Leperello on the Uke: ROAD TO SINGAPORE (1940)

I just watched THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN (1948) starring the great Errol Flynn--perfect casting of course considering his reputation--and it managed to be thrilling despite winkiness. I'm a fan of the Mozart opera, DON GIOVANI (which is to say I can tolerate more than most operas) so I was sad to see the Flynn version skips the "Hell" ending (see pic below) and fails to take advantage of the unique opportunity of exploring the complexity of Juan/Giovanni's manservant and drinking buddy Leporello, who waits outside with the horses for a quick escape beneath m'lday's boudoir window. There's not been near enough characters like him: the Juan and Leporello pair bond is a fundamental archetypal myth which today survives only in the form of "the wingman" or else falls into disrepair via the "Bromantic Comedy."

The true measure of a man when you're trying to hook up with a woman is whether said man be a wing man or cock blocker. And we know this. But oft times they are one in the same. Once the class divide is erased then the issue of the rich kid footing the bill for his poor but hilarious confidente is mussed up and endangered. Such a Leporello-Juan relationship is nowhere better expressed than in ROAD TO SINGAPORE, with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. 

The Bob Hope-Bing Crosby "road" movies are all sublime. The third, ROAD TO MOROCCO is commonly considered the most hilarious and inventive, but I'll take ROAD TO SINGAPORE (1940), which gives us the boy's full back story and thus a better idea of class demarcations (Hope is the poor sailor friend to rich kid Crosby). Paramount knew comedy, and it seems the studio most permissive regarding improvisational canoodling and futzing around in what Manny Farber would call 'termite art.'

Bob and Bing have a relationship that mixes constant fraternal antagonism (and backstabbing) with a post-modern detachment that never quite falls into the abyss of narrative disruption, which is a PBS fancy-pants way of saying you still get absorbed in the plot, even as the boys constantly eat the script. They dance on the lip of complete chaos but never fall in; they are classic "bad influence" friends of the sort weary sets of parents meet over drinks to figure out how to separate; and their worst enemies as far as getting girlfriends are each other as they cockblock every chance they get, but all while being perfect pals, both madly in love with the sweet and demure and ever-so-vaguely 'ethnic other,' Dorothy Lamour (left).

Bing always gets the girl, because he can sing. And man, he can, can't he? I generally hate when some guy starts crooning onscreen, but der Bingle brings such a smooth tone no feather can stay ruffled. Even if you leave to go get popcorn during his romantic numbers, he forgives you. All I have to do is remember Mel Blanc's (?) impression of him and Sinatra as dueling roosters in Swooner Crooner, a cartoon I saw countless times through childhood, and I too swoon.

Usually we see only the evil versions of bad influence buddy friends onscreen, as in the girls of HEAVENLY CREATURES or DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL or the lads of BUTCHER BOY. But Hope and Crosby are the other end of the moral spectrum: they're knights of Camelot in vagabond clothing and mouths washed of poesy talk. Even if their gallant behavior is solely to placate the era's sharp-eared censors and strict codes, their de-sexualized lust strategies are calming, endearing examples of what Lao Tzu might call "the pursuit of emptiness." Neither one is going to "do" anything if they win Dorothy Lamour. They can't stay separate long enough, like comedic magnets, to get beyond first base, or even stay there long. 

It's possibly due in part to Hope's baby face and Bing's glassy-eyed ease in his own skin. What's Dorothy Lamour without Hope around, and vice versa? They're all 'mates,' Bob and Bing, married to each other the way young straight guys or a pair of outcast young male lions can sometimes be, freely wandering the savannah together, growling in good-natured antagonism, vowing 'no women' even as they fight over each flash of legs through the sarong of Lamour, who refuses to pick one over the other for more than a few minutes at at time, and even if they think they're winning, that in turn prompts them to remind each other where that train of lustful thinking leads: children and nagging! Round and round they go!

While eternally free, Bob and Bing's path is one of flight; reacting against the terror of returning 'too soon' from the idyll of boyhood. In the beginning of the film, Bing's dad (Charles Coburn) admonishes his son to settle down: "Your galavanting is over, young man!" But we've not seen any of this previous galavanting - there is no past when you live in the moment! Bing's barely begun the picture; he's not about to settle down so soon after the opening credits. The boys would seldom be back in the states after this first outing. I don't think Bing ever saw his dad again. They just kept running!

Their rapport is always the same: Bing is the leader in the end by virtue of his sharp wisdom, calm demeanor and his singing; Hope's always been excellent at mirroring and playing off his fellow actors, using his natural heterosexual nervousness around hot babes as electricity that juices him into flurries of action and barking. Bing meanwhile seems much more calm around the ladies, playful and relaxed, waiting for the meat to drop so he can grab it, and Bob uses this space to become a great meat dropper. The tension Hope works with centers around babes, or food, or money. His need for whatever's lacking is unending; he's 'fear and desire,' and Bing is more the calm, cool, Zen center.

In an earlier post I discussed my deep appreciation of the "Thanks for the Memories" number that serves as a quiet show-stopper in the otherwise ROTM film BIG BROADCAST OF 1938.  That was Hope's first big picture and how interesting it is that only two years later he slammed this home-run, ROAD TO SINGAPORE, kicking off the immensely popular road pictures and displaying that great range of cowardliness and courage, a two-fisted Romeo and conniving goofball, immature layabout and solid citizen. In the first few reels, Hope even looks kind of handsome in his black sailor sweater and cap. (The scene represented by the picture below, however, is a whole post in and of itself):

Yes sir, racist, perhaps, but would you admonish children if they're up in their bedroom wearing bedsheets and pancake mix, pretending to be native tribesmen? Jokes reflect their era and stereotypes run rampant, but it's all just for laughs... like Stanley Cavell writes about screwball comedy in his essential Comedies of Remarriage, the core of post-code 'screwball' comedy is the play-acting of children, such as 'house' and 'dress-up' and the 'paddy cake / paddy cake / baker's man" chant that comes right before the boys start punching cops (but in a fake fighting way, like brothers do). The censorship code kept everyone locked in their room, grounded in pre-sexual juvenalia, bu--like Cary Grant or Groucho Marx--Hope and Crosby seem to find a special way to use libidinal restriction to make the world edgy, alive, and full of laughs -- and sexy almost as a side benefit. Rather than all the strident leering and wolf drool of say, Frank Tashlin or 80s sex comedies (wherein the sexier it tries to be the less sexy it actually is), Hope and Crosby are sexy because they never try to get past first base.

The film begins with the lads having recently come back from an ocean voyage, watching from on deck as their sailor brethren are corralled and abused by their waiting spouses. No sooner have they badmouthed marriage than a hick shotgun wedding party tries to corral Hope because he kept a girl named 'Cherry' out "half the night" at the movies. The implied sex or pregnancy is never addressed: it all being a crazy misunderstanding - and we believe it - as the pair have the impish charm of eternal youth that makes sex seem a vulgar impossibility. One of my favorite Hope moments comes when his face lights up at the name 'Cherry' only to suddenly slowly drain into dead seriousness before looking them in the eye and slowly shaking his head no, no idea who that girl is. A couple of brawls later and they've escaped to Singapore and a life of ease. The boys may or may not be innocent but really, as long as we don't see it, did it really happen? What does happen is that someone needs to chase them to keep the party moving, and no one does that better than Anthony Quinn as the whip wielding Lothario who 'raised' Dorothy Lamour as his daughter and now, her time to be married, she has come.

The magnetic pull of Lamour is enough to drive a wedge between the our heroes, because Hope isn't Crosby's servant--this is America, buddy!---and yet neither Hope or Crosby is apparently ever sexually intimate with her. Hope and Crosby sleep together in one room and she in another. When Hope tries to go to her in the middle of the night, Crosby stops him and vice versa. They never think to share her, as she shares herself with them, and when either gets a chance to be alone with her, he can only either badmouth the other or sing a song. Thus they are like fishermen who throw whatever they catch back as they don't really like fish. Theirs is the 'boyfriend/girlfriend' of childhood wherein there's no sex or kissing and any actual contact is usually antagonistic. The relationship often exists more in conversation with your second grade buddies than in actuality. In their constant jostling for top dog position, Lamour becomes the ultimate McGuffin, but sheesh, is she ever oven-fresh!

Bob had shown flair for this sort of hokey adventure-comedy-romance picture--usually tangling with Martha Raye--in GIVE ME A SAILOR and BIG BROADCAST (1938), while Bing held his own against Raye in WAKIKI WEDDING (1937) and subjugated a hoiti toiti Carole Lombard castaway in WE'RE NOT DRESSING (1934, which included the Raye-ish Ethel Merman). But when they weren't busy chasing off the brass belters and orbiting around the timid torchers, they always seemed a bit lonesome, like no one in the room could match their insouciant wit. They were like those kids with no one their own age to play with at the beach. But when Bob and Bing were put together they both lit up with a magic instant best-friend chemistry. Every good parent knows that if you want the kid to have a good time at the beach, you have to let him bring a friend. Though if they both like the same girl, look out, brother!

Call me crazy but comedy took a one-two punch with the success of THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and later THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. They brought scatological humor out of the bathroom and onto the dinner table and comedic civilization has since crumbled into balls and scrotums. Hope and Crosby were from a different era: Vaudeville, and their charm had to work on the whole, loud family in the back of the theater, from the kids to grandma. These guys got class! They're peppy! Fun for the whole family, sure! They're not exactly modern, even hokey on occasion, and yet, I'd rather hang out at a hep party with them than the all the dick-wagging navel-gazing schmucks of today. Hope and Crosby didn't need to talk about their dicks, they just plowed the chorus and kept it quiet, feigning a sexual naivete that only the well-laid can feign.  Only a real man can make childish behavior ennobling, it's all in the energy you manifest. You have to grow up to grow back down the right way, to paraphrase Cavell again.



I turn to Cavell in times of need, his analyses are like the friends who never fail to take you back into their inner circle even after you blew them off for the last three years to be with your girlfriend. Now you're back--wrecked and sad--and they take you in like you never left. They are the cool uncle who takes the pain away with a single deadpan smile. They are the hearth; the earth father; our Iron King; our blue mood saviors. They are every moth-eaten Romeos chance to start again, with an unslain Mercutio, ten cents, and a zauberflote carved from a sweet potato. And now a word from the folks at PBS...

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Acidemic Mother's Day

I recently re-read a 2004 popmatters review I did on ORCA (1977) and it's definitely the wellspring from which my 70s Dad series flowed. You should read it but wait, tis Mother's Day, I need to do a sequel to my Cinematic Blonde Moms of Death!

There's lots of theories of the "gaze" or viewer perspective in the mise-en-scene; are we masochists unable to control the stimulus we feel (unbearable suspense in Hithcock, for example) or sadists dominating and controlling through our masterful stare of covetous ownership? I think of it in Buddhist reincarantion terms, as if we've spent countless hours in between past lives surfing through the wormholes of the world, scoping out future wombs suitable to our karmic needs the way we scope out new apartments in "waking" life. At any rate, I get a glimmer of such a feeling during certain movies, such as MULHOLLAND DR., PERSONA and SPECIES, as I've written about. In all these the mother isn't yet a mom, in that sense, but the specter of an unborn child seems to hover around her, literally in PERSONA with the cut-aways to the kid waking up in the morgue; with the momentum of an unborn child's urgent need to be born into SPECIES, raging at the CGI bastard who takes our place; or with the camera as fearful, hesitant child approaching depressed mom in bathrobe in MULHOLLAND.

I talked to my own mom today and can attest that she's actually a pretty sweet and a nice lady, despite all the cold, Nordic things I write. Moms understand that their writer sons need to push them back/elevate them up into larger archetypal symbolic realms to add extra textural resonance to their emotional outpourings into the ether's vast unknowable net. My dad also read where I called him Orson Wellesian and thought I was ribbing him about his weight. Man oh man, some parents just don't understand that to a film lover, Orson Welles is like Shakespeare, Zeus, the devil, Daniel Webster and Colonel Kurz all rolled into one, and if their story is really a confession, then so is mine. Dad, Mom, I love ya.

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Lords of Fliestown (3 capsules)

  THE CHILDREN (2009)

British horror auteur Tom Shankland closes in on Neal Marshall for the title of British John Carpenter with this sweet tale of a tadpole egg-related infectious disease that turns children into coughing, smiling, wan, matricidal maniacs in an isolated English estate on Xmas holiday. 

 

What's really good here--aside from the awesome music--is the film's knowing critique of our fucked up social order in the wake of 1980s conservative "Spielbergism," through which 'cute' children are allowed to literally get away with murder while sulky teens are ostracized for beginning to remind parents too much of themselves. As an eldest child attention-seeker who's had to face being upstaged by cuter little tykes (and with no children of my own), I relish scenes where blind adherence to child-worship  results in bloody death. The seminal archetypal moment in this is perhaps the daughter in the basement rising up to grab a trowel in 1968's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (right). Advancing towards her mom while all mom can do is plead, so crippled by maternal compassion she can't even ward off a single stabbing blow. 

If that's one of your favorite scenes in movies, then you will love THE CHILDREN, wherein moms conveniently forget that their sweet children were trying to stab them just minutes ago, preferring to blame the savvy teenage girl in the group, rather than be forced to re-adjust their sense of the cuteness hierarchy. It's a terrifying thing when your parents won't believe you for no other reason than your little sister is more angelic and less openly rebellious, so you wind up punished for her murders. Shankland creates a great sense of mood, pace and real time amidst the dead winter English countryside, and it's fun to see parents that dare to drink and smoke in front of their kids, as they did in my day. I'm sure there's American audience members who think that if you smoke and drink in front of your child you should be arrested for reckless endangerment, and I'd just love to stick these sanctimonious reactionaries in this movie, so they could cry "Won't someone think of the children?!" as they gently wipe their own blood off their children's mouths and knife edges. Oh yeah. Believe it, for the jealous older sibling in each of us, THE CHILDREN delivers the corn.

SURVIVING CROOKED LAKE (2009)

Or "Anti-Antigone" as this Canadian film (made by three University of Toronto film students) winds up being about a girl's irrational refusal to bury the decomposing corpse of her brother. You don't need a hostile Greek king to pronounce her sentence, she'll do it herself. That's feminism! Steph (Stephannie Richardson) and her three cute blonde friends are lost in the Canadian wilderness. Rather than fight bears, tigers or hillbilly mutant cannibal rapists, the girls have to contend with Steph's obsessively self-righteous "no corpse left behind" policy.

Up until about half-way through the film it's a pretty good bucolic fantasia. Our three student directors keep the shots artsy and the shorts short, with sun-dappled dreamy close-up dissolves from one blonde-haired, nearly-mature beauty to the next. There's a nice film school idyll at work, like the cinematographer really studied PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1973) and maybe even MEAN CREEK (2005). But then the film bogs down into an argument about whether to drag the heavy , rotting corpse of their accidentally dead guide --he is also Steph's dead brother--FITZCARRALDO-style over hill and dale towards what they hope will be the highway. 

As Steph is the insane one who wont bury her brother or leave him, it becomes very hard to not judge her as the villain for her selfish, reckless endangerment of her friends, just so she can save her sibling's rotting corpse from being re-absorbed into nature. When some friendly wolves offer to take the corpse off her hands, Steph shoos them away and you don't know whether the filmmakers want you to cheer her bravery or wish she'd just get eaten, too. In other words, are they weirdos who think the spirit remains in the body after death, crying for legal permission to be buried, or are they recovering from some past trauma of being forced to attend an open casket funeral as a child?

So what's the raison d'etre, then, of this film, which is advertised as being a taut survival in the wilderness thriller with bonding teen chick streaked highlights? Whereas THE CHILDREN seems a veiled critique of modern over-parenting and child worship, SURVIVING CROOKED LAKE becomes an open one on girls who can't let go of their "inability to let go," even with slow death by starvation (anorexia) and constant vomiting from the stench of a decomposing brother (bulimia) staring them in the face. Are Canadians obsessed with dragging corpses around? Is this a national problem the way child obsession is in the states and UK? Something that needs to be addressed? It's certainly far enough outside my own realm of experience it seems made for some weird necrophiliacs-trying-to-get-straight rehab lounge. I hope it's not that someone somewhere secretly gets off on seeing girls regularly vomit from the stench of what was days ago their mutual object of teenage lust! Praise Jesus and King Edward, it ain't me babe.

 PS - If you want to check out another quiet strange "personal" Canadian exploitation film along the lines of CROOKED LAKE, may I recommend PUNCH?  Allegedly about the world of female topless boxing, it's actually the story of a widower trying to ween his daughter off her incestuous desires for him so she'll stop socking his new girlfriend, a timid photo booth worker with a topless boxing sister who may just have to come to the rescue. The director's actual daughter plays the girl and admits in the essential commentary track that the story is based on their true relationship!! In other words, he got funding to make a sleazy late night Cinemax cat fight flick but highjacked it to tell his own perverse confession, ala Ed Wood with GLEN OR GLENDA! Icky but fascinating... read my review here. 

 

 PLAIN DIRTY (2003)

And if you want a good swampy jail-bait exploitation fairy tale that's way off the radar and which the writer/director subverted to his own motive--this time to a loose reading of MACBETH--check out the under-appreciated PLAIN DIRTY (2003, above). It's almost Val Lewton-esque in that it shows you can make art instead of obsessive confessions and still hide it all under a functionally exploitative backwoods sleaze rubric. It does what HOUNDOG could have and Dominique (LOLITA) Swain holds her own as a conniving Lady MacBeth type! Woo Hoo!! Here's an excerpt from one of my first Acidemic reviews ever:

They take a typical swamp and cut off shorts exploitation set up ala Gator Bait (left), Poor White Trash, or Mudhoney, and then go off the deep end with it, into Kentucky-Freud Gothic grandeur. There’s a great, scraping viola and cello score by Nathan Barr, and dark, steamy cinematography by Scott Keven, both of whom worked, along with Verveen, on that last great entry in the redneck genre, Cabin Fever (2002). Keven doesn’t waste any chance to capture muted swampy sunlight trying to break through the filthy windows of these muddy shacks. The performances are all wonderful, especially Verveen’s, who manages to be believable while being simultaneously dirty, poetic, sneaky, charming, and oh so creepy as he woos Inez with lines like: “I wanna see what you look like when you grow old. Is you gonna grow gray or what?” Swain’s untamed Lolita-like energy makes her a believable force of girl nature, running around in her cut off shorts (nowhere near as short as Daisy Duke’s, alas) and cut up, dirty legs, or a filthy summer frock.

MMMmmmm, filthy... isn't there some over-nurturing movie parent out there who can come do her laundry?

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Bright Lights Film Journal #68 online w/ Twilight - Plus Night Nurse!

Bright Lights Film Journal #68 is online, featuring, in addition to a host of fine stuff, an all-new essay by mois, about TWILIGHT: NEW MOON: Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in Twilight

And if subversion of the dubious morality enforced by a stuffy bourgeoisie-elite is your thing, you know that pre-code is the place to look, and when it comes to pre-code, there's no gutsier poet auteur than William Wellman, and of Wellman's vast oeuvre, none so daemonic, two-fisted, sexy and brilliant than NIGHT NURSE (1933), which the two-fisted, sexy, brilliant and daemonic Kim Morgan presented recently at an Austin film festival: Provocative Pre-Code Peach: Night Nurse.

Meanwhile, it's Monday, and there's around 800% humidity, and I love air conditioning more than life itself.

And the Big Parade has a nice float coming by on Wellman, and the Mummers are due any minute. 

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Mountain Man in the Middle: Arthur Hunnicutt

He's the craggy cowboy-faced feller who somehow grounds every film he's in--no matter how peripheral the character--with pioneer-style grace and droll aplomb. A Walter Brennan without the fogey sass and twice the steely-eyed mellow. He's just an actor who found a niche playing pioneer-types far older than he actually was, but when he's onscreen you forget you're watching a dude who dropped out of college and joined a theater troupe in Martha's Vineyard before a starring role on Broadway in a hit production of Tobacco Road brought him to Hollywood and low-key fame as a low-key stalwart in westerns. But he's so authentic and natural, he makes whatever he's in take on a fly-on-the-wall documentary air. He's Arthur Hunnicutt, and he doesn't even need our praise. Hell, if he ever got some he'd probably have to quit, he just wouldn't know what to do with it! 

One of his finest roles comes in the sometimes-shown on TCM but criminally-unavailable on DVD-- and a must-burn for Howard Hawksians--THE BIG SKY (1952, above), a poetic, ramshackle film about fur traders who love, laugh, drink, sing, swap tall tales, and occasionally shoot bad guys up in the Pacific Northwest. Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin are the handsomer leads, but it's Hunnicutt who makes it all work with his casual narration. 

Cinema blogger par excellence Ed Howard notes that the central performances of Kirk Douglas and Dewey Martin (in the juvenile understudy role Ricky Martin would play in RIO BRAVO) are only so-so (and weren't Hawks' first choices). But that the supporting characters are awesome:

Hunnicutt is especially great in the Walter Brennan-type old coot role. Zeb's outrageous tall tales and deadpan humor — reminiscent of the Squint character from Frank King's great newspaper comic strip Gasoline Alley — are consistently funny, especially his anecdote about sewing a friend's severed ear on backwards, so that whenever he heard something thereafter, he always turned in the wrong direction. (Only the Cinema 3/27/09)

Hunnicutt was actually nominated for best supporting actor Oscar for SKY, but he didn't win. In the meantime, he did a lot of western TV shows. But it's three movies in particular which I'll focus on, because they're all classics, and two aren't on DVD and that makes me mighty ornery. The second I'll mention is on DVD, another Hawks' pic, EL DORADO (1966, above). Hunnicutt here is often overlooked when it comes to talking about EL DORADO, and that's probably because John Wayne, Robert Mitchum AND a young James Caan co-star. Ain't much room left on the marquee, 'specially if you add Ed Asner.

But while Mitchum, Wayne and Caan hog the spotlight, Hunnicutt hangs back and steals the show--again by barely entering into it til round halfway down the clock. He's 'Bull,' the deputy of drunken sheriff Mitchum, and he blows on his trusty bugle when he runs into danger down the street on his watch. As in THE BIG SKY, he's the kind of feller who seems too authentic to actually bother to act; he just brings a wit dry and sharp enough to split a hair'n and a deadpan delivery method too smart to be a southern drawl, but too slow to be much else. His is the voice of a man who's spent time enough alone in the wilderness or amongst Native Americans to find himself, and has nothin' much left to prove 'sept he's lived a fair and colorful life and has a jug full of semi-true tales to tell for it.

THE LUSTY MEN, Nicholas Ray's underseen film from 1952, is a very Hawks-style immersion in rodeo culture, and is actually the earliest film on this list, though it seems the most modern. (the pic up top is from LUSTY, and you can tell how relatively young Hunnicutt is).  In true and beloved Nicholas Ray fashion, the film places importance on every minor detail so you can't be sure what's 'foreshadowing' the way you can with more careless directors, who use ominous music cues to show you what guns in the fist act are going to go off in the third, to paraphrase Ibsen. So when Hunnicutt appears, as he usually does, a few reels into the film, you breathe a sigh of relief; if Hunnicutt's there, you know these people are good folks, regular people, but not overly cliche'd, neither. He'll never scare or bore you, neither talk up nor down. He's the guy you first make friends with in a new group of strangers, the one who first makes you feel comfortable, long as you don't mind listening to his colorful tales, which are hilarious but which near everyone else in the pack has heard already twice at least, not that they don't love them, and he'll probably end up borrowing money, but he always has a dram on the hip when you need it most. The role of the 'pappy'-style colorful sidekick was clearly more Walter Brennan's gig, but when you wanted the stealth third man, the 'mountain man' in the middle, a man who'd make it all seem suddenly more real and more relaxing at the same time, there was no one better than Arthur Hunnicutt.

For speculation on why the Lusty Men ain't on DVD, dig my 2008 piece o' passionate masculine brilliance, Lusty Men and Cockfighter.

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South Park Terrorism and the Nicole Kidman Experience

Nicole Kidman, the post-modern Maya princess for the media age, has an amazing track record for playing women full of complex dichotomies that range both inside and outside the mirror of the image: TO DIE FOR (1993), DOGVILLE (2003), BIRTH (2004), and EYES WIDE SHUT (1998) are prime examples, each in its way a self-reflexive meditation on desire vs. the mechanations of reality, of the spiritual's derailment at the hands of sex. She's a hottie, tall and true, and heads above the rest. She lets herself be blankly led through life, snapping awake and lashing out like no one else, seeming to be both the best and worst actress at the same time, fearlessly sexual yet always remote, dissatisfied and in no mood to hide it or even change it. She slithers between moral extremes, from the shy twinkle of silent film virgins like Lillian Gish to the unapologetically homicidal sirens like Fu Fah Lo Suee. For a prime example, please see BIRTH and play close attention to the sex scene early on, and the long take of her face at the concert (above).

Now, hold that thought while we discuss Arab extremists and the "crime" of drawing their prophet, Muhammad. First, SOUTH PARK should be allowed to poke fun at anyone without fear of terrorist attack, but at the same time, we must bear in mind that the Muslim distrust of images has a sound grounding in "reality" - that is to say, they don't want to be hypnotized into a false reality. Consider them the opposite of Kidman's split subject. It's hard for us to imagine it--all media-hypnotized as we are here in the belly of the beast--but pretend you're watching a great movie and you're really into it and suddenly it's your life, there's no more dividing up your energy between fantasy and reality. Where the split world protests their government's atrocities by getting depressed and then getting some catharsis watching stuff blow up in Bruce Willis movies, the extremists are their own Bruce Willises. For them, perhaps, explosives are less dangerous than the seductive allure of the image, of desire-driven commodification aesthetics. Earthly death is nowhere near as terrible (for them) as the soul-eating vortex of the simulacrum. And who's to say they're wrong? Plato wouldn't.

That's where Nicole Kidman and BIRTH and EYES WIDE and of course TO DIE FOR (left) all come rolling in. When the platonists and the extremists threaten to exterminate the image and the alluring veils of desire, capitalism, and commodified aesthetics, Kidman parachutes in like Maya, the Hindu goddess of illusion. Kidman's sexuality is such that operates both within the seductive lure and without. It overflows the boundaries of her films. She's above the fray, but where is there to go other than down?

TO DIE FOR tells the story of a girl who lives and breathes the desire to do the local evening news. She sleeps her way in, blackmails her way up, and murders all the way to the top, seducing poor Joaquin Phoenix into doing her dirty work. In DOGVILLE, we see the college education of the mediated celeb – the "slumming" of the elite, seeing how the other half lives and the eventual rejection of the townie mindset, with a bullet. This leads us to BIRTH and EYES WIDE, and the bitchy end-products of the social climbing. In EYES WIDE, for example, Kidman's wealthy uptown girl bristles at the fallow narcissism of her short, wealthy husband (Tom Cruise). He's 100% in the simulacrum and she at least has one foot outside it. All she has to do to set off her man is paint a picture in his mind of her fantasy ravishment at the hands of a lusty sailor and he's off tearing up the town, or rather, sauntering up to it and when it starts to tear back, running away like a little wuss.

Kidman's reality is that she just locked eyes with the sailor 'in real life.' She only imagines having the affair, a fantasy that no real sex with the man you've had a kid with can ever match. She accepts that and can live in both the imaginary and real levels, unlike say, Tom Cruise, who can't quite understand why her fantasy is so vivid in his mind. He ends up going to great lengths – renting costumes and taking cabs out to Long Island in the dead of night – to try and reconcile this split so he can escape the mirror, but even then he's too uptight and bound by desire to participate, because to participate would end the fantasy and thrust him into disillusionment and the real, which is actually what he wants but he doesn't quite know it. Sadomasochism and orgies are, in the end, perhaps truly enjoyable only as literature. When you make them real, something goes missing.

I guess it makes me mad because I've done the same thing. But thanks to Lacan and Baudrillard though, it makes some sense now  -- the unconscious goes to great lengths to keep you hungry for succor at all times; Tom and I both made or make the mistake of confusing the real and fantasmatic levels. When our desire suddenly meets us smack in the face, we run away before we know quite what hit us. You may know the feeling: you're single and looking for love and suddenly you lock eyes with a beautiful creature from across the room. They walk over to say hi but before they even open their mouth, you run away, blushing! Why are you such a loser? You berate yourself all night, never perhaps realizing that the berating and longing are, themselves, the whole point. Once desire is quenched it inevitably leaves an empty taste on your soul's evolutionary tongue. Your unconscious knows this, so sabotages your every step.

Observe the photo still from EYES above: Nicole fixes an earring and looks over at Cruise in the mirror as he comes towards her, his eyes flashing himself a come-on like a narcissist in a candy store. Note that we don't see the sexy Cruise persona outside of the mirror-the figure in the far right of the image above seems like someone else, his arm lumpy, his nose big, his mouth slack--it's as if he doesn't even realize there is an outside to the mirror at all and so leaves it blank. Like many actors, he sees himself from afar, the way a video gamer sees his avatar so sudden proximity exposes his Brundlefly-like nature.The veiled contempt with which she observes the scene seems to indicate she understands this split; she's outside and inside the mirror; fully conscious of her unconscious.

Validated by his medical profession, Tom thinks there is only "this" reality, the one where he is rich, good looking and sociable. To even imagine a universe where money and social standing doesn't matter is beyond him, and the film is about him coming to grips with that, trying to crash a party out of his league and otherwise fumbling with the keys to physical gratification. Thus it's with ease that Nicole sends him hurtling through the Manhattan night; all she has to do is suggest the image in the mirror could be read in an entirely different way, as a mask; once outside the costume ball his mask – his medical authority, wealth and privilege – don't mean shit.

Similarly, masks, doubles, and mirror images are all evil concepts to a fundamentalist religion wherein reuniting splits and bringing everything back to a tangible, universal real is so important, especially since the fantastic imagery being force fed to them is not "theirs" per se, but the American dream machine juggernaut that streamlines all reality into a Wal-Mart /Starbucks strip mall. Thus the threats to the makers of graven images of Muhammad stems from this line-in-the-sand approach. "Make fun of us if you want, just leave this one thing unattacked." But of course we've lost so much in gaining all our cool shit, we can't even begin to understand that kind of deep devotion. We've forgotten we have a mask on and we resent being asked to take it off just as much as the fundamentalists resent us wanting to put one on their prophet.

 But again, it can all be solved by looking at Nicole Kidman, that rare creature that seems able to exist in two places at once, the personification of that simulacrum/illusion present in the brief moment between putting the mask on and taking it off. There's not a "censored" black bar in the world that can hide her awesome cinematic body or stop her from arousing men (and women), distracting them from their prayers, and creating earthquakes enough to destroy the world. No amount of explosive or patriarchy can contain her. I love her, because she melts down my I, and all others, until we're just an empty mask drifting feather like to the bottomless floor.

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Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE (1963) on blu-ray:

The release this week of Godard's 1963 uber-artsy Vivre sa Vie ("My Life to Live!") should mean a lot to fans of French New Wave cinema, even the poseurs like me who just like it because all the women are beautiful and everyone smokes and never show their teeth, for good reason. And of all the beautiful women of the new wave, Anna Karina stands out for her unconscious savvy and button-nose cute meets existentially adrift persona. The hipster intellectual's Bardot, Karina is a mythic archetype for the ages, the poster girl for Godard's most appreciated and legendary output of the early 1960s, including Band of Outsiders, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, A Woman is a Woman, and Made in the USA. She's beautiful in all of them, but only in My Life to Live is she elevated truly to the special realm of sacrificial object--the ultimate screen goddess set upon the altar of, forgive me for using this word, the "gaze."

On the new blu-ray disc from Criterion, you can notice abundant new and shatteringly depressing things: the dust and emptiness of the run-down pool halls and cafe arcades; the rickety realness of old phone booths, sun-faded scotch tape marks on pinball and cigarette machines, real coffee cups glittering with thumb prints, dirty spirits in the cigarette smoke; the terrible flatness of Parisian life witnessed through cafe windows; the narrow, sloping streets that seem to have no sky over them; provincial and ancient architecture encumbered with urban exhaust fume grime made so blu-ray clear in Criterion's excellent restoration that you can smell the unregulated car emissions, the inky tang of fresh newspapers, croissants, and coffee; the acrid haze of Gauloises, and most of all, Anna's big round head, shorn of her girly tresses in a smart bob, like a castrated Samsonette, crowding out the space at every turn, as if we can never quite escape the perfect isolation of her cranium.

This is the most literally heady of all Godard's films, cinematographer Raoul Coutard cuts off Karina's chin rather than miss a centimetre off the top, as if she's seeing herself being seen directly from within her shadowed skull, a brain that sees through the thick black bob a mirrored object of the camera's interest, 24/7, always aware of how she might look related to who might be looking. Her black smooth hair fills up the foreground of the screen at least half the running time, flattening out the horizon. I never really noticed this on the crappy Koch Lorber DVD, which I thought way back in the early days, was the bees-knees. Now I wretch when I think I ever found any of it beautiful. Blu-ray makes everything shockingly apparent -- the lunch naked on the fork -- the cold duck whose beauty and ugliness shall never disentangle. 

No matter how many times you've seen a film like this, seeing it anew on blu-ray is like seeing it for the first time. And this new first time, Vivre sa Vie depressed me like never before. One feels with this flattened image and black hole of a hair-style, trapped. Rarely does Godard show off Karina's figure in any leering sort of way, preferring to focus on her button-nose face, the shockingly tobacco-stained teeth that sometimes appear when she laughs, the way her eyes dilate in and out with a mix of fear, excitement, attraction and queasy dread when she's interviewed by her new pimp.

The issue of prostitution is very hard to deal with in a cinematic frame, especially when the woman being lowered into the seediness of it all is so beautiful and regal. It's easier when she's made up to look like a Aileen Wuornos, as I wrote in 2004 about Monster:

Prostitution is itself "acting," as in to not just engage in sex for money but also (assumedly) to seem to enjoy it. Indeed, a prostitute may actually enjoy herself during the contracted sexual act as long as she pretends she is just a good actress pretending to enjoy herslef. There may be a moment during the paid-for sexual act when the prostitute is completely "herself," which is to say, completely subsumed into her role as a sex worker pretending to enjoy sex. An actor onstage is likewise 100% safely hidden as far as drawing attention to her own enjoyment. She can rest assured that no one on stage is going to break character and remind her she owes them money, or is gaining weight. In the entrapped stage with its dialogue already written she is free to actually become her character, in perfect safety, with no one to know when and if she crosses over into the sublime.

It is ultimately then, the lack of access to a camera that makes the prostitute "worthless" as an actress. For an audience of one there can be no Oscar.

 With an artsy self-reflexive intellectual like Godard, prostitution will naturally function as a metaphor for cinema, everything will, but prostitution is a particularly apt metaphor for the cinema. Coutard's camera leers over Karina's shoulder, sympathizing with her sadness even as it causes it, never sure what's an act and what isn't--is she just drawing us in to ask if she can borrow 2,000 francs? In a meta way, it's even true that her character's dreams of being a film star are realized, right there in the act of being in the movie you are now witnessing, and yet even that is not enough. Godard is forcing us to realize how our own hunger for cinematic beauty is itself responsible for the problems of exploitation and sexual commodification. We destroy the characters we love, our eye is the real monster here. But whereas the similarly distant Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion reacts to the encroachment of our gaze with delusional homicidal madness, Karina's prostitute just watches, almost bemused, as her freedom and life are crushed up in the jaws of the Other's tepid desire.

 It's Godard's most terrifyingly existentialist movie. With blu-ray you can feel the cold chill of recognition in Karina's tears when she watches La passion de Jeanne D'Arc (1928) with some random date at the cinema. On a blurry VHS in the late 1990s I found the Jeanne D'Arc scene to be "post-modern" but uninvolving; on that Koch Lorber DVD I thought it was just a cliche' - you couldn't even tell she had a date with his arm around her in those two blurry versions. I thought she was alone! On blu-ray, you can see some sleazy dude has accompanied her, bought her ticket, and put his arm around her. This adds immeasurably to the pain of the scene, the date's expectations for an after-film tryst mirrored in bizarre way the mix of sympathy and voyeuristic expectation in the face of Antonin Artaud onscreen as he hears the verdict Joan is to be burned at the stake. With this new clarity, both the screen within the screen and the terrible empathy and sadness in Karina's face are made terrifyingly immediate. This isn't just some 1928 silent film about an old trial for heresy, it's a staggeringly perfect moment - two brides stripped bare for their bachelor audiences, Karina's eyes mirroring every tear of the actress onscreen, and sensing not some erotic catharsis but the cold, horrific panic one experiences in early middle age as they realize their parents are getting old, their grandparents are all dead, and you are next in line, the pirates of time's inexorable progress making you walk one by one--not neccessarily in geneological order--off the mortal plank.

Like Joan's, Anna's sad lonely fate is all but set in stone, and she seems to realize it both as an actress and a character. She will die or get old and pushed aside for the next generation of doomed pretty Parisian faces--Isaballe Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, for example (both of whom appear while very young in early 1980s Godard films)--but also be enshrined forever in the silver screen pantheon, an altar where her virginal beauty can be sacrificed again and again, in clearer and clearer digital reproductions, long after all of us, too, have stepped off that pirate plank into that swirling sea below.

Vivre sa vie (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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