1997), Deborah Reed plays Creedence Leonore Gielgud - bottlecap glasses, hair-in-a-bun horticulturist by day, super sexy purveyor of drugged popcorn cobs by night. Her mission: facilitate a bunch of puny humans' eating of a special green toxin that turns them into plants so her troll children can eat them without getting tummy aches.

In BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997) Uma Thurman plays a bottlecap glasses, hair in her face horticulturist who winds up buried in a bed of chemically enhanced plant neurotoxins after she spies her boss creating Bane (way better than Chris Nolan's version). When she rises up as if from a lonesome coffin it's as a super sexy purveyor of drugged plant powder which she blows into her foe's faces so they, like Bane, will do her bidding. Her mission: 'greenify Gotham' by eliminating its pesky human residents.

In both films these sirens represent the malignant, understandably misanthropic flip side of plants. We desire them. They are beautiful and have a sense of humor. We're not necessarily encouraged to root for the idiots they slaughter, turn to troll food, or seduce into becoming their pawns.

It's surely no coincidence also that critics--a notoriously reactionary lot-- would hate on both these films. Just imagine these two lovely eco-terrorists working together! An unstoppably sexy eco-terrorist force would arise! Imagine if Nolan had kept Poison Ivy for RISES! Played by Angelina Jolie, aided by a flock of third world child soldier flunkies?

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997) was poorly received in its initial theatrical run but, later, catching it in a Sunday afternoon stupor on cable, and having since seen TROLL 2 twice and most of BEST WORST MOVIE (the celebration of TROLL 2's cult audience, both are on Netflix streaming), it all makes sense. Director Joel Schumacher's film simply fooled fans expecting more of the dark crusader who scowled in his cowl through the Burton films and the BATMAN RETURNS kinkfest with Val Kilmer. But Schumacher turns out to be a true fan of the original camp TV show more than the Goth Burton, as well as the classic weird Hollywood pre-codes set in the then-modern art deco era as opposed to Burton's preferred 80s art gallery Victorian.

Schumacher's vision also includes clear references to 1934 Edgar G. Ulmer-directed horror classic THE BLACK CAT and the big centerpiece charity auction involves a clear homage to Dietrich's "Hot Voodoo" sequence in BLONDE VENUS (1932). In short, while BATMAN AND ROBIN is bad, it's 'our' kind of bad. And after the terminally dour civics lecture of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES it's like a breath of fresh poison pollen.

The plot involves Ivy teaming up with Mr. Freeze: he will freeze ze world and maybe leave her some spare earth to grow on but at least all the plant-objectifying human apes will stop their tromping all over her precious earth dance floor. Arnold Schwarzenegger, gleefully shouting such lines as "Ice to see you!" in his comical accent, stealing diamonds for his freeze ray and cultivating the whole suspended animation wife in a vase thing, is straight up Bela Lugosi and then Uma comes onto the scene to the tacky roller rink and Ventures guitar instrumental version of "Poison Ivy." Stripping out of her drag queen hot pink gorilla costume Poison Ivy is a fine candidate for the ultimate rejection of Darwinism, reversing evolution to a friendlier pre-Adam Eden. Thurman's clearly having fun, looks great and adds to the pre-code resonance by doing a Mae West impression, with double entendres like "my garden needs tending" and "some lucky boys are bound to hit the honey pot."

Like so many of the films and TV shows, Batman lives and dies by his villains: Jim Carrey saved the previous film in the franchise as the Riddler; RISES would be lost without Anne Hathaway; the 60s show would have been nothing without the super sexy Julie Newmar, and in ROBIN the awfulness is saved by Uma, who captures Newmar-esque litheness in addition to West's sashay and Dietrich's de-evolution.  Rolling her eyes and carrying on about the plants of Mother Nature having their day, and 'greening Gotham' after ridding herself of the feathered and furry caped crusaders, Thurman is at least in on the joke as well as exhibiting some sign--lacking in all the other cast members--that she's seen some of the films Schumacher is referencing. And her servant Bane is ten times more fun in this issue as a hulking, mute inflatable Mexican wrestler instead of a musclebound Marxist professor, and her plan for world domination is ten times cooler, if you'll forgive the pun, than her partner Mr. Freeze's freezing of Gotham.

That said the cast is a mixed bag: Clooney's a one-note Batman, nitpicking on Robin's impetuous risk-taking ala Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan nitpicking on Annakin in the future Star Wars films, and as Batgirl, Alicia Silverstone is exhibit A in why sometimes you need those special 'slimming' amphetamines in the picture biz. You think Joe Sternberg wouldn't have sent her home, in tears and broke her contract? But at least Arnold does recall Otto Preminger, who brought Teutonic menace aplenty to his Freeze on the 1960s TV show. Arnold's melancholy over his chilled wife Nora is palpable; tears freezing as they form in an echo of Bela's melancholy over his suspended animation wives in THE INVISIBLE GHOST, VOODOO MAN as well as Boris' cold necrophilia in THE BLACK CAT (below).

But in order to savor all that high strangeness you have to embrace the day glo nite brite cityscape colors and huge shrugging Atlases that span hundreds of stories, skyscrapers placed atop skyscrapers with thin little roadways between them, like some kid is combining all his play sets into one huge bi-level battlefield that starts on his bed and ends in his little sister's room, and so the matchbox Batmobile would naturally go from the bed to the carpet along the cliffside of an armless plastic Shogun Warrior, like a Japanese Mount Rusthmore was sculpted down to the shoes. And the little sister got day-glo paint for X-mas and vandalized all the toy sets (or beautified them if you ask her). In fact, Wayne manor is the only place in Gotham not covered in green fire pots, and occupied by lounging thugs too colorful (electric lime and magenta) to be threatening. So what is there left, without menace? There is only Ivy. In fact she's a great cousin to...

Creedence Leonore Gielgud in TROLL 2!!

Creedence and her troll underlings have a strict diet and the preparations for this constitute the bulk of their eco-terrorism. Caught in a weird ironic limbo wherein they only eat humans but are strict vegans, they have to turn the humans into plants before they can eat them. So it's a long process involving getting the humans to eat some bright green food coloring, which causes them to quickly sprout branches and roots. And so the plant word has its revenge here, too. Creedence then is a bit like Magneto in the first X-MEN when he turns Senator Kelly into a mutant so he can see what it's like to be the hunted. Creedence turns humans into plants for the same reason, so they can see what it's like to be treated as an object--harvested, burned, smoked, made into newspaper, and boiled (like some kind of 'super carrot.') While meat may be murder, veganism is anti-human. Aren't most apes, after all, plant eaters?

Keep your eye on the cob, buddy

Like Uma's hyper-stylized Mae West-ish Poison Ivy delivery, Deborah Reed va-vooms the roof off in three different incarnations: the lady with bad teeth and Anne Bancroft shades; the wild-haired witch with even worse teeth and a from-the-diaphragm acting approach even Toshiro Mifune might widen his eyes over; and the hot-to-trot TV movie seductress (with great teeth, all the better to castrate you with, my dear) who appears on the last living lunkhead's trailer TV screen as he sulks alone, parked way out in the middle of nowhere for no clear reason. It's like any lonesome teenager's fantasy has come true: babes are literally coming right out of the TV screen to 'do it' with him. Now all he has to do, he thinks, is keep perfectly still...

But it's not that simple. Creedence brings a phallic corn cob, which she shoves into the mouth of this doltish bro (his lack of response even to this is hilarious) in a way that prefigures the conversion to vegetable and calls the whole issue of phalluses and penetration into turnaround. Luckily the corn is not green, if you'll forgive the expression. And since the rest of the film is so aesthetically ugly when Creedence turns hot and busts that thigh above you swoon like you're sixteen all over again.

In another great scene, one of the other bros is potted by Creedence and placed in amidst the other foliage in her lobby. In other words she seems to have made a lot more headway in her eco-terrorism campaign than Poison Ivy, who clearly made a mistake hooking up with the frigid Mr. F.

Like poor Ivy in BATMAN AND ROBIN, Creedence too may lose out to the human species for the nonce, but there's no doubt whose side we're on as viewers. Neither film ends with any kind of peace or happily ever after and for once this open ending approach gives us hope rather than jitters. Poison Ivy is locked in a cell with Mr. Freeze, which seems very inappropriate for any jail system -- something's bound to give and soon she'll be free! Or pregnant with frozen tundra children. And TROLL 2 ends, well, I shan't spoil it. Just see it and eat your green jello and drink your green beer and smoke your green herb, peel off your ape skin and stay awhile, dearie... right there on the couch. Be rooted, mi papa de la sofá - the eco-terrorist goddess of the Sage and Screen will water you, rest assured. Rest assured.

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Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, and the Republican National Convention

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. Burying pet and children chasing balls, and anyone else your now-limited government can't protect, sweeping them under the rug, becomes necessary. Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over you're no longer 'our family', but something abject and ostracized, best shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room, spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all warts.

Like Medicare and Social Security, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America  is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet: anxiety over population control (in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for death); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. Whatever you bury up the hill in a certain spot returns the next day, a demonic somnambulist of voracious homicidal ill will. It's like sending your good Christian values kid away to college and having them come back a vegetarian pothead socialist.

All this deep subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtext. Instead it belongs with the invaluable crapola consciousness-raiser Godsend, not just because they are both about the horrid deals distraught  parents might be willing to make in order to allay the grief of losing a child but because they do so right under a blase' horror audience's nose. Naturally we'd have to do whatever it took to bring them back if it was possible, as parents, but since it's impossible we can truly relax into our pain, surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue helps the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1) in examining how the reanimation option can cause loads of trouble. And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in PET the leavening Woodsianism comes from the image of a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of 2012 (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral can provide" - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1967)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comfort funerals can provide." In the Romero analogy, Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals, but I say these are our loved ones and we're not going to give them up!" Or vice versa, the utterly short-sighted nonsensical concept that we can better save ourselves by fucking over the earth or, more metaphorically, there's no time to put out the kitchen fire, moms have to make dinner tonight! It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from her toes; Arabs are pulling out her entrails; the Asian markets are scooping up her brains for overseas jobs. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country.

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice, and avoid 'getting everything you want' which would mean a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression on one side or an overly permissive socialist Welfare State on the other.  Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight for show - for balance.

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media who paint the opposition in vivid brushes to make it seem as if the comfort a funeral can provide is really after all not 'dubious.' The media's obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, while PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so awesome. In Romero's zombie films, we have the mom with the trowel in the first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from the man and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch determined to recognize that life begins at death, to the point of his posse killing anyone who disagrees. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' - it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic. Society is still in the midst of its collapse and two crotchety Irish landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain them up and let them deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster image for it all (above) is a hot Irish lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of it. It's a great moment: National Velvet of the Living Dead. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely paintings which 'come to 'life' the way the buried do. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young. And there's a fine line between wanting to return to any kind of past glory and actual denial of death. Zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior danger. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we floating in the cheap seats can live, for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove)  with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own. The dead people in the photo are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted hindsight. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet: if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels. "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again, just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he can't tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides would be lost without the other to blame in order to keep their rabid constituents happy - and sometimes the more angry you are at the other side the more it's really you're angry at someone else, but they're gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, mocking you from the mantelpiece, until the first face Fox tells you to hate, you hate.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)

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It's here, it's mindbending, it's Acidemic #8

This issue: Brecht-Godard-Wood, linked circlets connecting the search for freedom through 'dislodging' cinematic signifiers and turning bare soundstages into ghost ships and surrealist basements. This year's stellar line-up batted down the plate and strewn orchids on the grave of logic.

If through the issue you notice very little Godard, know this: Godard is in all things whether we speak of him or no. There is no going straight from Brecht to Wood. I tried. But my own understanding of film studies comes roundabout through Godard's dedication to Monogram Pictures (whose Return of the Ape Man is discussed) at the start of Breathless. 

Ed Wood by Mick Baltes

Also in this mighty issue: Peter K. Tyson decodes the Brechtian intertexutality of Fassbinder's Lola; teenage Molly Marie Wright rages against the empty-headed CGI of the Total Recall remake vs. the paravegan grandeur of Troll 2. Intertextual frisson erupts as Thomas Duke challenges Roger Ebert's perception of 'flaws' in Edgar G. Ulmer's poverty row classic Detour; Chris Stengl exhumes Pauline Kael's 'lost' review of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I lament the dryness of David Sterritt's Les Carabiniers commentary track. Film historian David Del Valle discusses the joys and inaccuracies of Tim Burton's Ed Wood while acclaimed Nuyorican poet Tracie Morris expresses her misgivings over Burton's Dark Shadows and praises the original 1,000+ episode TV show. We get insightful probes into the basement surrealism of both Val Letwon's The Ghost Ship (from Ethan Spigland), and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (from Budd Wilkins). Gregory Cwik discusses metatextual threads in horror via Cabin in the Woods, and I through Halloween.... and through the valley of the shallows of Brecht, we shall find Woodsy depth.

And we learn how Godard's Prénom Carmen explains the truth about UFOs, for, as the great Eros would say, "you didn't actually think you were the only inhabited planet in the universe? How can any race be so stupid?"

And check out Memento Mori, the staggeringly detailed historical action figure comic by our cover artist, Mick Baltes.

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