BEST of 2012

1. DJANGO UNCHAINED!
Some films this year were loftier or more intellectually advanced, but none provided the pure visceral cinematic euphoria of DJANGO UNCHAINED! And none have as much to say about this country (the USA) and balls and the N word.

What this year's election showed us, incontrovertibly and probably permanently, is that when Latinos, stoners, African Americans, women, academics, Jews, foreigners, queers, freaks, liberals, beatniks, hairbags, poets, Mansonesque junkies, alcoholics in out of the rooms, unrepentant druggies, 99%-ers, and Hispanics all stick together we can outvote the traditional white Christian (and ex-pat Florida Cuban) male conservative bloc. If we stand divided, they win; if we stand together, they can drag their heels in the sand over every new little change if they want but their protests will be as ultimately futile as the protests of children over booster shots. And DJANGO is the proof. It is the year's cinematic equivalent of a lit stick of dynamite tossed into the stagnant Mississippi swamps of conservative oppression.

Of course like all QT's films, DJANGO references far more of cinema history than its title would indicate. The main two films referenced are THE WILD BUNCH (1969) and MANDINGO (1975) rather than the original DJANGO. Critics at the time (with a few exceptions, like Robin Wood) misunderstood and panned MANDINGO (1975) during its release, probably due to its shock value and lurid poster.  Even now the film remains a harrowing stretch of dehumanizing violence that clearly traumatized DJANGO director Quentin Tarantino as much as it did me. (See my "Whither Mandingo?"). And like INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS before it, DJANGO uses a title from an Italian action flick from a certain drive-in era to deconstruct issues of cinematic genre, social oppression, class, and history, all while delivering visceral, awesome revenge highs only dreamed of by lesser directors with lesser running times who don't understand how to build tension and so their films are all release, no tension, and so suck.

On the subject of lesser filmmakers it's interesting that the first DJANGO feedback I heard was condemnation from Spike Lee for the same reasons he badmouthed JACKIE BROWN in 1998, and echoed the same sort of knee-jerk faux-liberal reasons some critics gave for their maligning BASTERDS (see my "What is it about this color that disturbs you, Marnie?), inferring Quentin didn't have the right to tell a Jewish revenge story. Similarly, here Tarantino undoes the open ending of the original MANDINGO, which left a horrific plantation in bloody disarray, but hardly broken, and comes back and obliterates it all with a howling vengeance and splattering of blood that for once actually does what such violence is supposed to do in movies--provide a heady cinematic catharsis that connects the multiracial multiplex in all the good ways, finally. In short the film delivers what the great 70s trailers promised. It vindicates all film, and all shackled souls who resist dehumanization no matter what the cost to their own safety. For in honoring our cinematic dead more than the tropes of bare life we honor ourselves. Sam Peckinpah, your Wild Bunch did not die in slow motion vain.

For in the unchaining from the soul-crushing bonds of antebellum mentality (the film includes a blood-curdling phrenology lecture) we can finally rise up and be the apocalyptic nightmare the red state uneducated "Christian" right already treat us as. Let them arm and barricade themselves in bunkers and strangle themselves on the twisted-up nylons of their own hatred; their progeny will see the benefits of having an open palm instead of a balled-up fist and they will be as 'the boy' who leaves 'the man' to his death on THE ROADt. As the great Stevie Wonder once sang, and I paraphrase, we don't even need to do nothing to them / they cause their own country to fall. It's their country that falls, that has never done anything but fall, and ours that has already been rising, and has always been rising.

And Leo, you took my advice even if you never read it and added some truly Widmarkian relish to a despicable dandy fop villain and hit it so far out of the park those racist rednecks will be picking that swatted fly out their teeth for the next 300 years. I wanted you to be evil but I could never imagine you'd go THIS evil! This is so far beyond my wildest dreams I go all the way around from worrying about you growing all puffy from beer and tough guy from the streets-itis to once more worshipping you as the elfin powerhouse actor demi-god you are. Dig those tobacco-blackened leprechaun teeth!  Yee-Haw! Sold! It's your best work since Man in the Iron Mask. Leo - you were born to be elfiny evil!  If Oscar rewards you as it should with a best supporting, the way they did for Waltz as Tarantino's last super villain, my faith in Oscar will be restored after the aggrandizing nostalgia-huffing of last year.

2. THE GREY
As Claire Trevor says in Murder My Sweet "Let's dispense with the social drinking shall we?" pouring Marlowe and herself heroic tumblers of Scotch from her rich feeble husband's crystal decanters. The Grey is like that. It dispenses with all the tommyrot about kidnapped daughters and struggles for freedom and lengthy debates over cannibalism and just crashes a plane in Alaska and sets the dire wolves upon the trail of Liam Neeson as an ultra tough security officer whose wife left him and who shoots wolves through a sniper scope as they come charging at pipeline workers.

Liam is in his element, forced to cross existential thresholds since there's no one to rescue him and his fellow dudes, nothing left to be selfless for, just their own survival. Too bad his gun quickly freezes over; the bullets go quickly and the landscape gets more untraversible; and the wolves get bigger and have nothing but time. I don't want to spoil it but the ending is one of the toughest and best since the Black Swan or Runaway Train. What else do we have, as men, in the end, other than how we face our own Sebastian-ish rending? With cringing arms up to block, or out to embrace the fangs of our final freedom, Neeson and cast are, of course, top notch, and the action flows like a blast of Arctic air. And it's not long.

3. MOONRISE KINGDOM
Romance has always been Wes Anderson's weakness but here he nails it by bringing together a bespectacled but eerily confident weirdo boy scout orphan and a slightly more mature girl who's got mad '64 style, which I guess is when the film is set. Their romance is never weak or sappy or creepy because they are outcasts and they fight back when pushed. They do not cower. Underneath Anderson's moon vest beats the heart of a basement fight club brawler.

The album that sets the romance in motion is that quintessential "The Yeh-Yeh Girl from Paris"  and it works perfectly and beautifully. These two outlaws start a romance that's so vivid it doesn't need to travel past second base to seem like the biggest score in cinema this year. Naturally it worries the girl's parents and the sheriff and child protective services before finally winning over the necessary adults, whose own wild streaks finally resurface like half-drowned wolves to protect this puppyish (with fangs) romance.

We all know and feel that we have felt this type of heady connection, I hope. I would regret anyone missing it. I don't care if it destroys your comfort zones. I hope it does. It's worth it. It lights up your basement and sends the rats skittering away, to make room for wolves. It's the kind of lightning bolt that comes at any age, at any time, and we either rise to its challenge or spend the rest of our life cringing as we try to drown our wolves in the bathtub like Paltrow's snuck cigarettes. Turn them loose and hope they don't get run over crossing the highway, that's the best you can do. And this is maybe the best and most undrowned Anderson film he's ever released into the wild. He's transcended the rich kid cinema quirk ghetto and unchained a true wolf whirlwind. Did I cry? I did.

4. THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER
Is this the best movie about the first love and acceptance of a mentally-scarred high school freshman? Yes. The heady acting chemistry of the three leads, especially the gorgeous extrovert Ezra Miller, and the deep American Beauty-style cinematography turn Pittsburgh into a magical science fiction landscape where anything is possible, including finding cool friends who recognize the beautiful genius buried inside you. As always with such kids circa 1985-95, the bonding glue is love of great music; mix tapes, in the days before DVD wiped out cassettes. Here they are so important that the music used--even if we've heard the songs before--seem deliriously new, even Dexy and the Midnight Runners.

In addition there's such seductive American Beauty-style lighting and such interesting, beautiful people, and such a refreshing absence of the bawdy sexual humor that mars 95% of coming-of-age films, and the energy pulses so well with the colors, that it becomes a dizzying dream I still can't let go of. Emma Watson made my knees weak in this movie; even when her longing is cliche'd she has the guts to ride right through it. When a film is this good it can have cliches, because the actors have the guts to dive right into them and it's suddenly all so new. Ezra Miller blows any complaints about the gay best friend stereotype clean out of the picture. You feel the heartbreak when he's not around because he lights up the screen. He and Thompson have such alive chemistry and beauty and aliveness as the step siblings who rescue our hero that when the movie was over I already missed them. This is how it is when a group of friends is in love with each other. It's majestic.

5. COSMOPOLIS
 Hilarious and disturbing in its low level candor, Dr. David Cronenberg turns Don Delillo's book of post-modern Wall Street Beckettishness into a kind of sophisticated addendum to his misunderstood semi-masterpiece Crash. Critics may decry but I dig Robert Pattinson's performance. It critiques his Edward mystique in a manner that's wry and yet not trite and he seems always about to morph into some new Cronenbergian advanced hybrid life form. His square alien face seems like skin covering a computer monitor. Note the way his mouth twists and curls with druggy last-ditch hunger at the mention of an available Rothko by his older lover art dealer (a still firm Juliette Binoche). Such pointless desire recalls Christian Bale freaking out over business cards in American Psycho, but that was an isolated moment of high brilliance the rest of the film never quite matched. Cosmopolis is like if that one scene was slowed down to 90 minutes and moved to a car. So yeah, I'm in.

Cronenbeg's dialogue sometimes suffered in the past in comparison to his awesome visuals. Here Don Delillo's absurdist dialogue finds its correct match in Cronenberg and Pattinson brings it to life in ways I never could get from just reading the book. As the film and vehicle progress we realize Pattinson's billionaire alien (think David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth) can't really die because he barely exists, and a lot of the credit for that surely goes to Pattinson's queasy self-implosion. It's a marvel the way he can convey such moment-by-moment disintegration without any of Cronenberg's usual prosthetics (there may be some ultra subliminal CGI at work on his skin tones, or maybe I was just hallucinating). Critics may grumble but when this generation gets older, they will write of Pattinson the way some of us write of Karloff or Lugosi. He's far more complex with that strange alien face than maybe any of us--except Cronenberg--currently understand or give him credit for. Robert Pattinson is the future. When he begins to get older and more in control of his career and his fans age too, look out. This being is no ordinary heartthrob but a reptilian hybrid with a willingness to contort into shapes and moods yet to be imagined by sober men.

6. TIE: SKYFALL and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
These two big cold films have a lot in common: a crazy villain who represents everything our hero has failed to incorporate into his persona over the course of a long, embittered life; masculine feelings of inadequacy ("low T."?) as the computer digital generation runs virtual circles around him; and tragic sudden self-awareness of how long each has been around, a permanent way of life instead of a fleeting young male fantasy.  Both films raid Homer's archetypal trough in telling of an old Odysseus-type, thought dead, lost at sea, now returned to save his bride (Q, Gotham respectively) from vandals, and does he have any new tricks up his old dog sleeve, and once more unto the breech dear friends, live and die on this day, time to dust off our hidden go bags, kiss the cat woman, set the booby traps and wait.

In each case villain motivation is always fuzzy: it seems odd that so much firepower, manpower, triple-crosses, and imprisoning would be expended on something as banal as revenge. Bane claims his is a 99%-er social experiment and Bardem's macho fey nutcase claims he wants revenge agains 'mum' for leaving him to rot in an enemy cell... it's fuzzy logic but in the process he becomes the coolest villain since Heath Ledger's Joker from the previous Dark Knight film.

And let's not forget that a big part of the second half of Rises is very similar to the final moments of the Bond film, The World is Not Enough. So there you have it, it's this year's Shutter Island and Inception, and though both of those starred Leo, both of these star defenders of big cities whose villain seems to have anticipated every move, and who like to use the sewers and underground tunnels to stage attacks and who seemingly draw endless amount of arms and armed support from out of nowhere. Just as the main 'woman' of 2012 is the 1963-retro beauty combination of Kara Hayward in Moonrise Kingdom and Lana Del Rey, the main hero in these two films is old enough to be her father, a conglomerate of Bill Murray as FDR (and Bill Murray plays her father in Moonrise), and Bond and Batman, all staggering wearily towards legendary greatness against younger, sharper, or more damaged foes. (for Dark Knight see here)

7. Three Way Tie:
 Lana Del Rey - "Ride'
(from earlier post) No, it's not art, or trash, just the best film made about the American endless highway since Natural Born Killers. Lana Del Rey proves with "Ride," that even if its an act  she's got the truest sense of operatic-sexy-sad-dangerous going in music, cinema, or anywhere.... she's sexy-dangerous enough here this video  would probably make it banned from MTV if MTV still played music. It's not Madonna faux dress-up dangerous, it's the real thing -- the kind of danger where self-cutting, anorexia, nymphomania, and pill addiction all swirl together to keep a young girl one step ahead of her suicidal ideation. She goes in this video where most coy lip biter pouter jailbait-poseur pop girls wouldn't no matter how much attention their gigolo boyfriends promised. She goes right over the cliff, into the arms of a bunch of guys at least twice her age, who give her a gun, a swig, a drag, a Native American headdress, and a bonfire full of fireworks.

It would definitely be the wrong thing to emulate. I imagine the moms must get nervous if their daughters like Lana Del Rey. Where's her helmet? Is she smoking? Those guys are old enough to be her dads! but her line that "there's no use in talking to people who have a home. They have no idea what it's like to seek safety in other people," explains it all. As Lou Reed said when introducing his song "Heroin," "this song's not for it or against it. It's just about it." He later noted, "Some people never a voice to talk with / that they can even call their own / so the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be, why, they follow it / you know, it's called bad luck." I listened to a lot of Lou when I was in high school. He was my patron saint. If Del Rey was around then, I would have been in even worse trouble.

 R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet 
(Chapter 3)
I was lucky in enough to attend the NYC premiere of the third installment last month and got to sing "I believe I can fly" with the man himself. It was a perfect fit to a hilarious, fun thrilling time. Del Rey's video features  persona I know very well, and while Kelly's vast array of personae are well outside my zone of direct experience, but like the sing-a-long at Sunshine Cinema, the experience of watching Kelly embody such a fun, crazy, tragic, hilarious, and insightful, even tasteful array of folks all to that catchy yet hookless incessant repeating stanza, singing the vocals of all the characters even females with a total deadpan, stopping to embody the amazingly named Pimp Luscious, replete with stutter, or the book-of-the-same-name hawking reverend, is a joy. And if the whole powerful fade out with 'the package' reverberating across endless phone lines in the second chapter is more or less forgotten, or dealt with, the mystique and fun and sheer ballsy difference of the concept, the aimless narrative, the interconnected folk tale malarkey, remains, making it a perfect double bill with Del Rey's long form "Ride" featurette, portraits of two different artists who somehow in their fractured role playing managing to capture the gist of America's strengths and sadness while they smoke and look good.

 Dewars' Scotch ads with Claire Forlani as a sexy after-hours Lady MacBeth
Claire Forlani may not be really Scottish but it's about time we had more 'Red Flag' style nutcase women pitching Scotch and ruling in hell rather than these khaki-wearing 'regular guys' who will never leave the safety of their heaven-lite Budweiser perches.... I vote for the natural hell habitat of stumbler psycho hotties storming through 4:20 AM clubs, ranting about some guy you've never met and how he did her wrong (I'm not going to admit I don't know him).. . but clearly she fucked the guy who owns the place at one point and now owns it or thinks she does and anyway she's pouring you enough post-last call slugs of near-top-shelf from behind the bar that her anger and narcissistic indignation is seductive like a slightly less cold freight train down an ice cold mountain you've been climbing til yr fingers were frozen bloody and then down down down rather than listen one more minute to the still preachy echo of last call wives and moms and bosses and sanity hand rails and Up All Night marathons with mothers in laws and all that shuckered loose from and grab the last falling skittering perfume and real fur (faint scent of kitty litter and/or bile amidst the Chanel) and marble ice covered in melanin-melting thinner in older age hand
slipping from yours soon enough, aye Angus, if skin were mottled fur, out along the slimy ocean cobblestone streets, into more and more warming drinks, floating you home on blackened bruise cushions (for the nonce mere tingles), a vague memory of a cab driver shouting but no sound in the oceanic roar of your ears,handing a crumpled twenty like a flag of surrender from weak wavy fingers soft applause dampening yr fall into the comfortable trash pile."

8. HAYWIRE
UFC kickass Gina Carano is the hottest most believably ass-kicking American babe, since Cynthia Rothrock, but this is no Hong Kong cheapie, this is Steven Soderbergh making up for the outrages of his ill-conceived but post-modernly interesting CONTAGION. Here Carano herslef is the contagion and the men don't have a chance. Only the beautiful shades of gray and blue survive, and this becomes the best film in Soderbergh's canon for my money since OUT OF SIGHT. I've already seen it twice and it's going to be with me forever, thank god for Netflix streaming. I could go press play and re-see it right now! (PS - it's ideal to see in an airport on your kindle or iPhone while waiting for a delayed flight back from Arizona to NYC, then finish watching when you get home at 6 AM and the sun is coming up over the skyline. Word)

9. THE MASTER
I know, I know -- only number nine? It's a Masterpiece! Yeah, because as profound and astonishing as this was, and maybe it's because I didn't see it in 70mm when I had the chance, it was more intellectual than moving. PTA found the problem at the heart of the American male once again but wasn't able to mend it the way Quentin or Liam or Wes Anderson did. He could only to point at it and then encourage us to both marvel and wince while Phoenix and Hoffman acted the roof to ribbons to ultimately no cumulative cathartic or moving effect. Maybe I was just too damned apathetic to take a subway, dirty and dank, into Manhattan, all sold-out and safe now, to see it on 70mm. My 35mm trip to BAM gave me lots to write and think about (i.e. here) but no real Plainview-style jolt, no MAGNOLIA-motional wallop, no moment of stand up and cheer cinematic PUNCH-DRUNKeness, only little spurts of insanity that are then crushed by the concern of the clueless cultists and local law enforcement. This is his most emotionally distant Anderson film since HARD EIGHT. Is PTA at the point in his artistic evolution where alchemically masculine outbursts against idiots are childish? What was the name of the girl, Steve?

10. 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH
Well, 12/21/12 got away, but we got the music. (see full review here)


HONORABLE MENTION: 21 Jump Street, Chronicle, Snow White and the Huntsman, John Carter, Cabin in the Woods, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Yes Virginia, the World DID End Yesterday

Dear Virginia,

Yes, you called last night and gloated that no aliens landed, no volcano erupted, no meteor crashed, no new anything happened yesterday, and yes, haltingly I stumbled like an off-guard republican at a press conference, seizing up in my Martin Sheen Dead Zone arms all sorts of rationalization nation children shields against your Walken seer reproachment ammunition. I should have cried, or conveyed my sadness, which was even then too deep perhaps to voice. Ah, I said, but the change is within. The change is within us all. The 2012 event horizon is where the personal and the universal meet. This is, unfortunately what even Ancient Aliens (all new starting yesterday only on H2) doesn't understand. There was an AA marathon last night and they were talking of Nazi archaeologists using Buddhism's secrets of astral voyaging --going outside the confines of space and time-- as the foundation of some time machine they had created underground in Hungary somewhere to travel back and forth through time.

It's like bitches, why would the Buddhist means of astral voyaging, which is how 90% of alien travel is done to begin with (just as 90% of our communication now is via cell phones and Skype and email), have anything to do with actually lugging some physical body around outside of space and time? The ONLY way to do that is by going through black holes (1), so if you're planet's nowhere near one, you're never going back to anywhere, anymore than you can use a chute in Chutes and Ladders if you're not on that square. So it's only when earth is way way close to a black hole in the distant future will we be able to travel back to here, which is how I know, and I've said too much. Put down the gun, Virginia / Christopher Walken, we're all humans here.

But that's the gist, Virginia. Just as that enterprising columnist wrote you all those years ago about Sinter Klaus being in all our hearts, now too I write to you to justify the doomsday prepper mentality, the fear and woe that swept Hollywood, Ancient Alien theorist contenders, and even me up in its exaltation and dread. As I wrote earlier this week, the horror of facing an immanent personal apocalypse is what makes Xmas movies so cathartic -- i..e. Scrooge crying on his own gravestone while the ghost of Xmas future wags its skeleton finger, or Clarence showing the distraught Jimmy Stewart the dreariness his absence would portend in It's a Wonderful Life. So how could the impending doom of some long-ago predicted doomsday be anything but a guarantor of holiday cheer?

We should of course feel grateful nothing did happen, and find comfort in little everyday miracles. For my family it was finding the face of an alien (left) hidden in a bag of red potatoes! Or various jokes and wisecracks, at my expense, as usual. Or the sudden terror I felt when alone here in Arizona in Fred's house and the darkness of the desert night so sudden and ominous the way the pink ridge of evening just plunges straight to midnight made me think the aliens had come for me and had their ghostly trans-dimensional hands around my heart.  Maybe the surest sign of alien intervention is the relentless sameness of our world, where a minor disaster here and there effects only one side of one country, one power grid here or tornado path there, never enough to bring our status quo to a halt, never enough to wipe away our credit card debt in a huge burst of magnetic energy, or enough to wipe out all life through a super volcano eruption or massive meteor strike. Someone is surely looking our for their investment.

So yes, Virginia. In some ways the world didn't end, in others maybe it did. Now if any of those predicted calamities do erupt we'll be like too little too late. Even if we go down in flames we'll be like sorry apocalypse, you had your chance! Isn't that, in some ways, a triumph!?

Eckhart Tolle writes about working with inmates on death row and getting them to let go and embrace the light of pure consciousness through meditation. The change is so incredible that oftentimes the result is some sort of governmental pardon, but then -- since the void is no longer so close, the felon's new goes back to coveting, scamming, lying and bargaining. It's perhaps inevitable we'll do the same as 2013 roars off on whatever course it chooses. But we'll have 12-21-12 to remember us by. They'll never want to market all the 2012 documentaries or rerun them on History, it will go the way of Y2K. But we'll know, won't we Virginia? We'll know this is all a dream, a colored cartoon carnival, an exact duplicate, a remnant, a thought, a sound wave beamed from the inter-galaxial fractal connection and are now living on repeat, a holographic image projected over a wasteland world. It won't help, but it won't hurt, and if life is going on just as before and that's annoying the hell out of us, maybe that's on us this time. We just can't wait anymore for some giant heavenly hand to pluck us off into some new dimension, we have to carve it out ourselves. It sucks, but it's true. As the technician said in Close Encounters of the The Third Kind, "it's the first day of school, fellas." -- and I don't wanna go, mom. I'm sick. I just want to stay home and watch Lathe of Heaven til it all turns to black.

Love,
Erich

NOTES - 1) for the sake of brevity I didn't put "As ancient astronauts theorists contend" in every other sentence... or preface with perhaps, but of course everything I write here can't be proven, but then again explains things way better than some other paradigms I could name.

The Psychedelic Scrooge Satori Pocalypse

Nothing gets us in the holiday spirit more, perhaps, than reformation, enlightenment, the sudden game changing glow that turns misers into open, generous souls... what magical formula is at work, and how can we slip some in the coffee of, say, Mitch McConnell or the Koch brothers? Whatever it is, whatever the ghost of Bob Cratchit slipped into Scrooge's watered-down soup, it worked, producing three spirits of Xmas, one symbolic death / ego dissolution, one spiritual awakening and a partridge in a banisteriopsis caapi. So why don't we deal with the unspoken and unvarnished cosmic truth? Lo, Scrooge is reborn! I was in tears on Sunday watching Alastair Sim leap around his bed chambers on Christmas morning. I cried because I know what that's like -- you just came back from the rim of the hideous void and you're so grateful to be alive you can barely contain yourself... but the maid just thinks you went looney. Only Tiny Tim, his antennae already half-connected to the world beyond, knows where the goose is coming from, if you dig what I'm plantin'... in your mindgrape vineyard.

I think it would be nice if there were 'Ascendency Welcome Centers' for these kind of 'awakened' misers. I think the Scrooge awakening is going to start happening all over the world because of the cosmic alignement; people will all go off at once, like popcorn after the first early kernels. Hopefully their jubilance will override the preconceptions their family have about them. They won't suddenly be ostracized from their church or marriage. After all, this inititiaion / conversion / awakening is nothing new. It's only new in this century. Witness Hazel Court in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH! Tamino and Pamina in THE MAGIC FLUTE. Have you? Do you want to try? Five dolla. What are you, chicken? buck buck

It's only natural to be wary since without the all-consuming threat of death --without genuinely believing you are going to die or are dying or have died, and not just for a little roller-coaster moments but for what seems like hours, days, of being dead or terrorized by death -- you will never get there. In FLUTE, Tamino and Pamina have to brave the writhing flames of the initiation mystery cave to the tune of Mozart; in MASQUE Hazel Court (above) endures an around-the-world of ghost shamans cutting out her heart upon a Satanic altar in blue-green tint and slow motion to the tune of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." And Ebeneezer Scrooge endures the cold marble of his own tombstone as all his dear possessions get tossed to beggars and fences. He even winds up at the bottom of a deep grave struggling to get out while the dirt falls around him. He screams and moans and vows to be good and twists up in his bedsheets. He has to get that low, not a pennilessness less low, for his rebirth, his reformation, his temporary cessation of toxic ego vexation, to click in on some permanent level. Why don't most Xmas movies realize that without this big looming death presence, Xmas has no deep, lasting catharsis? The holidays in the end are all about this -- sometimes even just having to talk to your grandmother for a few minutes can be enough to remind you where you're frail aging flesh is headed.

 Jimmy Stewart doesn't experience death so much in Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE but he gets a cold from trying to commit suicide by jumping into an incy river on Xmas eve -- and that's kind of the same, because suicide is often attempted as a means towards spiritual awakening as the sufferer wants to trigger their egoic death and rebirth and don't understand that there are easier (albeit even more terrifying) ways. Clarence the angel serves as a melange of Xmas ghosts, rescuing Jimmy and showing him and shows him the miserable Dickensian werkhaus of a place his little town would be without him.

Again, I stress that just like CHRISTMAS CAROL, LIFE would have no resonance without these scenes of grim despair, mortal loss, defeat and desperation. There would be no cathartic tears of joy if we were not allowed to gaze into the snowy void of terror at our own mortality. Cut out the despair, you cut out the exaltation, the tear-streaked gratitude.

The last time I was in Chicago visiting my relatives I had that same sensation - part of which was caused by the unceasingly grim weather, another part by the severely aged condition of my granny, the cancer of my father and my own mix of cigarette withdrawal and constant winter sickness. It felt like we were all chained together in order of age on a ship, and our great grandparents were already overboard and the chain was just forever being sucked down into the ship as it sailed on and we were all slowly getting pulled under by the weight of our sunken family tree...kuchunk, one link of the chain at a time, unstoppably, like grim clockwork.

Death, it's what's for dinner. Let's face it -- there's no true art without death. Without death, it's all just comedy, or pornography. So it stands to reason that mortality is no enemy to be feared! Rather it is only when we avoid her, forget what we're running from, that she has to come looking for us. Observe the lower right hand Kali, indicating 'no fear' or 'welcome' or 'how ya like me now?" depending on your attitude.

Instead of letting it wash away our current ego like a snake shedding its skin in an acid bath, our ego convinces us it would be a much better idea to cover all that mortal terror up in curtains and movie posters, sex gossip, political debate, petty seductions and longing for objects, and sooner or later there are so many curtains and covers and objects and seductions over the face of our own mortality that we can't see it at all, and so we feel cut off.... we forget what we were even covering up in the first place. Still, we obey the egoic edict to pay no attention to it and instead blame people for letting us down, spouses for holding us back, parents for holding us up when we're trying to get, you know, moving!

It's like when you're looking for your keys and a part of you thinks it might be in a big clump of crap way down under your desk, tangled like Jack Torrance searching for an exit in the Shining maze of computer wires. You don't want to bend mighty low so you search any place--at eye level--getting madder and madder at not finding them and then finally you bend on down and reach into the dirt.

And there the keys are, always, deep in the dirtiest of your hidden corners, buried under rocks of crap, and now you have FOUND THEM. Ganesha! Saint Christopher! and Scrooge! Finding that sense of oceanic bliss means reaching down in the dust under the desk: you gotta get low. You can't buy your way in, and you can't possibly be too poor. No wheezy Tim is too tiny for the open heart.

 

The initiation room in The Magic Flute (Bergman's)

Today, of course, those who knew Scrooge would just say he was having a manic episode, that he should adjust his meds, or that he was possessed by the devil, or had gone new age. I've often wondered what it would be like if Scrooge became a ghost of Xmas junky, needing to act all miserly and bah-humbug starting around December, just so he can conjure Cratchit and wrangle another visit to that tombstone, to get that second chance glow again. Or, what if his new open heart and generous spirit led to him being swindled of all his fortune after only a few weeks, and so he bitterly renounces Xmas as instrumental in getting him to let his guard down and becomes even more miserly than before? Thankfully Dickens lets us know this was not the case, noting that  through the end of his days Scrooge 'kept Christmas well.' May we all be so lucky.

Drug of Choice: 4:44 - LAST DAY ON EARTH (2012)

The apocalypse, or at any rate the end of the Mayan... thing, is Friday. Some preparation may be in order, and if you're reading this blog that means movie choices. What's the ideal apocalypse film you want to be watching at the very moment of apocalypse? I've already seen mine. Just the other night. Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth. It couldn't be more timely! Especially if you live in New York City, and are a permanently drug-addled middle-aged artist in recovery, a loft, and a relationship with someone much younger or older than yourself; and you've always looked forward to the end of the world as an ideal excuse to relapse. 4:44 - Last Day on Earth belongs to you, baby, and me. Forget the weird numeric title and just set your clocks back. Way back. To zero.

Of course television figures prominently in the film. How else would we know it's ending? We see the main character Cisco (Willem Dafoe) watch Al Gore talk about the truth of global warming with a knowing smirk; We see him watch the Dali Lama with a big old grin; and finally he watches NY1's Pat Kiernan with concern. Cisco's younger girlfriend, Skye (Shanyn Leigh) meanwhile paints a grim ouroboros figure on a big piece of paper on the floor at the other end of the loft. As artistic couples do, Cisco and Skye fool around, fight, putter, try to break each other's concentration out of sublimated creative jealousy, and so forth. It may take some extra dirt in your nails to identify with the part where Dafoe almost does some heroin (or something) even after six months clean (or whatever),  but it's the last day on earth, and in an Abel Ferrara film it's always the last day on earth --so this is double your pleasure day, and never a better time than whenever to do the mortal coil shuffle sensitive bluesy minor key melancholy madness munchies malaise trip.

 

Top: 4:44 / Bottom: Seeking a Friend

Ferrara's druggy Catholic kinetics have been in short supply stateside of late due to, apparently, fucked-up deals with French producers at Studio-Canal. His tale of the virgin Mary was supposed to be pretty heavy, and there was Go-Go Tales, both MIA.  It don't matter --4:44 is as perfect a career and global autobiographical capstone as we're likely to get. And as such it functions fine as a skewed sequel to his Ferrara's very first film, Driller Killer (1979), which, we may recall, ends on a very weird apocalyptic cliff-hanger. Driller gets a bad rap because it was banned in Britain during the whole 'video nasty' 80s, but it's really just a good mix of grit, grime and druggy Catholic punk energy, with some drill killings thrown in to please the producers who are hoping to outrage the censors. The killings barely figure into it, actually. Ferrara prefers to concentrate on the downstairs neighbors, who are in a loud, terrible glam-punk band. They practice constantly and finally get a date at Max's Kansas City. All of which which both drives Ferrara's character insane as he tries to concentrate on his buffalo and provides a way to pad the running time (as both of his girlfriends end up preferring to rock out down there rather than watch him paint and curse the fates).

Both Driller and 4:44  are apocalyptic in their own way. In Driller, the artist exorcises his terror and madness by drilling old homeless guys instead of Skyping or almost relapsing. Either way both end with a couple in bed and a fade out (to white and red respectively) while the girl whispers soothing gentle words in OS voiceover. And Ferrara doesn't star in the latter film, but there's little doubt that Dafoe is playing Abel, right down to casting Abel's real life girlfriend as Willem's.

Ferrara is Driller Killer

Ferrara's longtime screenwriter Nicholas St. John isn't billed on 4:44 and based on the hesitant weirdness of it all, I'm betting a lot of the dialogue and action was improvised. But that's awesome! What are you going to do during the last 24 hours on earth, fumble through scripts? Hell naw. Most of all, the characters are really just avatars of ourselves as we watch what TV would look like on the last day of the world, or dig how empty the city seems. Cisco tries a lot of things to grant his life some last-minute meaning: he shouts down at a bunch of people gathered around a guy who just jumped off a neighboring fire escape to his death below, for example, but doesn't seem sure even himself why he should care. And then his addiction shows up out of the emotional blue with a hastily scrawled I.O.U from a year ago that reads IOU a relapse if and when the world is about to end. 

Is this why Ferrara made this film in the first place? To deal with that issue in a way that hasn't really been dealt with? Because 4:44 more than any other apocalypse film I know brings us to the crystalline point imagined by every recovering alcoholic or addict, the 'if you know the world is about to end, is it okay to relapse?' point. I wrote about it a bit in a discussion of the film 2012, which I called "Day of a Million Relapses:"

Emmerich makes sure we all are represented by one stock character or the other. Me, I resonated most with Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of the bleeding heart geologist son (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray. His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"

Harry doesn't even answer, and our movie makes sure we actually get to see him drink that first drink in 25 years, a healthy swig, thus letting us know that (a) he's cool and b) he's doomed, and c) he's relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with half his 'time,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score!... finally a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse.

But as it turns out it's just not that easy. Spurred on after a hilarious fight between Skye, and his  ex-wife on Skype --trying to break it up and protect his computer from being slapped shut by Skye while the wife jeers and curses onscreen -- Cisco goes out onto the street, to his old dealer's house, climbs in through the fire escape window, like the old days.... all right, now things are going to perk up, you think. Now we shall return to Ferrara's druggy urban steadicam rhythms. The mood in here is jovial, sexy, intelligent. These are believably his friends.

But Cisco's plan is blocked because his NA sponsor, Noah (Greenwich Village musician Paul Hipp), happens to be there, canoodling but not getting high, and instead reveling in the freedom of choice. He's totally cool with other people doing it in front of him, though, he says. Noah 'chooses' to just hang out with his old user buddies but face the end with clear open eyes. He tells Cisco it's his choice too, but he should choose not to pick up. It's a bizarre moment that few who are not addicts will probably truly understand.... we've been waiting, after all, for this. It's the night of a million relapses! Those of us who are in recovery will have mixed emotions. On the one hand, good for him, on the other that's not his sponsor's business, let the man do his thing! He has an IOU to pay. It's like if you're Jekyll and you make a deal with Hyde that he will go away willingly for awhile but he gets to come back for the end of the world. Even though it's just you making deals with yourself, it's still a valid contract my brother!

 
In the end, as it always does, the only thing that saves the artist is the art, the drugs are either a means to that end or a hindrance. Nothing else matters.. Only art can grant meaning. Skye (Shanyn Leigh is Ferrara's real life live-in girlfriend) spreads great puddles of color all over the floor and makes a giant protective circle ouroboros. Dafoe has no one to act with, no audience with whom to perform (except us, in the shadows, of course) so he watches TV. This is another interesting aspect since Skye never doubts how she wants to spend her last hours, painting this big ouroboros surrounded by black. She has what I've referred to as the Keith Richards life preserver, wherein you have that one thing you're good at so you just do it, constantly, and that's what keeps you from freaking out, killing yourself, metaphysically drowning, and so forth. It's what saved the life of Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) in The Runaways (see my post here) and it's what would have made Kirsten Dunst's last hours easier in Von Trier's Melancholia. (meinen posten hier)

As the hour approaches, the ouroboros Skye has painted becomes heir sacred circle to hide inside, in much the way Dunst builds that cave she promised out of some sticks as the world falls away in Von Trier's Melancholia (see my detailed praise here) and of course Dafoe was in Von Trier's previous film, Antichrist, so there you are, the web of genius is all connected...Dafoe is the key, and art, and it's all about to end, so get inside this circle before the snake swallows up the world.

Of course Ferrara's limited budget doesn't allow for real world-swallowing, so its conveyed via stock footage and newscasts which is fine with me. I enjoy the tense energy of the mixture, the camera following Dafoe around wondering when he's going to go off, tuning into the Skype or what's outside the window or what's on TV. The film feels padded even at 74 minutes, butFerrara spares us the rerunning of previous footage in his similarly multi-media / post-modern adaptation of William Gibson's New Rose Hotel (which starred Dafoe with Christopher Walken and Asia Argento) and like in that underrated film allows the action to unfold as it would in real life, i.e. somewhere else, watched by the characters from their secluded den of druggy, sexytimes comfort. With so many screens onscreen, so much information, including the sci fi miracle of Skype and so forth, the post-modern affect has completely subsumed the real. The only way to stay above the multimedia din is via meditation or art, and in Ferrara's film both finally merge into the simulacrum so it's all as it should be. After all, in the final count, you and the TV are two snakes, facing each other, but they'ah One! 
 

So even if you can't relate to the addict stuff, it's worth seeing just to soak up Ferrara's legendary  fly-on-the-wall NYC authenticity, with such great details as NY1's Pat Kiernan, an inescapable presence in most New Yorkers' frenzied mornings here delivering a professional sign off indicating he's been happy to have been a part of your life and now he and his co-workers are going home to their families regardless of what their producer says. Kiernan plays these moments with beautiful grace, both angry, poetic and always stoic. As Frank Lovece of Film Review International notes:

In a nice surprise, given how lame most TV and movie news anchors sound, Kiernan, of the local-news channel New York 1, offers onscreen reports that sound like a broadcast journalist; perhaps he himself actually wrote them. His final signoff is dignified and humane without becoming sentimental or overwrought in the least.

It's interesting that this journal of international cinema sees nothing offensive in Kiernan's statement in the film that "Al Gore was right,"  and that global warming will take us out in a blinding solar flash at exactly 4:44 AM. Meanwhile condemnation of the same line comes from Will Leitch something called Deadspin: 

In 4:44 Last Day on Earth, what gets us is the ozone layer, i.e. not caring about it. (Writer-director Abel Ferrara actually makes poor Kiernan say, "Al Gore ... was right." Ferrara should be arrested for that.) This is the lamest possible reason for the world to end in a movie, because what kills us should be a metaphor for the sins of man, not the actual sins of man. Of course, most of the movie involves Willem Dafoe in his apartment doing yoga, muttering to himself and playing around on Skype, so whatever it is that hastens the end of our suffering, as far as I'm concerned, will suffice.

Man, it's easy to tell which writers are American, sometimes. Naturally such a fellow would want the world to end as soon as possible, cuz he's tired of looking for a real job. Haw Haw! Just kidding my man, hey man, what's a your name?

As I say, your mileage may vary. Let me give you some tips: a good way to watch 4:44 is while calling loved ones and chatting idly with friends on the phone, with laptops and kindles all playing different documentaries and TV shows. Put Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, or The Quantum Activist or 10 Questions for the Dali Lama on your laptop, with the sound off, and position it about 10 feet away from your main TV screen but still in view, tilted towards the other screen so it looks like they're watching each other. A brilliant little moment indicative of this--what Steven Shaviro calls "post-modern affect"-- occurs when Skye looks across the building-length loft from the floor by the window where she's painting, it's pitch dark, as Cisco is out scoring, and she's startled to see an old black man sitting in a chair staring at her. As she starts moving towards him he suddenly vanishes into a square white static. He was just on TV, a big flatscreen that was left on in the dark and is now off. The sudden change is jarring, funny, and brilliant, the coolest post-modern goodnight ghost set-up since The Ring in an earlier post I wrote that, "in a post-cinematic affect you're neither safe nor in danger, neither an actor nor an extra, neither on TV or in front of it." The way man and space merge into one dream consciuosness in 2001 is the way man and TV merge into one dream consciousness in 2012 at 4:44 - no accident they're both number titled.

More ways to metatextualize your experience: If you meditate, do so when Dafoe does, assume his poses as if he's a yoga instructor, or Simon Says. Counterpoint your own movements with those of the camera as it paces around the loft. Dig that Anita Pallenberg is Skye's mother and remember fondly her insane work in Performance (1968). Here she looks pretty haggard, speaking over Skype to give daughter the fare thee well in a deep, gravelly voice, and to let her know she's proud of her artistic drive. You can bet that Anita Pallenberg would be fine with you dating her daughter  no matter how old or poor you were, as long as you were as cool as Dafoe, You can feel her benign indifference to the mundanity of bourgeois morals in the teutonic depth of her voice. It's soothing. This is a film with no villains, no purpose, it just waits, it has the guts to stand still and let the finish line come roaring past, through, and obliterate.

An ideal movie to see while you're alone or with your lover and if they don't like the film as much as you do and so are on their iPhone or browsing the web while you're watching, so much the better for the post-modern affect. I never saw this in the theater but I can't imagine liking it nearly as much outside the safety of my own artist loft-ish bunker. Of course if you're a materialist who's never had any addiction problems and is not an artist or struggling with a contempt for mainstream society that keeps you isolated in your Manhattan loft, then good for you! For the rest of us, those who've felt the oroborous tightening around us in the last few years and feel it's now reaching its zero reset black hole point, for better or worse, I say congratulations for making it this far. Even if nothing tangible 'happens' - no meteors or alien invasion or super volcano eruption or massive chain reaction tectonic plate shift or pole reversal or planet wave or solar storm -- you have already felt the apocalypse, the eruption of fire and Gomorrah in your thirsty veins. Some of us have shot a million dollars worth of white powder and wood onto the logs to keep that tiny flame alive within our pulsing systems. Some of us have almost drowned our livers with Maker's Mark to stop our heart's incessant aching just so we could drag our moldy carcasses to this one beautiful point in history. Some of us have felt the hot pink fuzzy warmth of a spiritual experience or the white light ticking us down to our soul, and felt our heart chakras opening up now, breathe in with me now children, ooooommm, all together now ommmmm like spiral antennae picking up the cosmic frequencies beaming right into our planet from the galactic alignment.

Materialists might call all that a lot of nonsense, in fact anything that doesn't fit into their narrow paradigm they call nonsense and this surely doesn't. If there's anything I'm hoping will happen this week it's that something will shake these atheists and materialists and positivists from their strangled perches and open them up to right brained intuitive joy and expanded awareness we in the morphing pink coming dawn sunlight rose petal clouds purple along the leggo silhouette of a New York skyline feel... because we need them if we ever want to build a big spaceship and fly to Venus... so I pray that they will awaken unto the intuitive right-brained egolessness that is the grand 2012 ascension (breathe out ---ahh ommmmm)

All I ask for myself, o wonderful Quetzlcoatl of Machu Pichu, is some ruby slippers, so I can clack them three times, chant "no place like Hommmmmm" and then wake up back in the spring of Syracuse 1987, when I was 20 and in a locally popular hippie band, surrounded by gorgeous everything, had the world by the tail, and could drink like nothing you've ever seen. How I wish I could go back! And yet... how glad I am to know for almost certain I won't have to. To rest assured, regardless of actual assurances, is this not wisdom?

Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, BROKEN BLOSSOMS, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, FU MANCHU, etc.

In the early pre-code 1930s the Asian menace was a hot topic. China was in a bloody civil war, and its newsreel scenes of exotic people in various states of distress brought the mystery of the orient into movie audience's laps in a big way. Of course with foreign fascination inevitably comes 'miscegenation' fantasies, always proportionate in intensity to the extremity of the culture's racial intolerance. The white male viewer was presumably all alight with lust for the beautiful Asian ladies they saw, whether via the exotica-betrothed vamps like Theda Bara or Myrna Loy in Asian make-up (before she hit it big in The Thin Man Loy was the go-to girl for scheming Asian roles -- Mask of Fu Manchu, Thirteen Women, The Barbarian (half-Egyptian and enthralled to Ramon Novarro's sheik prince). Even today audiences who should know better, like myself, fall madly aswoon to Loy shimmering around in glittering silks.

But with every forbidden fantasy comes the verso, the dark flip-side. You can't have one without the other. While the entitled American white straight male viewer is agog over the exotica of this beautiful other (with her Sadean-skill in inflicting kinky pleasure-pain through knowledge of eastern medicine and her complete freedom from the suffocation of western bourgeois 'morality') -- he must naturally, inescapably, worry his wife is being seduced in turn by some handsome, smooth-skinned, erudite, extremely cultured albeit cold and cruel Asian man, like Nils Asther in Asian make-up in the most complex, beautiful yet ultimately frustrating of the lot, Frank Capra's Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).

Hal Eriksen notes of Bitter Tea:

"The one scene that everyone remembers takes place during one of Stanwyck's fevered dreams, in which she imagines Yen as a Fu Manchu-type rapist, who then melts into a gentle, courtly suitor. Directed with the exotic aplomb of a Josef von Sternberg by the usually down-to-earth Frank Capra, The Bitter Tea of General Yen was unfortunately a box office failure, due in great part to its miscegenation theme (this was still 1933). Even so, the film was chosen as the first attraction at the new Radio City Music Hall."

Yes, what about that misegenaiton themee and speaking of 1933 (arguably the greatest year ever for Hollywood) in Bitter Tea you can feel the sheer stupidity of miscegenation codes come full flower, practically baiting the intolerant bourgeois 'moralists' into getting angrier than Rush Limbaugh at a peace rally. For Capra's film dares to present the forbidden love of missionary Stanwyck and Manchu general Asther as preferable to the disposable British fiancee.

Abducted and given a beautiful room in his summer palace, Babs becomes enamored of the spring moon and the sight of Chinese lovers frolicking in the fronds, even if they are just soldiers and concubines. Her own sexuality is at stake as her letters back to her fiancee are misdirected by Mai-Li (the Japanese Toshia Mori) a young local who has to sit lower than everyone else at the dinner table as she is not the general's wife. In trying to seduce Stanwyck, Yen is foolish enough to listen to Bab's please of mercy, and its this mercy that costs Yen his kingdom, fortune and leads to his bitter tea-drinking.

Like another Stanwyck vehicle, this time from the still horribly racist year of 1950, The Furies, the romantic aspect is both enhanced and marred by miscegenation codes. It's fascinating that even though the general is played, as was often the style by a white man (Nils Asther), any kind of romance, even of a kiss on the lips, is forbidden. Similarly the Furies' romance between a Mexican man and Barbara is forbidden, so turns chaste and leads to his convenient hanging early on even though he's played, again, by Gilbert Roland. In Yen a kiss happens kind of but only in the Fu Manchu monster dream sequence Eriksen writes of above, but the tagline below is right, "they found a love they dared not touch." Or rather Columbia dared not; Yen is down to touch it but is also a gentleman so she has to want to come to him, and then even if she does she's eventually unable to actually kiss more than his hand in fealty. When Babs thinks about kissing him, even though she dreamt this awesome dream where the Fu Manchu rapist stereotype is replaced by a dashing Zorro type, both played by Asher, she's repulsed. Critic David Thomson seems to miss this and adores the film's choices and interprets Stanwyck's misisonary coldness as the result of external metatextual echoes of Capra's smitten advances. They had dated for their first three Columbia pictures and she had broken it off, so he cast her in Yen to try and win her back. "So Stanwyck tries to be the missionary when everything in the film calls for a creeping abandon in Megan. When I say everything I mean above all Nils Asther's Yen, one of the most attractive figures in early sound cinema--witty, fatalistic, and very smart." ("Have You Seen..." p. 99)

Clearly he's missing some obvious points: Yen can't be that smart if he lets his attraction for another man's bride get in the way of his war, since it means he'll lose it. In a closer reading his fascination  for this missionary begins with her offering him a hankerchief after he runs over her rickshaw driver. He's turned on by her mix of kindness and revulsion (he doesn't care about the rickshaw driver because "life, even at it's best, is hardly endurable" - a great line he delivers with the perfect mix of ennui and breeziness). The idea of a culture clash is driven home in the way Babs gets to apply her missionary zeal to her own attraction/repulsion in pleading for the life of Mah-Li. Yen adopts her forgiving attitude almost on a dare, and while he handles the subsequent loss of his stolen fortune with Zen aplomb he can't really handle the strait-jacket of the production code (who could?) which results in Babs' surrendering to Yen in penance yet still unable to think about kissing him in real time without recoiling as if he was still the leering Fu Manchu character from her dream. She loves him but his non-whiteness ensures she'll never convert him back into that masked prince.

This repulsion and lust see-saw between beautiful white women and hormonal Chinese officers was prevalent all over the years 1930-33, and so it's no surprise one shows up in a Josef Von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich film. Their Shanghai Express has a villain Chinese general in Warner Oland (another white guy in Asian make-up) who hijacks the title train and won't let it go until Dietrich agrees to stay behind with him. She will, because she's heroic, but it's implied that this would be a fate worse than death. Luckily Anna May Wong stabs him in a race-appropriate act of post-rape retribution before this miscegenation fantasia gets any farther.

Shangai Express by Erich Kuersten - 2008 

Wong and Dietrich are upscale prostitutes, so it's presumed Dietrich has slept with Chinese generals before, but as long as we don't have to see it, or know about it, I guess it's okay (don't ask don't tell!). So Oland takes Anna May Wong into his makeshift train station boudoir as consolation and against her will and without paying, thus justifying her deux ex machina avenging. Apparently sex with an Asian man is hardly endurable even if you're Asian!

Anna May Wong played another 'entertainer' who felt this way, the previous year, in in the 1931 Fu Manchu sequel Daughter of the Dragon.  Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa plays a smitten detective who starts presuming that, since he's young and Asian and so is she, he can dictate who her friends are and make all sorts of don't-take-the-hint advances. Wong prefers the rich white guy, of course, even if she means to kill him and even if he's played by Bramwell Fletcher, an Englishman so wee he makes (his Mummy co-star) David Manners seem like Marlon Brando by comparison. We're meant, I think, to be a little repulsed by Haywakawa and simultaneously to secretly root for Wong's plans of vengeance agains the Petries, and to identify with the sense of love and duty she feels for her infamous father. And naturally we'd hate to see her throw away her happiness with this stiff Uncle Tom of an Asia detective! Anna meanwhile can have any white man she wants, as they all want to sew some wild oats with an exotic flower, though of course its understood none of them would ever marry her. Such things just weren't done in 1931.

The fear of course was that seeing a love scene involving a young Asian male with another woman, even an Asian woman, would lead to riots and lynchings and burning of the nitrate in the southern markets, so the censorship was pre-empted the crackers' pre-emptive strike against nonwhites, lest they rise up and steal our women (As Fu Manchu urges his throngs in Mask of Fu Manchu ---"Kill the white man, and take his women!"). As someone who was almost lynched just for wearing a yellow sweater my mom got my on a Christmas afternoon showing of In and Out in 1998 I can vouch that a lot of that intolerance is still very real. To these racist swine Asians are almost scarier than Hispanics, Latinos, African-Americans or Native Americans, because the derogatory phrase 'yellow' doesn't really fit. Asians are in fact 'whiter than white' - more refined than the white racist thinks even himself capable of. That's why for every exquisitely cruel and cultured monster like Manchu there must be hordes of leering Chinese soldiers or grinning, moronic cooks, often played by the versatile character Willie Fung, to make whitey feel better.

For example: At the very racist comic relief end of MGM's The Mask of Fu Manchu (1933), Fung terrifies the white people when he emerges out of the fog on deck with the dinner gong. All is well, apparently, once he starts giggling in pidgin English. The vile subtext is clear: So long as we keep the Chinese out of our schools (Fu Manchu boasts of earning at least one of his many doctorates at Oxford) they're perfectly harmless. This attitude occurs all over in cultures of extreme fundamentalism even today, where women aren't allowed to read.

I write this post not to stir up racist trouble.  In fact quite the opposite. I'm fascinated by the tropes of exotica, of chinoiserie -- I can't help it. The art directors involved in these 1933 films took the Asian milieu as a license to go nuts with ornate doorways, sparkling, slinky dresses, Hindu statuary reflecting monstrous shadows over jeweled walls, and exquisite torture devices. I've never thought these cine-fantasias represented the real China, but I love their beauty and weirdness as much as I recoil from scenes of neo-realist squalor or the banal prefab sameness of middle class suburbia, or anything showing reality in its lack of glory. There's a liberation from the sticky wickets of drab western symmetry when one surrenders to the Asian aesthetic. In The Cheat (1931) for example (see my review of The Universal Pre-code Collection on Bright Lights):

"Crashing like a drunken ferry between the banks of marriage's ho-hum sanctity and the liberal miscegenation fantasia (Pichel's character is coded gay/Asian, with a great sculpture collection, a penchant for sadism and silk pajamas), The Cheat (below) bangs itself up pretty bad in order for the heroine to be finally — for the sake of her children or her husband's reputation — forced into backing out of the deal. Pichel (the black-lipstick wearing assistant of Dracula's Daughter in 1935) is plenty creepy, but Bankhead, stoop-shouldered like a boxer or Garbo in Anna Christie as the gambling addict who doesn't want her husband to find out she's in debt, isn't exactly the stuff that dreams are made of. What's so sordidly pre-Code about it all is that the "cheat" of the title refers not to Tallulah cheating at cards, or cheating on her husband, but rather cheating on Pichel — our lonesome bachelor — by trying to reneg after he's already paid off. In other words, this sort of deal was — in the pre-Code universe — as valid and holy (or unholy) as the state of marriage itself!"

 The Cheat was made in 1931, and the coded miscegenation repulsion-attraction was even worse! The overriding motif throughout these films is that Asians are treated with some respect if they are cultured and can speak English, though they tend to go all to blazes when the get a load of a hot white chick. Irving Pichel brands Tallulah's breast to mark her as a cheat when she won't put out after he pays off her gambling debts. Apparently Asian guys even if played by whites (as whites) are so repulsive that being literally branded on the breast is better than putting out, even if you've promised to do so.

The earliest and most influential chaste interracial romance of them all is surely that between horribly abused Lillian Gish and the disillusioned Asian curio shop owner in Broken Blossoms (1919). Chris Jacobs writes "it is a delicate story of characters and ideals caught up in an inexorable destiny.  Modern-day critics who acknowledge Griffith's contribution to cinema also find the eloquent plea for racial tolerance less embarrassing to embrace than the controversial The Birth of a Nation." Yeah but as I recall they never even kiss or embrace despite this poster:


Nowadays of course racism is still a problem. But may I suggest that a part of this is the prevalence of the attitude that we are all the same? We are, but that is exactly why we should be celebrating our differences! I applaud kids who get way into the minutiae of another culture, even ironically... this is how racism is healed, through admittance. The purpose of making fun of something can be to join it, to playfully analyze and encompass it. How many best friends didn't like each other at first, but were drawn to the unique complimentary energy the other provided? It's well known that mixed race children are actually genetically superior to many purebreds, for the same reason that interbreeding leads to biological problems. The bigger the gene pool for your DNA to work from the less likely you are to have birth defects and the more likely you are to be beautiful, as per books on the subject, such as Breeding Between the Lines.

We should rejoice when our children start dating someone of a different race and culture. The best thing we can do is to mix our genes and absorb all the details of each other's culture, celebrating each other's unique perspectives rather than demonizing or objectifying. The sooner we're all one glorious carmel-skinned, mildly epicanthically-folded race the better! In the meantime we should try on each other's cultures like robes at a costume party, and in the process de-demonize ourselves to each other. This is what children do, and why children are not born racist. I had a Korean friend when I was five and I constantly teased and/or asked him about his weird culture (like afternoon prayer, the gross cooking smells, the stern but loving grace of his father) and in the process I expanded my knowledge of the wideness of the world. If I hadn't been allowed to ask about them, to express my culture shock freely I would have just been skeeved out and alienated and we would never have become friends. In not feeling the need to act like it was all just normal, the exact same as my house, I was able to slowly acclimate. Films like Bitter Tea can be accused of racism or copping out on miscegenation but they also open up the dialogue, they point out the withering hypocrisy at the core of the anti-miscegenation code and its ultimate damage to world culture the same way homophobia in Brokeback Mountain does.

Any 'us vs. them' dichotomy brings the 'us' closer together, as every snotty popular school boy learns, but ideally they learn it's only a matter of time before the 'us' shrinks so small that you are left to join the 'them.' It's only when we give up this dichotomy-addiction--and that includes the foolishness of thinking we're all the same and should just act like the other culture's aren't strange and shocking to us at times--that we begin to truly blossom. We should all become race-ophiles, openly enthralled by each other's differences, in this we can begin real unification. That's why, in a way, people like Eminem are heroes in ways that mirror the importance of Sidney Potier, the idea that to win even a fleck or respect from white society you have to out-white them should be reversed. We should all be picking and choosing what suits us from each other's racial identity, finding our own unique place wherever it may be. We're not racist when we're tourists!

Thus the flip side of familiarity breeds contempt. When we feel denied the right to objectify, imitate, adopt or consume 'another' culture, isn't that also a kind of racism? Let's not just go through a faux-Rastafari phase as a college kid then get mugged in Kingston and get all racist all of a sudden, flimming and flamming based on personal experience rather than an objective outlook. Let's learn the lesson of our fascination with exotica, and let's let the tortured sprits of conveniently killed characters like General Yen point out the absurdity of Hollywood's censor system, an outmoded code which encourages Montague-Capulet divisiveness even as it portends to delve into sensitive issues of star-crossed lovers, separated by chasms of culture who are destroyed by the very divisiveness the code encourages, demanding credit for putting out a fire they themselves lit.