Blitzkrieg gegen die normalen leuten: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie is bland, easily led, normal and stupid, just like YOU!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure; his eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department, yet he's smiling.

Since Peckinpah considered Dustin's math professor 'everyman' to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George), who was born there and left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends. Since he's long since been lumped by the literally minded critics (how riff-raffish of them!) in with conservative ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of a self-righteous lefty nerd narcissist will be weeded out until he's American Average like "everyone" with their breaking points and whatnot.

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound self-righteously astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses! And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun - and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate. It's most worthwhile to check out, here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from the Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event in the peace and quiet of the lake makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do.  Meanwhile if Wild had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code Americana hell hole like the one in HEAVEN, would we act any different than Tierney’s character? Or, say, Francis Farmer? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepford-mation? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrely when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” Man, I hate mauve. At least Tierney’s character, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths” grew up in a situation outside the claustrophobic, chipmunk cheeked tedium of the “sanitized” American family values. She had her dad's love, and money, and learned somewhere the bravery to throw herself down the stairs. It's hard to do. Have you tried it? Lord knows I tried; it’s a very difficult thing to pull off, actually. I’m not saying you should, but try it some time, it’s hard to do; you can hear all your other selves clamoring up from the basement, working your limbs better than you ever could, in order to prevent you hurting what one day might be theirs. 

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, and Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs them into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. The censors are gone, they have been for years! Drop the shears, and stop being afraid to take a life or too -- it's just the moves! We need LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity. We had THELMA AND LOUISE but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over the fire like a flood of designer bottled water. These people need shocking; art can be the shock therapy to jolt them from their carbohydrate stupor. In this sense Ellen is an artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her.

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point beyond good and evil. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it; who aren't afraid to see beyond the 'chilling psychopath' to the artist and human within.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with it than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, and so is America. Dig? Let's fight... and be beautiful!