Psyched: THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Shot at a castle in Hungary over two months on a mix of money provided by Pepsi (to slyly fund a bottling plant they were setting up there) and author William Peter Blatty's EXORCIST profits, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980) is a dark mix of anti-war/ masculinity deconstruction craziness (based on Blatty's 1968 novel, Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane) that could only have come out in the late 1960s-early 1970s, but didn't. Released at the dawn of the age of Arnold, it's understandable the film wouldn't make any sense until the 21st century, when DVD could help the film can sneak quietly away from it's 1980s brethren and back into a seat next to all the 70's anti-Vietnam, cold war satires and post-traumatic masculine character studies-- DR. STRANGELOVE, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, M*A*S*H, CATCH-22, TAXI DRIVER and APOCALYPSE NOW--to which it belongs. Blatty, himself, directed. With a powerful hand!

Catholic spirituality, masculine psyche-probing; BILLY JACK-style pacifist vs. bikers mythos, and the garroting of children are all wrapped up in a a story about a remote experimental military officer's mental hospital, which blossoms under the loving leadership of a guy crazier than Gregory Peck in SPELLBOUND. Said fella is played by the awesome and always underrated Stacy Keach, who's tight, pulp magazine face and round eyes make him ideal as a mix of Christ and cobra, Gandhi and Golem. He says his lines like he's barely holding back toppling Gomorrah, reaching for an olive branch like Samson might reach for a wig he knows is far too small for him.

Keach condones the inmates' plans to--among other things--dig elaborate GREAT ESCAPE-style tunnels to freedom. There's communal madness afoot and you get a real sense that it was a real boondoggle for cast and crew, with the Bavarian beer hall/castle interior carrying a Sunday afternoon frat house vibe. Murky cloudy day photography uses exterior castle shots and lunar crucifixion and 'Nam flashback dream sequences to break up the mostly indoor scenes of doctors, carousing and breeches of military protocol; after awhile there's the feeling you get when you wake up with hangover and start drinking right away, but now it's hours later and you're still drinking--watery beer from the frat house tap--and it's made you more existentially depressed than comfortably numb. The camaraderie of hairy, foul-mouthed bros playing pool does nothing to quell your heartsick longing for some girl you stayed up all the previous night with, and it's a lonely on a rainy Sunday afternoon mix of aching in the shoulders and jaws, heartsickness, as you wait for the frat house pot dealer to come home from his 'ahem' errand and sell you a much-needed bag. At such time every earned laugh is like a stray sunbeam in your cloudy constellation, and you can feel the need for amusement and male bonding like a junky in permanent withdrawal. 

Believe it or not, I can also vouch for the authenticity of the 'letting the inmates run the asylum" approach, having interned at Bellevue's alcohol clinic. Our head doctor was a sexy Swiss woman with huge holes in her ears and an office full of bizarre trinkets she'd collected from the Africas. When Keach shouts "Where's the love, man!" at the stern staff sarge--or just keeps reading and drinking as Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) hams it up with tantrums and wearily Marx Brothers-esque anarchy-- I'm reminded of when this doctor would do the same thing, patiently listening as nutty drunks-in-residence rambled excitedly away for hours on end in her office while I tried to figure out the patient admittance software. And oh my god, the creative arts therapy director looked just like Linda Fiorentino and we had this cool connection... but she was freaking married. Dear God, hell is truly where you find it.

NINTH CONFIGURATION is not all hell and high water however. Good as Scott Wilson may have been as one of the killers in IN COLD BLOOD (1967), here he's way too ectomorphic to be a believable astronaut (his character was told "you're gonna die up there" in THE EXORCIST, making this a 'sequel' in the most sketchy of terms). He wasn't Blatty's first choice, but Michael Moriarty pulled out at the last minute, so it's not Wilson's fault he's miscast. Moriarty doesn't have the mesomorphic right stuff either but at least he might've ripped a sweaty hole in the screen with his teeth. Wilson just kind of chews at the corners and the scenes seem too moistened with saliva (not Salvia). Insanity really needs to have a hunger behind it; to tear the screen one must be a little rabid. Like our friend below, Jason Miller.

Far more alive than he was as Father Karras in THE EXORCIST, here Miller shows off a deep understanding of deadpan comedy as a theater director doing Hamlet with a cast of dogs. Miller also shows a fine rapport with Times Square grime legend Joe Spinell who plays his devoted "Aww, gee boss" production assistant. At times they seem to channel John Barrymore and Roscoe Karns in TWENTIETH CENTURY (1933). So yeah, there's a lot about this shaggy dog boondoggle of a movie to love, like the way Blatty shoehorns his Saint Christopher medal and issues of loss of Christian/Catholic faith into the plot. I'm no Catholic, but I appreciate the balls it takes to shoehorn spiritual allegories into a shaggy dog story.

In fact, Spinell and Miller have--in spades!--what's missing from Michael Shannon's matricidal nutter in MY SON MY SON WHAT HAVE YE DONE (which I lamented the lack of a few weeks ago), that Radium X of deadpan absurdity and detached gamesmanship even in the face of existential horror--the Kinski precipice--but hey, not everyone has it. Does Vince Gallo have it? I thought he did, but now... who knows. Does this astronaut played by Scott Wilson have it? No, well, sometimes. Does that answer your question, freak? Luckily, Keach has enough of it to burn the film up like a spliff in a Rasta drum circle.

Alas, decades of reruns of the hit TV show M*A*S*H has made military silliness (showing up to roll call in bath robes and summer dresses, for example) banal with repetition. You get the feeling here that a NYC hipster might have watching Corporal Klinger show up at a Jackie O Motherfucker meatpacking district party in 1997. But we should also remember that at the time of CONFIGURATION's inception, Hawkeye Pierce was still a little cutting edge. Nowadays, well, I can only imagine how deglamorized and downplayed all his drinking and sexual harassment would be in a M*A*S*H remake. But the 1970s was when adults first realized the government and military weren't always on the square, and they acted accordingly, via swinging for the aisles. That attitude now seems almost quaint, like watching Father Karras wrestle with his faith in THE EXORCIST (1973) in the light of all the child molestation and global warming. In other words, there is no longer any reliable pillar of authority to rebel against! Regan and her advisor/war counsel Pazuzu run the country. The Karrases of the world have dissolved back into the NY Post-headline Sargasso Sea.

In the amnesiac lathe of time we've largely forgotten that THE EXORCIST was shocking not only because of what the devil did to Linda Blair's little girl body, but what the medical community did, systematically violating and corrupting a little girl in the interest of calming her demon mind: Regan suffers two graphic, painful spinal taps and has her mood altered via 'scrips for ritalin, benzos, god knows what else. Nowadays kids get this kind of treatment for something as innocuous as being caught with a joint in their backpack, or testing positive via a mom's at-home urine sampler. Blatty is clearly predicted all that - it's the Regan generation!  NINTH CONFIGURATION is Blatty's attempt to imagine a saner policy for the insane, the humoring of madness to get at its root, the notion that people who act crazy do so to keep from going crazy, that only by embracing madness can they stay above it. Like any other jealous lover, crazy chases you if you run from it, but pursue it with open arms and it shrinks back into the shadows like a frat boy in a Courtney Love song who just got / what he wants.

In the scheme of NINTH CONFIGURATION, belief, love, and faith are all that separates us from falling into the yawning chasm of meaningless carnage and despair. Acting crazy is just a way to try and own your own plummeting. As someone who, in 2006, was touched by God (on the shoulder) and told to preach the gospel, and realized I was just creeping people out and so stopped, I can relate to the issue Blatty explores. If you ask for a sign from God before you believe, and God gives you one, do you stammer an excuse why you still cling to your life raft of earthly possessions and egoic fears? Or do you jump into the sea and follow Saint Francis Aquarius of barefoot flower power bowl haircut love like a cult-brainwashed punk? Either way you wake up cold and hung over one morning feeling like a sucker, shivering in the hungover cold of post-party frat house, waiting for the pot dealer to come take the pain partly away. So make every touch of God count... and boondoggle your way to temporary freedom! Fire up the coffin, Jesus. Daddy's rolling home!