ACIDEMIC TOP TEN 2010

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Acidemic Xmas Special: Santa Vs. Lacan

Ho Ho Ho! And Merry Xmas. Via Lacan's tenet of the objet petit a, Erich in claymation explains why no present can compete with its wrapped potential, for desire's fulfillment is never the energy equivalent of its unfulfilled state. So give up seeking gratification and find fulfilment in the spirit of Xmas, and booze!

Ms. Icarus Risen: BLACK SWAN

Kiss Me Deadly (1957) happened to be on TCM as I was suiting up to go see Black Swan at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today, and something I hadn't noticed before caught my attention: the "Swan Lake"-ish classical background in the scene where Ralph Meeker rummages through Chloris Leachman's boarding house room. Coincidence?

Then I got home, The Eye remake starring Jessica Alba was on Lifetime: Jessica Alba looking in the mirror and seeing someone looking back who, while a lot like her--hot, damaged and mildly Mexican--is not her. Coincidence, tambien?

There was a moment in the crowded matinee BAM theater when the black swan Portman looked down at me with malevolent intensity (I sat in the fourth row center) and her eyes were like two white opals, her eyes they were like two white opals, coming together in a shaman bouquet and I thought of how weird I'd felt all last week while sick and hallucinating and possessed with a medicine-spiked serenity, focus, stillness and the ability to listen to Patti Smith's "Birdland" on endless repeat. The black swan of Birdland possessed me through the miracle of fever dreams, down on that New England farm, now walking down 5th Avenue towards Atlantic-Barclay Center. I'll go up. Or down. Don't give a shit for my feet have wings like a florist.

Movie audiences these days can drive me nuts with nonstop blue lights of cell phones and people whispering loudly but I can hear every word --but this time--emboldened--I merely hissed, like a swan might at a tourist without breadcrumbs (but who still wanted pictures) --and, having so hissed-- I let it go. They may have yelled the whole time I wouldn't have noticed after that, for I'd spoken up. I'd done my part. I felt the liberation and the intensity of the swan (along with the DXM) My insane rage at their uncouth bourgeois unconsciousness brought me closer to the Blanche Dubois-meets-Ms. 45 gonesville of Portman! Portman! Bravissima! 

I could go off in multi-hued directions about Black Swan in comparison with Aronofsky's last film, The Wrestler (see "Mess with the Horns"): together they are the his and her fictional artist career capstones, Oscarbait elegies to artists caught in amber at that pivotal acrobat swing from the arms of Ben Vereen to Jessica Lange's in All that Jazz (1979). They are Icarus--amber-frozen in the Led Zeppelin Swan Song label instant--the war-face grin of true freedom and anticipation affixed, dissolving like wax in the blazing sun, like the final mylar shield between the priceless comic book and the greasy thumbs of gravity's unclaimed child. They move beyond viewer and screen so that even the distractions become part of the whole--the screen in front of you, the seats below you and the Exit sign behind you--even the blue cellphone glow and whispers of the annoying latecomers--it all incorporates beautifully into the complex soundscape of scratching black swan wings fluttering like the rain of pine cones on ANTICHRIST's tin roof. The
whoosh 
of feathers and clatter of feet on squeaky floors, the horse-feather hoofs of long-maned and nice-legged ponies and cute girls in raincoats and blonde bobs--one dead, one missing-- one masturbating while her hysterical stage mom pounds on the door, boggling Mike Hammer's sadistic mind in KISS ME DEADLY colors; the beeping of its hideous heart-monitor and the applause of the crowd. As Smith's song goes, I'll go up /up / up / I'll go up.

Is Aronofsky the Patti Smith, then, of his generation, and Swan his Horses? Going fearless into the two white opals whiteness of credits with nary a pause of regret or doubt, at the end I burst into slow applause a few seconds as wild applause rang out on screen, and the people around me started to applaud by reflex, and then caught themselves--shot me waves of accusation in their gun-like glances. Why do we applaud in movies that aren't premieres, i.e when cast and crew aren't there to bow? Are we applauding ourselves for 'getting' the morbid black comic gut punch of it all? Are we applauding because our moms would hate it? To salute the projectionist for keeping it all in focus? No, we're applauding because we've forgotten we're watching a movie, and so we've shared a collective dream; we're applauding the machine because we hear the applause in the sound mix and we are trained to respond. We applaud because finally we're in the movie, too. That's how Aronofsky tricks us, and it's the best of tricks, the trick of only the greatest art, where it bleeds out of the screen and all over your lap, then follows you out the door, precedes you like a giddy, tumbling herald.

As I walked out of the BAM and headed up towards Park Slope again I felt free, the reality behind the screen, the audience of the world in rapt awe looking up at me, and me swimming through a thin walkway past the godawfulness of the still-under-construction Barclay Center, feeling safe in coat and iPod against onrushing lights and tires up Flatbush avenue past desperate storefront Xmas lights, the diva swan sculpture chrysalis-talizing into Sofia Coppola twirling the ribbon in Spike Jonze's acrobatics video for that Chemical Brothers song whoisthisdoin'thissynthetictype-a-alpha-beta psychedelicfunkin?  Coppola's trophy case the same as that Buffy the Vampire episode with the cheerleader mom witch getting trapped, a la bruja en ámbar... in her own trophy after trying to literally live through her daughter. Hershey as the mom with no life but to micro-manage her tortured daughter's each breath, Norma Bates harming the fly, the filly... Sophia Coppola going on to direct a film about suicidal virgins - "Cecilia was the first to go."  Trip Fontaine reaching through the suffocating lather of Catholicism that binds them only to run after mistaking orgasm/conquests' hollow aftermath panic for a real emotion; Sinead O'Connor ripping her papal way to persecuted freedom from popularity on SNL; Tyra Banks looking through light blue cellular eyes back out the TV at the pictures of her model contestants behind you on the wall; Annie Hayworth's bird-beak-busted skull eye sockets hidden by picket fences in THE BIRDS; Marlene Dietrich covered in ink black feathers slashing the Shanghai Express screen open with her swan talons, letting the rotten corpse fruit come sagging out.

Virgin Suicides, The

In SWAN, Natalie Portman plays the ideal mix of perspiration and inspiration. Hers is a cloistered life of rigid discipline and striving for perfection, necessarily without freedom or any experience of decadence. She knows no outlet for passion and vice or even an orgasm--living with a crazy mom and no bedroom or bathroom door locks--so when finally released from bondage into supernova orgasm because she's required to, finally, for the very pinnacle of her art, be the black swan instead of just the white, the freedom of ecstatic release is a Pandora's box-cutting moment that makes the whole cinema tremble with aftershocks. The good, the bad, and the naked rotting corpse underneath the lobby are exposed to the angel's pecked-out sun orb eyes at last, and all pain and fear and work revealed at last to be only ever the flimsiest of veils for this one inescapable moment, the melting wing flutters into applause.... the cheering like a distant hawk.

And if death not ends it, why bother starting? As Oscar Jaffe said: the sorrows of life are the joys of art. Knowing this and accepting it gives us a way of preserving those sorrowful joys in celluloid amber, of letting our artsy life fade and wither like an en verso Dorian Gray: Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman and now Mila Kunis - a single line of frozen youth unwillingly dragged into the middle ages, thence to become self-mutilating corpses. But first the bloom. If her name wasn't so reminiscent of Milan Kundera I'd like Mila more, but it is, and so I think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and 20 years ago in Seattle trying to watch it on VHS with my platonic girl friend-friend, when I was still too young to realize that one can't not masturbate or have sex or any kind of orgasm forever and not get sullen and irritable when living in close quarters with a beautiful intelligent blonde woman and no locks on the doors, watching some European art film rank with perfume ad sex and cocksman swagger... I wouldn't mention all that, except that it fits the BLACK SWAN to rushing, headlong, screaming "It is Accomplished" Tee.

But when the eye is for art and not for pornography, when 'I' stands for love and not for base desire, when a heart yearns for naught but is complete just to watch movies and pound Rainers and Red Hooks then Milan Kundera can go to hell. I've always been one to appreciate the purity of a chaste love... but it's so hard to find free time to take care of yourself when you're living in a commune, or with Barbara Hershey, or Isabelle Huppert's mother in THE PIANO TEACHER or Lux's parents in VIRGIN SUICIDES, or Piper Laurie in CARRIE. If you're feeling like you need to invade Iraq, or give up on your dreams in a fit of whiny depression, why not first try Seroquel, or see your Lexus dealer or give yourself some 'you' time-- as they euphemistically like to say.... Psychedelics can save your soul just as masturbation can save you from regretful decisions, art can save your life but only death shows the true color of the light behind the curtain and only it is unavoidable. They can't arrest people for successfully dying, much as they'd like to. Some of us peak behind the curtain, but most are content to wait for the curtain to come to them. Oh! It hangs like a CGI vibrator, all for you Damien! That signpost up ahead - it's your life's credits--quick check to see who played you. I'll go up! I'll go up! 

Don't listen to a word of it. There are no words to Swan Lake, nor sex --just violins reflected in the inky blackness of its surface, and inky feathers in the sprockets overheating the projector until the bulb explodes in a shower of black swan Bergman's PERSONA blood:. You can live to be a hundred and never dance or you can blaze out by nineteen and never stop, but to find peace in sobriety you must first get drunk. You must become besotted to ever be bereft. You must first know MONSTER ugliness to be Oscar beautiful. You must first know fame before becoming eclipsed by your own empty spotlight. Like Moira Shearer in the Lermontov RED SHOES, like Lazarus risen from the dead, like Mike Hammer risen from the dead, the tortured barefoot husk of Chloris Leachman at his feet. Mikey! Brrrrrm! Pow! Swan-eee how I love ya / how I love ya.

 I love you Patti, Chloris, Natalie. Natalie... Nat? Nat. Nat, pour me another.... take the sandbags off and take thy waxy wing to sky and go up / go up /up

And.. suddenly--just like that--you're old.

POW! 

Die like an Eagle: ENTER THE VOID (2009)

ENTER THE VOID is the first drug movie of the 22nd century, so far ahead of its time it's behind it. Centuries from now humans will look at it and laugh: how little we knew of the afterlife, of the fourth through ninth dimensions! Gaspar Noé's warper is the first receding light in the void of what we don't yet know about death. A little over two hours, it's five hours too long. It renders all pornography obsolete, dicing and slicing at fear and desire until nothing is left and everything is revealed. I imagine this film in a room with the films of Americans of similar ballsy-mindedness, like Vincent Gallo, David Lynch, Larry Clark, and Darren Aronofsky--all of whom have a similar push me-pull you thing going with drugged-out sex workers and heartbeat/rapid breath-synched sound walls--and I imagine them all getting jealous and competitive like it's James Dean on planetarium day.  If they were all playing chicken, only Gaspar would have the guts to sail off the cliff.. laughing all the way. Whose car are you going to ride along in, even if it is kind of battered and has those fuzzy day-glo dice? Sometimes day-glo is enough, and guts all over the windshield, and roller coasters, MILFs, MDMA, DMT, GHB, music box Bach, urns, car crashes... No, no, Noé, you had me at goodbye!

The term 'liberation' means different things to different nations, and people, but in every sense of the word there's something liberating about the traumatizing violence in VOID (I'm glad to say there's no brutal rape scene--at least in the cut I saw--so sensitive poetic males like me and the mentally challenged janitor at the end of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN can rest easy). That's not to say there's no trauma, but it's a productive kind- the kind you feel at the bottom of a K-hole, or after a day of dry-heaving through the bottom of a four week bender, a feeling it can't get no lower, a feeling you've reached your AA bottom and will be telling of this day for anniversary meetings in the years to come and even though no seaweed mermaid mom taxi will come to take you away down the comode pipes it hardly matters, since absolutely nothing worse can happen to you. It's the blacksmith on the Pequod showing off his epidermis: "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar." Now you're free of scorching! It's what enables MARATHON MAN to throw a fortune in diamonds at Laurence Olivier. Away, away, into the selfsame sewer sea. And it's Ahab, beckoning you follow those diamonds down. Now that you're free, Tokyo.

Aronofsky reaches for the scars, the diamond-tossing in the heart monitor undertow of THE WRESTLER and the eye-rape editing of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and the collapsing tent of Marion Crane identity in THE BLACK SWAN, but he's still too American not to flinch or sync his key lights. If he could let all that go, America might finally have as much sex and vacation as France. Instead we get a hungry ghost monkey on our back screeching "show us your tits" at random intervals, chasing all our opportunities away. The fraternité thing enables the French to embrace the surrender, the weening, the realization that chasing your little death down the red light district alleyway, or racing through the airport to give a proper goodbye kiss to your departing Aniston, isn't going to postpone facing the Black Swan demon in the mirror.

The French get the joke, because they know the sting of occupation.  America has not yet admitted complete defeat, while France has done the 12 steps, from Vichy to la Resistance. In World War Two France forked over its lunch money rather than getting its beautiful hair sullied in the pissoir and so they saved Paris from being bombed. Americans fought and died for French freedom, from afar, and read Sartre. "We were never freer than under German occupation," wrote Sartre. He was right. America has never been occupied, so it can only get jealous, cocky, dopey, demonizing, and deny that Sartre's brand of Leopold jackboot Sacher Masoch freedom is worth a damn. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, that's step one of AA. America's still down to party, why, you got a bottle? We don't have a prollem! YOU godda prollem!

I imagine America staggering like a slow-witted kid trying to find his way out of a candy store, and clearly so does Noé -- otherwise why was it so important the lead characters in ENTER THE VOID be Americans?  And why Tokyo, a land who got its ass kicked in the war, worse than any other, and so learned a few things about not going into the militaristic jingo light blindly just because its pretty like a mushroom (psilocybe, cloud, or shitake --it's all the same in the end).  The Japanese are a people fond of flash and Tokyo under Noé's floating spirit camera becomes a land of pulsing red light district fornications, abortions, drugs, and ratty little snitches who should go kill themselves and do us all a favor. On a double bill with LOST IN TRANSLATION, the meaning of being Bill Murray becomes clear. He's the closest thing our current cinema has to a Bogart, staring into the void of death with a wry smile.

When things actually die though, the French notice. When you surrender, lose your lunch, and lick the boot nice... and clean... then you feel the pain, because you are involved in mankind. You know the bell tolls for thee. You're not afraid to meet the eyes of babes. You can dance if you want to... even leave your friends behind, and use the pole without being stoned as a slut by your peers.

stripper, hold the 's'

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), our dead free-floating POV in the film is not only a dumb American, but a flatliner, a depressed monotonal zombie hipster. Oscar's stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is, however, terribly cute, though she seemed blurry and far away in the film, a condition understandable in the wake of a terrible car crash that took away their parents at a very young age, but inexcusable in the post-modern wake-up world of ecstasy-addled po-mo Nippon. My question then, is this: what kind of dead parents are Oscar's that they don't come get their son at the pearly gates station when he floats down/up? This film may take place in Tokyo but it's the most searing indictment of American small town hypocrisy since DOGVILLE. Even beyond the grave, parents are self-serving deadbeats.

I knew VOID was something I had to see and review here, but I was dreading Noé's intensity, his glee in exploiting brutality. But no artist better understands that the moviegoer's gaze is itself a ghost in the narrative, longing to permeate the silver screen and be re/born into the simulacrum via its favorite movie starlet's womb. Aren't we, when dead or watching horror films, forced to watch helplessly as our future mother or some girl we don't know is killed or sexually mistreated and all we can do is beat on the glass screen door and scream? But though VOID is drenched in fuzzy sex, I found it more sad than sleazy, like both sexes were just biding their time, exploiting each other--enslaved to the sparkling dollar store bardo like UGETSU or EYES WIDE SHUT. Oscar's sister can handle herself fairly well in the trade; it's Oscar's POV that has the issues. Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the copulations and floating into light bulbs like Hitchcock's camera might if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO; we never know what his free-floating POV is thinking. We just see what he (or rather his third eye lens) sees. Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat where reincarnation can occur and he can get back in the game again, our POV eye drifts towards through what Buddhists call the 'sidpa bardo', the land of darkness where the flames of love draw lost souls hoping to hop the interdimensional fence and be reborn, the way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one door off this shitty flesh pot parking lot of slide show life flashes. Doses... doses.

This essay was really long, but I edited it down, and down, and down. Let me just say that as your doctor I recommend this movie very highly, but if you have panic attacks, epilepsy or nervous disorders, make sure your fully and properly medicated in a legit Rx fashion before entering.  And just remember, wombs may look nice and relaxing from the outside when your ephemeral and a ghostly orb and stranded in the hungry ghost plateau, but once the placenta busts and the crying starts, it's the same old Hell... I mean heaven! Heaven... sorry god, Christ, and sponsor. Heaven.

Beards of Bleak: THE ROAD, WINTER'S BONE

Look at these two fine, bearded gentlemen above: Viggo Mortenson (left), billed only as 'the man' -- a grizzled survivor of an unspecified global holocaust, traveling with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in John Hilcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2009 THE ROAD; and John Hawkes (right) is 'Teardrop'--a grizzled meth head slightly of a mind to protect his niece (Jennifer Lawrence) as she travels into the heart of meth belt code-of-silence darkness in Debra Granik's 2010 WINTER'S BONE. The two films have much in common: ravaged rural starkness, paternal anxiety, and them man-oh-manly beards, pointing and twisting under hawk noses. Teardrop and the Man are the cinema's 2009-10 beard combo (1), the best such combo since Moss and Plainview in 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (another Cormac adaptation), and this time, there's fewer words in the titles, even fewer in the scripts, which is hard to believe.

There's an awful responsibility that overtakes us, cinema do declare, when raising kids in a land rife with scorched earthiness, meth, limb-hacking, and squirrel skinning. Kids in horror and sci fi used to be possessed by demons. In the 1980s they hung around long-fingered aliens and quirky robots but were generally safe. Now kids have fallen from their endangered pedestal as beacons of Spielbergian light or position as 'other' to be feared, and become mere luggage, screaming cargo that must be protected from C.H.U.Ds, hillbilly paranoids, cannibalistic pedophile priests, and zombies if one is to avoid the agony of being branded a bad father and having to spend the rest of the film crying and staring at old family pictures. All one really wants to do is shoot, smoke, sniff, and sail away from life's burdens, but they have kids. In the 70s they could still do all that stuff, and just get a sitter. Now though, what if the sitter's a psycho or there's a fire? They can't relax even for a second. Gradually they go nuts from anxiety, the kind of nuts some meth or booze would handily cure.

BONE is the sleeper indie award winner this year, though first glances might make you sigh a BASTARD OUT OF GEORGIA RULE HOUNDDOG'S SWING BLADE RURAL JUROR poetic realism on the cheap kind of 'here we go faux-Faulknering' harmonicas and steel guitar-scored sigh. But, as I explained to my sentimentalism-wary lady friend when we watched it, even if all the signposts are the same that don't mean it's the same road. That's the mistake that made so many film scholars originally overlook Douglas Sirk! Underneath all that soap was a very dirty boy. But you had to scrub a little to uncover how deep that dirt went.

I'm sure by now you don't need me to tell you that WINTER'S BONE is beautifully photographed. Every image reminiscent of the lovely dust bowl portraits by Dorothea Lange, but in color and thrift shop winter couture, slow drip rainspouts, baleful-eyed horses, eerie drones and impeccable foley wind-swept periphery shrub rustling. The story itself is interesting, proving as did in DOMINO and JACKIE BROWN that bail bondsmanship is a fertile, relatively under-explored film subject. Dee (Lawence) has to forfeit her house to the bail bondsman if her meth cooker dad doesn't show in court so down the dirt hills trail she treads, asking tough questions of her hostile, meth-paraoid kinsfolk. As she's met by slammed doors and threats Dee begins to resemble the Phillip Marlowe of Tobacco Road, bravely digging where no one wants her to dig, taking a beating without flinching, hallucinating under quality pain killers, relentlessly traversing a mise en scene of desolate winter landscapes and druggy evasiveness. The men hide behind smoke and yellowed curtains, guns at the ready, hallucinating police cars in the thumbprints on the windows. Where male detectives in 40s noir found Venus flytrap perfumes overwhelming their war-torn senses, Lawrence finds tough, inscrutable men, all relatives to some degree or other, their brains half-fried, with violent tempers, coiled cottonmouth postures. If they have information she must suss it out but that takes time and their wives are listening in the next room with a shotgun under their aprons. Dee's knightly champion eventually emerges from Teardrop's twitchy shell, kinda... but drug users are notoriously slip-prone when it comes to metamorphoses.

'The Man' in THE ROAD, meanwhile, never doubts his princeliness, but he sure doubts the world's. He saves his last bullet to use on his son if they should ever fall into cannibal hands. Several times the kid has the gun pressed up against his head while danger looms, and one can't help but think of John Ford's STAGECOACH climax, with John Carradine's last shot aimed at the 'lady' as the Apaches draw closer. Fear for the virginity of your young 'uns and maidens can make you brave or make you weak and in the final bullet moment it's impossible to tell which is which. It's one thing to be courageous for yourself, another to be courageous with the life of a charge, a child. Viggo refuses to let his son risk his life in order to make friends, thus dragging the 'helicopter parent' principle into the post-apocalypse wasteland.

The main difference between Teardrop and the Man seems to lie in this approach. Still like a cobra, eyes cast low in a thousand yard stare, Teardrop's superiority lies in the cool uncle position. When he finds a stray strand of nurturing in his soul's muddy weave and a banjo is introduced you practically cry to see this man finally engage in something that's not potentially deadly or destructive. At that moment, you know Howard Hawks would have loved him.

So, without a reliable social order in place in either dirty outdoors film, the thematic question seems to be, when is life 'safe' for little children to frolic? Dee proves it never is, so fuck it, frolic anyhow. The Man thinks it will be safe 'later' - so 'the boy' gets carried hither and yon, like America getting the paranoid treatment from a stand-down military, like the boy is George Bush and Viggo is Dick Cheney, creating all sorts of problems with his paranoia and access to the inner ear of power. 

As trends in fathering in our modern society('s films) make clear, dads don't often feel the need to stick around --too much pressure. What makes Teardrop, in his deep sympathy with the shadows and evils of the world, a better dad than 'the Man'? Teardrop knows how to come at a room full of meth-addled hick gangsters; he knows when to shrink into the shadows and when to refuse to step out the car and put his hands on the hood. He's not afraid of dying and that's what enables him to better help out. Like most of the men in either film he can't wrap his head around a woman un-cowed by the threat of death and physical violence. He has no choice but to be impressed. Viggo's problem is that he doesn't respect bravery, since he has none, and so his son's fearlessness or his wife's (Theron, below, looking straight out of BONE), is dismissed by him as foolhardiness, while he cowers in the shrubs knowing only one thing, that he's right to do so.

I know I'm not alone in being grateful that WINTER'S BONE chooses to forgo the threat of sexual assault that seems to dominate most other hillbilly franchises. We don't get much of it in THE ROAD either, but the threat is always there (along with OS screaming), putting an uneasy Kung Fu grip on your throat. A similar heavy threat hangs all over BONE, but the whole sexual assault as worse than death thing doesn't factor, and I'm glad. As I've written on BL, I think we're reaching an ugly saturation point in that regard: it's become cheap shorthand to get the audience deeply disturbed and emotionally involved, but at what cost?

Another thing I'm glad BONE forgoes is sentimentalizing childhood innocence. Funny how the two things go hand in hand, as if innocence itself was a side effect of corruption rather than vice versa.  Both films examine the nature of emotional involvement, and of parenting and responsibility, and while both films tug at issues of bare life survival vs. the sweet joy of giving up, only BONE knows how to harness the beard, the wild man energy of the masculine.  THE ROAD paves the way, perhaps, in subtextually condemning the conservative 'my family uber alles' ethos, but only BONE takes that message all the way to the bottom of the family swamp, where the wild man lies, and dredges that deep man up.


As Robert Bly wrote in IRON JOHN:

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

That's poor Viggo in THE ROAD, a sanitized man, re-bearded, trying to be wild in a wild land, learning the role of the deep, dark masculine and getting it incorrect. No reflection on Viggo, of course, who showed he can bring that shit hardcore in the RINGS trilogy and HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. What I don't like is the head-on craftsmanshippy approach to the McCarthy novel --it gets it too right, maybe, to work. Teardrop on the other hand is the truly untamed wild man, the kind of guy that creeps you out at first but then somewhere along the way, not sure when, you start to admire him.

Isn't that so much better, children, than the other way around? 

NOTES
1. Yeah, THE ROAD came out in 2009, but I didn't see it til last week, so what?
2. Vintage Books, NY, 1990 - Page 6

Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema

A recent post by the unique and sensational Cinetrix, pulling the otherwise unstoppable Dan Callahan in The House Next Door to the curb over a piece about 'rich girl cinema' reminded me I had this semi-self-righteous rant tucked away in my 'drafts' file.  Too snobby and self-righteous? You decide!

I'm not prejudiced against rich kids, they're some of my best friends! But if they've never been slumming for a substantially Sullivan-ish length of time, or bummed around Europe for a summer, or whatever, it becomes pretty obvious when they go to make a film about 'real life' that they've no idea what it is!

Being rich gives kids like J.L. Godard, Sofia and Roman Coppola, Wes Anderson, M. Night Shamylan, Alex Payne, and Jason Reitman a strange obsession with the non-jet set, and a vague hand-that-feeds-them biting self-loathing disguised as knowledge of 'common people' and their 'real' problems. What was it William Shatner 'sang' about 'common people?' Anyone who's dallied in their midst knows they suck.

I have no problem (or only a sporadic one) with Wes Anderson as he deliberately avoids 'real life' - preferring the eccentric rich (like the respectful objectification of the brothers in DARJEELING UNLIMITED,  j'adore). And Sophia Coppola is exquisite at capturing first-class Tokyo hotel ennui with Harrison Ford while Spike was off with Cameron Diaz, so the story behind LOST IN TRANSLATION goes.  There's also a stretch of 20 minutes or so in VIRGIN SUICIDES that's totally awesome, you know the stretch I mean... but then Sofia thinks she can pull off MARIE ANTOINETTE just by gathering some of her friends together on location with fancy wigs and her favorite 1980s music on the anachronistic soundtrack. America recognized a boondoggle when they saw one.

No offense to him personally, but Jason Reitman to me is the worst of the lot (I hear he's a lovely fella in person). I've not been able to wade more than a reel or two into either UP IN THE AIR or JUNO, and that's weird since I love Ellen Page and Vera Farmiga. It seems to me Reitman is the type of filmmaker who hasn't flown coach in his entire life, who's never had to wait in line for a bagel, or change a light bulb, and without those valuable life experiences, what qualifications has he to tell stories about 'life' at all? His view on how people act and even walk feels not even observed, let alone lived. This again would be fine if he was making a Godardian polemic or Wes Anderson doll house, but not if he's going to get at anything like a 'real' truth.

As a recovering alcoholic for example, I can tell when the actor portraying an alcoholic onscreen doesn't know shit about what being alcoholic is like. Similarly, when an inexperienced rich kid makes a film 'about real life' you feel like you're being taught sex techniques by a virgin. And I have been! I know all sides of it. I know a thing. And even if not, will gladly mansplain it.

Anecdote Time:

When anti-Apartheid campaigning was all the rage in the late 1980s, I remember being at an anti-Apartheid rally at the outdoor theater up in Syracuse that was run by this beautiful blonde girl, Christena (not her real name), a rich, blonde, pampered Single White Female type from Connecticut who proceeded to lecture a largely black, Rastafarian male audience about what it was like to be non-white in South Africa ("Imagine.. row after row of shanty towns."). I don't know if the rows upon rows of Rastafari felt as embarrassed for her as I did, but it was kind of emblematic... of something.  And then a band came on after her and the bassist was 100 x better than I was, and my band was next... and I freaked out and ran home to take an 1/8 of mushrooms on the off chance it would make me 'play' music better. It didn't work, and that's why I blame society, and Jason Reitman.

Hey - does anyone remember that movie CQ (2001, above, and top)?  Roman Coppola directed it, and man oh man, is it excruciating. And yet, it's so almost good it hurts, kind of like BARBARELLA, a film CQ clearly apes around the edges; and as a director he has all the worst qualities of Roger Vadim. Roman's cousin Jason Schwarzman is hilarious as a faux Jean Rollin, but the protagonist is a horrifically pretentious dullard played by hand-talker Jeremy Davies. Rather than blow our minds with a De Laurentiis-ish sci fi sex epic, Davies wants to make a tedious documentary of his cliche'd ex-pat Paris life, in grainy black and white, so we can all bask in the mundanity of his spoiled film student existence. Jean Eustache should be rolling around in his untimely grave!

Tout va Bien - (1972)

The main offender in all this--to my mind the classic example--is Godard, who comes from a silver spoon Swiss family, a source of income he's returned to throughout his career when he needs 'help' to finish a film (one presumes). Meanwhile, what are his films about? The evils of capitalism!  I love, love, love Godard, don't get me wrong. And he's brilliant enough that he didn't let his 70s Maoist phase derail his deadpan absurd comic genius. BUT - I do question the motivations behind his attacks on consumerism, especially as film costs money, honey. Is his Commie phase a kind of French filmmaker equivalent to a rich girl bringing home a black guy over break to freak out her parents, so that they wont complain when she later brings home a deadbeat white kid musician the way my drummer's girlfriend once did? Or is he like Charles Foster Kane answering Thatcher's question about what he would have liked to have been ("Everything you hate")? Has a member of the proletariat ever watched a Godard film all the way to the end, even if they appeared in it?

Then again, America never did have a Guy Debord or Brecht to call its own (unless they fled here to escape the Nazis). Maybe that's why we're so stuck when it comes to unpacking the difference between acrid satire and sour sermonizing. We deny class exists, with the result our art compels us to illuminate our own even while depicting another, like a guilty conscience.

Another anecdote:
For around a year or so I knew a quintessential Park Slope co-op kind of guy who freaked out if his roommate set the heater above 65 degrees in winter, or used the AC at all in summer, no matter how hot it got. Every day he'd bicycle every day across the Manhattan bridge to school, even in the rain, all the better to lecture everyone who'd listen about greenhouse gasses. He'd drone on about organic food at the Park Slope co-op, the evils of money and the NWO, and then, once a month, he'd go home to his super wealthy upper crust WASP family to get his allowance. Hilarious!

When being a film critic/theorist/ranter, it's important to keep all that in mind, as it illuminates the underpinnings of what I call trust-fund Marxism. Do the trust-fund Marxists care about 'the people' or are they like Sturges' Sullivan, merely idealizing the poor out of repressed guilt (the urge to 'give something back to the poor unwashed to make one's own diamond swimming pool less shame-soaked) or in order to covertly piss off his parents (or parent corporation)? I mean, it's fine to do that, just be aware of the glaring irony. The blue collar guys ain't gonna see yer pitcher. They think your artsy sermons are bullshit. They want to see cartoons.

I recall this quote from Sullivan's butler:

You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned

In short, my rich kid cinema critique isn't mean to champion the working class, or the unemployed, homeless, etc., in fact like Sullivan's butler, I hate them. I hate the characters of directors like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and John Sayles, those critically-lauded filmmakers that try and 'justify' their use of national endowments by patronizing the proletariat with that 'Barton Fink feeling.' Also, just because they can afford to keep meddling producers at bay, ensuring the true stamp of auteur (rather than the committee second-guessing that comes with too many producers), doesn't mean they don't need script doctors. It seems to me that since they didn't 'earn' their budget, they have this need to prove their 'stories' worth telling, and cinema is a hard thing to fool. We fancy-ass expensively-educated critics can deconstruct a blazing hole right through the curtains of any auteur's big wizard style. We'd know you were a rich kid filmmaker even if you signed your name 'R. Mutt' or Alan Smithee. We can tell because you think poor or lower middle class people are noble, humble and saintly, rather than loud, boorish and filthy. This is because you clearly have never had to fly coach. The closest you've come to meeting 'common people' is when your usual drug dealer isn't answering his pager.

As I say, except maybe for the preppie wankery of Whit Stillman, I like films by rich folks to be about rich folks. In general I'd much rather roll with the rich kids in cool parties like the ones in Bertolucci's STEALING BEAUTY than mope around some rich snob's idea of working class Bristol. And besides, to get films finished you need money, and since cinema has a respect for finished films and without a fall-back income source, budding auteurs can get slammed into the dirt by budget issues, even inches from the finish line, having to crawl into bed with litigious distributors who tie up the DVD rights for decades. It happens to Abel Ferrara all the time, which is why half his movies are unavailable in the States... ever!

Not all rich kid auteurs are bad: there's a purity of voice in Wes Anderson, for example, a unity of taste and mood that you can't get in a film that's leveraged to the hilt with a dozen different film company backers; Noah Baumbach brings strong doses of scathingly honest bitchiness and bravely hilarious moral ambivalence to his loosely autobiographical skewerings, the sort that nervous execs would probably never greenlight if they were paying the full bill; Alexander Payne is one of Middle America's true Swiftians, and if he does depict low income protagonists it's clear he'd rather dump them into a sea of embarrassment and watch bemusedly as they drown, rather than romanticize their mundane suburban prefab ennui.

Darjeeling Limited (2007)

But then there's M. Night Shyamalan, whose parents funded his early films, like TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. Now that he's surely lost most of his SIXTH SENSE and SIGNS money with his string of bombs I wonder if they're helping him again, because he's still churning out the shit. Alas, Hollywood is very forgiving once an auteur's name reaches the collective consciousness. You can recoil from Shyamalan's AmEx commercial which posits him as the hippest purveyor of trick ending spookiness since Rod Serling, or you can just guffaw at his amok ego. One thing you can't doubt: the man has no real life experience to bring to his films, just the right 'twist' - one inevitably cobbled from other earlier sources.

The thing is, ultimately, if an auteur has enough money and is a recognized name, he can easily surround himself with sycophants for whom is every lame idea he expounds is exclaimed as brilliance. The result? THE HAPPENING and THE LADY IN THE WATER (below).

I call attention to this not to blame these aforementioned rich kids for the silver of their spoons, but  to point out that these kids might benefit from some time out on the real bread line, ala SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS or the very least, a trip on a public bus. Let John Sayles get conked on the head and do time in the chain gangs, so he can realize that the average 'worker' is a boorish  thug; let Reitman be thrown into one of those David Fincher's THE GAME experiences, or a serious iboga trip. Send Roman Coppola to the ayahuasca communities of the rain forest in San Paolo and make him clean the vomit buckets. Most of all, make these punters realize that what they think of as 'normal' is to us as rarefied as a bird with crystal plumage. Would we try and teach them how to party at Ibiza? Or how to ask their parents for money? Then they shouldn't try and teach us how to suffer and yearn for self-expression as they fly around the world in their first class haze, romanticizing the poor like some one-man amateur mendicant society. Then again, people seem to love Jason Reitman... so maybe I'm the rich yob after all. Hmmm? I am, after all, pretty deft at asking my mom for money.

CQ (2001)

Soooo let me backtrack: as long as your pampered innocence doesn't result in the kind of black and white self-indulgent wankery that Jeremy Davies makes in CQ, who am I to judge? As the great Woody Guthrie once sang, "It takes a worried man / to sing a worried song." And sometimes even then, who wants to hear it? Not the worried man, that's certain. You know what I want to hear? Kathryn Bigelow singing about bomb disposal in Iraq; Darren Aronofsky singing about the madness of the one performance that truly makes it; PT Anderson singing about the dawn of big oil. Sing, in short, of subject matter and stories that fascinate and impel you.. not what you think you 'owe' to the little people your grandfather swindled so you could have a $25K a month trust fund. Being true to yourself doesn't mean filming a mirror, Roman! Such surfaces--for all their shiny luster--doth distort, warp, and drown all meaning in a sea of empty gestures.

Somewhere (2010)

Acid's Greatest Shorts: THE SUNSHINE MAKERS (1935)

"We're happy when we're / sad"
"We're always feeling / bad"
-- "How are ya?" / "Terrible!" / "That's fine."

"We're happy when we're / sad"

According to Annetesmusic on youtube comments, they used to play this between sets at the Filmore in 1969, with 'sunshine' being a common euphemism for acid. I believe it!

I have no memory of seeing this at 'the Filmore' or ever going there at all, but I did see it a lot around the age of 13-16, when I'd fill out the ends of my VHS tapes with old cartoons culled from TV shows like 'Matinee at the Bijou.' So The Sunshine Makers was on at the end of a tape I watched almost constantly - Nighthawks (starring Rutger Hauer!) followed by The Thing (1951) followed by Cat People (1942)... a perfect flow. I still remember all the words to the "Hail his majesty the sun" song, and the "Happy when we're / sad song." My brother and I would sing it to each other for laughs. I had no idea about the acid connotations til years later when it showed up as something they play between guests in Get Crazy.

Of course my brother and I rooted for the Sad people, who, after all, have a clearer understanding of morality and Lacanian objet petit a... i.e. the more miserable you pretend to be, the more happy you really are, vs. the terrible 'command to enjoy' perpetrated by the Sunshine makers. It's a chilling lesson, the reason everyone acted so miserable behind the iron curtain, and yet drank more vodka and had more fun than the rest of us, once the curtains were drawn. It's sci fi dystopia imagining along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS and GASS-S-S, wherein acid-soaked hippie youth culture becomes the new jackboot conformity... and of course, you can read the hook noses and dark, vaguely ethnic clothing of the sad people as an anti-semitic signifier set if you so choose... but I'd rather just dig the row of bummer sprayers who get bombed with sunshine and start dancing like goofy little doofuses, and think of the recent footage of North Korean military displays and wonder if, at this advanced age, as the wind whips the trees outside my office window, the USA will ever get its 'true' sunshine on again. The consumerist command to enjoy is suffocating us... when all the time we were happier when / we were / sad.

Or were we? On the other hand, tralalalalala. I won't deny that acid saved my life, that I was beyond miserable and turbo depressed until first mushrooms than acid lifted me up from punk rock ennui and into the arms of my future loving hippie clique.

So enjoy... and remember, it's brought you by Borden's!!! MMM-hmmm Borden's.

And pray with me that one day, GET CRAZY will come to DVD.