Getting to Own You: CLOUD ATLAS (2012), RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935)

In my eleven feet of apartment, in a couch gone saggy from my restless weight, armed with a hairless cat and a vast battlefield of Coke Zeros and Camel Lights, I spent the Fourth of July weekend watching a  six part Revolutionary War documentary and marveling at the mule-headed courage of our American forefathers (many of my ancestors fought in it, from Ipswich, Mass --how Lovecraftian!): "All men are created equal," Jefferson wrote, believing it "self-evident," yet even on his deathbed the man could only bring himself to free five of his many slaves. What a complete bastard, but perhaps the meaning of freedom is lost on those who are born free. Unless they watch the right empathy-triggering movies, of course.

Here now I celebrate my freedom from the bondage of self, from the need to socialize to stave off anxiety and depression, to reap the benefits of age and medication which allow me to sit and be fully absorbed into what I watch. I observe no bed time, no three course meal structure. I am free to gild my cage and wallow in the tube's glowing captivity. Fuck the picnic grilles and distant echoing screams of children. The world outside the screen becomes more and more like an easily forgettable dream, a place to visit to stock up on Diet Coke and snacks, before the next two-hour plunge into the collective cable-DVD-Blu-ray-Streaming ocean. Without plans or rivals for the remote, I am free to choose any illusion.

A true slave, at last, am I. The Butler of Orbs, the eyes and ears that connect my unconscious to the screen; my hands that connect my unconscious to the page. Is this not a kind of ecstatic freedom, to recognize consciousness as little more than some unseen being's tool to communicate? Reading my own work 20 years later, it's like connecting with a stranger.

And over in 'real life,' what is it about owning our fellow man that is such a vile turn-on (the unconscious is without empathy of morality). Why are we natural enslavers of ourselves, we who pay the concept of freedom such sanctimonious lip service?

I didn't realize my next choice of dream submission transmission, CLOUD ATLAS (2012), would perhaps explain all that and more. There are whippings and escaped black slaves, Soylent Green references, unlawful incarceration, schizophrenic devil visitations, bombs on planes, cannibalism, Tom Hanks as you've never seen him before, an ingeniously understandable futuristic neo-ebonic patois, interesting predictions, and way too many Jim Broadbents and fake-looking epicanthic folds for comfort. There is misery and the sweet sting of freedom's disconnect and an examination of the bizarre difficulties in trying to whittle a human soul down to a commodity.

Its source novel-- written originally no doubt in that page-turner potboiler manner where something bad is almost about to always happen at the end of every riveting chapter--each small victory against the tyranny of evil men comes cathartic through the door at the last possible moment, and even if we're all going to eventually be sucked under by Miss Fellowes-closeted dykes, racist capitalists and homophobic Capulets, somehow we go on to write interesting if overly familiar philosophy about our intertwined destinies, one life after another.

The fantasy at play in ATLAS' life-after-life thesis isn't just reincarnation, for there are enough documented cases of past life remembrance to convince anyone willing to look, the true fantasy is that our words, art, or music will somehow endure through the ages, even if it looks for all intensive purposes like we'll die in obscurity. ATLAST posits that--even if we only get a handful of copies of our music out on CD-R, or LP, or our films are only seen by a few hundred on YouTube, or our abolitionist diaries are only used to prop up piano benches--as long as we reach one other person in the future then we will have succeeded, because that person might be us, or be interested in helping a future version of us, based on what they read or heard by this past us. And so, each piece of art or writing is a message in a bottle to a future self, every shipboard journal or pirate broadcast a possible bible to one's bored future servant. It's what we writers and artists and musicians tell ourselves when laboring in near-obscurity --even if we're one-day world famous, we'll still have to face that blank page, alone. And it's never satisfied. Even after inspiration has long since flown it begs for words, like a junkie. The "after I'm dead I'll be famous" fantasy helps us keep it sated. If we focus more on the page and less on the press agent, we can crack on rather than crack up. Only a focus on the perfection of craft has any results as far as relief from the withdrawal of full self. But is that 'satisfaction' a true artistic 'in itself' purpose, or a distraction from finding out how far we can go in the 'real' world?

Hugh Grant - Reloaded all right.

Hugo Weaving, about to get (finally) clobbered by a mellow Scotsman

All writers of today and even yesterday dream and wonder about whether their words will live on to tomorrow, or disappear forever in some massive power outage that kills all internet files. We wonder if we wouldn't have been better off writing everything down in longhand and saving it all in a mysterious pouch for our future descendants to marvel over in 3-D Technicolor flashbacks. Alas, years of typing and bad posture and impatience have made our thoughts too rapid for slow pen movements; our hands have gone arthritic from poor circulation. In longhand, I end up writing three sentences ahead of my previous one. My text collapses in on itself like a slowly forming whirlpool.

CLOUD ATLAS understands all this. The censors of the mind are embodied in the text by some seriously twisted villains, cast against type mostly, except for Hugo Weaving as, depending on the century, a Papa Legba-style demon, a corporate assassin for big oil interests, an old world evil enslaver of black flesh... and an evil female nurse at a no-escape Dickensian old folks home wherein s/he looks unaccountably like Matt Damon (above). And then, evilest of all, Hugh Grant as a cannibal, another slaver, and an old grotty rich dude who traps his freeloading brother in said gulag rest home.

But the filmmakers, siblings Wachowski and Tom Twyer, may have brought over too much baggage from THE MATRIX. For one thing, they are way too into face tattoos and other neo-pagan body mods (who can forget MATRIX: RELOADED's big rave scene, despite our best efforts?). But the many lives/many genders thing is fascinating when one considers that one of the Wachowskis is a real-life transgender/woman, and this undoubtedly helps add a sense of lived-in vivid urchency. Couple that to the feeling of powerful corrupted agents of power breathing down our necks and we're in a weird but riveting zone between the epics of DW Griffith and the gender-bent soaps of Pedro Almodovar (only sans any form of humor).

One other theme, more pronounced than even gender and freedom/objectification issues, obsessing the Wachowskis seems to be the concept of art's 'permanence,' the glory of art and letters (and video tape) to transcend time and  keep the flames of freedom alive. We see this in V FOR VENDETTA's secret chamber of forbidden pop culture collector's items, and in THE FOUNTAIN (see: American Grievers), wherein one letter writer gets an art exhibit and people flock to gaze at their faded penmanship. Experiencing the full magnificent weight of ATLAS, you get the feeling the Wachowskis are already justifying to themselves that it's okay if this film doesn't make any money. Future generations will recognize it as the defining film of our century. Hell, maybe it isn't but when they're dead, along with the rest of us, who knows what films will be the ones revered as eternal by our aquatic ancestors? I can see CLOUD fitting the bill far more than THE MATRIX, which seems more and more clunky and over-the-top pretentious with each passing day.

And who amongst us, late at night, alone, drunk off our asses with notebook in hand, haven't looked down upon our illegible scrawls and felt the surging power of Wagnerian music in our unbound soul, as if every line will one day be memorized as gospel by millions? If every drunken scribble is one day to be studied by enraptured art history and English lit majors, does it really matter if it's just the booze warming your cockles? As long as you feel famous during your drunk scribbling, who gives a shit whether anyone will have ever heard of you in 100 years, or has heard of you even now? The Akashic Records, man, they'll have you on microfiche.... and that's good enough. The future is where, as Criswell famously said, you and I will spend the rest of our lives. And your work will be there, lasting maybe even longer.

And then, on the passive end, on this plane, if you could feel entwined and get that old unfamiliar familiar feeling listening to a dead stranger's music, or seeing their art, or reading their life story, or seeing them act in a film, does that make them you in a past life? Doesn't that make their ghost feel better about their (to them current) lifestyle choices? Do the things they sacrificed to bring you that book or painting or film feel worth it once they see you inspired by it? Do they almost feel like they could have or would have written it themselves if they could (Which is how I feel about John Dies at the End). Or what about contemporaries? Can't you be living more than one life at the same time, separated from it by a wall of conscious amnesia that only art and music can cross?

Didn't I write this....tomorrow?

See, I feel that way about Lou Reed (hear me sing "Sweet Jane" here). I felt a deep connection to him and his music even BEFORE I ever did drugs, drank, or realized we shared the same birthday, and studied the same subject at the same University. It was all just a kind of weird fate connection (albeit one-way). And so I feel that reincarnation can occur in a contemporary phase, to varying degrees (Reed might be 1/10 me or rather we both might be 1/100th someone else. If all of us are connected and time doesn't really exist then it makes sense that not only will we live many lives along a linear historical axis, but we'll live every life in all eras, eventually. The only lasting illusion of our reality, besides space and time, is separateness, oh yeah and everything else.

Unlike the Wachowskis and Tykwer I'm not a big budget story teller. Rather I am a story liver-througher. I treat what I see onscreen and hear through my headphones as part of my own living heritage. As Peter Tork said (while wearing a white robe): "It is impossible for the brain to distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." Media is more meaningful to me than my own reality --I feel it too deep. I can read the future in a passing synchronicity ("plate o' shrimp") on TV, and find any mood or exaltation reflected in any actorly face. God, in other words, speaks to me through the randomness of TV chance. Film is my I Ching.

There are reasons for this: I grew up in the land where color aerial TV was the height of home entertainment and no child overruled their father on what to watch, so we learned to take it all in without distinguishing regardless what we liked or disliked.  Cartoons were on until dad came home from work and switched on the news, without so much as an apology, and I regularly had to go to bed before the end of the prime time movie, forcing me to dream the rest of it. I learned to roll with the boredom of Meet the Press, exalt in the heights of Shock Theater, soak it all up sans filter, ride the cathode ray like a twin-stalked lobster surf into the blue dream mystic.

Anyway, my point is...

Close our eyes and think hard enough and we can feel the feelings of being anywhere any other human has ever existed. If it can be imagined or performed, if we can feel and hear and taste that which is suggested, then it's all true, and those instantaneous links our words and music and art create are proof we are immortal and All Things At Once. We're the cumulatively encompassed transparadoxical double helix timeline of Self. DNA... we're a virus... written by a genius trying to figure out just Who "I AM".

Hugo Weaving, comin' ta get ya!

By contrast, the evil people--the racist, classist, sexist, and intolerant-- the Hugo Weavings and Hugh Grants in their various ATLAS incarnations-- will always want to isolate, enslave, incarcerate, or annihilate a subset of humanity for personal gain. Our unified field of self is proof of their evil and separation. They refuse to be connected in any compassionate way to the people they've deemed lower than themselves in order to justify their inhumanity. They don't 'feel' the connection so they don't realize that to oppress humanity in any of its forms is to abjectify an aspect of oneself, which is what leaves homophobic racists on a shrinking life raft until they finally have to try and open fire on their own toes for lack of options (1). What anti-gay marriage proponents forget to mention is that up until 1968, it was illegal in most red states to marry outside your own race (see: Anti-Miscegenation Laws). Nowadays even Rush Limbaugh doesn't dare publicly wish this law was reinstated, or slavery, or segregation. That's.... temporarily... too far.

Olivier's Richard III

I pity these haters in many ways because I know the horrible feeling of powerlessness that underwrites such veiled misanthropy. These souls can only create human bonds the cheap, fast way, by demonizing a subset. "Not it!" they cry, always first to say that, always terrified of being "it" in life's game of tag. But they know it's only a matter of time before they're next on their own chopping block, like the Duke of Buckingham (above) in Richard III, slowly realizing the unspoken rule of paranoia: if one sells out others one shall inevitably be sold out in turn. It can be no other way, by definition of karma's own law, which we realize all too soon is just for us.

BUT even within the context of this, there's something downright unnerving about CLOUD ATLAS and its suggestion that evil souls can survive through many lives, rather than the common conception, shared by me, and Buddha and probably the Rosicrucians, that after one life of such condensed navel-orbiting, they have their dark, condensed storm cloud souls stripped clean of all liens and barnacles and their magnetic field used as fuel for a gravity propulsion engine. Hugh Grant and Hugo Weaving in ATLAS however are unconscionably evil shits for centuries, persecuting the same souls over and over. It's truly a horrifying idea, to link a victimizer and victim together over and over across aeons, the one dominating, incarcerating, flogging and inconveniencing the other without relent.

I choose to believe this isn't 'really' how reincarnation works. I believe Weaving's character would probably wind up re-melted in Satan's forge and caste in lower forms after one go round, or better still would reincarnate as his own victim. BUT - it's damned scary to think that some souls are just evil forever, given a license to shit on the same other soul/s throughout eternity. That idea is just too odious to bear, though it does make for riveting viewing. Real nightmare shit --I don't advise seeing it alone, high on DXM and a fever, unless you want your old FLATLINER death signals reawakened.

And then they came for me.

Carrefour is the name of the mindless black slave descendent-turned-automaton
played by Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie - coincidence?

I cooled down after ATLAS in the warmness that is RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935), which was smart of me. In this Leo McCarey masterpiece the struggle against systematic oppression and human "ownership" involves a third generation English butler (Charles Laughton) learning to stretch out in America's limitless potential as a Washington State small business owner/restaurateur, and to stand up to both his original British "owner", an earl (Roland Young) and current harridan employer, Effie, the petit-bourgeois wife of Egbert (Charlie Ruggles - no relation), the laconic heir to a vast lumber fortune in Washington State. But getting there first involves the pain of being 'lost' in a poker game Ruggles wasn't even present at.

"You're going to America, Ruggles," the Earl (Roland Young) simply announces that morning as Ruggles  hands him the morning paper.

"The country of slavery, m'lord?" Ruggles asks, British upper lip masking his aghast shock.

"Oh that's all finished, I think."

And yet Ruggles has been used as pokers stakes, which seems pretty close. He later takes to drink (With Effie's verbal consent because "she's broadminded' - her finest moment).

As US citizens it's both amusing and alarming to hear an English valet dismiss America as beneath contempt for its practice of slavery, a nation that boasts of its relative classlessness. Stressing the difference is Effie and he brother's attempt to bring class stratification to the States, a sure sign of their petit-bourgeois vanity. The Earl, when he visits to retrieve Ruggles after realizing he can't live without him, proves his true nobility by choosing to hang out at the never-ending clambake keg party down the street.

Ruggles' merry sidestepping of their pretense involves--among other brilliant things (I cry every time)--his reciting the Gettysburg address. Director Leo McCarey shows his humanist steak in spades here, and I think it's his best film, which says a lot (he's the man who gave us Duck Soup and The Awful Truth). Another highlight seeing the villainous social climber Belknap Jackson (Lucien Littlefield) who tries to fire Ruggles for various perceived insults (including Ruggles kicking him square in the arse) get what's coming to him. He and his sister are the same types who in the past upheld the traditions of slavery because it was 'being done' in all the best southern families; the sort that prizes one type of person over another, i.e. anything that enhances or upholds some social hierarchy must be superior to the French ideal of liberte' egalite' et fraternite' which is way too populist for the rich afraid of losing their riches to liberal taxation... even now.

But--as I learned while working in a high end art gallery through the 90s--the really classy people--depicted here by Ma, Ruggles, Nell, and Egbert and even the Earl --avoid the bourgeois nonsense and stick to drinking and having fun. The highlight being that the Earl and Egbert sneak out of the house to avoid the guests at the dinner party Effie's giving in the Earl's honor. All they really want to do is drink and hang out with cool-as-hell Ma (Maude Eburne, below right), a wise woman cinemarchetype if ever there was one, never getting involved in the petty domestic squabbles of her in-laws, just paying the bills and shrugging it off with a good laugh. We should be able to do the same, and thanks to Warner's Archives, RUGGLES is at last on DVD, and looking great. Don't ever not see it.

I'm about out of time so, in closing, America, happy birthday again. For the most part, you rule! Just don't try to rule me, because I am not even here, psychically or spiritually. The last thing I want is for you to find that out and come looking for me inside the screen, hunting your lost property like a relentless alarm clock, insisting--as my mom used to do--that I come outside, to work, play with the neighborhood kids, and be my awful 'trapped-in-the-sticky-amber of linear time' self instead of vicariously living multiple lives across time and space. It took me years to be able to let all that go and indulge my misanthropy and vanting to be alone without hearing mom's nagging voice and my own depression dampening my spirit. But I made it, Ma. Look at me looking!

Still, even with this celebration of independence, I am not really even my own master. I belong to that remorseless muse, the inner spectator spirit, riding me forever deeper into the muck, heedless of fame or fortune, caring only for the next crazy turn in the untraveled yellow wood pulp. As long as it's the one less traveled, and a dead end, I'll keep going. Even after it all vanishes in an electromagnetic pulse back to page one stone age tablets, I'll be there. Id be so stoned too - m'lord. to go elsewhere. If I can't find freedom from my cramped office/studio apartment cage in my cramped office/studio apartment cage, I'll never really find it at all. Is that right?

NOTES:

1. I of course refer to that old folk tale about the scared lodger who, spotting two shiny eyes at the other end of this bed, scared in the dead of night blows his own big toes off with a shotgun (the nails of the big toes resembled eyes in the moonlight) - as apt an illustration of projected hatred one is likely to find. Makes sense it's from Appalachia. They wise.