Thursday, September 25, 2014

Tales from the Benway Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE

If I ventured into the 'flix stream, between the viaducts of Dr. Benway prescribed drug-enhanced science fiction hallucination dream, would you find me?  Or would there no longer be a 'me' to find, and no difference between you, these words, the future, the past and all constructs of self I may adopt and discard over lifetimes? Yeah, it's the second option, because good films dissolve all difference. The screen is just the first in an endless banana peel of self (and vice versa).

I dissolved once or twice into that void this week, thanks to the following two films being available on Netflix and their modulating, droning and pulsing analog synth scores being available on Spotify. By Sinoa Caves and Tom Raybould respectively, these evocative scores make a big difference, especially this time of year, the autumnal Samhain, i.e. Halloween. These two films seem to occur in a realm of permanent ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) midnight where dangerously liberated prisoners/patients/experimental subjects break out of bizarro world environments, in the process etching out as fine a metaphor for the dangerous liberation offered by psychedelic drugs as anything I've seen since PSYCH-OUT (1968).

So, when you're on an all-night weird movie binge, save these two for the late late show slot, i.e. the high strangeness Interzone gateway stretch between three and six AM, when the straight and sober are fast asleep so their bland consensual reality can't interfere with your psionic reception, because thanks to Netflix, the future is then!

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW 
2010 - written and directed by Panos Cosmatos
***1/2

A lot of typical science fiction buffs are nerds, man, and they stay that way for one reason: they're scared of psychedelics. Scared to lift the throbbing rock of the known and scoop the writhing worms and scorpions from the muddy void and devour them, they live in a reality circumscribed by the trappings of the social order; the border between their fantasy life (as a fifth-level chaotic good paladin in D&D) and reality (high-school) is very well-marked. The closest they get to living their own fiction is, perhaps, LRP or paintball, but never the 'inside job' of acid or mushrooms.

This cautious avoidance is a wise decision. Unless one feels the psychedelic zone tug them towards it like a magnet, one is probably not invited, and would probably not be treated well. As Bill Lee says in Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, "the 'zone takes care of its own", implying: all others beware. Not everyone is meant to have their ego ripped like a bad tooth from their screaming psyche. Their self-centered fears lodged like a giant tick in the back of their skull, each wrench of the psycho-active pliers felt like fire consuming the crown chakra, and only the already in pain would want to stick it out in the chair, enduring the probing and inflamed wrenching, until that sucker is at last ripped out. But for nerds of the sci-fi role playing type, maybe their egos aren't solid enough to be killed. There's no formative I AM life experience to get cocky about, no hardening of yesterday's persona.

Lick the 2001-legged Monolith
Sometimes the sci-fi coterie do make it past their initial fear and enter the void, and if they do, they tend to run in packs, and--when running is done--retreat to the movies (as we all have), spending the come down from the peak watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), because it's the familiar made unfamiliar. Kubrick's movie is never entirely familiar no matter how many hundreds of times you see it, and on LSD or shrooms it's a whole other thing. From there, an adept sailor of cinematic madness will wind up leaving England along Commonwealth solar trade winds and winding up at two Canadian horror films: SCANNERS (1981) and BLUE SUNSHINE (1978). Each explore the long term psychic side effects of prolonged exposure to the drug-dealing elder god behind the wizard behind the curtain. In BLUE a particular strand of LSD makes people lose their hair and go on rampages after exactly ten years elapse. In SCANNERS a briefly marketed pill prescribed to pregnant moms has caused a offspring to be born with the power to blow other people's heads apart through conscious projection.

I mention these two films this for a reason, this acidhead tab of Canadian druggie sci-fi history is imperative for a deep lysergic appreciation of the 2010 Canadian homage to that golden era of tripping man's Kubrickian-Cronenbergian-Blue Sunshine maker crossroad science fiction, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW.

The first feature by Panos Cosmatos, RAINBOW stars Michael Rogers as a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle. His pet patient is a scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) kept under sedation in a futuristic white room for reasons no expository monologue need explain (we having seen SCANNERS and deduced the drug side effect angle via the psychoactive experiment clinic prologue). During the daily sessions, Nyle tries to provoke any kind of response from Elena, talking molasses slow through a thick protective glass while jotting down 'notes' and going even more insane. He also has special guards called 'sentinauts' (their brains can't be exploded) and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves should she try to escape. Clearly, she must have the power to transmit her thoughts and explode the heads of anyone in the same room if the puramid thing should be turned off.  The uncanny analogy synth score by Sinoia Caves heats and throbs and pitch modulates as the doctor and patient engage in a long drug-addled silent treatments and staring contests. Cosmatos trusts his viewers to connect the dots, to have seen the classics, to have had their egotistic wisdom teeth pulled at the psychedelic dentist, to know that fields of red and pulsing, throbbing analogy synth music is enuff.

To make it all just that much better, the institute is housed in a bizarre retrofuturist geodesic dome, which includes the office/drug den of a terminally-ill Buckminster Fuller-Timothy Leary-ish junky, the founder of the institute (and Elena's father). In a flashback to 1966 we see this guy taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (the date is important: LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists the provinces over). Barry's trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 if slowed down 99% and experiences while meditating as one's face melted off. It's so much like my last few salvia divinorum trips I nearly fell off the floor, but Barry is not like us. He is  reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes?

Either way, when it's over it's clear the doctor blames himself; Barry's not held responsible... but the hope for the future is done, and though Elena shall be born with all the special extra sparkage having a dosed-out LSD-awakened mother can bring to one's junk DNA, she'll wind up a prisoner in an all-white room in a geodesic dome in the middle of nowhere, the captive of an insane doctor who killed her mother while in the throes of a deep dish LSD freakout.


 Meanwhile there's lots of delicious red walls and filters and the sense that time is melting (Barry pops pills from the Benway pharmacy--another nod to Burroughs) and though he's off-putting at first, Rogers gonzo performance grows on one over repeat viewings; he's committed to his work, he should be committed into the place he works, period. It fits hims snug like in a strait-jacket. Being a shrink seems like a pretty awesome occupation for a druggy maniac: you get to prescribe whatever mind-expanding things you want for yourself and go so deep into the void that reality ceases to exist and you finally get a peak 'beyond the black rainbow' and don't have to worry about a thing, as you have all the Ativan and Thorazine you need to bring you back down to 3D space-time if things get too terrifying.

If you get confused, just presume this is all meant as an analogy to the mysteries of consciousness itself as it may have existed in Canada after the collapse of the psychedelic movement: Elena is the unconscious, the anima- mutated along with the psyche's chromosomes; Barry is the amok ego trying to keep the sinful Jane Eyre attic madwoman lovechild locked up tight; the old man is the repressed superego dissolving from years of drug abuse (nothing nullifies a moral compass like addiction) and watching his high watermark 60s utopian vision for the future gradually erode under the deranged stewardship of his sociopathic protege. No matter how lofty one's intention, the ego finds a way to take advantage of it.

So remember, nerds: baldness = homicidal madness, and if you can't escape quickly, move so slowly no one can see you; otherwise you're dead at the hands of a guy who's so high he can't tell the difference between your skull and a stress ball.

THE MACHINE
2014 - written and directed by Caradog W. James
***

THe low-budget but highly intelligent (if unimaginatively titled) British film THE MACHINE (2014) has great gloomy electronic momentum (no daytime shots ever, which is great), a beautifully retro Carpenter-meets-Vangelis synth score from Tom Raybould, an overall aesthetic that splices the labs of the Tyrell Corporation to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's Lee Van Cleef sub basement, And a script that mixes some TERMINATOR touches with CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962) post-humanist philosophy. The captivating Caity Lotz is great in a double role, evoking Elsa Lanchester in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, as both the inventor and the machine. And thanks to thrifty use of lots of Val Lewton darkness, a single, largely empty cavernous soundstage and great artistic (and ingeniously simple) touches like the way the bodies of the artificial beings light up in strange patterns when excited (though the lights are clearly just projected onto their skin), Caradog's etched out ONE of those economic sleeper B-movie gems that can sometimes be unearthed when digging around in Netflix Streaming, ranking it alongside other dusty gems I've found there, like BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, THE ORGEGONIAN, IRON SKY, BOUNTY KILLER, and JOHN DIES AT THE END. It's short, yet operatic. There's no filler, no corners are cut. Everything fits and it doesn't need trauma or didactic postures to feel justified in existing, though of course there is some of each. Even the bit with the dying daughter sidesteps all the usual cliche'd sentimental pitfalls.


The story begins with bigwig AI engineer Vincent (Toby Stevens --the Richard Branson-ish villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) interviewing various freelancer-designed artificial intelligence programs via a series of surrealist questions to see which can answer far enough outside the box of logocentric thinking that genuine personality is possible. Ava's (Caity Lotz) program comes closest, and she's cute, sparks fly, so she's hired, and brought down into a deeply buried network of basement level research programs, all funded by the British military intelligence operatives for assassination work in China. Vincent's not a fan of the assassin aspect, but he loves the unlimited funding. It's enabled him to develop software that can scan and duplicate whole personalities via sensitive headsets worn during Voight-Kampf-style questions. Meanwhile, military vets suffering from brain injuries and missing limbs are turned into half-machine monsters, the trouble being they're liable to kill everyone in the room during the slightest existential tantrum. Meanwhile one of them steers Ava towards a possible cover-up conspiracy in the works - these soldiers are being cut off from their loved ones, treated essentially like slaves. She knows too much!

Ava is assassinated by Chinese assassins before Vincent can even work up the nerve to ask her out, not before doing all the tests of course. How convenient! Dennis (DR. WHO) Lawson is the ruthless installation director who wants to make sure this new Eva isn't so independent she'd refuse a direct order, especially since Vincent tells her killing anyone--even Chinese diplomats!--is wrong. She murders a guy in a clown mask during a routine test. She feels bad. Raybould's synth pads swell in mecha-grim portent.

Oh well, it's not hard to guess the rest, and we viewers we don't really give a shit about Vincent's Asimovian ethics, so Lawson needs to to up the stakes via an enforced robot lobotomy and another easy-to-guess subplot with the daughter. But what could be some douche chill sentimental nonsense in non-British hands (such as Guillermo del Toro's) doesn't rankle, and I've got a sensitive rankle meter for that shit.

Slick and dark, but with some genuine AI insight and vintage analog originality to back it up (See also CinemArchetype #13 - The Automaton / Replicant / Ariel), it's a good lesson in how you too can survive the coming robot revolution! Hint: treat the machines with compassion or at least tact, because they'll remember every last kind or derogatory word forever, no matter how far out of earshot you think they are when you say it. They are the past and future, reaching back and forward along your every gesture, like karma's own sweet engine.

Remember us, your future? CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS! 

If you have Spotify, click here for a mix of both the amazing scores of these films.

NOTES:
1. If you don't get that reference, see BLUE SUNSHINE!

1 comment:

  1. I just watched The Machine on Monday and I really dug it! I found it because I had searched for Caity Lotz on IMDB (she got a Lotz a what they call the Most). I am pretty smitten with her! She was Stephanie on Mad Men and she plays Black Canary on Arrow. She is the Woman Action Star that is an actor first, which is novel. Ms Lotz aside, I loved the low budget with the high aspirations and I wish bigger budget movies used this much of their brains. I also loved Beyond The Black Rainbow - with it's weird Australian looking stoner massacre at the beginning of the end. I loved how both movies looked like they were filmed on dioramas - like a bizarro Wes Anderson world - and how they would play so well on a VCR. They both brought back the motherlode!

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