In Hysterics: LIAR LIAR Vs. A DANGEROUS METHOD

Is hysteria at the root of comedy in the same way sex is at the root of hysteria? Or has fear of being a bad father replaced sexual repression as the self-exposing terror at the heart of the modern persona? Has the removal of spanking as an acceptable from of behavioral correction in our current era of overprotective rod-sparing in fact altered parenting and childhood to such an extent that the neurosis at the heart of repression is no longer a sublimated sadomasochistic incestuous taboo but fear of being branded a bad father? Without the threat of spanking to anchor his authority, the father becomes the child, living in mortal terror of being accused of spanking or, at a more acceptable Hollywood plot level, being branded a bad dad and thus spanked by the ex-wife and her lawyer with the rod of alimony.

Watch A DANGEROUS METHOD and LIAR LIAR in the same day and the whole crazy charade comes clear: Cronenberg's 2011 film chronicles a passionate lapse of ethics on the part of Jung (Michael Fassbender) with his sexually unhinged masochist patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). As Freud, Viggo Mortenson smokes cigars and feigns shock at his mentee's weakness but is he maybe jealous? Even though with her hysterical symptoms including a frightening distending of her jaw she's still super hot. As she gets 'cured,' her madness abates and she is "allowed" to go to medical school and become a psychoanalyst herself, but hot mess-wise it's like she dries back into the scenery.

Jim Carrey's 1997 film by contrast follows two days in the life of a high-powered lawyer who specializes in unscrupulous larger-than-life lying. He's never around for his son and he's divorced but when Jim does show up he's a riot, apparently: Carrey's emotionally arrested spastic antics make him the ultimate in 'fun' dads, albeit useless as an actual parent or presumably as a lover. His is the opposite of the suffocatingly masculine sexual presence of Sabina's unseen father and his corporal punishments. One is far too rigid a suffocating authority figure, the other far too genial and mostly absent. When Carrey's son's birthday wish comes true it means his dad can't tell a lie for 24 hours, but unfortunately within that frame he has to do just that to win a big important divorce case that's a handy mirror to his own life. When it all goes to shit he's forced to beg his son try and undo the 'curse' via another birthday ritual. 

But of course his inability to lie is wherein the comedy is since giving statements to the court, he gets to twist and spazz impressively in a textbook example of Jung's autonomous complex, wherein the subject is emotionally arrested, unable to cope with adult reality and so:

"... the significance of archetypal defenses is relatively greater. When the ego is not developed, the damage is more catastrophic. The psychic defenses are more primitive and archaic, such as splitting and projective identification. The inner world is full of rage and violent aggression, which is split off or dissociated into fantasies or autonomous archetypal forms, which threaten to turn against the self and others. There is not an adequate ego to deal with the rage or with the split off forms which are invested with aggressive, destructive energies. (Singer, Kimbles, p. 160)

The differentiation of Carrey's post and pre-epiphany persona (for these comedies always end with the dad realizing what's 'important' in life) hinges merely on the sublimation "for good" of the autonomous complex Jung describes. Carrey's performance of "the claw" keeps his son amused (and is thus good) while his spastic herky jerky in the courtroom endangers the sanctity of the legal profession (and thus is bad). By ultimately leading Carrey to a self-realization (he quits his job to spend more time at home with his son) the autonomous complex 'wins' and forces Carrey to relocate to a place where said complex has its approved outlet -- forever amusing the son in the seclusion of the home -- and so Carrey remains unable to actually eliminate the complex, merely finds its correct outlet, just as Sabina eventually finds hers in her own doctoral practice. Once Sabine steps out of her ascribed domestic sphere and enters psychiatry school she's cured of her spastic antics, while Carrey steps into the domestic sphere to find a place for is. In other words spastic = domestic, a kind of madness.

As it's a love story we root for the forbidden passion of Sabina and Jung in METHOD, their affair is an autonomous complex that cures each of its victims of all sorts of positive traits, such as doctor-patient bonds and professional ethics-- and leaves them wiser and complex-free. In the end, Jung and Sabina keep their jobs: Sabina marries someone else and Jung pops out more kids still with his long-suffering wife, all while Freud looks on, askance. Luck for them, neither Jung's nor Sabina's issues involves the trials of parenting. Jung avoids his kids at least in the film (and lives in a time when such remote parenting was accepted) and yet childhood parental relations are at the core of his secret affair, as in the whipping and spanking of Sabina during their trysts.

So while Carrey finds an outlet for his undeveloped ego's hysteric split in amusing his son with an autonomous hand 'claw,' which only pretend-threatens corporal punishment (triggering jouissance in the child), Sabina and Jung find an outlet for their own jouissance by not sparing the rod with themselves. Jung's claw, the whip, becomes a surrogate for Sabina's father's spanking hand, while Jung himself gets to escape the crushing guilt over his own real-time absentee fathering through this re-enactment of a role as Sabina's corporal pater. Just as the hand of her father is on Sabina's ass, if you'll forgive the expression, Carrey's mark is of the claw on his own neck. Perhaps when Carrey's son grows up his girlfriend in college will deliver her own version of 'the claw' on him, by his own kinky request, and the cycle will be complete.

Back in the day I dismissed Carrey, along with 'idiot savant' film stars like Adam Sandler and Jerry Lewis, as lowbrow buffoons strictly for the kids and the French. But armed by DANGEROUS METHOD, Carrey's schtick glows with archetypal dementia that explains my overall reticence, my fear of squirming on the gender-based guilt hook. Now that I've made the leap, these spastic males I used to hate can join the pantheon modern apocalypse dads I wrote of awhile back for Bright Lights (See: Dads of Great Adventure) wherein I suggested that the hook of modern disaster movies is no longer fear of dying but "having it be your fault if your children die or are horribly maimed, kidnapped, or molested while you have them for the weekend." It's a very real fear I'm sure, but in a way it's a cop-out, you avoid imagining your own death by just imagining being 'in trouble.' Conquering fear is of course a huge part of the sadomasochistic complex, but such a complex precludes any by-proxy nonsense such as what the anxious dad obsesses over, imagining his child being spanked by some stranger in a white van.

The by-proxy masochism and guilt of the lost child anxiety complex is just replaced in comedies like LIAR with spastic airport chases, or other last minute declarations of castrative fidelity to the tedious parameters of mom-governed parenting. We never see the real connection between the child and father (as opposed to performer and audience) only the declaration that from now on there will be a connection, after or under the credits. This is the last minute voluntary castration and re-entrance into the domestic sphere, back to the realm of the wife where any amount of family unity is ever-measured against the displays of same on the TV, and inevitably found wanting. The comedic dad, unable to maintain his fragile ego against TV's injunction, flees into the realm of the infantile, which is where we usually find him when the film begins. Having received his karmic lesson after the climax, Carrey goes racing back to share his 'changed man' status with his son, who is imminently departing for a new life with a bland and simple 'perfect' soon-to-be stepdad.  This new guy usually has a good supportive job and is 'there' for the son in ways the actual guilt-ridden dad is not (a step-dad isn't expected to be perfect, thus he's free from guilt and can actually be present).

No one in LIAR sees a shrink but they should, in order to see that it is the unbearable pressure of being a perfect TV dad that drives the 'real' dad away; the 'new' bland dad is just the castrated version, the pod person, who has trimmed away the excess jouissance that has no place inside the bland confines of the ascribed nuclear family. He's a cautionary example of getting what you wish for. The new dad is useless as a father because of his perfection. What the real dad does have, eventually, hopefully, is a way to incorporate some of the wildness that drove him from the family in the first place. The dad must bring the wild back into the family, learn to take charge, punish and be an authoritarian figure if need be, but bring in his boots of eccentricity rather than leaving them at the door (because the wife says they're too muddy, for example). He needs to 'take 'er easy' as a dad and not hover over the boy, terrified any moment some fathering challenge may erupt and expose the nonexistent commitment the dad fears is/isn't there underneath his shaky, undifferentiated persona.

Even the phrase 'undifferentiated' bears him out, for the dad hasn't learned to split himself off properly - whatever's going on in front of him, or whatever spastic pleas for adoration consume him at the moment invariably makes him late for whatever's next on his agenda; prior commitments are forgotten in the rapture of the moment. A differentiated persona internalizes the split so instead of one hand doing something (say strangling himself) against the rest of the body's will, the subject can go ahead and act like a lunatic with his whole body, but keep 'one eye on the time.'

Unfortunately in METHOD we're not allowed to stop at the moment of true blissful union between Sabina and Jung the way we stop with father-son reuninon LIAR. Instead there's Jung's bitter mishandling of rumors about him (which it turns out were spread by Jung's wife), his insistence the passion he and Sabina have found must be internalized, cut-off due to peer pressure. Eventually Sabina finds a way to split the hysteric masochist off into her other sexual encounters, while Jung finds the moxy to challenge Freud and follow his own drummer into the realms of the mystic - even terrorizing Freud intentionally with displays of telepathy. That's what Carrey is so afraid of in LIAR, that even if he parents with all his heart he may still be found wanting, but that is supposed to happen. The dad must inevitably be found wanting to be a true dad, otherwise he just suffocates with his cardboard perfection. It's something Freud realizes with a heavy heart while on a ship to America with Jung, wherein Jung brings him a dream that predicts Freud's own passing into history, no longer cutting edge. and Freud accepts it with the understanding grace of a true psychoanalyst.

It's necessary, it's the final lesson, this surpassing and renouncement. No one can stop time from stepping on Freud's or Jim Carrey's faces until all that's left is a graying portrait on the wall. The difference is Freud knows it, and can thus can play his part and then get on with his smoking. The Carreys of our world refuse to accept this, so never get to the level where they finally learn the truth, which is that the only good father, in the end, is a father who pretends to be bad. The wise and differentiated father knows when it's time for the son to be disillusioned and move on, to show that behind the paternal "no" of the father lurks just another human dealing with their own set of issues. Bad authoritarian dads mistake the role for their actual self, and wreck his children's lives by micromanaging them long into adulthood. Bad "fun" dads never notice when they're being intrusive, learning all the music his son likes, overstaying his appearance at all his son's basement parties. The good dad stays upstairs, lost in Handel, but will snap into it if, for example, there's a fire. Otherwise fuck you, man, he's listening to Handel. Having raised a great son he cuts him loose like a painting he's spent decades working on and now must sell to a private owner. Freud may cling to his subconssicous as the whole unconscious boilerplate and rant against the new kids, but perhaps it is just an act. An artist may cry and stamp his foot but he knows that just drives up the value when it's time to sell the painting. He is always down to let the prodigal wander, and to take comfort in his sixth cigar of the day as he fades into irrelevance. And that's why there can be no self realization without tobacco, Anna.

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CinemArchetype #11: The Wild, Wise Woman

"Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PHD -Women who Run with the Wolves

There's not a lot of wise women archetypes in the movies - maybe that's because they were all burnt at the stake in the gynocide of the Middle Ages. We've largely forgotten how cool they can be. When they've appeared they've either come on as wizened old crones (hence not a sexual threat), pedantic humanitarians, and/or fantasmagorical spirits. There are real-life icons like Jane Goodall (left), healers (Mother Theresa), TV earth mothers (Oprah), first ladies, scientists, surgeons, pilots, astronauts, and they abound in fairy tales and myth. But in cinema, few and far between be they.  

 Is it because wise women aren't cinematic, or do they just 'spook' us into feeling guilty, like we should finally call grandma? I've enjoyed assembling this entire series, but I must say I've been dreading this one. Luckily there's the amazing Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women who Run with the Wolves, a book I once bought for an old girlfriend, who couldn't understand it, gave up after ten pages, and thought I was holding my knowledge of Jungian archetypal symbolism over her head, and I was. The very existence of that book brought on a lot of fights, and maybe even broke us up and for that I am grateful. As was she. As Estes notes:

“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”

The wild wise woman has, as Estes notes, the ability to love even death, and failure, and rejection, as well as their opposites. She knows how to let go of her children without a thought, never resisting heartbreak any more than the sky resists a passing cloud, to take all that comes as rungs on a single winding ladder, to nurture without conditions... Jung wrote of the 'whole self' and discovery of one's true nature as essential to one's ability to be a good parent: "Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." Guiding the wise wild woman towards the universal life are the archetypes. Mothers, queens, doctors, spirits, and warriors, have lived that life, to the benefit of all us children. 

1. Cate Blanchett  - Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)
I found the first Elizabeth to be over-plotted and over-acted, but The Golden Age is just good old-fashioned, even subversive, camp. Blanchett--having dispensed with the origin story and all the 'must rise against patriarchal oppression' historical accuracy motif-mongering--is free to play Elizabeth how she should be played, with drollery and sly spirit. A great moment comes early on when, in the midst of  an ornate procession aglow in Bollywood pomp, she breaks her regal deadpan and winks at one of her friends in the crowd, but majestically and very British.  Both figurehead and woman, neither repressed nor repressive, she is earth mother and sky father both, able to wear the crown without it hanging too heavy. Two steps ahead of her enemies, free of all fear, she is an iron lady and effervescent as a daisy.  She's both nurturer and destroyer and, as the indirect result of having transcended sex, she is possessed with the ability to wipe out the entire Spanish armada with her virgin power and golden stormy garb, the stormy magic of the channel! She becomes what royalty was always supposed to be: a living archetype that points endlessly inwards, outwards, and upwards... and redefines fabulousness with an insect reptilian glam.

2. Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper - Night of the Hunter (1957) and as the Eternal Mother - Intolerance (1916)
What a pair of career bookends! Surely Laughton had Gish's role in the silent multi-narrative film Intolerance--with its connecting images of Gish rocking a cradle as the archetypal mother--in mind when casting her as Rachel Cooper in Hunter. While Intolerance didn't do well at the box office, Griffith's unabashed symbolism has aged very well if Night of the Hunter (which also flopped) is any indication. Both offer a clear line between evil 'false prophets' (the child-stealing moral crusaders of Intolerance and Mitchum's scary preacher in Hunter) and the true protectors of innocence.

Gish is perfect in both roles. Vulnerable, a bit frail maybe but iron tough, whether enduring betrayal by a no-good man (Way Down East), the dust bowl (The Wind), the French revolution (Orphans of the Storm), or beatings at the hands of her cruel drunk father (Broken Blossoms), she wins us over to her cause through those hardscrabble Yankee eyes. 

3. Pamela Brown as Catriona Potts - I Know Where I'm Going (1944)
One of my getaway fantasies is to escape out to the wilds of Kiloran and shack up with Catriona in her supremely cozy inn. Can't you see me, bonding with her troop of wolfhounds and borrowing from her loaded gun rack? Getting my hair wet from the wind and warm foggy damp of the isles and warming it up by the cheer of a good fire as I pour out whiskey for steady streams of cool visitors like Roger Livesy. There we are, the lot of us, staring out at the windy, stormy sea while nodding in and out of woozy romantic black-outs.

4. Julie Andrews - Mary Poppins (1964)

"Blown by the wind with an umbrella, she comes down from the clouds in response to the Banks' advertisement for a nanny. Her personality can be abrasive at times. She is not very sympathetic to the children other than in the Disney movie adaptation. There have been many questions as to whether Mary Poppins is human or not (perhaps an extraterrestrial disguised as a human)--that is for the reader to decide. P.L Travers said that Mary Poppins is 'a pretty young woman, a nurturing mother and a wise old woman, all in one.' Thus, Mary Poppins may be a reference to the "Triple Goddess," a frequently occurring archetype in many world cultures." -- Woo Factor

5. Katharine Hepburn - (everything)
She's already shown up in this series as devouring mother (Suddenly Last Summer) and anima (Bringing up Baby), but I don't dare leave her out of this. In films like her Spence collaborations or On Golden Pond she proved she could match the big old patriarchal blowhards stare for stare. The real sizzle in her chemistry with Spencer Tracy (who, gifted though he may be as an actor, radiates a joy-killing sanctimoniousness) is her refusal to buckle to his bullying, nor hold a grudge about it, nor lose her feminine cheer in the process, all of which makes her a modern heroine and a wise woman of the first class... She always played herself, but it was a self that could encompass any character or role the way the sea encompasses the sailor.

6. Nancy Reagan - Shadow on the Wall (1950)
Perhaps this unique character slipped by the censors because having an adult male doctor playing dolly games with a child would be creepy, but it's great and rare to see an unencumbered professional female character like this in a film, even today (compare her with, say, the doormat sex-starved shrinks in THE DEPARTED or BASIC INSTINCT) and Nancy Davis pulls it off very well: she's got low key sexual appeal because she's strong rather than in spite of it. She's allowed to take over important medical duties from men without them squawking or belittling her, and she even educates older men lawyer friends of the family on the latest breaks in the developing field of child psychology. No man comes along feeling he has to 'put her in her place' with a smug passive aggressive put-down. While it's great this film exists, it makes Hollywood's long history of sexist inequality that much more glaring by contrast, since it never had its own series, or spawned imitators.

7. Alannis Morisette as God - Dogma (1999)
As a god that's both an avenging apocalypse-toting Kali 2000 and a goofy Harpo Marxist sprite, Alanis's God is one of the few redeeming features of Kevin Smith's overwritten, under-directed, tediously foul-mouthed ode to the pantheon of Catholic angels. Electrifying and 'in the moment'  Morisette proves you can be wise and wild without sacrificing ditziness. As Television without Pity notes, Morissette-God:

 "Makes angels cry and stoned slackers stop swearing with the sheer force of her presence; issues screams that are literally earthshaking and explosive; resurrects the dead and makes ‘em pregnant; can do a pretty good handstand."

8. Dorothy Neumann as Meg Maud - The Undead (1957)
She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future like himself were not uncommon in her bizarre Middle Ages dimension. Neumann was a great find for Corman; she's to the putty nose and chin born, but with a genuine ease, wisdom and spry sweetness that makes her Meg equally reassuring and spooky.

9. Bea Richards as Baby Suggs - Beloved (1998)
Tak Fujimoto's cinematography captures the purple brilliance of black skin at twilight with precise poetry, but director Jonathan Demme couldn't really find the right ground to make Beloved breathe. Still, Beloved offers a textbook wealth of mythopoetic realism: old plantation myths, ghosts, folktales, superstition, and religion all bleed into the mundane muddy life of a woman haunted by some bad deeds and bad history. But then there's Bea Richards' awesome Suggs, the backwoods earth mother / preacher. Bea Richards alone seems to grasp the folksy deconstruction at work and morphs herself into the humble epitome of a wise woman in a way that's genuinely compelling. The end has her conducting a big gathering in the woods where she tells the congregation to love their hands. I think of her a lot when I'm stressed out in the grocery store... just keep thinking of Baby Suggs telling me to look at my hands.

10. Maria Ouspenskaya - The Wolfman (1941) / / Marlene Dietrich -Touch of Evil (1959)
Unfortunately gypsies have had a hard time throughout history--first Middle Age witch hunters and then the Nazis tried to wipe them out. But as archetypes they survive and are without parallel, especially as fortune telling, whip-cracking, Esmeralda-pimping relics of a deeper connection to arcane things, a connection Christianity has tried for thousands of years to eradicate. Ouspenskaya gave the role of Wolfman's advisor a lot of sympathy, as Theron Neel notes:

Ouspenskaya’s main purpose is to act mysterious and deliver ominous expository dialogue to let the audience—and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Lawrence Talbot—know what’s going to happen. This she does wonderfully, but she does oh so much more. As the mother of the doomed Bela (played by Bela Lugosi), she’s oddly touching as a loving parent who has somehow accepted the fact that her son is damned. Ouspenskaya treated the character of Maleva as seriously as any other she’d played. (Portraits in Horror)

Dietrich's gypsy woman is no slouch either, but a whole different sort, more adult and ennui-ridden, more stand-offish yet just as 'oddly touching' and compassionate in her cold way; Ouspenskaya doesn't have to recall years of sleeping with Larry Talbot while he hangs out at her place guzzling a case of whiskey. Still, Dietrich comes running out of her salon after Hank Quinlan bites it in a last minute gesture of compassion for her fallen ex-John, noting "he was some kind of a man." Up until then she seldom speaks without a cigarillo in her mouth, is usually counting money or reading tarot cards, and telling Hank his future is "all used up." Like Ouspenskaya's gypsy she is the earth mother to a falling shadow self (both Hank and Maleva's son Bela are in the Shadow section of this series), the wellspring of nonjudgmental forgiveness that western civilization has tried so hard to cement over (with by-the-book blind men like Vargas). In the twilit world of the gypsy, even monsters can find motherly love. Too bad it's the gypsies that are always first on any culture's kill list.

11. Elizabeth Taylor (gone gray) - Giant (1956)
"(Taylor's) character in Giant clashes with her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. So they surrender, like aggressive dogs surrendering to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for beating them, and she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll always let you try again. And after she bloodies your nose she'll gently wipe it for you with her own perfume-scented cloth" (From Great Acid Movies: Suddenly Last Summer)

 

12.Kim Hunter as Zira - Planet of the Apes (1968)
When you're captured by oppressive apes or aliens you always hope some nurturing earth mother scientist will come along and declare you an endangered species in need of protection. Zira's compassion for humankind provides the sense that perhaps, somehow, things may turn out all right for human-ape relations. In the sequels she ends up giving birth to her own species thanks to traveling back into the past, the ultimate in matriarchal self-creation.
  

12.5: Lorraine Bracco as Dolores Del Ruby - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)
Few people have seen this disaster from beginning to end, I'm told. But I caught a whole middle stretch on IFC awhile ago, so got to see Dolores Del Ruby conducting peyote rituals and Bracco is awesome, dropping truth bombs like "playfulness ceases to have a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously."

I still wish there could be an alternate cut of Blake Edward's Switch where Bracco hooks up all the way with Ellen Barkin (who's a straight male reincarnated). Irregardless, matriarchs of the psychedelic bent are so far between I have to at least mention her as extra credit. Okay, mother?

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Uneasy Riderless: THE OREGONIAN (2011)

Piece of advice: If you're ever driving west, skip northwestern Oregon. Back in 1989 my girlfriend and I were driving out west, and decided to take a scenic route down through Oregon from Montana, and soon we landed in a horror movie: long twisting crumbling two-lane blacktops snaking around gnarled tree trunks, deserted plows, empty pastures, collapsed barns, boarded-up feed stores and closed motels. We saw caved-in mailboxes that looked like they hadn't seen mail in decades, smoke-blackened trees, unlit neon bar signs, lingering decorations of holidays long past or yet to be --Christmas and Halloween blurred together like a sad K-Mart close-out left to grow mold in a sunless void for 30 post-apocalyptic years. No life --not even a bird. And as the sun set the road seemed to be pulling us forward into the sheer blackness of the next turn like a twisting yellow line jellyfish. Something waited for us in the darkness behind the trees. It was coiled to spring on us like a coiled redneck cottonmouth, to flash its genitals at my traveling companion, or humiliate me in front of her, or abduct her and force me to spend panicky hours asking for help in a high, crackly voice as I navigated The Vanishing or And Soon the Darkness-style scenarios. Never before had a landscape so resembled modern western civilization's rurally twisted nightmares.

Sharing my experience of western Oregon as a Lovecraftian sinkhole, apparently, is Calvin Reeder, who has blown some festival circuit minds recently with The Oregonian (2011). A landmark debut of high 16mm strangeness in the Alice in Wonderland / limbo / post-apocalyptic / dream world / experimental mode, it joins the ranks of works by David Lynch and Herk Harvey in the nightmare logic pantheon, but with the tactile American flannel shirt dread of Coscarelli and Carpenter. With it's droning electric guitar score and refusal to explain itself or offer any stable reality to warp, Reeder's film turns to the groundless ground previously inhabited only by Eraserhead, and then goes deeper down into the mucky muck, attacking along the fault lines between avant garde 'le bad cinema' and psychedelic Xtreme horror, waking reality and nightmares, and a grunge-tinted road movie. Put this on a bill with Dementia AKA Daughter of Horror if it took place in the wilderness of Oregon instead of Los Angeles; Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me if it was on a Plan Nine budget, on bad acid; Carnival of Souls put through a Mark Frost psychotronic spice grinder;  Easy Rider if done by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

The story progression centers around the experiences of a blonde hippy-ish smoker chilling at an isolated lama ranch; a creepy stalker fuels her boyfriend's jealous insanity, the boyfriend passes out drunk, so she bails; suddenly she's waking up in a car that apparently crashed into a father and son who were having a picnic by the side of the road in the dead of night. Now they're lying dead, and her forehead is covered in blood, but no one is around anywhere to help as she staggers down that lonesome road. There is no phone to call the cops and the desolation stretches for miles; the few folks she meets stare and smile insanely. Her only friend becomes a degenerate in a big frog costume, and later she hooks up with a bunch of weirdo musicians who drink gasoline.... Luckily she finds a shotgun, and a few guides who advise her to just relax and, as Martha advises in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, "sink into it."

I love that Reeder refuses to pick a side, to explain the madness, to have some root answer to whether it's all a nightmare or Phantasm-matic inter-dimensional death drive film school experiment. Unlike few other films, it maintains it's madness with the patience of a gardener. For my money, The Oregonian is way better than a lot of over-praised existential stuff like Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (though Refn's awesome Valhalla Rising compares well).

I'd warn that there is a very strange bit of sexual dream violence in case you're squeamish, but if it didn't offend me, it probably won't offend you. It's too far gone to be misogynistic. There is a chance everything our looking glass Alice heroine sees and hears is all just cover memories to mask the trauma of a past rape ala Last Year in Marienbad but it's too surreal, involving way too many abstractions to be traumatized from, any more than you would be if Louise Bourgeois and Edward D. Wood collaborated on a 1972 road movie version of Repulsion.

That sound good? Then you're sick!

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CinemArchetype #10: The Wild Man

The most essential (we desperately need it back) yet dangerous of the unassimilated abject pantheon tends to be defined by his utter lack of social graces and his surplus of animal power; he's the shaman outsider, a bit too large for ordinary civilization so he lives--by choice and necessity-- in the wilderness; his hair and wild beard and maniacal eyes give him away... he's the wild man. Any hero's journey requires a visit with him for the wild man holds onto the element that is 'circumcised' or castrated to make a civilized man, and that element is required for success. When the rest of his tribe was being declawed for city living, the wild man stayed behind, and kept his claws. His isolation represents a possible outcome for the hero's journey if the hero decides not to return to the social order with his beanstalk prizes and instead shuns the company of soft-handed mortals and stays in the forest where nymphs and satyrs run free. The wild man can be terrifying or gentle but either way he lives larger than the average bear, and way larger than the civilized schmuck.

The modern sage archetype evolves from the wild man: the sage has harnessed the wild man energy and incorporated it towards higher goals, while the wild man is wild man energy, he embodies it and he doesn't transcend it. Sometimes he can be both sage and wild man, like Merlin. And the knights of Camelot when searching for the grail essentially must all become wild men themselves, entering the twisted forest and letting their beards grow strange and long. Yoda and Obi Wan both start out their films a little wild -- as when Obi Wan spooks off the sand people, or Yoda ransacks Luke's Dagoba encampment. In their instances the difference is more in perception; the more we see them the more sage-ish they become; their wildman aura is based on unfamiliarity (Olaf in HEIDI is another example of this). Thus the sage can enact the wild man to scare off trespassers or to teach the overly civilized and the wise man can act civilized to teach the overly wild, but the true wild man, as seen here, doesn't 'act' anything- he just is; forever lacking the 'lack' that would bring him into the 'enlightened' age.

1. Timothy Carey (in everything).
The Wild Man as Actor -

"One of the most gargantuan and adorable scenery chewers the cinema has ever known, the six-foot-four Timothy Agoglia Carey had a growl so loud and a grimace so creepy he could have frightened Beelzebub off a toilet seat—and a warm if slightly warped grin so goofy and infectious he could charm a kitten out of a tree. A beatnik/hepcat/margin dweller before there were terms for such things, Carey was born in Brooklyn (are you sensing a pattern here?)" - Chuck Stephens ("The Killers Inside Me" - Criterion website)

2.  Robert Shaw as Quint - Jaws (1974)
The Wild Man as Killer - To catch a primordial eating machine like the Great White you need to access the primordial fisherman within. Quint's first appearance in Jaws is one of the great moments of manly archetypal move-busting. "I'll catch him for five, but I'll kill him, and clean him, for ten," or whatever he says to the group of stunned, soft-handed island Amity committee members. He's an Ahab just waiting for the right whale to come along and here it is, eating the eaters who by day probably wince at Quint's briny passing on the street. Now they need him, and for the initially anemic Brody and Dreyfuss he's a blast of manly impetus. They must earn his trust, must show him their scars and tell him their stories and drink at his pace or else go home with ladies of Spain. Emblematic of the aspect of manhood we leave behind when entering the social order, Quint is an archetype we forget altogether only at our peril. We'll be up shit creek when his kind finally all die out and all we're left with are loud-talkin' minnows.

3. Matthew McConaughey in Reign of Fire (2002)
The Wild Man as Warrior - When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, and thus Matthew goes crazy dragon-killing machine. While little Chrissy Bale hides in his post-apocalyptic den, Matt's out there killing dragons in the wild, eating them up and collecting their teeth. I think old Matt's underrated as an actor, and here's the ballsy proof. Best moment is when he fires right at Bale's head, trusting the dragon's about to come right over the horizon at the perfect time. Anyone who's manned a gun turret or played Space Invaders knows it's not about shooting at your enemy, it's about shooting where your enemy is going to be in a second or two. When chaos reigns, Matt reignser.

4. Gordon Liu as Pai Mei - Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004)
The Wild Man as Teacher - There's a very thin line between the wild man and sage archetypes but there's no doubt which side of the fence Pai Mei falls on. He lives alone, shunning the company of lesser men, in a graveyard at the top of a high hill and he kicks the shit out of his young, female grasshoppers, even ripping out the eye of California Mountain Snake, a bad idea considering she makes his food and is Ellie Driver, the sexiest and deadliest of all the mambas. Imagine Yoda ripping out Luke's eye to make a point? You can't, and that is why he fails.

5. Brad Pitt - Thelma and Louise (1991)
The Wild Man as Lover - Like the fairy tale wild men, Pitt's seductive cowboy hitchhiker gives magical gifts to the hero for her journey. Of course the wild man never gives without taking, usually what he takes is the bridge behind you, your money, even your shoes, creating an impasse so wide you can never return to civilization without first completing your quest and then taking the long way around. After he gives Louise her first orgasm, Brad absconds with the Louise's money, but leaves them a magical tool, a gun. Pitt's performance in the film is nothing short of alchemical magic - it made him a star overnight. For a hot minute we all wanted to get "robbed" by Brad Pitt.

6. Javier Bardem as Romeo Dolorosa- Perdita Durango (1997, AKA Dance with the Devil)
Wild Man as Shaman - One of the biggest crimes in post-Tarantinoville is how Spanish wild child director Alex de Iglesia has been shafted in the US via poor distribution and second-guessing, self-sabotaging US distributors who replace his films' awesome (Spanish) titles with generic straight-to video meaninglessness.

Thus Perdita Durango becomes 'Dance with the Devil.' But either way, Bardem is one of my all-time favorite actors and deserved to win his Oscar for No Country, AND YET! it's in Durango where he brings the monster home.

 How wild man is this film? The original chicken killin' wild man of rock, Screamin' Jay Hawkins (left) is Dolorosa's right hand man! Rosie Perez is Perdiata! Her love story with Dolorosa is muy hermosa! And when they start to sway and bounce to the music of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass as kidnapped white kids panic in the backseat, you will be rolling on the floor laughing in hysterical delight! Demand they release his previous film, Day of the Beast, a horror comedy too good apparently for American audiences.  Che, un re flash balujo tu puta madre!

7. Jon Voight - Runaway Train
Wild Man as Convict 
From my 2007 post for the Performances that Changed Your Life Blogathon:
I once had a mystical vision of a giant bull walrus roaring through a whole in the arctic ice; all alone and trapped in desolate, freezing waters, but he breaks through the ice and lets out a huge roar into the empty white wilderness. With that roar, that blind raging shout of “I am,” the walrus becomes one with the cosmos. I knew I could stay happy and in the moment (and not have an acid meltdown) as long as I remembered the loud bellow of this mystical bull walrus. When I saw this film I recognized right away that Manny is the human version of this walrus. Hurtling towards death, frost on his big walrus mustache, howling into the void, Manny even manages a heroic gesture of selflessness before journeying into the final blast of white. One of Marlon Brando's favorite films.

8. John Hawkes as Teardrop - Winter's Bone (2010)
Wild Man as Meth Addict -
...BONE (goes) all the way to the bottom of the family swamp, where the wild man lies, and dredges that deep man up. As Robert Bly once wrote in IRON JOHN:

But going down through the water to touch the wild man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and he seems even more so now, when corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless shallow man (2)

Teardrop on the other hand is the untamed wild man, the kind of guy that creeps you out at first  but then somewhere along the way, not sure when, you start to admire him. Isn't that so much better than the other way around? (Beards of Bleakness: WINTER'S BONE VS. THE ROAD)

 

9. Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview - There Will Be Blood (2007)
Wild Man as Capitalist - Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons! 

10. Michael York as John the Baptist - Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
Wild Man as Prophet
Buried as he is deep in Zeffirelli's staggeringly long and ignored Jesus film, Michael York is, for my money, woefully under-praised.  Is it just because he's so damned gorgeous and feline and didn't make too many great movies? Well, if you doubt his capacity for wild man fury then you need to see him in Jesus of Nazareth: if you were planning to save any scenery for breakfast, forget it, York makes John the Baptist's holy madness into something far too dangerous for amateurs. Jesus comes to him to get baptized like a monk walking into whirring helicopter blades. Witness Easter Acid Cinema: Jesus of Nazareth! 

11. John Belushi as Bluto - Animal House (1978)
Wild Man as Dionysian Rebel
"Just keep your hands and face away from his mouth."

It can't be over stated the liberating effect Blutarsky had on the masculine psyche when Animal house was first released upon the world in 1978. We had been looking for him, but wild man had gone to college! After losing him when Quint died in Jaws, we finally re-found him in a ratty frat house, catching hurled bottles of beer like a Zen boozehound amok in the early 60s time capsule forest. We learn at the end he went on to become a senator, which made us, at last, optimistic for America's future. Seen today the film seems remarkably of-a-piece, the era predating the Summer of Love rock explosion, when there were just folkies and soul acts and it's as if Bluto and company are conjuring the rock and roll edge right before your eyes. Belushi shows why he was such a beloved presence and wears his indebtedness to Harpo Marx, W.C. Fields, and Buster Keaton on his sleeve. Bacchus bless and keep his satyr soul.

12. Bencio del Toro as Dr. Gonzo - Fear an Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Wild Man as Deranged Sociopath
Sort of the dark inverse of Bluto, Del Toro's performance in Vegas is terrifying and darkly heroic, even when terrorizing waitresses and destroying things for no reason and howling primordially in Las Vegas hotel bathrooms, vomiting all over the line between wild man acidhead and just general asshole.  When Hunter likens del Toro's Dr. Gonzo to the last of the buffalo--a unique one of a kind original--only then do you finally begin to understand the relevance of what you have just seen: from thence forth drugs will have to be done on the sly, behind locked bathroom doors because dicks like Gonzo ruined it for everyone. The days of giant monster men carving their carnivorous hallucinations large into the flesh of the mainstream are over. The gonzo method, apparently, includes leaving no bridge unburned behind you, only strings of draconian laws made to ensure no one pulls the same shit you just got away with. - (8/29)

13.  Klaus Kinski - Himself
It's fitting that the CinemArchetype Rule of 12 would be broken for Klaus Kinski, by Samuel Wilson's special request. My favorite Klaus moment is in the opening segment of Herzog's Mein Liebsterfreund where he's on stage in what looks like the closing act at Altamont speedway. He'sshouting at a disruptive audience with stout Teurtonic conviction, rabid eyes and spittle-flecked German. I think he wears the audience out. I forget because I stopped watching, in terror.

Looking around the web, there's a lot of great lines about the man, including this bit of spot-on, if broken, English from a KK bio : "Klaus Kinski does over 60 films, alone, in the 1960's, and never looks back once."

Elsewhere on the site, this Kinski quote (excerpted from a letter to his son) which is a perfect ending to this wild man post:

"I came into this world in the form of a human, but the sun, the stars, the wind, fire, deserts, forests, mountains, skies, oceans, and clouds were trapped inside me. Do not be sad, Nanhoi. The truth is, I can never die. For I will be in everything and see you in everything and watch over you. I am your reaction in the water of a mountain lake. I am your shadow and I am the light that creates your shadow. I am your fairy tale. Your dream."

Wild, man. Wild.

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They Shoot Horsemen: HUNGER GAMES

The idea of obtaining instant celebrity is a fantasy we all share, especially in the 'blogosphere' --and why not? It comes true for random people who don't deserve it, like viral video stars, and it's this fantasy that's explored in The Hunger Games. If idiots can win it all, then why not we? Killing people to get there? No problem.

 This fantasy is dramatically different than the usual hook of teen franchises like Twlight and Harry Potter, which offer a return to a pre-egoic sense of safety in cozy confines with numerous friends and attractive protectors, i.e. Hogwarts or the Cullen house, or the Starship Enterprise. In Games there is no safety, no 'base' in the future's lifelong game of tag. The only way to find any kind of fantasy fulfillment with Hunger is through unease, and the idea that one day a whole world will see you, on TV, all the time. Your very lack of a secure space is the fantasy. Omnipresent cameras depict your struggle for survival as you navigate the bully-strewn way to gym class. In Games there's not even a Coney Island to bop all the way back to and say "We fought all night to come back to this?" There's just a frail little sister who's lost without you, producing the very opposite of 'security' in your anguished teen heart.

Imagine though, knowing every time you smiled into a mirror and raised a punk rock salute a million viewers burst into unheard applause? The pain of Truman was that he was unaware he was adored by the unseen masses. The triumph of Jennifer Lawrence is that she knows... and she learns fast how to milk it.

Over on Bright Lights, C. Jerry Kutner has dropped an awesome post about Hunger Games' science fiction ancestors, including: Battle Royale, the 10th Victim, The Year of the Sex Olympics and an Outer Limits ep, which he presents in its entirety. I would also add Series 7: The Contender, a well-received but ultimately ignored 2001 indie of which I saw the first 2/3, but had to stop when the last two survivors, one of whom is the other's ex-boyfriend who is dying of cancer. Ooops, did I spoil Series 7? No, of course not, every one of these movies ends that way. And I don't actually know how they resolved it because I stopped watching, in disgust!

Series 7: The Contenders

Kill like a woman, Contender! It's your one big chance for immortality vs. eternal pussydom, and if your wounded boyfriend wants  you to win, and puts your gun to his temple, just press the trigger! After all, they shoot horses don't they? I say that when you let civilized decency stop you from pulling that trigger when the ratings demand it, then the terrorists win.

What some detractors decry about the Games, and those in the know appreciate, is Lawrence's character's relative moral aloofness (she makes Bella Swan seem bubbly) and her ability to feign love and caring to gain sponsors, to the point where even she no longer seems to know if she's sincere. Certainly we at home or in the theater don't ever learn whether her romance with her short guy partner in the games is something she genuinely wants to happen, and I like that ambiguity. It's classy. Detractors probably resent it because they don't want to admit they feign their own lives for an invisible audience too. What if Jennifer only pretended to like, for example, us?

And on that level Lawrence's characterization is a sublime modern metatextualization, illuminating the way actors pretending to love one another onscreen are no different than those 'in love' in the 'real' world. Each believes with vengeance what they know deep down not to be true. What Fleetwood Mac forgot was that players believe they love you when they're playin' -- only in the deep, deep down can admit they it's all just Liaisons Dangereuses-style seductions undertaken to impress our Marquise de Mateuil-du jour. Only later does it dawn on them that the Marquise was playing them, too, the whole time.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959)

If you ever want to break free of the chain of love-starved idiots chasing each other through the enchanted Summer Night's fairlyland woods though, then start actually loving people you pretend to love. Don't just believe your own lies, make them come true. Those who hold out for the one perfect love rather than loving the one they're with eventually fall into the Groucho club membership abyss (1) and never recognize when the right person finally comes along. Meanwhile trauma, fear, fighting, and loneliness transcend the notion of emotional truth-- just ask anyone who's ever had Stockholm syndrome. So is love really a reliable goal? Shouldn't it rather be a practice?

At the same time, pretending to love someone gives you tons of power over them, presuming they love you more; pretending not to care about someone you do love gives you a better chance at not scaring them off with your needy longing. Sometimes you can avoid the fear/lonely/trauma altogether and never change your mind for anyone, but rarely because our minds change all the time whether we want them to or not. Fuck the world if they think you should act in some other way than pretense. In Falsum Veritas! When the world around you has proven it can't be trusted, only a fool ever feels secure. It's this aspect of Lawrence's character that resonates with writers such as Laura Bogart:

These books illustrate why PTSD is—as my former shrink once put it—the gift that keeps on giving: Nobody will be trustworthy, not entirely. Not when our parents and our governments, the very people who were supposed to protect us (or at least not cause us harm) are the ones who’ve thrown us in the midst of swinging fists and tracker jacker stings. How can we ever believe in anyone, even when we know (intellectually, at least) that we should? And if we can’t believe in anyone, why should we be anyone worth believing in?  The Hunger Games trilogy gives an arrow-strike of a pulse to what Genet called “the irreducibility of terror.”.  (The Nervous Breakdown, 3/12)

This level of absolute failure of trust in authority makes Games more than a metaphor for Vietnam and/or school bullying. When I first heard about Hunger Games I instantly got mad that something could get so popular without me knowing about it beforehand, and also I thought it was a ripoff of Battle Royale, but in the end I'm okay with all that, because what the film's endurance test grind most reminded me of while I was watching it was Sydney Pollack's existential period pain-a-thon, They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969, an earlier post on it here).

Like Hunger Games, Horses involves average, starving, broke ass poor citizens entering a grueling but possibly lucrative competition as couples, two by two, as if upon a massive, hellish ark. The film records their signing in, health check-ups, coaching, etc, before the competition begins so by the time it starts we're already antsy. As the cruel hours of the competition drag on, sponsors are courted from amongst the gathered gawkers. In Games, Jennifer Lawrence feigns reciprocation for her less agile fellow entrant Josh Hutcherson because the rubes love a romance, and in Horses Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin even get married right on the dance floor, even though at that point they no longer even like each other, just for presents from the rubes, pots and pans they can hock once the contest ends. In both films, after many torturous days and nights the final survivors are so exhausted they're barely recognizable to themselves, and of course that's just what the ghoulish audience loves to gawk at... in both worlds.

As in Hunger Games, Horses is keen on issues of food and starvation and the ample servings available to the participants vs. the starving cheap seat audience. Hunger's blue-haired (ugh) emcee (Stanley Tucci) compares well with Gig Young's award-winning performance as the 'caring' emcee of the dance marathon in Horses, both don't really end so much as drift away from us, carrying the sense our hero is just heading off into the next nerve-wracking scenario. In short, fellow kids, if you're looking for something cool and weird that will illustrate your own life anxiety in a profound and sexy way, something that fits the dog eat cat mentality of Hunger Games, Netflix the '69 Horses, and ponder the eerie similarity.... to our own goddamn country.

(1) Groucho's famous telegram to Friar's Club: "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

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