Jills of Jack Hill Part 2: BIG DOLL HOUSE, COFFY, SWINGING CHEERLEADERS, SORCERESS, BIG BIRD CAGE, FOXY BROWN

At last, the color portion of my promised Hill oeuvre, celebrating the mountain of Hills now available on Blu-ray, framing the golden question of whether Hill "gets" women or just loves them - whatever the difference is, and if a single filmography can answer it. Thanks to great work of the mighty Arrow video, and Scorpion releasing; most everything Hill did is on Blu-ray or at least DVD (see part one of this series, the Hill black and white era). Next to the great JC, he's the premiere Hawksian of the drive-in era. Cherish him.

The following have always been in print and written about quite a bit, largely due (I think) to Quentin Tarantino and Pam Grier, so just a quick pass through of their (both literal and figurative) pros and cons.

PART II: THE GRIER YEARS

THE BIG DOLL HOUSE

(1971) Dir. Jack Hill

*** / Amazon Image - A_

Made during New World's stint filming everything down in the Philippines with a brigade of rising talent, this quintessential Women in Prison movie has aged far better than most, with Jack Hill's love of strong beautiful women in full effect. The leggy cellmates (Hill is a master of keeping them all in-frame, splayed on their bunks) include: Pam Grier as the dyke alpha; Brooke Mills as her strong-out junkie squeeze; Judy Brown as the newbie; Pat Woodell as the guerrilla/activist; and Roberta Collins as the tough blonde who's only looking out for herself (and advises the newbie to do the same). 

This was Grier's first film--she'd been Corman's secretary when Hill 'discovered' her--and you can see why she was an instant smash. She would go on with Hill to make history with two iconic films as we shall see soon. But here her iconic force and breakthrough sexual heft (always with innocent sweetness she can't squash in herself no matter how hard she tries) is kept in chains, more or less. She's just part of an ensemble who spend their days racing cockroaches, fighting in the mud, showering, and getting it on while the sadistic head guard (Kathryn Loder, left) conducts nightly torture sessions for the pleasure of the mysterious Colonel Mendoza (the kind of character who watches from behind screens --only his cigarette holder and riding crop discernible in silhouette). 

What's great is that for the most part these girls are damned tough, they suffer but they don't plead and moan. They're tough, like Cagney might be if given the same treatment, rather than moaning in surrender and pain to appease the kinky raincoats. Naturally Mills doesn't quite live up to that tough girl standard when it comes to the real torture of heroin withdrawal (turns out the head guard is supplying but holding out now that her snitch isn't snitching enough). But freedom in one way or another will soon be theirs, guns blazing! 

Grier's dynamite song "99 Years" tops a great knowing soundtrack, and highlights include Collins raping a delivery guy at knifepoint after she notices him spying on her in the shower (Hill lingers on her lusty gaze and she really sells it). Kathryn Loder is genuinely chilling as the sadistic guards, with just enough Nurse Ratchet surface warmth and justification of her behavior to chill the blood all the more after she gets the disobedient inmates all strapped down. Sadly, Hill mainstay Sid Haig delivers one of his worst ever southern accents as a skeevy fruit vendor. I'm not a fan of this genre in general, but there's no denying this is one solid piece of quintessentially New World drive-in exploitation. Sexy and sordid without ever being depressing or cheap, it's easily the best WIP movie as far as I'm concerned, thanks especially to the new HD restoration/remaster. The photography is dusky and vivid without any of the waxy tropical sweat that seemed to cover every surface in past versions, i.e. when the air is so humid it can't evaporate any more liquid, so every surface seems slimy --the main reason I always used to avoid movies shot in the Philippines. Not sure where it went, but I'm sure glad it's less pronounced, as if the HD remaster came with a big blowing AC.

THE BIG BIRD CAGE

(1972) **1/2

The Doll House was such a hit that Hill and Grier had to go back to the Philippines and crank out another; this time there's more comedy, more rebels, and a bigger budget (a whole summer camp-style compound is blown up, searing even the celluloid). Now the showers and catfights are outdoors on muddy sloping hills, which is slightly less depressing, and there's even more of a revolutionary angle as Grier's boyfriend is rebel leader Sid Haig, and the plan is to get his lonely rebel troops some girlfriends by liberating the women's work camp. That's all fine, but the real selling point is the the amazingly slender-hipped huge-haired mega-babe Anitra Ford as a free-spirited nymphomaniac named Tory, whose bedding of important political figures has landed her 'on ice.' She becomes Grier's sparring/bonding partner and helps blast their way to freedom.  I dug this the first time I saw it with my socialist rebel Argentine espousa (when I was working as a film critic covering the New World canon for the Muse); I didn't like it the second, alone and disheveled.

Pros: Grier and Ford are both dynamite with their bad attitudes and skimpy prison attire (Ford may have the best mid-riff in the history of the genre - though she's not in the above pic) and this go-round Hill is much more about escape, sisterhood, and machine gunning your way to freedom, than he is about seeing women tortured (though there's plenty of that too - alas). Grier and Ford are a great team, and--even though he's rocking a misplaced accent--Haig's the man.

Cons: It's a personal thing, but I find the sweaty Filipino foliage claustrophobic in its visible sweaty humidity. The gay mincing guards (the film's most dated element) are much too flouncy, and there's a wearying amount of suffering and abuse prior to the revolt. Me, I like ten pounds of vengeance to an ounce of provocation, not vice versa. As with the next two films, Hill seems to get meaner the second time he covers the same ground (venting subconscious anger at Corman for trying to pigeonhole him?)

COFFY

(1973) - ***1/2

Grier rocketed to stardom as the queen of blaxploitation films with this big cult hit-- capably stepping out from her ensemble work in New World's Philippine prisons and into starring roles at the now blaxploitation-focused AIP. She's a hardworking nurse out to avenge her smack-addicted 11-year-old sister by waging a one-woman war on Los Angeles' drug/prostitution racket after her kid sister is made into a junky ("her life is over!"), and cop friend Carter (William Elliott) is beaten up for not being crooked. She blows (the head off) a pusher, forces another to give himself a hot shot; threatens to carve up a prostitute's face unless she gives up her pimp's secret stash, and goes undercover as a high-class Jamaican prostitute to move herself into the stable of the marvelous King George (Robert Doqui), a super mack-daddy pimp with big-time heroin connections and his own funk leitmotif by legendary Roy Ayers (the whisper of "King George..." over and over as he struts around helps make this high-end pimp quite endeqaring). Pam's Jamaican accent is limited, but her white bathing suit is divine, her body bedazzling, her cape delicious (she also has a cool cape with her nurse's uniform. Capes!) Her hair huge and (it turns out) spiked with razor blades. 

She's soon getting in over her head, escaping narrowly, pinning her own theft of the stash on King George and flowing back up the chain of smack empire command like an IV of death. Sid Haig delivers a truly chilling extended laugh while dragging King George behind his car (courtesy Chevrolet!). Diane Arbus's husband, Allan, shows up as a sleazy sheik (MASH fans are bound to be pleasantly unnerved by the sight of visiting shrink Sidney demanding Coffy crawl to him on the bed). Booker Bradshaw is Coffy's tall, dark, and handsome politician boyfriend, whose slick-ass roadster is so low he has to step down to get into it. Through it all, Grier keeps her character tough and glamorous and always holding onto her sensitive center, even when wielding a sawed-off shotgun. Hill stretches the movie to accommodate her three dimensions, her towering strength always coming with back-end working girl weariness, the kind that needs no man's aid, just maybe a cup of coffee or a Sunday drive. (It's clear Tarantino was trying to capture that mellow openness, the weary but kittenish honesty, during her early scenes with Robert Forster). 

It's temporarily good to be the 'King'

Cons: The Olive Blu-ray is barebones and in its widescreen HD reveals something not as immediately apparent on VHS, just how cheap the sets on this movie are, something the full screen VHS I used to have successfully obscured. Here we can see the far edges of the cheap plywood phony walls in mid-warp/decay from the swampy heat of the soundstage lights; every surface has that sad "under construction" look. The bars and apartments have an airless, sweaty claustrophobia. As for the actors --their wigs appear crooked and misshapen, their make-up runny; it's like a giant basement of Arbusian freaks (or was I just really strung out on cough medicine last time I watched it?); even the outdoor scenes have an existentially oppressed vibe. And just because he's a pimp doesn't really mean King George (above) deserves to be betrayed and dragged around behind a car like Angelo in Wild Bunch, or the fellow stable whores deserve to be all cut up or otherwise abused just so Coffy can use them as stepping stones to her ultimate vengeance. She's just slumming but this is how they make their damned living!

Pros: In the end, though, none of that shit matters, because that score by Roy Ayers is so damned funky, so tight, so on point, and sounds so full and badass in the Blu-ray digital that if you watch this with the stereo connected, you'll be blown well clear of any lingering urban blight. And despite the bad wig factor, the actors are first-rate. Grier, especially, is in a class by herself. And, more tellingly, the tawdry atmosphere works to make all the heroin addiction--that longing for release--perfectly understandable. Hill can't convey the way an armful of opiates can make a heaven of ghetto hell, but he sure has a handle on the look and feel of withdrawal. The whole COFFY mise-en-scene seems as if its an aesthetic reflection of what the Hold Steady's Craig Finn calls the 'crucifixion cruise', i.e. the endless slog through the pain and despair that is withdrawal, pain and despair that makes you so desperate for release, you'll sell your soul to the first buyer.

(PS 1/19- Seeing this again on the Amazon Prime HD streaming print, I'd scratch all that urban blight stuff- everything looks gorgeous and glamorous, even the dingy green light of the hospital where she works highlights Pam's luminous skin, and Booker's pad and topless bar hangout scintillate with moody fireplaces.)

courtesy Art of the Title

FOXY BROWN

(1974) - **

Paid homage to by directors from Spike Lee to Quentin Tarantino, this is the title Pam Grier is known for/by even though it's COFFY they're thinking of. Originally set to be a sequel, this incarnation of Grier is a tougher, more cartoon-like version of her same vigilante character. A  'take back the street' grassroots anti-pusher coalition jostles in her loyalty with her scuzzy small time junky brother (Antonio "Huggy Bear" Fargas). Drugs and gang violence have so destroyed her neighborhood that when her undercover cop boyfriend (Terry Cotter) is gunned down in the middle of the afternoon, no one comes forward as a witness. Her brother might know who did it, though and so--uniting with that local "neighborhood action" group--Foxy goes undercover herself as ---what else?-- a high-end prostitute. 

I dig the opening sequence at a late-night coffee stand with Fargas nervously hanging out while two Italian legbreakers wait for a pair of cops to finish their coffee and go so they can beat him up. His call to wake up sister Foxy, and her last minute cavalry rescue are all pretty good, but then we start cutting over to the the bruised thugs and their leader, a dour white girl (a doughy Kathryn Loder) and it all starts to twist downhill to an wildly uneven mix of broad camp, shrill sadistic (ugly and prolonged) brutality and glum inner-city realism.

Lacking a lot of the sadistic flair she brought to The Big Doll House, Loder spends way too much time dressing down her underlings, threatening the girls who 'work' for her, and nuzzling her right-hand boy toy, Stevie (TV actor Peter Brown). I think she and Stevie even end up sharing a slow, menacing maniacal laugh at one point. As for Foxy, she travels as far as the poppy fields of the Philippines (where else?) in her quest to bring down the operation. We keep expecting her to be smart and manipulative. but she winds up captured, raped, given forced heroin injections (which is always--it seems--how the bad guys get the girls submissive, uninhibited and completely dependent) and her eventual payback is never enough to right the catalogue of wrongs. For example, Foxy's sexual belittling of an old white judge is pretty hilarious, but even that goes sour when the call girl she encourages to participate (Sally-Ann Stroud) winds up tortured and murdered after Foxy leaves. (How emblematic of America's involvement in third world power struggles)!

Pros: The crazily colored opening credits feature Grier boogying down in all sorts of super-sexy outfits to that iconic Willie Hutch theme song. As with Roy Ayers score on COFFY, that Hutch soundtrack worth the price of admission all by itself, play it loud, neighbors be damned. Unless they complain, of course. Then put on your most expensive headphones. 

Cons: Way too much screen time is spent watching Loder sadistically abuse her girls and dote on her  gigolo and not nearly enough watching Grier kick the shit out of people. Even more so than COFFY there's way too much urban blight, sexual abuse, and general social degradation. Foxy seems to think turning tricks, getting shot up, raped, harassed, shot at, and leaving the people who help her to be tortured or killed, is small price to pay for --what? Does she get anything for her troubles? SPOILER ALERT: She doesn't even kill the evil Loder at the end, as if to pay back Loder's endless ugly egotistical sadism--which by then has grown as soul-crushingly wearisome as that of Alan Ormsby in CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGs or Michael Gambon's Peter Grant-ish thug in THE COOK, THE THIEF, THE WIFE AND HER LOVER--with merely death wouldn't be enough to avenge how soiled we feel. Still, it would be a damn sight more satisfying than what happens.

PART 3: The Centaur and the SORCERESS

Hill would break out from Corman's wing a bit for his next film, to form Centaur Releasing with John Prizer, for which he'd bang out two quick punchy films in the female ensemble vein: one would rake in a small fortune; the next would lose it. After a lengthy hiatus he went back to Corman for one more film, would fight a bit with him one time too many and then that would be it. Career over. To all our regret. Well, how else do you graduate from the Corman school unless it's to fight with him about some creative issue and off you trundle, into either the abyss or the big time? Sadly, Hill's disinclination to work in direct-to-video or TV led to him doing just zero more films after that. 

He's still around though! Never say never...

THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS 

(1974) - ***

Following New World's tried-true three girls at work-and-play ensemble "nurses" formula, this brings Hill's cunning mix of sexy feminism, cathartic violence, deadpan wit, and covert liberal politics to bear in a sexy comedy-drama form. Radical journalism major Kate (Jo Johnston) goes undercover to expose outdated mores and institutionalized sexism within the college's football cheerleading team, but instead she finds she these girls are cool, while her wild-eyed radical underground newspaper editor boyfriend Ross (Ric Carrott) is a rapey dick. Besides, the handsome quarterback Buck is played by Ron Hajek, his teeth white and straight enough he's worth stealing from the bitchy, manipulative cheerleader squad captain Mary Ann (Colleen Camp). Sulky Ross, meanwhile, takes out his anger by publishing Kate's expose (after she tried to scrap it) and then, later, inviting his sicko friends over to "break in" the virgin cheerleader (the doe-eyed Rainbeaux Smith). Mary Ann's dad, the dean of the school, is meanwhile embroiled in a plot to "fix" the big game, along with the coach, and a black professor (Jason Sommers) who is having an affair with the black cheerleader (Rosanne Keaton, one of Playboy's first black centerfolds).

Pros: Hill keeps the action flowing in surprising ways. I'll confess I have a low skeeve threshold when rapey idiots start snickering and egging each other on like so many dickweeds needing their graves spit on (like in the odious misogyny benchmark PORKY'S). So I like that here the jocks are sensitive and serious and the radical underground journalist is the swine. (Hill reports that a Texas audience one burst out of the seats applauding when the jock beats up Ross- so did I!)

Cons: I liked it the first time I saw it, and kind of fell for Johnston in those shorts. Now, a decade or so later, she just terrifies me--those eyes seem wild and unhinged, the mouth grinding as if from a line of badly-cut coke snorted fifteen years ago but still lodged behind her eyeballs. (Am I just talking about myself? I guess that's what they call 'maturity.')

I know it goes without mentioning in a more enlightened era, but what sticks out now isn't that there's a black main character --there were more than a few at the time (as in 1970s' BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS and all the New World nurse movies) but that it's a reminder of the miscegenation taboo that no black woman and white man (or vice versa) can ever be attracted to each other in these movies, so if you're black woman at a predominately white school, there will be one or two black men showing up, and you'll be bound to have an affair with one or both. As a kid in the 70s I wondered if that was just some instinctual thing - like black people don't find whites attractive, genetically, and vice-versa. Now of course I know the truth (racist southern distributors would never show the film otherwise) but in today's enlightened time, it actually seems conspicuous.

Pros: The black professor has a ferocious tough-as-shit black wife (Mae Mercer), who drops in on our terrified cheerleader in the film's most surprising powerful scene. Even if you've never been verbally threatened by your lovers' spouse--either by knife-point or just over the phone--you will get a queasy pit of your stomach thrill from her intensity . I've been on all sides of that equation and let me tell you, Hill gets it right and Mercer is a powerhouse. Never losing our sympathy even as we're terrified to the point of shitting our finest cheerleader slacks, she makes an impression so deep the picture still shakes after she's gone. As for the 'sweet one,' Rainbeaux Smith glows with a mix of doll innocence and angel sublime grace (hard to believe she was pregnant at the time --as we learn in the Arrow Blu-ray's generous extras). I like too how Hill doesn't even bother with the big climactic game at the end, nor even deign to mask the terrible emulsion damage and faded color on his stock footage of the game (do we ever even see a football?)

Cons: The main thing I can't stand about it all though, is the Scott Joplin rag underscoring the big climactic brawl at the warehouse. That kind of corny silent film (i.e. royalty-free) ragtime jazz nonsense hangs anachronistically around all through New World nurse and AIP's beach party catalogues, even in The Trip! I'm sorry Hill had to lug it with him to the Centaur's kingdom.

Blu-ray: The Arrow restoration is surprisingly only so-so as far as some colors being restored (lots of glowing greens) but it still seems very bleached out. I'm sure they did the best they could, but expectations are so high after the beauty of Spider Baby and Pit-Stop. 

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

(1975) Dir. Jack Hill
****

SPIDER BABY's my favorite Hill but this is the second, a complex but highly re-watchable tale of feminism, street violence, and short-shorts. Doll-faced, sweet voiced, crazy-eyed Robbie Lee stars as Lace, leader of the gang, the 'Dagger Debs.' New girl in town Maggie (Joanne Nail) is the newcomer, and not averse to using her belt as a chain and/or grabbing a switchblade to defend herself at the burger place. Lace's one-eyed Iago, Patch (Monica Gale), sees the writing on the wall re: her beta status. Lace just thinks Patch is jealous of Maggie's cool gutsy charm, but ole Patch is right. Not only that, there are the sparks between Lace's boyfriend, the Daggers' leader, Dom (Ashner Brauner, doing a great Ralph Meeker impression), and Maggie. Even his breaking into her room to rape her can't change that, nor Lace getting pregnant and getting all gooey about raising the baby, to which he snorts and tosses her cash for an abortion.

Pros: a big roller rink massacre; an attack coordinated with a feminist black militant coalition, with machine guns and a badass armored Cadillac; the heavenly blonde Daryl Hannah jawline of Janice Karman as Bunny; the badass 70s funk score; some great hair and dialogue; and a lightning pace. See it when you're super furious at the world or just strung out with the shakes because your dealer never showed, and bask in the cathartic anger, the fabulous legs of Joanne Nail, and the way Robbie Lee's eyes widen and dilate, then contract into a glowing glaze when she talks. Savor too Nail's final rant to the fat cop, her face streaked with blood, eyes wide and maniacal, a shocking Cagney-by-way-of Lorre raving moment (maybe my favorite ending in all schlock cinema).

Joanne Nail would be back all right... in the fascinating 70s all-purpose drive-in capstone, THE VISITOR! (1979) Not much else, alas. Oh how I wish that Switchblade Sisters had a bunch sequels, like it would have in Japan. (Fuller review here).

SORCERESS

(1982) Dir. Jack Hill

***

Wild-eyed sorcerer Traigon (Roberto "the Mexican Martin Holden Wiener" Ballesteros - who really knows how to swirl his blazing red cape) needs to sacrifice his firstborn child to his crazy Reptile goddess to keep his magic strong, but his hot young wife (Silvia Manríquez) has twin girls and won't tell him which one came first (if he gets the order wrong, he's screwed). A wild-haired noble wizard strides forth to zap Traigon into a 20 year-long period of oblivion, but too late to save the mom from Traigon's swordy pique. Naturally, the wizard brings the orphaned twin girls to a farmer off in the wild to raise in secret (disguised as boys), imbues them with latent magical abilities and drops back in, Merlin-style, twenty years later, to tell them about it. By then the girls have grown into beautiful Playboy playmate twins, Lynette and Leigh Harris, who don't even know how hot they are or that they're girls and that they live in a world where there is no word for 'twins' so they have to be called "the two who are one" all the time. Traigon comes back too and resumes the hunt for the first born. His guards assault and murder the farmer family while the twins are out nude swimming. A vow of vengeance is sworn! The hearty viking, Baldar (Bruno 'the Mexican shorter John Goodman' Rey), and a horny satyr (who baas like a sheep) sign on for the ride. During a remarkably large scale market town square scene (viva la Mexico) they meet up with Erlick (Roberto Nelson), and launch a market-wide donnybrook. The twins do a pretty good job as a kind of tag team bo staff whirligig and the size and detail of the village is impressive. Ensuing are 'surprises in store' for the two who are one', not just birds-bees discoveries, but hair-raising escapes, magical spells, fights, god-wars, apes with druggy fruits (if you'll forgive the expression), remote orgasms (the girls are linked psychically), and undead warriors culled from their crypts. Erlick has his own problems too, including a near-impalement the original style of the word (slowly sliding down a greased pole towards a sharpened stick aimed up your arse and bound to pop out the top of your head --if you're lucky).

Long unavailable in any format, SORCERESS is now with me forever! I love it! It has just enough of Hill's dry Hawksian wit to stand apart from other sword and sorcery "epics" of the 'shot in Mexico or Argentina' New World post-CONAN era. With its score lifted bravely from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, and a cast of strong women (though for me the most exciting and charismatic is
Manríquez as their mother--who dies the prologue), hilarious monsters, very little torture and injury, and humor always well inside the boundary that separates dry deadpan wit (ala Big Trouble in Little China) from self-aware camp, and superb lighting of the night and underground scenes )it looks especially great on this Blu-ray - all burnished golds and charismatic highlights), it's a blast. And, of course, under 90 minutes long.

Pros: One of the lead guards has a crazy helmet that seems lifted from the 1936 FLASH GORDON. There's also a genuinely spooky crypt scene where the vertical dead in rows of alcoves slowly shamble to life out of the darkness. Baldar's a great wingman. The twins are real (in all senses); the little ape monster masks have facial movements; the satyr leads a charge of real sheep at the climax; and the effects are all of the charming 'painted on the celluloid' variety (CGI was still ten years away). The tactile earthy effort of it all--its solid mythic arc and florid array of weridness--floats it past its limits. Didn't all the best Hills? 

Cons: It's sad to learn this was Hill's last movie, mainly because he got in an "enough is enough" spat with Corman over the editing (i.e. length). Why couldn't Hill have just let Corman cut the movie up? Corman's judgement has always been--to my mind--pretty solid. Why did Hill have to raise a ruckus which caused a falling out? Hill's needing to look elsewhere to make his movies led to... no more movies? To all out detriment and loss.

But then again, home video was changing the landscape and who knows if he'd been as good on direct-to-video? I ain't as good a writer as I used to be either). Age and experience brings wisdom at the expense of exuberance. And Spielberg was coming along to make decadent deadpan larks like this -- too dirty and weird for the young kids and too cheap for the adults-- left to lurch along solely with the 16-20 year-old males at the video rental store looking for a post-Conan fix.

 Still, there were many more films in this style for New World to come, and a good number of them are pretty decent, as far as bad movies g, full of the wondrously paradoxical Corman mix of feminist empowerment and bared breasts, dry wit, and deadpan in-jokes we crave when relaxing in a late Saturday afternoon or five AM Sunday morning stupor. Sorceress's release year (1982) was a high point for A-list sci-fi and horror/adventure, and amidst that year's B-list, Hill could have rocked out for at least a few more classics. Damn you, Traigon! 

At any rate, long unseen in any format, SORCERESS is-- finally, thanks to Scorpion's gorgeous Blu-ray (replete with detailed extras)--made eternal. We are blessed twicefold, for the reds (of Traigon's cape especially) glow gorgeous and the black lunge deep - and when those corpses emerge from the thick cobwebs of the crypt into the torchlight,.

CONCLUSION

So in short, to answer my question from part 1, does Jack Hill 'get' women, the answer is clear: fuck you for asking!

Sorry, all that violence has me snappy and so does the state of the nation, and the liberals' bad habit of the back part of a movement lynching its own vanguard in its zeal. Hill's women are from the second wave of feminism, when it was called 'women's lib' and involved a certain amount of sexy strutting and sensual freedom that would now be considered a male-imposed fantasy. But from where I stand as a SWM, 'now' is a mighty buzzkill place. The third wave's dour sense of sulky humorless privilege still hasn't found a cinematic representation other than preachy documentaries and the kind of amateurish avant-garde downers seen mainly at museum and university lectures. The difference between Hill's strong babes and their un-charismatic 'representational' figures is like hanging out in an air-conditioned bar full of drunken undergrads vs. a sweltering administrative office full of self-righteous grad students who consider deodorant and air conditioning to be toxic.  Maybe they are right, man, but that don't make it fun to be around them. And maybe that's why no one is, unless they need to be, i.e. for a grade or a tenure recommendation.

Oh shit I'm becoming the very critic I was just critiquing, I've been beaten into a coma by my own copy of Sexual Personae. Actually, I never did read anything bad about the Hill oeuvre. Unless I wrote it about Foxy Brown. Still, I haven't watched Foxy since that bad experience in '99. Why would I? I'll just watch Switchblade Sisters for the dozenth time, or Corman and Angie's Big-Bad Mama, or The Lady in Red, by Lewis Teague and John Sayles, all celebrations of badass women who 'tag ya back' in ways unthinkable in today's noxious clime. We can either glumly point out they were made by men or we can act like the women in them and take out the trash, figuratively, and throw it all over the floor and tell the men to clean it up literally! Up (with) the Hill!

Let the games of spider begin, and let Robbie Lee, Jill Banner, Beveryly Washburn, Adele Rein, Joanne Nail, Lynette and Leigh Harris, Mae Mercer, and ---oh yeah, PAM GRIER...and all the rest, run into the blazing light of eternal replay.

---

RETURN TO PART I: Black-and-White: BLOODBATH, PIT-STOP,  SPIDER BABY, MONDO KEYHOLE

PS, Beware a movie with Linda Blair directed by the semi-odious Jim Wynorski--also called Sorceress, from 1987-- it sounds awful, though I do love that he just reused a title on which he already had credit (the 'original' story of Sorcreress). Had he forgotten? Does he just love that word? Jim, if you're listening, you're a dog, sir. A dog! PS - Loved Deathstalker 2!

Dipsomaniac Amore: FALSTAFF (aka CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT)

We fans of Welles and of his boozy expressionist MACBETH (1948) dreamt long and loudly of one day seeing a CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1966) DVD, ideally on Criterion of course, or even a damned Kino VHS, if you want to reach deep back (it's been in legal limbo forever). Orson Welles' culling of Falstaff bits from several Shakespeare plays--put in a larger English history (circa early 1400s) context via Hollinshed's Chronicles--was damned hard to appreciate on graymarket shit dupes, the only way we could see it outside of a revival house. The handful of critics who'd seen it on the big screen assured us it was a masterpiece, but with the muddy image of a dupe and Welles' glaringly obvious lip sync re-dubbing already alienating us first-time viewers, Welles' complex expressionist camera angles--all running cross odds against the verbal parrying and cross-cross against the odd editing schemata--"functioned" together so badly it was impossible to wade more than ten minutes in before running from the room. The effect was so busy and discordant that it seemed to us that the only way to appreciate Chimes of Midnight on the small screen was to perhaps to have edited it oneself, or to have worked on the editing. The only other avenue to appreciating its ceaseless cascade of intricate movement, overlaps of drama, history arrestingly grotesque woodcut- expressionistic deep focus frames, discordant distorted perspectives, bawdy double entendre, and poetry was perhaps to be drunk, tripping, and an actor or scholar who knew the plays and history by heart. Enough forgotten words and slang phrases were used that we needed subtitles and a period English dictionary to unscramble it otherwise, and we didn't have either. What's worse, the whole cast within the film were laughing uproariously at every little movement of old Jack Falstaff, before we even got a chance to see him or get the joke, and that's an alienating effect, intentional or not. The character of Falstaff himself seems hardly fit material for such guffawing. We're trying our best to keep track of what's going on but end up only worried we're not 'enjoying' it right -- their laughter becomes at us for being dimwitted philistines.

The last hard-to-overcome element was Welles himself, looking so ballooned and decayed it felt as if he might bust or drop a sandbag out of his purse and float away out of the Mad magazine-meets-Bruegel frame. Thanks to the overdub, his voice sounded like a ventriloquist throwing his voice back in time across vast sound mixing chasms. And now, time has made us sensitive. Welles looks so bloated as to be quite sick - his obesity is not a laughing matter, sir!

I tried to watch the whole thing once or twice but gave up, decreeing I'd wait for the Criterion Blu-ray to come along and deliver it in a remastered form with English subtitles. Maybe if the full scope and glory of the cinematography could be appreciated, the sound fixed up, this mountain of aforementioned icy qualms could into flattened puddles melt? Well, the Criterion has come. No more excuses. Dive in, that puddle is deep! Sure it's taken me months to finish it, to find at last the right mindset for its odious savors, but I did, though it almost killed me, I did.

Now allow me to suggest the ways I did it might for you too work, for why else would one watch it if not to boast later that one has and imply in doing so one is, what is the word? a cultured aesthete? 'Hiccup'

It's not rocket science, man. I relapsed over Xmas. Yea, for other reasons than Percy's scourge, yet I pray thee --judge me not. Because if nothing else, my cups grew so cracked by mid-February that, by contrast, Don Birnim would seem a lordly Dunsinane.

And so I 'finished' the Chimes at last. In glorium intoxicado.

I'd learned from my last relapse (1998) that Welles and Shakespeare are the ultimate bender companions. I spent days watching and re-watching an old tape of Welles' Macbeth, swooning and laughing, following along in my gigantic red 'Complete Shakespeare' book from college, and scribbling incoherent journal entries as Orson ranted under gloomy painted skies, swilled from his drinking horn, servant ready in the wings with the jug for refills. Welles soothed the saucy doubts and fears of a lost weekend-into-next bender.

And it all made sense. The obtuse Elizabethan language was as clear as a bell. For when the brain is bobbing merrily in the amniotic surf, Shakespeare's language comes into delirious focus. And Macbeth and his guilty conscience is the perfect partner for when you know your bender has spilled into the work week, the boss's unanswered voicemails like an accusing blinking digit Banquo. I still have the pages of almost illegible, whiskey-stained, hand-written notes I took from that last bender, to the effect it was the ideal relapse play, the fall from sober workaday Eden and into the opiate-womb where three meals a day and a job as Thane of Cawdor are as unattainable as even getting up off your knees to add ice to your highball. (see: Hallowed be thy Shakes: Three Macbeths). Into that morass, Welles' deep booming voice, his mastery of Shakespeare's poetry, came a-rolling like a harmonizing deep bass chord, vibrating through the rapidly misfiring chakras and aligning them, shaking off some of the toxic fluoride crystal buildup from thy third eye pineal 'til it vibrates like a tuned electric tamboura.

The best analogy I can think of for that feeling is the dread one might feel when alone on a rudderless raft being swept out to sea and looking back at the receding shore (knowing the only way back to sobriety is acute alcohol withdrawal, which is like being eaten by a shark in slow motion over a week-long period as you swim vainly against the outgoing tide). At such a moment of quite desperation/resignation, Welles' thunderous oratory fills the sail of Shakespeare's words like a westerly gale into the canvas sail of one's no longer-becalmed heart, not towards the ever-thinner mirage of the eastern shore, but upwards, via a cloud passing low one can climb onto to the cozy confines of the Republic soundstage and sail straight to olde Scotland. The full measure of Welles' resonant voice and the poetry of the dialogue cohere across moody expressionist compositions to make all of Scotland feel like one gloomy haunted house ride up in the cumulonimbus woods, the marching figures with their tall flags and hanging corpses, ghosts, silhouettes of falling axes and men ("let it come down"); and Welles staggering around in his papier-mâché crown and furs like some drunken glorious fool at a masquerade. The court in attendance eye him with concern and useless suspicion, the way my own friend coterie was eyeing me as they prepared for another impromptu intervention, as I screamed at phantasms in the middle of Sunday potluck.

So this time, because of a horrible Xmas, after 19 years of not drinking, back in that bender apartment,and after running through my usual suspects (including, because it was on TCM, High Society which stuck in my head like a broken record once I ran out of whiskey), I found Chimes and remembered how Macbeth had so grounded me in its repeatable coil of brilliance 19 years earlier.

I did so hope Chimes might at last make sense, and that all that High Society suffering wasn't for naught. 

A German translator friend of my dad's told me one Christmas long long ago that all Europeans have a drink before a foreign language class, that it's like running a stuck jar lid under hot water; our language center yields its tight latch to let us think outside the parameters of sober syntax. Drinks (plural) weren't enough for me to learn French, I found that out (never studied), but they are enough to finally get and think in Shakespeare's old world pun-filled English (which I did). The loosening of the deeply-whetted brain's linear grip enables a kind of twisty tongue-tripping free-fall that the bard's hyper-articulate eloquence catches in mid-air and swings around as if a glowing orange between two high-wire acrobats, and Welles' resonant voice reaches into the bones of the rattled skeleton Calloway drummer and harmonizes them like so many low note Tibetan monk chant xylophone bars.

That's good, because while Chimes is filling thy hitherto becalmed sails, you're still out on that raft with no paddle, being sucked out to the open ocean without a soul around to notice (if you're lucky enough to live alone). Soon you're realizing you really need to jump off the raft and start swimming towards shore before it's too late --but you're tired and the current is against you, and sharks and the undertow, and you'll jump in a minute you're just trying to get ready; and then, presto, it's too late even for jumping. The shore is gone. Then you can't remember which direction the shoreline even is, so you realize the next song you hear will be the sweet lure of the sirens to your exhausted cabin fever dehydration death. Water! Water!

What this means in relapse terms is not water, of course, but it's just as desperate. You wake up--usually on the floor or couch--in agony and unable to move your head to see what time it is, or what day. Finally, moving your head by tiny increments you notice it says either 6 or 9 o-clock on your VCR. But you can't tell if it's AM or PM by the thin gray light outside; if it's AM you're fucked: the liquor store wont be open for hours (I realize I'm paraphrasing Lost Weekend here, but it's from experience). Worse, you can't tell if it's AM on a weekday. I mean, if it is, you're going to have to go to work soon. If its PM on a weekday you're fucked, as you forgot to call in sick to work... again. You'd try to call now, or sit up, or make coffee, but just turning the channel to the weather/time is hard enough you get the dry heaves. Find that bottle... fast, before the DTs get you. If no bottle is left, oh lordy.

See, while you're drinking - ooh lah lah, hallucinations and sheer ecstasy, laughing with joy as Hal and Falstaff trade off on their impressions of Gielgud's dry air oratory as the king. Even if his officers hammer at the tavern door like Monday morning's rail-thin skeleton, their phone calls go straight to voice-mail. Away to the wars with you, they probably say, or the equivalent: "Where are you? If you're there, pick up. Hal, the war looms," they say. Being unable to even the find the phone, you declare pacifism and defy unemployment's looming shame to the empty air. You grab the bottle, still half-full, and a few minutes later, the magic is already working. The pain melts away, replaced by swirling ecstasy.

To go from such withdrawal-based misery that you can't stand up or even move your head to see the clock without retching, to such narcotized bliss that you float beyond time and space in so short a time, is worth all the suffering. The swimmer, pushing off from the bottom, swims faster upwards, breaching like a porpoise at the thought of a tossed fish. Hitting "bottom" is just the Phoenician sailor corpse's word for "a whole new worrrrld." Those are pearls that were his eyes. You can't even find your glasses, maybe they're all bent and broken under foot somewhere. You can find your glass, though, of course. You're king!

So... hit play, clink-clink the ice and pour the cure that makes a heaven of hell, (add grapefruit juice - repeat as needed). Feeling better now, you realize, to your infinite joy, that it's only 6PM on a Saturday.You have all the time in the world to get straight. Feeling good enough to mix another drink, to steady your wobbly raft as it were, you sit down with newly-minted drink for Chimes of Midnight. Ah yes, it barely matters that you've seen it three times in a row. It's still so complex, strange, alien, that you often have no idea what's going on. But you know it must be art, because your soul feels so good.

This is because really, in a sense, like the demon in the whiskey that unites with the demon in your soul, Welles' Falstaff is the ultimate bad influence friend, both diegetically and metatextually. We know the analogy, every alcoholic English lit major does. We're Hal, and John Falstaff is the booze, and he has got to go, and so we vow to shun him upon our ascendancy to a full time job, but might we not put that off awhile?

Certainly there's little love for the father in Falstaff. Though Sir John Gielgud the actor is himself a poster child for charm and wit in the service of base dissolution, his sober King is such a square and so ignobly come to crown (and blanketed by paranoia and guilt about it) that his road there carries its own sort of Macbathean self-fulfilling prophecy: the bad boy behavior of his princely son Hal with that fat rogue knight Falstaff approximates the shimmering accusatory finger of his own private Banquo ghost. He'd rather wish that some night-tripping fairy would go into the past and swap out louche Harry with noble Hotspur in their cradles than try to understand his own culpable odium in the equation. Of course he already does understand it, not even lying to himself eases the pain, just as I wince to see my young wild magic repeated in the youngsters of today, all the same mistakes and illusions they won't be dissuaded from making and falling under... and to see my own hand in it by making it all look so damned cool, and so on down the line (even this essay could count), and then knowing my dad felt the same thing for my brother and I, as my dad watched but said nothing as his 1.75 Early Times Bourbon water line dipped and rose like a ship in a hurricane when e'er we were home.

That's why, for all its robust glory and rich language, Chimes is really a kind of Adam Sandler movie. Half the film is just compilations of elaborate insults, pranks, bad boy behavior, and real job shirking, and then---finally and with much (literal) trumpetfare--the turn to sobriety, AA- compelled to kick the jonesers, townies and mooches out of your life. The sun shines and the clouds part. Adam Sandler grows up, gets a job and a nice girl; Hal gets a crown; you get "some help" and a sponsor; Master Shallow goes back to his own ruddy taverns to boast of knowing the man who knew you when, and then they forget you - for more naive and hitherto-sheltered freshmen are coming into town every fall. The things they have seen, Master "Shallow" indeed.

RECEPTION

It might have been pitched like that and done well at the box office--the violence of the battle and the lusty sex of the tavern with Jeanne Moreau's Doll Tearsheet played up, but instead, alas, Falstaff AKA Chimes at Midnight was paradoxically too old-fashioned and too sophomoric-- for swingin' '66. It proved yet another of Welles' art house flops, the equivalent of Oscar Jaffe's Valerie Whitehouse vehicle Joan of Arc. The art crowd of 1966 were flocking to see stuff like Blow-Up and Repulsion. A Shakespeare film starring a grotesquely fat malcontent with loads of overdubbing and complicated history, overlapping ornate dialogue that would be difficult enough to understand if read, let alone blurted in a post-dub rush over rapidfire grotesqueries and complexly interwoven fields of bawdy, profound, and historically-specific action, it was just too much johnson.

The first row is an array of successful art films from 1965-66 (for releases traveled slowly across country in a few prints) one might see in a row displayed before the local art house cinema.  Looking at the top row and imagining seeing all those posters in a row outside the theater, any promoter can see the subliminal issue why the lower row wouldn't fill many seats. Those movies have beautiful blondes; Falstaff has a grotesquely rotund brainiac nerd in full armor. Seeing it instead of, say, Persona is like admitting you're some wobbling bookish unlaid square with elbow patches on your tweed jacket and ink stains on your fingers from years of note-taking and running from the giddy, druggy thrill of svelte or buxom babes in shimmering mod clothes frugging to the latest psych rock jam or grooving down at the coffee shop to some bongo and guitar folk poetry until the (acid was still legal) drugs kick in. 

As you can see, there's no Janet Leigh or Rita Hayworth to put on the poster, no Edie or Catherine Deneuve nor Jane Fonda nor Raquel Welch. There's no 'sizzle' of the sort tarting up concurrent releases of similar length and film stock, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita or Antonioni's L'Aventura. There's not even any guns, or knives, or cars. All Chimes could promise was Welles--deep into his fake noses and rotund grotesquery phase--and some passing glances at Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet as far as sweet young things. There's a few wives on the opposing side (like Hotspur's lady, played by Marina Vlady who's vivacious and interesting) and gorgeous "seamstresses" up in the rafters, but they're seen only when they're needed to wave good-bye, engage in folk dances, run from the sheriff, or laugh obediently for Hal and Falstaff's impromptu plays. One or two are cute enough we hope to see more of them, but Welles gives us less than a few seconds at a time, so we come to rely on the random shots of Moreau's face for our respite from the rustic manliness of the blood vessel-woodcut old faces, Margaret Rutherford's pestering for money, and the inn's expressionistic rafters (Welles loves ceilings). Too bad, for with every strand of wild hair brilliantly captured in Edmond Richard's dusky Haxan-ish photography, her face wreathed in spiderweb lines, Moreau's Doll pulls doting delight from deep within Sir John's sack-and-gout plagued corpulence, but one shudders to think the abysmal state of his 'bait and tackle' after this long and chancrous life, and Shakespeare's bawdy double entendres on STDs, cleanliness of drawers, and full chamber pots ("empty the jason")--are all kept in to make sure we do, indeed, so shudder.

For a long time this was the only picture we could find of Chimes at Midnight
and it raised a lot of questions as to the age/relationship here, especially since, when I saw it first,
Welles' was in the news for allegedly bathing Pia Zadora (who was having her
Bardot-80s / Brooke Shields-70s x Zsa Zsa Gabor 60s / Charro- 70s  moment) in Butterfly (1982)

I mention this aspect only since it reflects the more elaborate expressionist approach of Welles vs. the psychedelic art house hit makers of the day, whose iconography moves intrepidly beyond signifier language, their focus on youth and psychedelic drugs provoking a post-modernist new aesthetic arrest that runs opposite to Welles' bellowing boozy poetics/ While booze dilates the mind's language center so it might easily swallow up Shakespeare's dense archaic language, acid eliminates words altogether, transcends them, to arrive at a kind-of 'impossibility-of-truth' with image and sound in and of themselves--the psychedelic impact on the senses is so amplified an intense that Wellesian intentional ugliness can create a bad trip panic - thus youthful beauty becomes essential to the point of compulsion. And music is the key...(3)

If Wine be the Music of War, Drink On...

In addition to the lack of sex and beauty, a problem with Chimes lies in the merry olde score by Francesco Lavagnino. Far too repetitive and jaunty in its main theme, it's as if he was so enthralled with Nino Rota's work on La Dolce Vita (1960) he forgot to bring in an actual mood of his own.

Then again, Lavagnino comes alive, or finds his own, for the celebrated battle, adding wordless female chanting and military drums so that the score becomes an ominous liturgy, heralding of the giallo eeriness to come in the work of Ennio Morricone or Mario Nascimbe's work on One Million Years BC, the following year. Deservedly at the top of cinema's best battle scenes (fitting perfectly between Potemkin's and Duck Soup's), the main battle sequence is a whirlwind of Eisensteinian movement-based editing: horse's stabbed, clangs of metal on metal, bodies in armor falling, charging lances and waving morning stars, waves of soldiers riding in and archers letting fly. From organized symbolic nationality and cavalry card shuffling we gradually get down to the pain and muddy brawling of the up close soldiers, no recognizable insignia to tell them apart visible below the mud and blood, as if starting out a Riefenstahl equestrian Olympiad montage and ending a muddy massive rugby riot filmed on a bunch of GoPros worn by the central rioters. There's almost no gore, just a gradual erosion of imagery--there's not even any judgment or polemic - just a real-time example of how men like to get dirty and deadly. It's also a master class is making a hundred extras seem like thousands and of staging battle, without condemnation or celebration. Instead Welles offers an in-between recognition of war's necessity for man's esteem and a sad realizing of his mortal frailty. In other words, Welles' battle is not a head-shaking "what a waste" dove polemic or a chest-thumping hawk call, but something more profound and important: he finds a sense of nobility and grace achieved through mud, crying widows, and grievous wounds. Only Conan and Patton have maybe come close since to tapping the same unspoken vein of true courage.

And naturally, I most adore that--after the field is won-- Falstaff turns his section of the front into a massive tailgate by pulling his rotund girth up to a big keg on the field of victory, and pouring out a measure of "sherri-sack." Chilling around it with a coterie of the surviving unkempt countrymen he pricked earlier, this is clearly a post-battle ritual he's experienced before, declaring his love of sherri-sack for it makes normal men both brave and droll, "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of fiery, nimble shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue... becomes excellent wit." Adding, that sobriety thins men's blood, he claims that's why Hotspur fell, and that "if I had a thousand sons, I would make them foreswear thin potations and addict themselves... to sack!" At that point of course, being drunk and feeling guilty about thy sack addiction, thou mayest cheer. In Falstaff's sanctioned view, your vice is a noble endeavor!

That's the rub of the nutshell, the full measure of Chimes' glory. We all wish it could go on forever, but war and the bender alike must end. A wild free-for-all is over in a flash, followed by months of recovery, limb mending, meeting attendance, and TV watching. Drinking speeds up time and the hang-over slows it, so eventually--as in The Lost Weekend--the only 'conscious' part of drinking is the pain of withdrawal. Pain is the only thing we remember, the only time we're conscious, aware of time's passage, plagued by saucy doubts and fears. If we get six whiskey bottles at the store, the misery will be postponed a week or so, but that week won't be remembered - it will pass in an instant. The joy of the plentiful glass may have been quite wondrous, but our takeaway is but a dim blur, a black space on the tape, a sweet narcotic black out, which is itself by shame and dread book-ended. We only have the evidence we must have had a blast -- cryptic clues: broken mirrors, ripped up pages, cracked DVDs--the vacuum cleaner left on, roaring away inches from our head on the carpet (true story) when we wake, or the stove left on, a pot of pasta reduced to scorched resin, empties galore, some bottles broken and jagged with chunks in our foot now crusted over with blood; the TV showing a patient DVD menu on eternal repeat (or in the old days, static), black bruises on our legs or arms, more empties-- all the battle fray equivalent of the dead bodies,  like unfinished vulture meals left to rot 'til the frozen winter stops the stench.

Sooner or later, the bodies and the empties must be cleared from the field for the next big show; the booze gone, the wounded too messed up to even call downstairs for delivery, or Seamless, or an ambulance. The show finally doesn't go on, and in that--freedom. We just had a sample of what suicide was aiming for. We skipped the earthly record.

Me, after my recent relapse left me too messed up even to call and order a liquor delivery, I quietly convulsed on the floor from alcoholic withdrawal and/or a bad reaction with my SSRI meds. Sinatra's slightly buzzed-flat reading of the line "She got pinched in the Ass- / tor Bar" from "Yes, Indeedy" kept repeating over and over in my head like a skipped record, ensuring I'll never be able to watch High Society again. That is my grievous battle scar. I have its big indoor shimmering poolside Apollonian temple for lovely Grace Kelly (who seems rail-thin) and the big central foyer in Logan's Run blurred together like a fusion of the mall (where I spent my formative years' depression) and the hospital (where I'd be shortly). I can't watch that one again either. For awhile anyway.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, unless it doesn't know what you're laughing at --then it feels paranoid, like you're laughing AT it. 

Getting back to Falstaff- if you're new, let me assure you of this: getting past the first twenty minutes is hardest, for the film just plunges in and doesn't endear itself to anyone: the voices seem mismatched to the actors, the words a muddle, and Hal and Poins laugh and cavort through and around interwoven camera movements with such hearty dubbed relish at Falstaff's cumbersome knavery before we even see him, that we're automatically alienated and thinking we made a mistake coming here. After all, it's no easy thing getting up, finding a disc, opening the machine, taking the current one out and putting the new one in, all without falling over, smashing the tray, breaking or dropping or losing either disc, and putting the old one away before it's scratched. The whole operation requires a finesse ill-served by a bender. We're putting a lot of hope on old Jack Falstaff, but before he even has a chance to stir from his mountainous slumber, Poins and Hal are rolling around on the ground, laughing, planning all sorts of teasing jests and bringing up older ones, that they--at least-find side-splitting, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths (Hal being royalty who thinks he's being a rebel by robbing from the middle class - sound familiar?). Meanwhile the landlady bustles about demanding payment and reciting Sir John's bill, which the boys think is guffaw-worthy, but gets me mad. I hate the whole concept of credit and when people give credit to a rogue like Sir John or that terrible fisherman Mr. Johnson in To Have and Have Not  -- I lose respect for them! And it hurts.

At the same time we're thrown into the political intrigue with Henry's father King Henry VI, who's sort of held onto a temporary king appointment and left the rightful ruler (by his brothers' decree) rotting in some faraway French jail, refusing to pay the ransom. In this sense, Welles keeps our alliance divided -- we actually do like Hotspur more than Hal on some level, as he at least has a young wife he loves and a sense of fun in honor rather than reveling in juvenile vulgarity and deadbeat debauches. The best Hal can do as far as restoring honor to his name is the kind of half-hearted declaration of the prodigal son, who promises to straighten up after his dad bails him out on his second offense. And is this not the claim made by addicts, drunks and slumming socialites, that this rough company is an example of the sun permitting "the base, contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world," so that, when he pleases, he can shine again and be "all the more wondered at"? What a rationalization! "If all the year were playing holiday to sport would be as tedious as work" (and therefore vice versa). Haha, I wish I'd known that line when my dad was alive. Hotspur, on the other hand, clearly finds time for both sport and work, and has grown a far healthier landscape. Harry's not wrong to want some night-tripping fairy to redistribute the pair. And it's Hal's killing of Harry in the duel that makes this truth all the more painful. Truly, the better man has lost. We like Hal for the first time only then, as he admits it.

"The day is wasted if you're not" - La Greco

VALUABLE ONLY WHEN LOST
But really, the most offensive thing, what should have turned the tide for good, is that Falstaff takes credit for the death of Hotspur; since he's after all a key part of Hal's base company it doesn't matter if the king believes him or not, it's enough to sully the victory. For me, in that scene, Falstaff goes too far - and it makes me like the man even less than before. Maybe the problem lies in positioning along the scale between Welles' gruff but decent rascals ( Will Varner) vs. the charming but horrible villains. My favorite Welles characters--Quinlan, Macbeth, Harry Lime--aren't supposed to be o'er lovable. They aren't kept in the company of guffaws and loving looks. In fact it's only at the moment of his profound realization that his thing with Hal is kaput, that he's out in the cold and that he deserves it and it's the way of the world, and he wouldn't fit in anyway -- that Welles' Falstaff actually seems to become warmly human. It's a powerful, haunting moment for being so long coming and Welles carries it sublimely. It's one of those rare persona breaks that major stars sometimes perform in films, that are all the more valuable for their rarity--Cary Grant's breakdown before the child services director in Pennies from Heaven, for example, or Robert Redford choking up despite himself after bumping into Barbara Streisand at the end of The Way We Were. It's probably Welles best moment as an actor, and worth enduring the slog of his roguery to get there - suddenly we get that Welles maybe never intended us to think him as lovable as Falstaff thinks he is -  but how could we resist with that voice? It's always there, that larger than life ego with the genius to back it up.  But here Welles does one better.

If we get this far into these films, we're already primed for these sudden changes, which take advantage of the previous reels of cool detachment to hook us. By this point in Chimes, we've figured out Welles' unique rhythm and can comfortably let the words we don't know slide clear away. And, too, Criterion's disc has subtitles and audio commentary by James Naremore. He's good at keeping the historical background front and center rather than getting too lost in production history (which comes out more in the extras). This is essential for understanding as is (I found this very useful), the English subtitles, since so many of the words are forgotten slang anyway (which most adaptations would subtly modernize) and so casually tossed off, being able to look them up if needed helps greatly. Also, the more we watch the less the dubbing aspect becomes noticeable. Especially as the film goes on it seems to all but disappear as a problem.

In short, if ever a disc was worth owning and studying and watching obsessively while drunk, this is it. Welles' Macbeth for your first big relapse; Falstaff for your last.

The last, you have heard me. Never say never but we have heard the chimes. All things must end - and if we're lucky they end in an Ativan drip and Librium dispensed by beautiful young nurses in powder blue scrubs bathed in the nighttime glow of their mobile medicine tray computer screens like shimmering valkyrie. If not, god help us. Let no man stand alone in that dark and dingy hour. With no Welles, art thy cups abused.
Though his mud-and-blood besotted gravity swallows up thy trapped and troubled shoes,
in his boozy expressionistic poetry art thou art lifted,
shoeless... through.

Lifted, drunk and truly through.
For two hours.

1. NOTES:
 Bright Lights -'Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day blackout. .."
2. Corman imported so many of these and one wonders just how much his genius with marketing had to do with the entirety of the art house movement. Sex sells the first ticket and art keeps the word of mouth high. 
3. PS 12/18: Welles--it turns out--explores the youth-psychedelic/sex angle in his film-within-a-film in the unseen The Other Side of the Wind).

SEE ALSO:
Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context

This is the (Dead) Girl: CASTING JONBENET, MULHOLLAND DR.

If you have Netflix and three-ish hours on your hands, why not bow your cowboy mouth down below your skies-are-not-cloudy and ride along in the buggy with "the Cowboy" to a double-feature shivaree fit to bust a low-hangin' cumulonimbus? I'm talkin' 'bout the Netflix-produced meta-crime-mentary CASTING JONBENET (2017), follwed immediately by Lynch's recently-upgraded post-affect-noir, MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001). They fit together so well you may just find yourself jumping over the moon in an identity crisis so intense your TV screen cracks and turns out to be a mirror! See cowgirl pageant darlings cast and into the coffin cradled! see non-starter starlets on the Hollywood bungalow bed, dead! Let's just say Death is driving the buggy. And you can ride along, if you like. 

Like that ALL ABOUT EVE chick bowing to herself in the roomful of mirrors while cradling Eve Harrington's theater guild award (left), this double feature provides an infinite cascade of cinematic split-subject no hay banda hauntologic dead media mimesis reality vs. fantasmatic / feminine split psyche that's fit to scare the glasses right off that young towhead in the PERSONA montage morgue. If a "real" identity crisis happens while you're takin' this three-hour tour through the tumblin' tumbleweeds, just click your heels five times, and whisper the word "silencio" as you draw a functional pentagram with a sacrificial dagger upon your flesh-toned floor. You may not hear his rustlin' in the underbrush, but the devil will come.. already came... and went, with you, and now you're long, long dead, waking never from the dream of cinema. As the fella said, sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you. 

Casting Jonbenet

A Netflix original directed by young Australian auteur Kitty Green, CASTING JONBENET is a true story, on both levels: the back pages of making of a movie about a tragic event and the chronicle of how the telephone game distortion of memory+artistic recreation of that event can't help but distort, mythologize, and obfuscate. Rather than just recreate the infamous events of the JonBenet Ramsey case, Green lets the story come out via interviews and screen tests for the casting call of a "Lifetime"-style movie version that then we never see. The idea originally is that she is going to make a film on the case using the actual locations and casting only local actors from the Ramsey family's Colorado hometown, many of whom who knew the people involved, personally or indirectly. We're in a new weird zone for documentary. Bergman used a similar idea in Passion of Anna and Hour of the Wolf, by including interviews with the actors in between takes, but those were fiction films. Casting JonBenet, though technically a "making of" documentary, unfolds the details of a true crime story via interviews and some screen tests and never really makes the actual film they're testing for at all. The weird and original idea is perfect for the way we never which suspect's testimony is true. Is mom covering up for either her weird, possibly psychotic son or her weird, possible pedophilic husband? What about that three-page ransom note? Was it printed on the Ramsey's printer? What about JonnBenet herself? Was she abused by an archetypal stage mom (an ex-beauty queen), or was she just a brat? Was she really too good for this cruel world or vice versa? Recreating the testimony of real-life individuals who seemed to be 'acting' at their press conferences as a screen test is to rip the idea of consensual truth wide open.

Take for example the montage of auditions / screen tests of actresses re-enacting mom's initial (real-life, recorded) phone call to the police: A script in one hand, the phone in the other, several actresses carefully modulate the tremor of anxiety and desperation in their voice as they read from the script and feign possible feigning of real emotion. Are they judging the real life mom as guilty by playing up the feigning aspect? Or are they going for it--pouring on the grief and fear even though they know their limitations as actors might provide plenty of 'feigning' despite their best efforts? Green trusts us to unpack the massive electric charge inherent in watching an actor performing a real person's real but unconvincingly acted phone call to the police. How do you 'nail' a scene like that? Seeing more than one actress try reveals the mutability of truth at turns on its mythological axis. Even if we've never heard the actual Ramsey phone call (and we don't within the film, nor do we see any actual images of any of the actual participants) we know the 'type' from other crime shows. The child kidnapping/murder story is a tabloid boilerplate fastened with adamantine bolts to the mediated public consciousness, needing only new names to come fill the tray. Like jazz, the variations are endless yet iconic and unchangeable. 

Kitty/ Kitty/ Kitty Green

This is the source line of classic Brechtian theater - the refusal to let the audience drift too far away from the dialectic crux even while ever-lulling them with trinkets and shiny songs and whistles of narrative immersion. And man does Green stay Brechtian in her dialectic crux, bringing us back again and again to the impossibility of truth, only for the whodunnit aspect to lure our attention back to analytical mode (like we can solve it) and again back into conjecture and the dawning of myth. In this sense of the endless reenactment, Green's film becomes ceremonial. Events become mutable and  abstracted by heightening their artificiality. We only gradually realize we'll never see the actual film she's casting.

This, whatever it is, is it.

But whatever it is, it's great: the cast interviewed cover not just their own hopes and dreams but their thoughts on the Ramseys--both speculation, personal observation from knowing them or living in the same town--and actor notes: their judgments are fairly evenly divided between suspecting the mother, the father, and the brother as either guilty or in collusion and not-- as some thought initially-- the mall Santa that mom tries to finger, or the skeevy pederast John Mark Karr, who confesses to the murder but who's proven to be nowhere near the scene. The actor cast in this role, Dixon White (below), gives the creepiest most memorable performance. Hearing how he prepares for a a character like this, entering this guy's mindset is to realize the true fearlessness of method acting. Few of us would dare delve that deep into the brain of someone so twisted, but thisacors plunges in and the film buckles a little bit under his intense stare once he goes into character.

By the time we get to Casting's weird, not entirely successful, all-in climax, we're left amazed that we ever had a concrete sense of reality at all. With so much acting and mask-wearing in our weird, kinky world, death's reality seems almost clown-like. Scenes of the actress cast as JonBenet enduring endless make-up prodding, painful hair extension inserts, flowers and a cowboy hat pinned to her scalp (all just to play a dead girl in a coffin) carry a morose but powerful charge that heightens the reality that only such double-artificiality can bring. When the back brush goes over her eye in one moment, the image is as clear as the last dissolve of Psycho from Norman to the grinning skull (top).

By contrast, the much-hyped NEON DEMON tried to deliver models playing dead but couldn't shake its overly familiar misogyny and dead-horse-beating message about vanity and youth worship.  CASTING JONBENET, on the other hand, goes far deeper than cultural critique, it goes all the way into the eye of the image's eye of the image, so far it comes all the way back around, which is why it belongs more with Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Lynch's 21st century masterpiece was originally supposed to be a TV series, but the network passed on it, so the pilot was melded with new footage to 'close it.' There was a similar thing done with the pilot of TWIN PEAKS, for some international markets where it was shown theatrically (see here). If you can find this addition footage ending you can see a midnight hot tip call-in bring Cooper to a remote boiler room and a confrontation with Bob himself, here in a weird human form, hence killable --followed by a telling "25 Years Later" Black Lodge coda that's remarkably prescient to the new series. When MULHOLLAND DRIVE came out we figured it would be more of the same, and it kind of is, to a point. Scenes seem to promise to go somewhere, then trail off. Robert Forster's homicide detective gets only a single moment, as does (thankfully for I find him a most unsightly character), the dreamer in the Winkie's and the dirty hitman guy also seems like he was to have a more involved arc-- they all seem unfinished, arc for later episodes kept on more for their mood and their humor or scariness than story. But the deep rabbit hole the film ends up spiraling down, with the tiny elderly tourists trickling from the monster's paper bag and so forth, brings the events full circle and tightens the noose so fast we are left breathless.

The elderly exit the womb (Mulholland Dr.)

At the time no one was quite ready for the reflexive meltdown critique of Hollywood and the psyche of the actress, this All About Aunt Acid Eve's Persona meta-miracle that we got with Mulholland Drive, but with each passing year it gets more relevant. It created a need for itself. In the recent BBC Culture poll of the 100 greatest films of the new century, it comes in at #1. 

It's designed for repeat viewings-- only then does it begin to make "sense," like a mantra, or a magic spell --it's in the repeition that old walls are broken down to expose wider vistas. And now, well even more than before, Lynch's LA ain't yer mom's La-la Land - but the boulevard of actual dreams, good and bad-- the LA of literal dreams where once you get off that plane, you're never quire sure what reality is, or if it's even still there anymore. When someone says "Cut" while you're sitting in a restaurant do you automatically stop eating and look around for your director, only to slowly realize you really ARE just in a restaurant and whoever shouted it is probably shuffling cards? Maybe you could play a little solitaire, Raymond? (If you get that reference, you 'get' a star).

There are a lot of strange double negative truths to cinematic performance, the key one being that the more you let the seams show, the artsier (not sloppier!) you're being. If you are an actor playing a role and you do a good job 'you' disappear. But a bad one emerges, and if we like the actor as himself, we're kind of glad we didn't lose him to a character. No one wants to see Arnold Schwarzenegger disappear into a role like Sean Penn (or vice versa). BUT If you have a good actor playing an actor playing a role and they still disappear, they 'reappear' at the same time and in the process wind up achieving a level of truth that's impossible even in the relatively artifice-free realm of mundane daily life.

Brecht's withered corpse just slow-clapped in his crypt. Did you hear it?

If you're in the hands of an myopic visionary like Charlie Kaufman you may, on the other hand, overdo it--to the point even have an actor playing an actor playing an actor playing another actor and there accrues so many layers that the actor himself winds up trapped inside them and it becomes just that two-headed coin of narcissism and insecurity.

(AS AN ASIDE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT CHARLIE KAUFMAN)

(WERE HE DEAD HE'D HAVE WANTED IT THAT WAY)

Kaufman's sexually frustrated self-conscious performer playing performer schtick has been a stone drag ever since we all felt that way as virgin teenagers. But for regular Joes like David Lynch, performance has a more fixed singular function. If there's sex to be had, it's had and then moved on past, and not all this '(literal) piece of shit at the center of the universe' moping or joyless smash-cut rutting. We know Lynch meditates-- and we can tell via his films that his ego is "right-sized." He doesn't even hide the sophisticated but out-dated type of woman characters he likes/writers-- with their strangely modern vintage clothing, shiny hair and fearless eyes, there as much of a type as Hithcock's blondes. For solipsistic loners like Kaufman, female characters fall into the duality of either being harpy/ lashing fury (a wife) or passive sex object (a fan!) as Freud would say "Ze boy is seeking a new mother whom he can zen reject." for Lynch, the pretty young ingenue is essentially a split character, not an object for self-laceration or fear/desire, but a dream anima - beyond duality. The dual lipstick pair-bond narcissistic amnesiac template in Mulholland of Betty and Rita adds a mythic ideal as old as western culture itself. ("No woman should have a memory," notes Lord Illingworth in An Ideal Husband. "Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness.")

In Twin Peaks never see, for example, Laura Palmer doing charity work-- but we hear all the raves from the elderly lives she touched via Meals on Wheels, reading to the blind, etc. That and her romance with doe-eyed 'good' biker, James are the opposite of the bad girl side of Laura-- whose arc we follow with more interest. We see the aftermath of her drug use, her running with the bad dysfunctional crowd (wild-eyed Bobby, wife-beating Leo, fat-as-hell Jacques) and eventually the trauma that caused the split (her incestuous Bob-possessed father coming to her bed "since she was seven"), against which the saintly goodness of the daytime Laura scarcely registers. Lynch's druggy parties at remote cabins have a surreal prepubescent nightmare current to them, less a 'real' party and more a virgin child's wildest jealous imagination, infused as a result with hyper-surreal nightmarish quality, what McGowan calls Lynch's fantasmatic dimension. 

To study the making of films in Hollywood (and the world) and the on-set drama that goes on, one is sometimes faced with tales of viewers/husbands/lovers fuming in the sidelines as their beloved gets it on in full nude scenes with some despicable actor she or he barely, knows while eight gaffers heavy breathe behind the kliegs. In Mulholland's torrid audition scene in Mason Adams' office (it made Watts a star!) we have the makings of a master thesis on the proximity between screen acting and prostitution. As I wrote in 03:, the prostitute and actress alike are judged on how well they can feign enjoyment of sex without making the john or their watching boyfriend, believe she actually enjoyed it--conveying being 'into it' without going so far into seeming to like it that the john thinks they shouldn't have to pay, or making their real life lover despondent. A prostitute or an actress may actually enjoy herself during the contracted sexual act as long as she pretends it's pretend enjoyment. Within her domain (the boudoir), the prostitute may be--more so than outside in the 'real' world-- completely "herself," - she may be experiencing that moment of complete subsumption into character which is at the heart of good acting. When "cut" rings out (or whatever the mutually agreed-upon safe word happens to be), she can resume the waking dream of societal expectations but until then she's free in the timelessness of the chthonic.



Of course that can lead to a kind of karmic celluloid looping (the actor who plays the same role onstage the same way, for a three-year Broadway run) that's escapable only if the script is deviated from, without warning, like Camilla's journey in the beginning of MD ("we don't stop here" - as if they've made the journey a thousand time-- and they have, more or less beginning and ending the film with it, yet they stop there--and she says they don't --every time). The crash forces us to wonder if it's the hit taken out by Diane against Camilla, or if there's a more sinister reason besides the treacherous curves and idiot teens combination of the titular drive. The deviation that sends Camilla down the hill to Aunty Em's house can be read as both the deal with the devil/mob (she's taken out of the car at gunpoint but then whatever was planned is interrupted by the crazy kids/concussion) and her own deal / deliverance - escape into a new identity (echoed in, for example, the presence of the same actress as Laura Palmer's cousin--but with dark hair this time, in Twin Peaks, or the prison cell switch from Bill Pullman to Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway; or the recent splitting up of Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks - the Return etc.)

We think we want to find out who we really are, to chase down the clues, but we don't, not really. For in finding out we also realize our entire life--this entire reality around us-- is an elaborate puppet show to distract us from panicking as we lay chained to the convey belt of sawmill Molloch. We're left with only a handful of decades, barely enough time to repeat the dirty trick on the next generation, and if we're artists, to maybe sew together some new puppets so they can forever dandle on the sawmill floor, free of splitting blades. The search for the meaning of the self always leads to the morgue, this Lynch and Green both know. In Drive. the trail of who post-accident Rita is always ends with the discovery of Diane Selwyn's dead body--a bit like Candice Hilligoss if she saw her own body being recovered from the river; or Jimmy the sax man finding his own body in the surf at the shocking conclusion of Jess Franco's VENUS IN FURS.

The Ingenue/Mistress to the Mob

Just as, in Lynch, the women are all the aspects of the same woman, who is in turn one aspect of a single psyche (the collective unconscious celluloid that runs through Lynch's Whole Self projector), so too the dark chthonic 'devouring father' is an aspect of that woman. If Betty/Diane is the unconscious anima to the male conscious ego (i.e. Lynch himself) then the unconscious's ego in turn has an inner male, a dark force of conspicuous enjoyment, the terrible father (ala Mr. Big in LOST HIGHWAY, and Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET), the one who separates the child from his mother, and who 'enjoys' all the women while the boys sulk and bide their time in the tall grasses, Moses and Monotheism-style; in MULHOLLAND he's a very shadowy nebulous figure in a wheelchair behind thick glass (the locked door to the ulterior basement of the unconscious mind, i.e the basement's basement) who sends his own agents and provocateurs out into the workaday world to inflict his seemingly trivial bidding (we're never permitted to learn why he is so insistent that Camilla Rhodes is "the girl" - is this payment for a separate 'deal'? Can Camilla really afford it? )

The mob, linked on some obscene fantasmatic level to the 'cowboy' (both a deep river 'big fish' childhood totem and Howard Hughes) have-long time Hollywood tentacles in the casting industry, ala THE GODFATHER's Tom getting godson Johnny Fontaine into Jack Woltz's FROM HERE TO ETERNITY-ish prestige pic (Theroux's frozen bank accounts = Khartoum's severed head). Camilla Rhodes' (alternately Laura Ann Haring and Melissa George) connection with them remains a mystery. It almost seems like they're doing it more for the benefit of some Kafka-esque attempt to drive the 'good' girl with the talent to insane frustration and cripple a director's project in the crib, to lay the groundwork for a deal with the devil (wherein 'wanting' to be famous eclipses actual talent or charisma as the guiding force - especially with state corruption [5] in the Arts Council). Or that famous line from Kafka's Before the Law: the gate was here solely for you, and now I'm going to close it.

THE META LYNCH-IN 
(A Sleepy Viewer is the Most Awake)

One of the most sublime fusions of venue, screening time and film occurred for me seeing MD in a now long-gone family-owned cinema on 1st Ave UES, at the midnight showing opening weekend, the place was rundown but still clinging to the trappings of some long-since fallen into disrepair prefab maroon upgrade it got in the 80s. Operated by a large extended Indian family, the men in turbans and flowing saris mixed with jeans and sandals; the grandmother with her long braid of white hair ran the ticket booth; the children frolicking silently in the shadows around the snack bar, run by the mom, her long braid beaming black, the red dot in the center of hr forehead--gave the vibe an international vibe without going overboard. There was no Indian cooking smells or incense, just the usual popcorn but that was briefly overwhelmed by a stinking drunk homeless woman of enormous size who'd somehow gotten in and camped out a middle aisle seat. She was eventually loudly ejected by the older Indian lady no less, who  shooed her out with a broom, to our muted cheers in the approx. time of the Winkie's episode; later, right around the time Betty and Rita were climbing into Diane Selwyn's apartment, I went to bathroom, which was right around one AM, and when the picture was starting to get super weird and somewhat boring for a first time viewer, at least enough to put me half asleep. I was sent by a series of signs on a long mystical journey underneath the theater, past various detours, piles of old chairs, puddles, and closed-off partitions until I came to the men's bathroom that looked like it belonged to a much older theater a block away, and old Indian man I can only assume was the grandfather was sweeping up, but making no noise. In my half-asleep, weirded out mind, his unexpected aura blazed like a whole different kind of lantern, yet he barely moved or made a sound

There was something quite reassuring about all this combined with the film; it made it seem like we were all sleeping over at this Indian family's surreal inn. With the film being what it was, it all made sense. I fell asleep around the time Betty climbs in Diane Selwyn's winodw; and yet was somehow I was still following events. Through some weird force I was dreaming while watching- third eye-open and trained on the screen-- like watching a movie in 3D and finally realizing I was wearing the glasses backwards, turning them around and--viola! The theater was one of the old type where the ceiling was low and the slope downwards small or almost nonexistent and the projector beam seemed to shoot right over heads so your head's silhouette blocked part of the screen if you stood up. Also we could hear the loud whirr of the projector in the quieter passages, or which there were a lot. Considering the post-modern meta-cinema qualities of the film, it fit is so perfectly. I know I myself was falling asleep to that soothing projector whirr, like white noise, and the blue light it streaming overhead matched the light of Club Silencio and when Rita O'Rio sings her a capella "Llorando" and the Betty and Diane cry from her passion, I could hear sobbing too in our own theater, as if our natural defenses had been lowered by the combination of being sleepy at a midnight show, the hour and the quiet nature of the film and the whirr of the projector all lowering our big city defenses so we had no ability to shut out the torrent of emotion the song + the response of these two women who--after their steamy hook-up--never do quite wake all the way up. 

When we all were released after the film at 2 or 3 AM it felt like we'd all shared a marvelous weird dream together. We wordlessly bonded-- and outside in the late night air was this weird warm glowing mist. Everyone else on the NYC street was gone (we were around 89th St. and 1st). The streets were dead empty. And we all parted from each other hesitantly, almost like we would say goodbye to people we knew, though we hadn't said hello. We walked together as long as possible, barely speaking even to the friends we came with, the magic of the film following us home. As if to up the weirdness, I read a Village Voice piece (that I now can't find) mentioning the magic of their own screening and--from the description--I think it was at the same theater, maybe even the same showing.

I mention all this for a reason - to show the way meta can make the rest of the world--the world you're avoiding by seeing this film--the world you're escaping--come into deeper focus. The focus can in fact get so deep it resembles a dream and you realize reality is way more of an escape than you knew. Which is which becomes meaningless when you can no longer separate the two. That's when you know you're an artist, and it's time to go check in at the hospital.  +++

any similarities to a TV screen strictly sublime/accidental (my guess is a formative sexual-musical moment in Lynch's life occurred in front of a 50s-early 60s TV set, when some facsimile of this group came on Ed Sullivan or Bandstand or whatever

NOTES:

1. I'd rather not go down this lane, as I'm as susceptible to hot button outrage and paranoia as the next man, and reading this stuff disturbs me. The result of getting too far into it is clear via the ridiculousness of armed civilians crashing the Bohemian Grove or Pizza Gate. Regardless of if it's true or not I personally can't believe it, for my own peace of mind, but the very hot button of it all is what fascinates me, the way our paranoid collective subconscious so mirrors the reports of actual programming that one can only assume it's intentional - either they imitate our dreams or our dreams imitate them. 

2. Read the copious conspiracy theories Monarch 7 program's use of the Wizard of Oz as a hypnotic/programming tool (as seen in EYES WIDE SHUT)

4. Read my work-assigned synopsis/review here ("course description" at bottom)

5. According to my Argentine socialist ex-wife, talentless gangster progeny wanting to make movies are a problem in any country with corruption and a state-funded art council, like Argentina, Italy, Spain, etc.) In other words, the hack scribbling of the Great McGinty's nephew gets made word-for-word into a feature, not the talented visionary work of someone less connected - (since there's not even the public box office taste really relevant as a factor)

Warning - Don't read the following ADDENDUM if you are not safely under a doctor's care.

AUDITION AS VOYEURISTIC ILLUMINATI SEX RITUAL 

Dreaming, falling asleep, swooning --Naomi Watts hypnotizes with her sudden turn to super sultry sexy in her audition. It's as if a trigger word for her mind control programming was uttered ("action?") and we realize the extent to which her whole wide-eyed newcomer schtick as Betty has been a pose. Her ability to to bring us along with her in the shift from wide-eyed newbie to sultry actress (and later to sullen jilted lover) made Naomi Watts a star (in the 'real' world). In the film she performs for a crowded room that includes cheery old wholesome seniors like Mason Adams; the audition is with an older soap star doing his best Clark Gable impression, not expecting Watts/Betty to become so open and sexual, we feel the intensity of her actually hooking up with us - it's like she's seducing the whole room of mostly older Hollywood types--and the theater--and ourselves-- into a collective swoon through this double performance. The sweetness of Betty makes the contrast. We appreciate Watt's performance of Betty's acting as this character, rather than if she was acting like that from the get-go, which would just be alarming.

This audition scene is hot enough to wake the dead, but it's also very oddly sleepy for this same reason--Betty's performance could very easily plunge her down a rabbit hole of X-rated movies and then, who knows, bumming scabby cigarettes from gross scumbags before getting it on with them (presumably) in the back of a van in exchange for--presumably--money for crack and the promise to keep her eyes open for any new girls that might come staggering down from the Hills. And it seems like it will may have. But she reverts to Betty at the conclusion, safe amongst the small mostly female and neutered male (bald or elderly) assemblage as she would be at a post-church reception with her grandmother.

From a paranoid mind control Illuminati angle, we can also connect the Betty audition to the striptease (she calls it a 'job interview') Alice is forced to do at gunpoint for Mr. Eddy and his contingent in the LOST HIGHWAY flashback. The split subject then is explained through the elaborate mind control rituals, of which the connection between both HIGHWAY and DRIVE audition scenes connecting to conspiracy theories about Monarch 7 (1) or the collective subconscious and its tendency to arrange its repressed libidinal desires around pentagrams and black candles in some hidden room of one's parents' basement - with parents, grandparents, strange carnally-attuned neighbors with pointy glasses (like Nicki [Michele Hicks] below as the assistant to the casting director). Note the odd, knowing, carnal, paranoia-engendering gazes into camera below.

Ready to bring you "over the rainbow" (2)

The genius of the Illuminati/CIA/reptilian sex slave mind control basement ritual conspiracy theory is that it so suspiciously reflects/matches our primal unconscious dread/desire matrix--the basement as collective subconscious repository for every forbidden desire since the dawn of one's separation anxiety as an infant. In fact, this conspiracy theory in particular so closely matches our deeply buried subconscious incestuous impulses (buried like Cronos under the bowels of the Earth) it's hard not to becomes paranoid or psychotic if you believe it's actually true. This might be intentional on the Illuminati's side of things, as it makes those under its power sound crazy when they try to report it (a kind of ur-gaslighting), and also creates split personality through the trauma. One is already a split subject as soon as they begin to repress base id impulses (locking in the basement the side of you who considers potty training and social mores to be an infringement on its ego-made rebellious incestuous polymorphously perverse freedom). This split of the self makes us effective assassins if its exploited, but also makes actors of us all, in more ways that we'll ever consciously know. 

Lynch knows, though. He's caught the big fishes.
------

PSYCHE FLOOR PLAN

Second (top) Floor
(Controlled by the Flow of "True" Events)
The Fishing Pier

Abstract thinking / super-ego / higher reasoning / artistic /: (FILMED) EVENT

Laundry chute to basement--> creative function /  film (i.e. hearing voices flowing up from the depths and translating the narrative for the upper floors
steps - transitional - performance/ duty / expression, from effort to finished film.

First Floor

(Controlled by the Ego)

Waking Consciousness: (pay checks / paint brush cleaning  / disclaimers / jail-time)

-------------

POINT OF SEMI-CONSCIOUSNESS

(the fishing line)

steps down - transitional from awake to asleep'

THE BARRIER DOOR

--Water Surface--

BASEMENT

(controlled by the Anima)

Incestuous desire / childhood fantasy depository (glee that a different child than yourself is being beaten/ sexual desire for neighbors, fellow classmates, friends, etc.) -

Little fish
Ulterior door/ barricade: Cover memory / split personality
crawlspace

SECOND BARRIER

Laundry Chute 2

(Whatever lies beyond our conscious/unconscious' control/will)
Medium Fish

Ulterior basement 
(where Cronos is Chained)
(controlled by the Anima's Animus OR Illuminati/Reptillians)

Any actual (real physical space-time) incest / abuse 

-TRUTH OF (Traumatic) EVENT 

(repression depository for memories of actual incest, satanic abduction) 

BIG FISH

---

By the above Lynchian hierarchy of consciousness we can pinpoint the problem with False Memory Syndrome or SFS. Actual horrors endured are hidden below the sub basement level of merely repressed libidinal desires and fears, colored through lenses upon lenses warps upon warps etc.  The traumatic real event from the basement (Mrs. Bates' actual withered skeleton in the dress) reaches up like a hand through the sock pocket of repressed unconscious desires (the frock and wig and Norman's mind), the hand reaching up through the laundry chute to kill women who arouse him (there's no lock on any of the doors between the floors of the psychotic, schizophrenic). The falseness of some recovered memories under hypnosis involves reverse-direction sock puppeteering that doesn't go far enough down, mistaking the sub/libidinal fantasy basement for the ulterior basement of actual truth. During the 80s Satanic panic it took the feds actually going down there and physically digging where all the bodies were supposed to be, under the foundation to where the ulterior rooms are, to realize there was nothing there - not ever (not yet anyway); the police were believing in empty sock puppets, because the puppets were covered in the sediment of their own deep wells, the collective subconscious hot button issues igniting us all to mob-style violence and outrage. 

For Lynch, a figure like the cowboy is a herald from one floor of consciousness to another, a sock puppet sent up from the lower basement, the agent of his own dark undersoul; the conveyer of actions dictated by the unseen monsters of power (seen here in big dark empty rooms --with nervous supplicants speaking to them from behind clear glass walls, a metaphor for the divider between unconscious and conscious, the way ideas and decisions are passed across a slot in the wall from the depths of psyche into action or art). 

The levels of heavy power invested in these characters is impossible to understand until one translates their meaning across three spectrum - the meta outer spectrum (the blue-haired 'ultimate viewer / voyeur' at Club Silencio; the inner viewer (Camera POV) and innermost (character 'identification'). That a childhood icon (a popular plastic toy) like a cowboy to deliver these ultimatums is no accident: he's outmoded but recognizable, an ageless archetype as fitting in its proud anachronism as Sam Elliot in THE BIG LEBOWSKI. 

Similarly JONBENET the film operates with multiple layers - with the innermost core being the mystery of 'whodunnit' the unknown story that no one could successfully descramble and so has fostered endless speculation; the outer--the narrative recreation; and the outermost - the casting and personal interviews - the telling difference which separates this from fiction of MULHOLLAND DRIVE is that the truth has a habit of doubling back around on itself while fiction tends to just reverberate out into the wilderness, i.e. the difference between bloating in a bathtub and dissolving in the ocean. So here the actors auditioning for the roles turn out to be friends and neighbors of the Ramseys, each with their own piece of the mosaic as precious yet macabre as a handkerchief with some of Dillinger's blood.

In Lynch's film, of course, there's no real blood, and all the handkerchief's have the same initials. The guy in the wheelchair is really one aspect of the same self that includes the cowboy, the mobsters, and both women; the fictive world of the film is as a universe exploded from the same ball of psyche. On the other hand, saying it's all one man's psyche doesn't mean its cast of voices is smaller than the Ramsey case's 'real' people cast. Events are rooted in time, relationships of cause and effect mutable only in the varying vantage points from which they are witnessed and remembered or performed, as if some endlessly variable mythic template (the way, say Pagans perform the roles of sun and moon during solstice). The world soul and the individual psyche are linked in ways that are beyond limitless. The brain might look like a ball of gray oatmeal but it's bigger than all the oceans combined and, if you try and get too close, will take a broken shard of mirror and fuck you up real pretty. But in the end, you will understand the most important truth--that there was nothing to understand at all. You can comb through that gray oatmeal for a thousand years and you will never find a thing, anymore than you can find George Jefferson's little shoes inside you TV set. 

FURTHER:

Ms. Icarus Risen: THE BLACK SWAN

Bangs & Beyond: LOST HIGHWAY, THE MUMMY'S CURSE

Now Bleed for Me: THE WRESTLER

Make up yr Mind Control: EYES WIDE SHUT

DOGVILLE vs. MONSTER