1994: The year Fiorentino and Tarantino saved us from Vampire Morality

Now more than ever we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror boom of the 1980s as a golden age, thanks in a large part to the Scream Factory series of DVDs coming out, elevating to high art in their loving detail everything from old slasher films to oddball Dolph Lundgren Terminator riffs like Dark Angel (see my praise piece on BLAD: "Rated R for Retro"). The market was so big that in 1987 two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story:  Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain teenage hunk--in a single parent family with a younger sibling-- ready for his first big mistake, falling for a hot young vampire who lures him into her weird pack. The pack in each film includes a small child vampire and a wild man shadow figure to the lead. And each lead wastes his gifts in lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing one's first drop of innocent blood. Ugh, there's the rub.

I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres --me being around their same age. And seeing them now they're fun and brooding in their measure, but man, I've had it up to here with these brooding hunks who dig the percs of being vampires and don't mind drinking blood if a hot vamp girl feeds it to them from her own wrist after she does the dirty work, but won't go around killing humans for food, because that would be 'wrong.' Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend! Son, that's called being a mooch, a lazy good-for-nothing boytoy - a K-Fed.

The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark)

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The buzzkills

Yeah man, Jason Patric in Lost Boys, Adrian Pasdar in Near Dark: two doe-eyed hunks used to getting everything they want through manipulating hot babes, relying on their motorbike or horse to wow the girls into submission, clinging to their vamp girl like she's their new mommy (one of perhaps a long string of blank doormats expected to worship their lame peccadilloes), they suck, in short.

Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys but young male viewers who aren't doe-eyed hunks aren't about to identify with these clowns and we're the ones who watch these kind of movies, the ones who would kill some humans and drink their blood, and worry about our immortal souls at the proper time (after it was too late to do anything about it). That would be a good angle: the awkward shy kid uses his vamp gifts to bite everyone whoever wronged him and gets so high off the hottie vamp's attention and the sense of belonging to the cool kids for the first time in his 'life' that he doesn't eve have a second thought until it's far too late. Instead, in these two films, the doe-eyes just squirm and try to dodge their bloodletting responsibilities like Donnie Brascoe with a gun to a squealer's head, waiting for a deux ex machina to rescue them. We end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase, it lingers on the edge of our beautiful manipulative older male swan phase and re-surges in the old reprobate phase, when we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandchildren's.

Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A: When he sees Star (Jami Gertz) in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage (with a great burly rock sax guy), he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away instead of falling onto her knees before his physical beauty, which he considers a sacred church and therefore no laughing or running around should be allowed in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood.  These scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the warning signs going off deep in your sacral chakra.

Star, it turns out, has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan, with Kiefer's approval - but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away after nights of drinking weird potions in the basement with the boys, trippin out on Miles Davis' Live Evil and driving home at dawn on the back of undulating black asphalt serpents with yellow dash line dorsal ridges. We didn't blink! Patric's a pussy.

Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, pumping anthem rock, and ingenious literalizing of common phrases of parents at the dinner table (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness: vast fields like a lover's skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos; one of the more realistic looking biker bars caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly, drip by drip from the numbness of time's passionless faucet and the emptiness of the landscape which the pack visits and rains terror on, almost like an angel of deliverance from this glum nothingness.

Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend rather than nut up and get his own. One could conceivably view it as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores who get super indignant when confronted with evidence of their butcher's slaughterhouse crimes, wherein they'll eat all the meat you can serve, provided as they don't have to look into its eyes. Serve the calf's brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're a serial killer; serve the usual rump steak and you're simply a nice host. Serve honey roasted grasshoppers, you're a freak. Fried shrimp? A true surfside chef! Shrimp are just insects of the sea, dude. And killing humans is no different than choosing your own lobster once you're not a human anymore. If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!

I feel guilty every time I leave my cat in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back I wince at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Rules of the Game (1939) is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real, and the hunters barely noticing, so wrapped up in their petty romantic intrigues? And though the characters don't flinch, Renoir does. But he doesn't blame them -- they are after all the very rich, the predator species of all cultures. It's what they do. That's real morality and if it leaves a strange taste in the mouth, savor it, that's the bitter tang of real art!

I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. My body was like fuck you I'm a meat eater, give me meat or after the little bit of fat we've stored is gone I'll start in on the muscle, bro, I just don't give a fuck. So I obeyed it, the way a vegan game warden obeys its aristocratic ruler. I learned one simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook. And whatever happened to the apocalypse of 12/21/12? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream... 'cuz it's dairy.

Going back to meat took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me. Maybe the whole point of ignorance is bliss, there's a reason that Italian guy eats a steak in The Matrix and not a celery stalk.

Tony Scot's parallel lines 

Too bad filmmakers, even talented ones with some moral fibre (mmm mmm) like Neil Jordan, Bigelow, and Tony Scott, balk at the chance for true vampiric ambiguity: The Hunger, Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys, the list of movies where a lucky stiff is vamped only to get all moral about killing is endless. It makes me wonder... is there any vampire movie where the newborn actually does kill a human or two without moping about it for the rest of the story? (see my post on Vampire Morality Blues). Damn I need a drink. Oh wait. I can't anymore. I'm like one of these vegan vamps, but for booze.

But then... a miracle happened. The year was 1994, a boozy flood came and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction. 

Looking at them now, they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed the innocent and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free. And we rooted for them every step of the way.

There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs, probably wiping out dozens with collateral damage, but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired by The A-Team without one guy being even wounded; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious problem.  But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah.

Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!

Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture references didn't make the QT films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid; the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing, the more true they are. Audiences can be trusted to not all go home and kill Rodney Dangerfield. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying. Can't you ever let go of the handrails.. even in a dream?

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Raiders of the Found Stash, from Flint's Treasure to the Crystal Skull!

In addition to being priceless, education ruins movies, it brings a liberal arts-enforced, PC-indoctrinated empathy that can subject once merry romps to bitter pill analysis and wool-less eyes. The jaundiced way I see West Side Story (1961) for example, now corresponds to a warning about Syria: instead of letting warring tribes settle their differences in an organized rumble, Tony barges in, uninvited, and two people end up dead. If he had just stayed out of it all the differences might have been ironed out in a simple brawl -- a few bloody knuckles and black eyes instead of corpses. But as Maria says "any fighting is no good for us," - ai Maria! Fighting is much better than dying. America, and Maria, disagree.

Similarly Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) used to be about awesome fights and solid thrills. I saw it eight times in the theater alone, probably 20 more once I bought it on video back when videos cost $40! Now, some 30 years later, I see that its innocence and 'matinee spirit' carry a steep price on the social science major's conscience. Is innocence itself is the culprit behind its covertly pro-colonialist--even fascist--message? It's Starship Troopers without the self-aware irony. Spielberg and Lucas apparently woke up to this, too, because the 'where are they now' saga of growing old and passing the legacy and zzzz  begun in Last Crusade (1989)--which I despised despite the awesome zeppelin-- continues in Crystal Skull (2008). Now Jones is in the Sean Connery role, i.e. a know-it-all curmudgeon, traveling the world with rock-n-roll son in tow, and brawling with stakes far too high for his age. Does Spielberg think this is pleasant, forcing us to imagine his frail old skeletal system subject to such harsh abuses?

Worse, he wants to grab that crystal skull, not for his museum or alien research or curiosity, but to return it to its rightful lost city high in the Mayan ruin area, so the Russians don't turn it into a source of 'limitless power.' Based on past experiences he should just mosey along after it, nice and slow, give the Russians time to try it out for themselves and then just pick it up from their melted skeletal fingers at a more convenient time. But he doesn't want them even to see it. He'd be right at home in MAJ-12! He'd rather make sure the skull is in the same place as the Ark and all the treasures he's looted, safely buried in a classified storage facility, never realizing that in withholding these relics and truths from the curious he's little more than a Medieval Catholic astronomer-torturer.

But this Indy's too old to check his own self, that would infer some sort of legitimate curiosity about the world around him. This amazing skull with its grey oblong headshape and odd powers is clearly alien and yet Indy still scoffs when the only 'awake' and genuinely curious character in the whole thing, Russian agent Spalko (Cate Blanchett), mentions its unearthly origins or expresses a personal desire to learn the truth about extraterrestrial experience and intentions. He scoffs like she's crazy! Even if the alien thing is true, Indy would never believe it coming from, you know, a commie spy, and worse, a girl. Maybe he's just stonewalling, but if so, why not be cool? Can you imagine Han Solo being such a buzzkill?

Time frames help unpack these reasons: both the sociopolitical landscape of the year each film came out, and when the film is actually set, mirror grave political and social realities. The first Indy film was set in 1936--before the official start of WW2, when the Nazis were in their Aryan-roots stage, with the Ark found and fought over in Egypt by Germans and one plucky Yank --six years before the Americans were officially at war. So really he's just a thief, though no more so than the Nazi archeologists. It's convenient that Egypt doesn't seem to interested in its own relics, and since any previous owner is long dead, the Ark belongs to whomever can grab this hot potato mcguffin first, because third world countries, it's implied, are backwards children who'd only break their own treasures so don't deserve them. In the Peruvian opener, the Hovitos mirror the Egyptian natives, unable to enter the mystery cave and so whomever brings the gold godhead out is apparently their new king, but it helps to speak Hovito, which Dr. Jones doesn't deign to learn, so he loses out to the crafty Belloq, who merely follows Jones from a safe distance and lets him do all the dangerous stunts, then grabs the prize. Therefore, by Spielberg's not learning the native language, and not being smart enough to let someone else do your digging for you, is considered the sign of the superior archaeologist. Sorry, Steven and George, but Belloq's far more of a 1982 man, a Wall Street shark with flair and a sense of humor, than Joner, whose scoundrelness is redeemable since he's oblivious; for an academic he's staunchly blind to anything like a bigger picture.

Is Spielberg being snarky about France with this recurring archetype? Consider for example the way De Gaulle went and took credit for the liberation of Paris while the American and British troops continued to push the Germans back to the Rhine in 1945! Or the way we forcefully took France's colonies back for them, from partisans who had been fighting the Japanese, like Ho Chi Minh, while the French sat around and gesticulated in their little cafes!

Let's stretch this idea even further to link the Carter administration and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with its own Belloq, i.e. a short French director (Francois Truffaut) conducting an arcane metaphysical ceremony to communicate with the ancient ones. There's no Harrison Ford role in CEOT3K per se, just a Goldie Hawn if she got away with her baby at the end of Sugarland Express (1974). The Goldie Hawn archetype was very big back then. But if you consider the big news of the day was Carter and his Camp David accord you can etch the little guy pragmatist clear as an unmuddied lake: exclusive, inclusive, emotional or empty as needed, enlisting Nazi aid towards his own ends, forging unions (the Ark ceremony is Jewish) and dissolving them. All in all, the idea of a crafty French Jew working for the Nazis before they went full-on genocidal is much more interesting now than Jones and his muleheaded tenacity. There is no such character in Skull except old Winstone who exists mainly to take advantage of an old man's sympathy.

I should mention that from 1993-1999 I worked for a French art dealer who would have been a perfect Belloq--he got into steep debt playing futures markets; eventually defrauding investors and clients, he wound up on the run in Brazil where he later went to--and escaped from-- jail on a whole new set of charges. Various lawyers, detectives, and Mossad agents are still sorting out a morass of who-owns-what and owes whom and who is really the rightful owner of a painting you took on consignment and sold to two different people at the same time and then told he owner it was still unsold, so kept all the money hoping to double it in the future's market in one day and then pay the owner, but instead lost it all. The whole experience left me with near-lawyerly insight into the workings of ownership, provenance, and extradition. In fact, I can no longer watch Raiders without musing over who would win a lawsuit between Belloq, the Nazis, Jones, and the Egyptians over the Ark. Hint: it wouldn't be Jones. Not even close.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) follows this self-imposed blindness, the first world 'possession is 9/10 of the law, and therefore force and luck and whiteness makes rightness. And the only one who deserves the rare comic book is the one who promises never to read it, to keep it in its mylar in a special vault. As it moves into the atomic age, Jones survives an atomic bomb test by hiding out in a model home fridge, showing he's still surviving by missing the spectacle, and soon after he's caught up in a greaser vs. jock fistfight set to Elvis songs, driving around on a vintage motorbike but scoffing at the idea of a real alien presence on Earth, once again avoiding destruction by not looking into Medusa eye of the true unknowable Other, the one who would explode Spielberg's cute/evil alien dichotomy with its sheer monstrous alien ambiguity.

That's one of the reasons why the whole time I was rooting for Cate Blanchett's Ms. Spalko, who at least treats Jones and his doofus family with some compassion while at the same time not losing her ruthless edge. She's dicked over by him time and again because he can only see this good/evil dichotomy, hence she and the Russians are evil, period just as he is good, which as a professor of anything should make the academy reconsider their tenure practices, though sneering at aliens is definitely a sanctioned practice there too. Miss Spalko at least, has an agenda. So what if she's a commie? At least she plays the game with good sportsmanship and is awake to the mystery of the skulls. Indy doesn't even feign a sporting interest for the purpose of his job in the way Sam Spade did over the falcon. Say what you will about the Russian, agent Spalko is a woman, sir, who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. But Indy can only clam up, as tiresomely and rudely as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.

But the main tell in this version is that the academic deconstructions of Jones as an emblem of bull in a china shop imperialism has at last begun to take hold. Now Jones can only take the skull and bring it back to its rightful place at El Dorado; when he tries to take so much as a small sword - a knife from a mummified conquistador, his doofus son makes an 'ahem' voice, like put that back, that's not yours, that belongs to the dead conquistador's family, or... he doesn't have a specific reason, and it suddenly casts all of Jones' past acquisitions for his museum in doubt. 'Grave robbers will be shot,' the sign says going in, which his son points nervously a-towards. "Well, we're not going to do any grave robbing," Indy says, but of course his whole life has been one long grave rob. Considering the modern age legal battles over cultural ownership of relics (see here) of late, perhaps Lucasfilm and Spielco have begun to realize that the casual American arrogance underwriting Jones' plundering in the first films might be unconscionable but they should realize that this arrogance is what makes it so eloquent as a metaphor for 80s amok capitalism. Jones is a badass because he's so heedless, so obsessed with acquiring whatever ark-shaped jet ski catches his eye. Imagine how great the film might be if Jones was a heroin addict thanks to a dislocated knee? Instead Indy can't even borrow a dead conquistador's knife for his future endeavors, because his son--leather jacket and motorcycle signifying only conformity in rebellious trappings-- clears his throat in a way so pussy proper over 'stolen' antique weaponry it makes me want to punch him in the face and steal his switchblade.

This question of who gets the loot started to flair up for me a few weeks ago while watching another of my first world favorites, the MGM 1934 version of Treasure Island. Whose treasure is it, rightfully? Whomever has the map? Whomever paid for the expedition? Or whomever stole it in the first place? Or owned it? Or took it from third world natives too primitive to understand the whole concept of 'private property'? When Jim Hawkins and his mom go to look for the money Flint owes in his chest after he dies, mom plays the moral cuckold, saying first say they will collect only what is owed "and not a penny more!" But the treasure map makes it okay to, in fact, take Flint's whole savings account. Flint stole it from his fellow pirates who all stole it from Spanish lords and ladies from centuries before who stole it from their subjects: Spain, the enemy of England, Jim! Like stealing the Nazi gold from Kelly's Heroes or the falcon from the Russian, Kemidov; it's hard to say anyone really has a right to it if the current possessor stole it from people who stole it from (and killed) the previous owners, yet try telling that to the Mossad, am I right, Mr. Wildenstein?

The status of the treasure as up for grabs offers a very peculiar notion of 'white makes right," white being the clothes and the powdered wigs of a gentleman born and bred vs. a dirty scalawag. In the MGM production, there's no mention of how the treasure will be divided up, presumably in equal parts between Jim, Ben Gunn, the Squire, and Otto Kruger. But does the crew get a share? Presumably the pirate crew would get nothing for their efforts other than some measly pay. Are they really the bad guys for wanting to seize it for themselves? In reality the only ones with any right to it are the relatives of the victims of the pirate crew's initial piracy, and after that, the pirates themselves. But the right of Jim and his gentleman born to have all of it and the devil take the pirates is somehow much righter than any other option, if for no other reason than a boy like Jim is writing the story.

"Three more stout and loyal men you'll never find... in this room, Jim."

Luckily MGM changed the ending somewhat, so that Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) escapes with his shirt stuffed with gold coin sacks. He probably worked the hardest to get it, and is not just the craftiest of the lot, but also the only one in the whole cast with an infectious wit and easygoing charm. There are some who might call Indy a pirate, one disguised as an academe. We kids knew he was really Han Solo, so the prof thing was a kick, a fun disguise. By the time he's chasing the Skull though, he really is a professor, the worst kind. In the Treasure Island comparison the Indy of Skull wouldn't be Long John Silver --that role would go to Cate Blanchett-- but the crusty Captain Smollett (below, center), good to have on your side when the shit starts going down, but an awful drag at a party.

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Post-Structuralism of the Living Dead: PONTYPOOL (2008)

"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard

In PONTYPOOL  the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends' in Pontypool a ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism. It is spoken, and having spake, the words lead spaken to death, unless they're in French. No time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, as emergency broadcasts (or pirate interceptions, in French so who can tell?) and mass confusion envelop you and your crew, especially not in the early hours of the morning on a typically white winter of a a middle-of-nowhere Ontario town (the title). But there they are: early morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a self-styled outlaw with a yen for conspiracy theory; his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle); and cute blank of an intern Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos as people chant meaningless phrases over and over then each other.

The stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard fishermen and it's not until BBCI phones that Mazzy realizes his town has become the news; what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave anarchy) becomes a matter of being too spooked to make his Wolf Blitzer mark.  These three people at the station are the only ones we see for quite awhile, and they haven't seen any of the things described and they are hard to believe in a town where nothing ever happens, or even if anything did. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then the alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast signal. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio --they're an island in an already island-like town. Pontypool, where they know most of the residents by name, winters stretch forever in a haze of booze, depression, and shuffling from heated car to basement to home, with windows just reflecting an opaque wall of darkness and snow.

What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story --we strain at the bits of the movie's limited known, and we recall the way breaking news drips slowly with newly emerging facts buried in an avalanche of idle speculation to fill in the minutes. There was a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock; now it's the opposite --showing us almost nothing becomes a new form of subversion.. There are still countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago, now only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power, the news broadcasts, the way the professional newscasters with their cigarettes and thick glasses and bustling assistants behind them all both offer reassurance and terror, their steady cool and news voices only serving to make the pronouncements about 'packs of ghouls' more terrifying.  Pontypool rocks that same tack. It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times but makes terrific use of uncertainty--are these reports just drunk ice fishermen spinning yarns?--and delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them, and even the media finds itself compelled to provide one. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, official press conferences, the calm but thrilled voice of an reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own. I first heard of 9-11 on a radio at work, for example, hearing Peter Jennings describe the towers falling and planes crashing into Washington, I imagined the world consumed in fire, civilization ending all around us -- when I finally saw the footage, horrifying as it was, it was almost a relief.

But that's it - we can't always be near a TV with CNN, but even if the power goes out we can find and old battery-operated radio. We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant --careers are made in such moments, ala Wolf Blitzer during the Gulf War--and for once no one can predict what will happen. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon.

What really makes Pontypool a delight beyond this gimmick is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ --- begins to think people are all fucking with him -- so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. In other words while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it.

The news' secret agenda has always been to cast anxieties about the prevailing social structure's solidity off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists, which then makes the news a comfort - you see which way the finger of blame points, and you make sure you're standing behind instead of in front of it. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise and in the process strengthens the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's main problem in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors in less interesting but bigger budgeted films. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron.

In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion, devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to experience directly see the looming chaos, such as the black intellectual in the final news show, commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. The opening events all take place at the crumbling Philadelphia local TV station, ending with the producer escaping with her helicopter pilot boyfriend and two SWAT guys. When they're later able to find a TV, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. It was like that once, maybe, before cross country railroads and telegraphs. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our own neighborhoods. 

Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and his producer who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners to their callers. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent (I had the exact same one as a kid). This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, an idea that rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan, whose concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" underwrites the film's post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.

While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, chanting) or  drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, chanting) or both (dervishes, chanting). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this power, and does not take his DJ power lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire he's railing against by railing against it. And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a Canadian in other words, a bit of a rotgut and cigarettes innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary but tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him feeling grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.

This is perhaps the film's key concept and also perhaps its one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy burt the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy, which is very Cronenbergian, making us wonder if his themes are somehow as much related to Canada itself as to his own clinical doctor experience. The movie seen on streaming (on Netflix) masterfully sets itself up as a virus via the internet, through which there are no coincidences in whatever you happen to be doing as a passive viewer. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a  phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.

Sure that's a sick idea, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on; you don't know what is real because you can't see it so your imagination fills it all in and does a much more apocalyptic job of things. You need electrical power, devices, connections, reports, and images from far enough away that you can see what's been destroyed and what hasn't. None of that is possible without a vantage point from far enough away. Because there's one thing that can reach even the deepest of burrowing loners and isolationists, the media, the radio waves, thought, sound, speech. Pontypool's climactic moment of interdimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!

Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville

But the French, as Godard's Alphaville (1965) computer knows, are too stubborn and contrary to be as ingenious and post-modern as Pontypool, which does for the 1939 Martian broadcast what the Blair Witch Project did for found nature films, i.e the very lack of reliable 'authorized' source information gradually reduces the one on the microphone to the sole remaining authority. John Connor at the end of Terminator 3 achieved this but with nuclear certainty, while Grant Mazzy ingeniously understands that, unless the revolution is televised, it does not exist, so as long as it is only chaos, a mere riot, he can talk it out of existence with nonsense. Without a pundit chattering out in the cold and another one warm and looking at them from a screen, and us looking at them, then there's no certainty about anything. Let go of language and everything is revealed. Not even the credits can end your transmission. So stick around for the end credits very very....

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