Argh, Matey! THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA (1976)

Hey sweetie, let a man 'splain it for you: the 70s were a great time for feminist horror, though the word back then was "women's lib." It was all about being liberated --via sex, pills, books, grass, the sea, castration, and the occult, and violence, too! Paths out one's domestic bliss trap were varied and didn't all have to end in death or marriage. Horror movies latched on for the ride, but the trip would usually make the girl go Ophelia-level mad before she found she wasn't crazy at all: the whole world was a massive patriarchal cult determined to keep her 'down'.  In films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), The Sentinel (1977) and Stepford Wives (1975) she's actually sane and everyone else is nuts (as in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby). In 1975's Symptoms, for example, it was the other way around (ala Polanski's Repulsion). But it turns out there's a third way (beyond Polanski's ken), where the woman is crazy and 'liberated.'  Truly a product of her moment, far outside the reaches of conventional nuclear family values, she's a heroine for her times-- sweet as applejack with a kick that could geld a stallion at thirty paces. It's not traumatic though because the people around this crazy lady genuinely love her and are, more or less, normal, or at any rate, pleasantly debauched (you know, not a bunch of drags). There's only one film like that in all of western civilizations: Matt Climber's 1976 near-cult semi-classic, The Witch who Came from the Sea. It's not hard to guess why this film has never become a big cult classic it deserves to be (or why there's no Polanski template). But now, on Prime in HD and looking good, albeit slightly faded, there's no reason not to batten down the hatches, zip up to and delve into primal Freudian/Jungian chthonic murk so thick and rich it must be good for you to get this squeamish. If you're an ally, plunge in!

I'll confess: my squeamishness when it comes to seeing females abused in movies--even if the abused, or Liam Neeson, wreaks suitable cathartic vengeance--will make me avoid a movie altogether no matter how ubiquitous it is in 'the conversation' (I still ain't seen Last House on the Left or Irreversible). My Ludovico-induced feminist liberal arts programming is too strong for such imagery not to linger in my brain, tainting all subsequent media consumed by association; I have to write vast screeds on Bright Lights to vent about it just to breathe. So I staved off seeing Witch even though it's right up my alley (if you'll forgive the expression) as far as being pro-castration (I'm no militant, but I consider Teeth too sensitive and Hard Candy too soft). Imagining a depressing 16mm treatise on child abuse and dirty wallpaper (looking dour and grungy like Romero's Season of the Witch), I avoided Witch who Came From the Sea even though I've been long drawn to Witch's poster of a defenestrating Kali Venus, rising on the foam of the castrated lovers. So I was glad it showed up on Prime looking all engorged and gorgeous.  I finally had the nerve to see it last weekend after coming home from Gaspar Noe's Climax at the Alamo, since I was already in shock (so knew I'd be, temporarily, invulnerable to further trauma).

Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. It rules!

It 'gets' it - the brutalizing way so much abuse is depicted on film clashes with the mind's ability to cover up unendurable experience in the shroud of dream and abstract memory. Thus the childhood trauma flashbacks are warped by cartoon and ocean sound effects and bizarre incongruous details that make it all too strange to feel brutalized by, instead the feeling is like remembering strange nightmares from childhood, too bizarre to be terrifying- the brain abstracting trauma until its palatable (and then splitting off a separate persona as a side effect).

Millie Perkins stars as Molly "The Mermaid," a single barmaid at a seaside dive on the beach of Santa Monica, "The Boathouse," owned and operated by the pleasantly grizzled Long John (Lonny Chapman). She's not just great babysitter to her two adoring nephews, beloved of clientele and employees, but she has the ability to 'get' good-looking men as if fishing them out of the television. Aside from headaches as her brain struggles to keep the lid on her buried incest childhood by cloaking it in all sorts of nautical imagery and oceanic sound effects, she's perfect. Maybe she's mad as a hatter, and has a weird thing for good-looking men on TV, as if they can see her from the screen, and are propositioning her. Maybe she keeps talking about her lost-at-sea captain father as some kind of omnipotent hero despite her more grounded sister who assures her kids he was a monster. But she's not 'victim' crazy, not a cringing trauma victim or a twitchy mess. She's crazy in a way that encompass sanity within itself. When a bubbly blonde actress (Roberta Collins) at the bar bemoans not being liberated, which is now a requirement for TV she glances over at Molly in her patchwork denim and declares she could be in commercials: "You look liberated." The older barmaid Doris (Peggy Furey) adds that "Molly is a saint, a goddamned American saint." Later when her nervous welfare-collecting sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) shows up to try and convince them of the truth, "you think she's just about perfect," she says to Long John. "Yeah," he snaps back, "why not?"

We agree, thanks to Millie Perkins' dynamic, confident, warm portrayal we love her as much as the staff and her nephews do. Anything she does is all right with us. She's a goddamned American saint.

That's what makes it so tragic. Molly is a liberated saint, yes, but she has no grasp on reality, and it's not the social world's fault, it's the fault of the family dynamic that would let her vile father rule the roost in such a horrifying way (we never see if she has a mother). It's a mix of latent, incest trauma-induced schizophrenia, wherein she sees people on TV talking to her, and her childhood is--understandably--warped and blurred in a salty sea spray of nautical mythology, punctuated by deeply unsettling visions. She has a habit of being drawn to people on it or connected with television, only to then kill them or is she merely fantasizing. She presumes the latter but lately, who knows. If she hears someone is dead she announces she won't believe "if it's true or not until it's on television." As if TV isn't lying to her constantly, the men on it leering out at her, calling her forward. Her dichotomy seems to be a relaxed ease in the anonymous oceanic of the bar, and the bed of salty pirate Long John, a grizzled old reprobate who accepts Molly as she is, no strings. ("Molly is the captain of her own ship.") The bed seems to be in the bar itself, and as such it becomes a very weird uniquely 70s cool spot, with panelling and aquariums and mermaid and nautical bric-a-brac, including those painted mirrored wall tiles that are often associated with orange shag and faux rock walls.

"Her father was a god; they cut off his balls and threw them into the sea."

The ocean plays a huge part, though the film never gets out on a boat, we see the ocean outside the window, and hear it deep in the sound mix, the town where they live seems largely deserted, so shops like Jack Dracula's tattoo parlor loom with an almost Lemora-style surrealism. The flashbacks are all given a surreal, sometimes darkly comic, patina, with comically distorted or ocean sound effects as if her brain is working overtime to contextualize the most primal and odious of endured horrors in terms of oceanic myth. The sea itself becomes her father, a timeless chthonic wellspring, an ultimate signifier connecting this film to everything from Treasure Island (hence the name Long John) to Moby Dick (the local tattoo artist's long tattooed face evokes Queequeg). The soundtrack is a brilliant melange of background sound (the ocean's waves are never out of earshot) and ironic electronic counterpoint: when the melody of a sea shanty she's half-singing while going in the bathroom, the two football players tied up, is suddenly picked up and finished by the ominous soundtrack as she comes back with a razor, its the kind of darkly comic interjection that would make John Williams probably shit himself with fear ("do you shave with straight razors, or is this all going to be agonizingly slow?"). When Molly learns of Venus, born in the sea, according to one of her pursuing men, ex-movie star Billy Batt (Rick Jason - above) she says, with child-like sincerity, "You're lying to me." It's a brilliant line, she could be kidding in a cocktail party way, or it could be an indication her concepts of reality, myth and TV are hopelessly blurred together. And in fact, it's both and why not? This is the age of liberation and free-thinking - where the structure of reality is far looser than it used to be. A latent schizophrenic barmaid isn't even judged for her violent bedroom actions, but loved and accepted by those around her, neither in spite of or because of her castrative tendencies.


And as in any ocean, there are storms: when all other boundaries fail her, her oceanic visions become terrifying pictures of being tied to the mast of a free-floating raft, surrounded by dismembered male bodies, as if remembering some primal prehistoric siren past (only without a hypnotist Chester Morris pulling the strings). The split between her castrating angel of death, turned on by sadism and dismemberment, both as projection revenge against her father and tricks maybe taught by him (we never really know - or hear his voice), and her sweet aunt / fun carefree cool barmaid type is as vivid as the difference between TV and reality. "Let's get lost at sea, Molly m'lass" is what we learn her father used to say, "and we got lost at sea so many... many times." The ocean surge mirroring the rise and fall of the bedsprings - its base horror itself part Greek myth (Elektra) and part Sumerian or druid sacrificial cult, the young boy castrated and his loins thrown into the sea to ensure a good harvest of fish (or wheat if on the fields).

Long John seems somehow to be spared, to share a bed. Maybe due to his easygoing attitude, age, that he's not on TV, and his ability to be contextualized into her nautical miasma (he's a "pirate"). He certainly never reigns in her sexual adventurousness or belittles or infantilizes her. He says he's too old and experienced to get jealous, he says, and we believe him. But you know he loves her, and is willing to take her at face value, as much as he can. He's no fool though, and when he asks her when she lost her virginity and she can't remember that far back, starts stalling and getting a headache he realizes immediately and to some horror the truth; the script and film don't need to underline the moment. He gets it, and his whole demeanor changes, and so we get it too, without ever needing it heard aloud. It's a brilliantly modulated bit of acting by them both. These are smart, interesting people, with unique bonds.

THE MYSTIC ORACLE:

One thing that most horror movies, or any movies, lack is the presence of TVs. They're hard to film due to streaking, so often they're just left off, but it really spells the difference between a believable reality and this kind of utopia where people just sit around in empty kitchens waiting for their cue. Here, though we can clearly see the TV image is superimposed to avoid telltale streaking, that actually works to give the images an extra eerie frisson.  TV is a constant extrasensory, imposed presence: in her childhood memories a very creepy black-and-white clown makes all sorts of weird swimming gestures towards her, beckoning to her/us in a way that's genuinely unsettling. Watching, I had the distinct feeling some terrifying being from my own childhood dreams had found me and was beckoning me from across time and media. Other genius moments tap into LSD experiences (every hippy's schizophrenic sampler), as figures talking to the camera on TV seem to be addressing us/Molly directly. No sooner has she seduced Alexander McPeak (Stafford Morgan) after seeing him in a shaving commercial ("Don't bruise the lady,") she's receiving bizarre directives directly from his TV commercials, telling her where and how to take that razor across his jugular vein.

"He's stark naked! Everywhere... looking at me!"

It's a weird trick to pull off - Molly is a tragic figure who we don't have to 'protect' or 'fix'.  There's no evil or malice in anything she does. ("Does it help that I didn't hate any of them?" she eventually says, "except that first little bastard," she notes. "His mother sang on television," thus spelling out why perhaps he was doomed, "and he sang with her!") And that's why for me, the film really takes off, with a script that looks at the whole mythopoetic televisual-schizophrenic pie, from the raw ingredients to the final delicious slice, ocean-to-table, as it were. Rising from ocean depths to behold the facile screen and its leering Apollonian males, and find those titans in need of gelding by a dark agent of the chthonic. It's a perfect role for the right actress, and Millie Perkins is just that actress. Maybe she had a hand in creating it (she was married to screenwriter Thom, and played the senator's daughter in his AIP hit Wild in the Streets). Between her turn as Anne Frank (in 1959's Diary of Ann Frank) and as the 'woman' in Monte Hellman's The Shooting (1966), we know she's very comfortable playing strong women who are quite comfortable in situations that might make ordinary female characters cringe like crushed flowers. Molly the Mermaid is not a wuss, or one of those rote timid types that become punching bags for every bully and sadist in a 20 mile radius before finally getting down to revenging. She behaves in a way that is indicative of the kind of liberated female vibe of the decade the film is from. Though she's clearly "a mess," she's falling apart from a place of strength so beyond most modern female characters that even a mess she's more together than they are. With her voice given a druggy surreal echo or pitch-shifted to a just slightly low-enough to be eerie (not enough to be goofy or obvious), she becomes the deranged siren, as if stirred from the primordial past).

Trying to find out how this amazing film could be made, could emerge so fully formed from the frothy foam of independent horror cinema, we need to look at the credits, for both Thom and director Climber have unique outlooks on feminine strength indicated by their other films. Thom's body of work shows a latent queer eye for strong young beautiful men, fully-formed (non-objectified) females, and his films often feature a strong, domineering mother figure (as in his scripts for New World: Bloody Mama and Wild in the Streets, Angel Angel Down We Go) He's the exploitation market's Tennessee Williams, tapping into the same vein of Apollonian beauty reaching like Icarus, for the sun, swallowed up by the maternal chthonic of the devouring mother. In fact, Witch's conspicuous absence of a human mother figure allows for the sea itself (ever-present, either in the sound mix or the frame) to step into the role (and nobody does it better), its warm, forgiving maternal tide like a ceaseless flow of half-dissolved titan testes, and scuttling crustacean claws (by Gillette). Keenly aware of its archetypal resonance (yet avoiding literality), The Witch who Came from the Sea would make a great mythopoetic subtextual gender/death-swapped  double bill with Suddenly Last Summer, with Molly's sister as the Mercedes McCambridge (there's even a bit of the same speaking pattern), Long John the equivalent to Liz Taylor, and Molly herself as the dead Sebastian and hid cannibal bird beach boys, soft-swirled into one many-armed/headed deity. 

Promise me you'll think about it? Constantly?

Director Matt Climber is the other major "ally" that helps make Witch so redolent, as his love of strong female characters very much in evidence. Basically the real-life inspiration for Marc Maron's character in GLOW (there's even a passing resemblance between GLOW star Alison Brie and Perkins), between that and his 1983 Conan-ish film Hundra, about a wandering blonde Amazon warrior who teaches an oppressed group of women how to rise up and smite their bullying men, it's clear Climber's got a unique appreciation for very strong, assertive, capable women. He also loves Molly as much as Thom, Perkins, and the actors and their characters in the film do.  I love her too. I love this film.

I love the weird, uncommented on details I haven't even mentioned: the way Molly and Long John sleep downstairs in the bar, that it converts to a bedroom, one with a cigarette machine by the stairs (who doesn't want a cigarette machine in their bedroom?). We never quite figure out how that works, if the bed pulls down or something, but it doesn't matter. I love the way all the scenes have that strange 70s mirror tiling and gorgeous deep wood decor, as if they're all the same place. Things that bear examination aren't addressed, but that's to its credit. Not since Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) have commercial and private space been so subtly blurred. I love the way Climber uses the cinematic time image as a reflection of Molly's dysfunction (just a single cut could bridge years, hours or seconds, how she can seemingly commit murders in the space between taking a drink and putting the glass down). I love the seamless way she goes from being playfully sexual to totally deranged, and the subtle pitch-shifts in her voice as her inner siren emerges, voice getting low and draggy like a riptide. It's all so very fierce. I've already visited its shores three times since that fateful post-Climax night! Won't you sail away on it too? It's on Prime so there's no excuse to shun it. Not anymore. It may not put you in that tropical island mood but it will give you that old-time religion.... older than Aphrodite, older than Innana, Ishtar, Asherah and Astarte! Old enough to sail the sea without a rudder, knowing your raft is safe--at last-- in your mother's foamy talons... Adieu, Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks. Good night. At the count of three... a wake.

Burnt Persona Jessica Drives Again (to Death, Sister): SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (2016)

Rolling through the ghostly corridors of small town 70s America, via director A.D. Calvo, rides SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (2016), a retrosomely intertextual homage to those young girl-sunk-to-madness horror films from the 1970s, the ones float between the drive-in and the after-school special, never resting, never settling.... Calvo's feature debut, it exudes such a curious retro-pastorale lyricism over its nicely brief running time (78 minutes) one can forgive it for not really having anything new (or even coherent) to say for itself. What it has in place of meaning or resonances however is something far rarer in the retro-homage horror genre: a nice slow but inexorable build of unease, genuine corner-of-the-eye scares and moments of quiet beauty, photographed in a style eerily reminiscent of early Vilmos Zsigmond. I kid you not. Make sure you see it on a good HD screen, with deep blacks, to get the 3-D cavernous shadows within shadowiness. It's there.

Sent by her weary bitch of a mother to work as a helper for a secretive (and wealthy) shut-in aunt, vacant but sweet Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is left alone most of the time (the aunt never speaks or comes out her room, just leaves notes outside the door). Though it's a big eerie Victorian house with very few lights on (left) and quiet enough to make the suffocating tick-tocking of the clock in Bergman's Cries and Whispers seem like a swingin' sock hop, Adele is already a taciturn bookworm who's never without her anachronistic 'walkman' so she adjusts easily to the job's long stretches of lonely tedium.

But we're uncomfortable for her! The Gothic gloom gets to us almost immediately. Is the woman in that room even her aunt? Maybe she's some creepy monster lady who killed the aunt and took her place! If you've seen any 'paranoid chick' movie made in the 70s, you'll naturally be suspicious. There's not much else to be. Adele just bops along listening to lit FM pop songs, shopping for auntie's sardines alone at the lonely small town supermark- wait, who's that chick? Adele stops in her tracks as cold as we would.



Beth (Quinn Shepherd) is her name. Can you dig her rocking a welcomely 70s midriff, holding a tell-tale apple and the gaze of a long-haired shop clerk? Naturally they're drawn to each other and soon Beth is dropping by the aunt's Victorian mansion and bad-influencing Adele into all sorts of things (stealing from the aunt's petty cash, etc.), until it's too late for Adele to extract her old persona from the vortex. Not that we want her to, but what's the deal?

Wilhelmi and Shepherd are subtly captivating as the leads in what's essentially a two-hander character study and lord there's been a lot of them, these "which is one is crazy or a figment of the other's imagination or going to kill the other, etc" two-handers. Sun Choke, etc. But this one, this one follows its own little whispering shadow up the attic stairs.

I also shouldn't neglect referencing  how the combination of new formatting (it's 'exclusive' to Shudder, a curated horror streaming service) and old style (digital recreations of retro-analog celluloid familiarity) so eloquently sums up the easy death of 'currency.' Today, any new movie can choose to look older, like a tween at Forever 21, or worse. No one from 20 years ago would want to deliberately evoke bygone eras of filmmaking (except for confirmed horror fan Mel Brooks) but now there's just too much 'present' to go around. I, for one, am glad the the 'everything available all the time' post-modern paralysis has reaped at least one benefit, the ability to make things made before our time. If that makes no sense, you understand it perfectly: the past is perhaps the one place we can still look forward to. Anything lucky enough to have been shot on 35mm film stock now seems bumped up a star in our esteem. Loving restoration Blu-rays by Scorpion, Shout, Code Red, Blue Underground, make the lamest 80s slasher film glow like a priceless artifact in comparison to the washed-out flatness of most HD video.

In short, everything is topsy. If it will ever turvy again, well.... there's always the movies. We can make turvies today that make the topsies wince in shame.

GIRL is one such turvy.








Don't think about it, I won't tell if you just enjoy the eerie vibe Calvo generates using little more than the odd deep shadow--such as the dark, empty nearly Edward Hopper-esque chasm space of the local watering hole.




WHOM DOES IT ALL MEAN:

Calvo is taking a lot of variants on "the opposite female personas melting into one another" artsy subgenre of the 60s-70s (3 WOMEN, PERSONA) and seeing how many can fit. There's: the 'wild free spirit helps alienated young wallflower open than tries to kill her and take her place' lesbian thriller (POISON IVY, THE BLACK SWAN); the cautionary mental breakdown after-school 70s special episode ( GO ASK ALICE); the 'is this all a dream of Jane Eyre's crazy attic dweller post-Lewton Victorian Gothic' descent to the underworld; and the cracker factory "distortedly loud ambient sound" am I alive or dead genre (REPULSION, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, ), all deftly blended with Satanic supernatural subdivisions. Fans of 60s-70s feminine psyche horror mind-fuckery like BURNT OFFERINGS, the "A Drop of Water" segment from Bava's BLACK SABBATH, and of course the 1970-72 lesbian vampire 'Carmilla-wave.' and THE SENTINEL will love, as I did, mostly, scenes like the girls' dallying through the graveyard with their brass rubbing materials (LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), peeking in at dead child coffins (HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY!), their long sapphic gazes as they try on Victorian attic clothes, they're sneaking a peak into the invalid aunt's room, etc. Calvo touches the touchstones of 70s paranoid feminist horror like he's rounding bases after a grand slam.

I hope you didn't consider all that a massive web of spoilers. Am I just showing off my vast 70s feminist horror acumen again, Hannah?

That said, being able to predict future scares doesn't make them less enjoyable when they come. Rather, there's an almost Godard-esque cross-referencing between disparate sources that made me, for one, yell out the names of referenced films like I was recording a footnote commentary (in ways I hadn't done since SUBMARINE) and annoying my fellow viewer/s. The erotic story of a beach tryst Beth tells Adele during their getaway is lifted wholesale from PERSONA (1966), which is then seen, briefly, very very briefly, on TV, and further checked via some 'was their lesbian tryst / psychic merge a dream or real?' facial merging (the way it is referenced too in Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE). Things start to get really real when... well, I've said too much.

Beth in bed at the cabin (Note Pazuzu on night table at left)

While these references are really all the film has under its sleeve, SWEET fits nicely next to recent work discussed elsewhere in this site, like AMER, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and IT FOLLOWS, KISS OF THE DAMNED, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, and Ann Biller's THE LOVE WITCH. These retro-modernists operate on the principle you've already seen the movies they love, and rather than remaking them or working around them, they incorporate their direct thematic tropes like colors on a palette or a song in the hands of a jazz improviser. Their retro-analog stylistics intensify the melancholy of half-remembered small town suburban isolation, the giddy feeling of renting movies for Halloween parties as kids coupled to the dreamy mixture of after-school special and women's lib with sexual awakening pastorales in all the best female-centered horror. In other words, not just the tropes but the love, what drew them to these films, is very much in evidence. These are labors of love and the sincerest form of flattery, even if in the end, little else besides (in some cases).

The trying on old clothes in the Victorian attic with a possibly ageless vampire lesbian bit was, I thought, basically over in indie film since all that great Victorian stuff finally fell apart (it lasted much longer than our modern pre-fab shit, which is why there was so much of it still around in the 70s when it would surface in films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death)

If there's not a lot else to add except to once again cite the excellent cinematography by Ryan Parker, who cares? I'll confess, for awhile this seemed more like a cinematographer's demo reel or film school thesis, a kind of Terence Malick of horror, rather than vice versa due to the continued emphasis on gorgeous composition and fading light indoors lit by a single multi-colored lamp, or a rotting pomegranate on a table at night in a thunderstorm, all twisty and alive like a rotting old Dutch master's still-life. Seriously, perhaps it's thanks to a new generation of DPs and ever-evolving tech in the HD world that underlit shots only the ballsiest of cinematographers (like Zsigmond) would dare make in the days of 35mm film (to risk wasting a day's shooting on the hopes the dailies wouldn't be too dark to see).

Those who know all the films I've mentioned here should have no problem respecting Calvo's homage as a real film as, for the most part, Calvo quotes his sources like a man, a man who's not afraid of dipping his unmoored eye down into the split-feminine psyche (even the tale of the beach tryst lifted wholesale from PERSONA has an echo--in Godard's lifting Batailles' Story of the Eye for a similar part of WEEKEND). People can argue about men doing split-subject female movies but I think it's natural --they're effectively imagining themselves trying to endure the harassment and unreasonable and contradictory social expectations forced on women and realizing they'd never be able to handle it without snapping their pea brains.) It's too bad more women don't do the same with men. As of late there's only Kathryn Bigelow, whose HURT LOCKER is still probably the most profound movie about the split-masculine psyche since RED RIVER.

As per Jung, the unconscious ego/anima of every sane man is an insane woman; all demons are haunted by their inner angel or vice versa. The nature of the universe consists of a weird balancing act of gravitational, everything spinning everything madly around itself on both sub-atomic and macro-galaxial reality level, everything interlocked and reflected so that every Rochester has a madwoman in the attic. Thus, as the enigmatic Beth, Shepherd is both alive/seductive and zombie-like/terrifying -- her motives stay shadowy, she's a composite - is she even there? She not only lifts that sexy beach narrative in Persona but notes the Jane Eyre reference herself. Don't ask questions or you become guilty of listening, but to whom?

If, as a man, you get your anima to even talk to you at all, you must be either crazy or lucky. Lock her away behind thick Victorian wood and she still passes you empty notes and whispers unintelligible secrets. You'd wish she'd either speak clearer or not at all. These constant meaningless notes and phrases only distract and derail a man.

The gay or lesbian pair-bond if taken at face value in this way--(i.e. without the presence of any feminine image on which to screen the anima)-- confounds traditional Jungian dialectics, however, like electric guitar feedback, the creative inner voice looping on itself and drowning out the male ego altogether. This may be a simplistic reason but it illuminates one of my pet theses, that the reason men are so drawn to the subject of lesbians in films hinges on this aspect (even more than --as pop culture presumes--some kinky three-way fantasy) in reverse. The lack of a male to project the animus onto leads to a kind of death-drive freedom in the male viewer--we are left to imagine the complete lack of our own presence in the fantasy - the result is like snuffing out an oil fire that's been scorching our brains since we were first cockblocked (after a fashion) by our own father in infancy. Since we can't get jealous with, or compare ourselves to, a woman - we can withdraw our ideal ego from the scenario without feeling any sense of personal rejection. Put a man in there and we wince- now we have competition right when our Anima was finally beginning to talk above a whisper. Now it goes slinking back into the shadows.



Exiting the film, the Shudder, the TV, it's the truly unnerving work by Wilhelmi that lingers in the mind. With a face that seems at times very old and others like a child, she has a homeschool Heather Graham-ish vulnerable good cheer that contrasts starkly with the shocking ambivalence she receives from both mom and aunt. We come to admire her pluck, even if it's a little strange, smacking almost of psychotic disconnect. We wonder how quickly we'd lapse into morose depression in similar circumstances (or maybe already have) so her ability to keep trying, her can-do spirit, however wan, wins us over and then--when she gets slightly bonkers--we realize we're already in too deep to escape. We thought we were escaping via this movie, escaping maybe from other, less-captivating, retro-genre pastiches, like THE VOID. But now, well, we're stuck deep.

Alas, a few things stop me loving this film: there's yet another of our decade's apparently inexhaustible supply of cliche'd 'dehumanizing sex' scenes, one of those joyless HBO-brand rutting smash-cut that signifies a kind of depressed ambivalence (you know the type: a girl and guy make eye contact and we suddenly smash cut to the girl's expressionless face as the dude mechanically ruts at her from behind like some spastic dog); the Lite FM 70s hits by the likes of Classic IV, Bread (cover), Lobo, and the unfortunately-named Starbuck ("Moonlight Feels Right") are so ROTM it feels kind of like a missed opportunity. Music is so integral to doing these retro films right, and one dreads to imagine similar pop music burdening the amazing analog synth scores of Disasterpiece (IT FOLLOWS), Tom Raybould (THE MACHINE), Dixon and Stein (STRANGER THINGS), Sinoa Caves (BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW), The Gifted (SOUTHBOUND) and so forth. And while composer Joe Carrano often conjures a retro TVM mood from the use of familiar eerie string sustains and scales, bongos and rattles, we can't help but wonder if they weren't secretly culled from some 70s PD cue library. The Sound mixing is sometimes totally psychedelic (indulging in that
aural tapesty' hallucinatory quality), but there's enough missed opportunities (the tinkling bell the aunt uses to ring for Adele could have had a big well-earned scare moment, and instead it's buried under such a cascade of piano mashes, stuttering drums, and Beth whispering her name close into the mike, "Adele..." that I wanted to circle it with a red pen.

But I'll forgive this final product a lack of point or logic or analog synthesizer with the same generosity as I appreciate the lack of torture porn, imprisonment, MISERY-style sadism, progressive isolation (i.e abuse) or moping, and I do love that it's short (78 minutes or so) and that the photography and the splitting feminine psyche thematics fit the film's pastiche nature. Because Calvo understands that narrative linear 'sense' is a prison, a phallic male construct.

One of the key '?' in Hithcock's VERTIGO is that we never know for sure, how Scotty got off that ledge, or if he's still there, or if this whole story has existed in the span of time between his grip giving way and his skull smashing open on the pavement (like the breaking chimney in Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET). There is no right answer, instead we're left with the difference between a 'twist' like in THE SIXTH SENSE and 'art' like in POINT-BLANK --if you need an answer as to whether Walker is alive or dead at the end of BLANK then man you're a square! He who complains is not artsy - and he who is artsy 'gets' the lack of anything like a concrete twist one can 'get' in the Rod Serling sense.

I don't mind, man, that even unto the last frame we're never quite sure--anymore--what is real, and at the very end, one more final reference, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944, below) brings the Val Lewton savvy full fore.

Shudder being worth getting at $4.99 a month is thus affirmed. One wonders just where GIRL might have wound up without it. So often these films get either ignored at the festivals (by distributors who aren't quite sure how to market them), or bought up and then relegated to the shelves for years or changed by studios who demand it make sense or have a point before sinking advertising into it. Shudder is there to do a rare and important job in unearthing the near-gems from the vast fields of shiite, not to say there ain't a shair fare of that at Shudder too. But I take odd comfort in their existence. In our sweet sweet loneliness and despair, the devil sent classic horror fans a friend. Whether or not this friend is real or just a homicidal amalgam of past images, reflections and hazy memories, riffs on photos both still and in motion, we'll never know... but that's just how it's gonna have to be. Times change either way. We've never gotten anything without losing something else. That's just progress, and whatever other names you'd care to call the ceaseless diligence of gravity, weather, and worms.

See also: Naomi Watt's Post-Modern Mother of Mirrors

Genealogy of Flies: HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, LORDS OF SALEM

The Carpenter Hush: IT FOLLOWS, SOLE SURVIVOR

Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic (Netflix Curated List)

Baby in the oven and the chicken in the Crib: GO ASK ALICE

Last Year at Marien... something something

Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH

Let the Darioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance: AMER

See also: Bad Acid's Greatest: Paranoid Feminsim Edition

1. for my curated list of cool retro-analog synth scores from 2015-16, have Spotify and go here.

Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (2016)

"Men are very fragile. They get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way." notes our love-junky Wiccan Elaine (Samantha Robinson), voiceovering in her vintage convertible down Highway 101, flanked by gorgeous redwoods and crashing surf. We see her stubbing out cigarettes in the car ashtray. (God, it's been so long since I saw anyone do that). This girl, we realize, has magic --whatever that is, she's got it. And she's crazy. Needing love from a man so bad when she's already beyond the ken of the entire accumulated gender. But hey, sane people are boring, and she's very pretty, and her new apartment is popping with magical candy color, and herb jars; the somewhat more flowery and genteel interior decorator Trish (Laura Waddell) was told to paint it with the "colors from the Thoth Tarot deck," by the owner, a girl from Elaine's coven. As she's new in town, Trish takes Elaine to the 'Victorian tea room,' where men are not allowed, and a lady harpist plays. We're clearly in some wild alternate reality, or are we just seeing the world through someone's eyes who has already broken off with it? It's a matter of perspective. Elaine seems not only from a 60s-70s time capsule but a timeless fairy bower. Her sisterhood in the coven, the safety of the tea room, she's protected by a magic circle. But the men who stray too close should beware. Her gaze alone--we soon learn--can knock men clear out of their own era.

Trish, by contrast, is rooted in the current era (as betrayed by her modern car and post-'The Rules' sense of female entitlement --the 'demand a lot, give a little' approach to male manipulation. Elaine, on the other hand, is a Love Witch, applying all her accumulated Wiccan powers towards seduction in loneliness-spurred desperation for male contact: "Giving men sex," she counsels Trish, "is a way of unlocking their love potential." Trish is shocked; she can't even tell if Elaine's serious with such--as she puts it--"Stepford Wife" antiquation. But what is Trish offering in sex's stead? A kind of frowny sense of third-wave entitlement? The expectation of blind dotage, with her man expected to be mindlessly obedient like a pet?

Elaine can fuck that shit up with nothing more than a heavy lidded sex magick hypnotic stare. As if to prove it, Trish's handsome (Robert Seely) fiancee barges in expecting to swirl Trish off to lunch, barging into the safe space of the tea room as if female rules don't apply to him (typical male nonsense). Handsome and naive, he's bound to be stolen by Elaine the moment his eyes meet those of this otherworldly new visitor. All Trish has to compete with Elaine's magic is the conventions of social 'reality' (such as her engagement ring), and who gives a shit about that in the movies? Social conventions are not sexy. They do not unlock 'love potential.'

Back at the Thoth Tarot-colored apartment, Ennio Morricone stings come in, slyly, shyly, and this Wicker-Mannered Kenneth Anger x Anton La Vey x Pedro Almodovar x Joe Sarno magickal tale takes slinky wing. Held aloft by a lovingly stilted acting style that approaches (no doubt intentionally) ceremonial ritualistic embodiment of astral bodies during solstice celebrations, The Love Witch gains a kind of magisterial ascendancy. Like some beverage of hitherto uncharted potency, its unique style tastes new yet old, mulled through a kind of high camp soapy-Sirkianism until it becomes no unlike the mind of a person being forced to watch that Taylor-Burton movie BOOM! while being slowly encased in a psychotropic pancake syrup that hardens into amber; as men we become Merlin watching helpless behind colored glass as Morgana le Fey begins her long-belated incestuous revenge against Camelot (ala Excalibur). And this time, we're on her side all the way, even though we're screaming in frozen agony, we love her to death.

Written, produced, and directed by CalArts wunderkind Anna Biller, Witch luxuriates graciously in its own lopsided consciousness, declaring that there is a difference in male and female auteurship and the difference should be celebrated with no shortage of nervous laughter - women are way more dangerous than men think, at least the sort of men who like to applaud women auteurs with condescending 'you go, girl!' enthusiasm. Biller at last makes the "little difference" properly ritualistic and terrifying in its Venus Flytrap beauty. Her work offers a complete analysis of female energy, with even the irrational spikes of derangement celebrated and accepted in a way that should terrify all men. Truly, no maenad madness like Love Witch could ever flow from a man's hands without lapsing into trite leering kink or preachy posturing. Rarely has so cohesive a vision emerged seemingly full-grown from the head of Athena.  This true septuple threat (Biller also did the art design, costumes, and composed several of a the renaissance faire songs) has no qualms about using deliberate artifice towards a ritualistic, almost fetishistic end, the do-it-all auteur who lets no breadth of 'sanity' or patriarchal logocentric reality checks upend the poison apple cart. It's a perfect fit, then, to visit the early-70s 'frustrated suburban housewife finds self in witch coven' subgenre, and the Eurosleaze erotic black widow variation, diligently spinnereted to Jacques Demy-style fairy tale romance with a Satan's School for Girls' annual solstice pageant primitivism that keeps it from being either campy or realistic. It's not even feminist. What the hell is it? It's dangerous, beautiful, and daring in its deliberate artifice. 

Interesting too, is the depiction of magic itself, as a force. Comfortably ensconced in the middle ground between power of suggestion (as in the devil cults of Polanski, Lewton) and fantasy, we can't really tell for sure where power of suggestion and delusional madness divide within the diegetic reality of the film, which is how it should be if you want to resonate with uncanny 70s cracker factory frisson, as this does. In the process she creates such a great piece of retro-vintage art that she seems to have taken lead point for a whole new flock of filmmakers, I've written lovingly about, who use the 60s-70s 'Euro-artsleaze' genre as a palette from which to paint uncanny new vistas, and in some cases--such as Billers'--bring in a whole other level of filmmaking cohesion -- deliberate artifice, ala Shakespeare's plays within plays. Any separation between art /experimental, film, narrative, genre, retro-pastiche, present and past --are all gone in her hands. Maya Deren, Anger, Rollin, Franco, Ira Levin, Polanski, they're all Minor Arcana cards in her elaborate deck with the major being the root chords, like Saturn, Pan, Eros, Dionysus, Archangel Gabriel, and sweet Lucifer.

The story of three or so conquests in the disturbed life of a dangerously powerful and intoxicatingly sexy 'love witch' - Elaine lets us know in the opening that she's leaving San Francisco "after a nervous breakdown" - which she discusses matter-of-factly in a highly mannered theatrical voiceover (reflecting deep neuroses) with flashback images telling a different story than her voiceover, connecting her current story not only to past events (like a possibly murdered husband) but a host of female-driven films from the late 60s-70s, from PLAY IT AS IT LAYS to CIAO! MANHATTAN (1972) and even LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. When Robinson deepens and draws our her vowels on lines "The day Jerry left me is the day I died" she sounds eerily like Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL, and of course there's STEPFORD WIVES, which is even name-checked. But in evoking these films, Biller is also surpassing them on her way towards a more cohesively feminine, unabashedly neurotic look at how one woman's magical thinking can wreak catastrophes in the reality around her, without her ever taking responsibility or even noticing. This works to Elaine's benefit as well as ours. Biller knows it takes lack of moral judgment to get this deep into the mystic; rather than go down a Goodbar rabbit hole of sex and madness, as one might expect--especially if a man was directing--Biller focuses in on Elaine's almost supernatural ability to wreak pastorale renaissance tarot imagery and witchy ritual out of nearly every scene she sashays through. Her ability to, in a sense, turn any man into a sobbing wretch ("Just like a woman," Elaine notes of one of her conquests in her ongoing voiceover narration, while he sobs in the bedroom and she lights a cigarette on the couch. "What a pussy.") It would of course be overkill if any actual magic was added--special effects lightning etc -as she's way too hot to need it, she dazzles the eye with just a little help from herbal psychedelics, lingerie and a rainbow-colored raincoat lining.

Such a spell is dangerous to the average man. If you've ever been seduced and abandoned by a creature so lovely and bewitching that you're instantly addicted to her worse than any heroin, and she abandons you at your first display of such dependency, then you know how easily death might result from that level of sudden wish fulfillment followed immediately by its total absence. Especially if you mix in too many toxic herbal psychedelics, like jimson weed, aka datura root (helpful hint: don't try it at home), the effect--as we learn--can be lethal, and maybe it should be.

Biller's film also explores and takes (relatively) seriously the world of the Wiccans (presumably) and (probably) explains the way young teens tend to get pretty warped when they happen to live near a Renaissance Faire and visit every weekend for a whole summer, and how Elaine's cracked determination to live life as a fairy tale might believably wreck men all up and down the coast. Magic, horses, princes, tarot cards, strange sex rituals, it's all dangerous stuff, as any Jack Chick pamphlet will attest. Never underestimate the power of ritualized intent! And Elaine isn't in the habit of casting lightly, despite the flowers and candy colors. Thing is, she doesn't need it. It's overkill. She's way too hot to need spells.

Are covens just the adult version of a young girls' tea sets and stuffed unicorns?

Disneyland ritualism run amok in a kind of clockwork movement, this film runs counter to what the sweaty dying dad experiences during his tryst with the aging princess in ESCAPE FROM TOMORRROW but the arrival destination is the same (isn't it always?) Elaine has chosen to live in a world of horses, mock marriages, 'girls-only' tea houses replete with beautiful "Victoriana" trappings, but taking them to adult levels (i.e. the 'actual' grim Grimm), i.e. the sacrificial maenad / murder ballad element, which puts her into the same rarefied world as female post-'period' musicians like Rasputina, Josephine Foster, and Dame Darcy). This girly tea set / stuffed rabbit / Wonderland world, brought to menstrual adulthood --is a 'safe space' for women-only (men beware), with girls in long blonde hair playing the harp or--at the burlesque house--twins dancing in unison with feather fans (the reclaiming of burlesque by feminist performance artists--begun in the 90s--ensures this isn't unduly jarring).

Such performance-within-performed artificiality paradoxically only adds to the feeling of ritualistic predestination, as if this movie's linear 'Apollonian' narrative (cop investigating and falling for prey - ala Basic Instinct) is there only to lure the eye into a sticky trap, holding it fast for the sacrificial ceremony of feminine rebirth through seduction and symbolic castration.

Our male gaze checks in, but it won't check out... what exits the trap will be a new sort of looking.

With THE LOVE WITCH, Biller zaps her mark deep in the soft collective unconscious tissue that binds us along our collective Islets of Langerhans (right/left; male/female). She goes so deep we're compelled to realize just how short other female directors come up on the same goal (i.e. ushering in an operational mythopoetic feminine--but commercial--film language). Sofia Coppola came close a few times to Biller's natural magic and might actually nail it at last with her upcoming remake of THE BEGUILED (PS 9/18 - no she didn't) but so far has only done it in the Trip Fonatine-prom segment of VIRGIN SUICIDES; Asia Argento was one of the first to go all the way down into the chthonic basement with SCARLET DIVA in 2000, wading through the septic sludge of the male gaze like a harried plumber; Anna Lily Amirpour approached it in half of A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT but it was a love story, with a real live boy, which threw the language off; Helene Cattet did the amazing AMER (2) with her boyfriend, and together they turned experimental abstraction and the giallo on their respective heads; Catherine Hardwicke did it in the first TWILIGHT, which was so good the terrified money men promptly turned the franchise over to male directors, none of whom matched the druggy electric drag of her original. Xan Cassavettes' ever-so-slinky KISS OF THE DAMNED is another where the men are arm candy in a matriarchal vampire jet set held together by beauty, wealth, and discretion. Along with Linda Hassani's DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, they're highly recommended as examples of women directors appropriating the fantasy/horror genre in ways parallel to--but unique from-- male-driven explorations of similar lines, returning each time to the fairy tale bower where the feminine myths are first heard as children. Sensibly, they know to create this new voice, they have to return to the place they last had one --the realm of childhood.

Bitches may be strong in retro-analog films by Tarantino, Rodriguez; Russo and Ashby of DANGER 5, etc., but are all susceptible to the male drive to action and violence, the 'drive-in' adrenalin rush. None would ever dare to, for example, show their starlet casually noticing a blood spot on her underwear inserting a tampon, and then later taking it out and adding it to a bottle of her own urine + a few wild grown herb (it's a 'witch bottle' we later learn), then placing it on a man's grave, so a "part of her can stay with him forever." If a man directed that kind of thing, they'd underline it as if we should be grossed out, rather than merely add it to the flow, the way Biller does here. Biller slides it right past us. We wouldn't dare flinch.

JW Waterhouse - "Circe" detail

The Rose Bower - Burne-Jones

By contrast and comparison. Let's examine the all-female lepidopterist un-fantasia of Peter Strickland's DUKE OF BURGUNDY, an example of 'faerie bower cinema' wherein chthonic overgrowth ensnares all chances for narrative phallic linearity, leading to a kind of feminine reverie/stasis, mirroring the way deep-rooted sensual desire can hold a person almost in a state of paralysis, tapping into the state of powerless awe we as tiny children once felt towards our gigantic mom and her visiting lady friends (when they, say, come over for tea). If we're at a cute age, they all fuss over us, lavishing attention and expecting no corresponding action from us so finding our every smile and kiss to be the height of rapture. Alas, this fairie bower period doesn't last, and suddenly we're not cute anymore; the lavishing of attention stops and usually by then we're so pissy and self-absorbed we don't even miss it until years later, when we find its correlation at the movies. Once again the women are gigantic compared to us and once again we don't need to do anything sitting there in the dark. We just beam up at Garbo's giant face and know she loves us no matter what, so much she even lets us know here deepest secrets. Her giant silver screen visage then is the consolation prize from the non du pere (Lacan's construct of the forbidding father who welcomes us to the social order on condition of symbolic castration). If we do our chores, dad gives us twenty bucks to go to the movies and we fall for, if it was me, say Sandahl Bergman or Daryl Hannah. If we're in an earlier era, we might get some of that undemanding adoration performed for us at burlesque clubs (where the male acts are all symbolically neutered - baggy pants comics or androgynes like Joel Grey in CABARET - thus posing no threat to our seat of pre-Oedipal spectral omnipotence - even allowing a kind of straw dog catharsis, a chance to boo our own father when he tries to censor our libidinal enjoyment).

However, it's also true (we find out) that when brought into actualized kinky tableaux, ala Jess Franco, sadomasochism and/or stripping often becomes merely tawdry.  We might be aroused and excited if we're seeing a nude woman for the first time, but it gets old quick. The reason why that is doubles as the fundamental proof, perhaps, that Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory is more a female construct of the masculine other than the sad reality. If she was a man, she'd recognize the complete lack of proprietary control that comes as the fine print on every male gaze. The fantasy of harem-construction / female dominance through looking (gathering an imaginary group of devotees ala 8 1/2) is borne of the fantasy of unrestricted access to the feminine, a restriction men must self-impose from a very early age, brought on by the utter powerlessness of being either small, pre-adolescent or a disembodied spectral ghost/viewer. Some cultures, as in fundamentalist muslims, are so wary of their handle on libidinal self-restriction they fear even a stray strand of their woman's hair, or a naked ankle in public might incite a rape riot - again the fear becomes a projection. The man's innate inner libidinal monster is projected outwards and the powerlessness of childhood comes back full circle.
Just as, when children, we're far too powerless to stop any adult from doing anything; as viewers we're like the huntsman, unable to ride through the one-way mirror screen (or out of the baby chair safety straps) to rescue Red Riding Hood from the primal scene awaiting her at grandma's house. The Fundamentalist's plan is to prevent Red from going without a male escort; but his inner wolf still projects out into the woods and his superego defenses buckle and strain with the anxiety of the horror film viewer.

I only refer to Lacan and sadomasochism (Mulvey vs. Studlar) to contrast Biller's style, which exits the bower (and does burlesque rather than stripping - and knows keenly the difference) to pursue the backdoor histrionics of 'suburban swinger' films by Russ Meyer, Radley Metzger, Arthur Marks, and Joe Sarno, instead. These may be male directors but they love strong, proud empowered, sexually voracious females who can and do turn any suburban backyard barbecue into a wild orgy of close-ups: batted eyes, licked lips, adjusting hemlines and sizzling symbolism. These trash auteurs don't judge their heroines, they celebrate their power and recognize their immunity to the petty rules of 'decency.' Lust is vented in this fantasy reflection of the repressed suburban milieu, and done cathartically without misogyny. It's to these auteurs Biller looks for a chalk mark arrow forward, then drags the bower behind her to wipe her tracks.
--

Not tawdry

Consider when Anna's first conquest in her new town, a naturalist teacher named Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) starts bawling and screaming needily for her the morning after, the format is set. Parise is a real find --his breakdown is a high point of the film, acting-wise, as he gives it his all while staying on message. "I have never felt real love like this before! Elaine," he shouts, "I'm scared!!" The sheer magnitude of his lovelorn heartbreak threatens to disrupt Elaine's candy-colored sandman 'magical thinking.' So she has to go smoke in the other room, suddenly it's morning and she's been sleeping on the couch. Wayne is a ruined man.

Usually it's the reverse: consider Yvonne Furneaux in LA DOLCE VITA-tearing herself apart waiting for her errant lover's call or stalking him as he tries to cover a story (above), only to threaten suicide if he doesn't come right home. Though DOLCE's Marcello waddles in guilt, ever the child, WITCH's Elaine's callous man-eating comes with no remorse. Fellini's film is a man's fantasy of a salt-battered surfer ever in the process of being swallowed up by the maternal sea, the clinging woman issuing suicide threats through phone line apron string kraken tentacles, all the women in his life weaving a luxurious seaweed wrap of ardor about him while he chases the next flutter of blonde feathers around the tower stair curve, and wakes up every morning to a beached sea monster. Aware of the closed circuit repetitive shallowness of his life, Marcelo's still powerless to change, or be happy. By contrast, Biller's film is a woman's fantasy, one where her past conquests succumb to acute melancholia, but she feels only contempt for them, all while chasing and pining for a real man to love, someone who can stand her absence without going to pieces. Rather than a surfer, Elaine is the ceaseless surf... and any man desired by another woman is her fair target.
---

Fans of 60s-80s Eurocult specialty DVD labels like Synapse, Mondo Macabro, and Blue Underground know well the genre Biller is exploring. In particular, the post-Ira Levin 'female empowerment through cult ritual magic' sub-genre (see Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition), the 'modern girl falls under ancient black magic sway and/or has really flipped or passed through the erotic looking glass' films, whose timeless complexity might seem anathema to LOVE WITCH's sunny Tarot card artifice, but like Kubrick or prime-era Argento, Biller offers a fully unified distinctly feminine artifice that's never merely 'cute' or 'twee' or 'precious' but includes all the downs and dysfunction with the same pop art realness. She doesn't star in it, but Biller has starred in other works of hers, and embodies a strong period persona. Just as Lana del Rey embodies a kind of early 60s David Lynch roadhouse hallucination, Biller embodies the female strength and cool of a composite of all three ladies in FASTER PUSSYCAT KILL KILL with some aspects of Lydia Lunch, Edwige Fenech (ALL THE COLORS IN THE DARK) and Argentine 'sinsation' Isabelle Sarli (FUEGO!).

Anna Biller - thou art a badass

I was scoping photos of her for this post, and found an interesting response to a Coffee Coffee review of Biller's previous film, the (also highly recommended) VIVA.  Coffee's writer Peter suggested viewers be better served by BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or Franco's VENUS IN FURS, presuming the intent on Biller's part was a kind of high comic camp, a satire of late 60s decadence. Her response is galvanizing:

Sexploitation films were based on real things, like sexuality between men and women. I would never be interested in critiquing them wholesale, because I don't find them stupid or inferior (you might). They are more for me like fascinating fragments of culture, all the more alluring because of their low status in today's culture. 

So again, you are making many assumptions. Those assumptions come from our need today to look back on history and laugh at it. They also come from a discomfort with the exploitation form because of guilt at male enjoyment of it. I am not critiquing those films, but I am critiquing cultural stereotypes. There is a big difference. 

The intention with VIVA was to make my own version of those films, to rewrite history as it were and place myself and my voice (as a female and an individual) within it. So in that sense it's pure fetishism, and comes much more from the place the original films came from (the desire to make a sexy film using fantasy and displacement). The confusion about my intentions may come from the fact that we have not seen many sexual fantasy films made by women, except by female directors who are working in entirely more "serious" forms.

Damn right, sister! Dig the way she defends her choices and calls Mr. Coffee semi-out on an ideological gender-based point, but does so without any knee-jerk third-wave snippiness. Her pride in wanting to make a "sexy film using fantasy and displacement" is justified. It is a truly honorable ideal, especially as she reaches for a new kind of subgenre, a truly female fantasy. And LOVE WITCH succeeds at this ideal, mixing intentional story book artifice--lots of 'talent show from Summerisle' light/dark macabre counter-Christian pageantry--with genuinely erotic content in ways we don't really see in modern film; the closest we get is perhaps Bergman's MAGIC FLUTE wherein the double negative, if you will, of a play-within-a-play, seems to help induce a mimetic erotic magic that's distinctly feminine (Mother Night) in its timeless (or lunar cycle-based) parallel to the 'normal world' of linearity and men (Sarastro). Biller grasps the deep magic at work in narrative immersion and in the way mythologizing through performance helps uncork one's inner power.

That power, of course, is too much for a shaky patriarchy to handle. Becoming a man's every wish and surprising him with allure beyond what he can stand leaves him a sobbing wreck, and leaves the love witch alone in the other room smoking a cigarette, listening to  his anguished infantile castrated bathtub sobs with the dispassion of Camille Keaton rocking in her chair downstairs (5).

Thinking it over, actually, the closest I can imagine to the first of Elaine's amazing psychedelic seductions is the opening swath of DUNWICH HORROR with smoov Dean Stockwell using that weird crystal to hypnotize Sandra Dee. Or even the way Mae West brings home "That Dallas Man" in I'M NO ANGEL (1933). The other extreme, of course, is more prevalent, especially in the US under the lash of books like The Rules and the ridiculous "perfect" man-vs.-slovenly selfish prick dichotomy rom-coms, that is: the disappointed woman of high expectations stranded in her narcissistic cocoon, unwilling to admit it's stifling her, and being rewarded with some perfect masculine ideal that may exist, but isn't necessarily going to ever pick her in real life just because she waited and demanded he appear. Stay waiting too long in that fairy bower, and you could get swallowed up by the underbrush.

The fairy bower end-of-the-line "woman in her fancy hats broods and pontificates along the rocky coast" kind of jazz is harder to do right than it looks. For example, Angelina Jolie took it for a spin in BY THE SEA, which some people (whose judgment I revere) love but which I felt suffocated by as if being dragged to some expensive boutique by a petit-bourgeois girlfriend and made to stand there for hours trying not to seem bored while she fussed over designer clothes and scowled at me for volunteering to pay for this one adorable Hermes handbag. The story of a couple dissolving and clearly trying to save their relationship by renting out apparently an entire corner of the Riviera, it's the film that helps us realize Brad and Angelina are not doing well as a couple - it's the movie version of them sitting us down on the couch for a special family meeting to let us know dad's moving out for an indefinite period while mom and he work out some issues. While outside in the open air bar, Brad makes a point of connecting with the old locals and picturesquely drinking a sun-illuminated pint of beer while the old men tells a story. The vibe is as faux light and spontaneous as if an Eric Rohmer movie was bronzed, thrown in the sea, and told to swim.  It can't, Brad. Stop pretending to care about these blandly generic locals with their trite pastoralities. You're better than that. Fight Club, Brad! Fight Cluuubbb-glub-glub (Imagine me saying this as i sink below the amber waves). (3)

THE LOVE WITCH on the other hand at least has its own lunar tidal pull. It's alive and snaking ever-forward; it might dilly-over the edge with little moments that evoke Ed Wood and/or Tommy Wiseau in their amateurish strangeness, but baby does it ever float, like a tossed bouquet--a floating iron glove cast in velvet--- to be caught by any future female filmmakers with a touch of madness or moxy. Biller's film is the feminine mystical equivalent of finally blowing a hole through the concrete defensive ring around male cult film Normandy, to seize princess super power without necessarily being a bitch about it. 'This is what turns me on," Biller announces, "and I don't care if it seems immature and I should have grown out of it by now--ponies, princesses, and love-love-love," whatever, I'm going for it, so fuck off." Of course it would still be the empty fantasy if Biller wasn't wise to herself, and to the limits of the bower's protection. LOVE WITCH is like a young girl's tea party crashed by a Jayne Eyre-Wide Sargasso Sea madwoman, who comes rolling down the stairs and under the locked door like little Rosita's blood in THE LEOPARD MAN (1943).

As Elaine masturbates to memories (?) of being shamed by her father as a child or mounted by the hairy coven leader during her coven initiation, we're forced--especially as male spectators--to contemplate just how thorny female sexuality really is. We're put into a position we're totally not comfortable with, and it's about time we were. Biller presents us with the idea that a woman might masturbate thinking about her father, and/or hairy and hobgoblin-esque characters and frankly, we weren't expecting that. As men we're taught to recoil from our own toad-ish aspects, the bloated troll underbelly of our princely visage, but for Elaine (and, by extension, Biller), the repellant frog kiss that prefigures the marriage to the handsome prince is swirled into the erotic potion that gets her off, only in her erotic fantasy, the prince is still part toad.

This aspect of female sexuality has been explored only by wild-eyed surrealists like Bunuel. Most men dare not go near it, troll-like themselves, perhaps, it would smack of wishful thinking and vanity. If they try, they tumble off the path and into the thorny issues that bog down so many films (and even some of my other posts).

Jacques Demy's Donkey Skin

But Biller's every gilded splinter-step is sure. She never falls too far down the whimsical fantasy rabbit hole or up the "psychotic break" vortex of subjectivity. Instead, snaking like a footpad between the high and lowbrow camps, Biller proves an adept guide to the feminine's archetypal root cellar, one who knows how to not get snagged. She excavates the tarot as a bridge between fantasy and the reality of the moment, and the result-- as in all the best examples of the period/genre--leaves us unsure whether the 'magic' being performed is merely ceremonial posturing (meant to focus the will with drugs as a kind of perception enhancing tool), or if it evokes genuine spirit power. It's not even important. That's how you know myth is working - you no longer perceive the illusion of a separation between the real and the vividly imagined.

We're also never sure just what we feel about these couple of disreputable hairy male characters who seem to have inserted themselves into the otherwise hip matriarchal coven, but we trust Biller to know the answer and never falter, to not let patriarchal conditioning kick in and warp her thrust. The fey, hairy warlock named Gahan (Jared Sanford) seems placed at the head of the coven, but it's not--we hope--out of some nod to some deep-seated animus patriarch sub-conditioning (6) but because he's a mentor/executive producer and thus it's a role that fits his role within the film (and her memories of being with him on the dais are folded into her thorny masturbation memories -- it's clear she's disgusted by him but not enough to leave the group- he's endured). That we can trust Biller to not 'cop out' and turn the car over to him and/or some other man, or get all heavy-handed and start saying 'killing is wrong' blah blah I found a boyfriend who loves me for me,' or something--is testament to her strength, her ability to use what we tend to pigeonhole as camp as the palette for a deeply subversive neo-feminist spin on a unique genre from a unique time and place. We can rest easy in her hands. Being able to trust a female auteur with the car keys --so to speak--is the psychotro-poetic equivalent, to a guy like me, of being able to float on a giant amniotic breast cloud into the dissolving rays of a birth-reversing sun. When you trust the girl driving you don't automatically wince when she pumps the brakes, and if she almost hits another car - well she meant to fucking hit it -- the other driver was just too fast or slow, or a man.

Knowing this, the rest is rearview.
---------

PPS
(shhhhhh)
Speaking of which, maybe you saw on FB: I happen to have been in the hospital most of last weekend with my first case of the DTs! Shhhh. I'll tell you, and bury it safely on the bottom of a non-related post. Actually, it's related as I had my own anima-projection/ fantasy girl come along when I was twitching in the ER. I hadn't even stepped foot in a hospital in over 16 years, so was amazed at all the progress that had gone on. There was a vision in blue scrubs, a luminous angel, wheeling around a kind of podium pushcart with the glow of a computer screen hovering over it in the dark of the early AM  like a kind of floating alien saucer.(not that there were windows - but they turn out a lot of lights after 10 or so, and it all becomes like a big slumber party). She floated amongst us agonized, zonked sinners like an absolving angel. In my case, shooting a dose of Ativan into my IV tube or passing out Librium in a tiny paper cup. Like on an airplane when everyone is dying for a drink and the stewardess slowly moves up the aisle towards you and all you can do is sit in your chair and watch and wait, and pine - and the slower she goes --every crack and hiss of an opening soda can like a sweet angelic harp chord.

Eventually they had me in an upstairs bed; a different beauty with her alien tray came gliding along (a "hospital medication computer cart" - I looked up its name), its CRT a reassuring UFO nightlight in the darkness, part Valkyre descending down the Valhalla-way with her benzos and opiates, and anti-coagulants, this upper floor girl looked like the eldest Haim sister and became my new feminine ideal. There were also three trainees, all very Haim-like but blonder--vaguely Nordic--traveling in shimmering haze of long blonde hair and white lab coats, led by an old, important looking male doctor, down the rows of sick and suffering. I was amazed. Why, I wondered, am I always presented, one way or the other, with these shimming visions of the 3 Sisters during my darkest hours? Angels exist, man, and they have long Haim hair that shimmers in the light from the blue screen monitors of their floating drug trays during the wee wee hours; and when they pass they leave the souls that had been screaming in forlorn pain, for what seemed at the time like hours, suddenly sighing and silent... as if the pain had never even happened; and then, the snoring.

Of course the shifts change around the clock so I don't think I ever saw the same angel more than once or twice. I could never find them again once they left my little screened off bed. Not that I  could look far. If I was feeling restless, like the drugs had worn off, all I had to do was try and stand up to realize that, no, they hadn't. I'd grab ahold of my wheeled IV drip (they make great combo canes/walkers, like Merlin's staff, anchoring those half in/half out of this reality, preventing us from both falling down and floating away) and slowly make my way out the door and out into the hall, to the quiet amazement and feigned disinterest of the staff and visitors floating around. All zonked and lost and powerless, forced to wait for everything to come my way rather than go find it, I soon learned that the screams and moans of the damned meant little to this super busy staff. I knew I was amongst experts with addicts and DTs (or whatever psychotic weird break I'd had with my huge regimen of SSRI medication reacting to the lack of alcohol) but that would not hasten the next Libirum or Ativan dose one iota.

And believe it or not, there was comfort in that. Total powerlessness is indeed liberating, just like Batailles always said. Here on the whatever floor of NY Presbyterian (Park Slope), I knew true surrender - beyond shame. Just getting out of bed was enough of a challenge, getting up to go to the bathroom as laborious and involved in my delirium as scaling Wudan mountain.

Now I'm back home but God I miss those lovely shimmering goddesses and their glowing late night floating UFO pill dispensary stations, bringing solace and salve to those poor damned miserable sinners, of which I for a time was one. Since I'm reasonably sure they'll never read this, or remember me, let me just say in case they do: ladies, collectively, in my fever brain, you have cohered into my Lady of the Lake, my anima ideal, my goddess, if I could get a photo of you as I saw you in that fucked up hour of total need, I would build a temple around it. Instead, well, there's this silent prayer. Hail and blessings be, oh shimmering Benzo-flection of my Lost Lenore, reflection of the kind nepenthe I know I can never drink again. When next will we three meet --thy cart and thee and my poor polluted streams?  (4)

(my previous sobriety date - 11/17/98; my new sobriety date: 02/15/17)

NOTES: 
1. Burlesque has become the go-to for female performance art and cultural/body/image reappropriation - in case you didn't know - Most larger cities have at least one tucked-away venue, even if it just hosts a show once every week, like at some cabaret-style comedy or improv club or bar with a stage.  
2. She did it with boyfriend Burno Forzani- but her presence is more keenly felt as its a woman story
3. I didn't actually get more than 1/4 the way into BY THE SEA, and felt the same way about LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD, a film I can only see in one 10 minute dose every five years or so (though I feel like I already have seen it, the version with Candace Hiligoss. Maybe when it's all finally seen, I can forget.
4. My initial hour or whatever in the waiting area of ER was a century of Hell- watching the faces cohere in Pollock-level drop deep through the pattern left by the hot floor waxer that had just been by --leaving too much damp heat emanating upwards. And feeling the emanating waves of slow opiate (or crack) withdrawal emanating from this junkie chick and her sketchy arm support. Now I know what Hell smells like. Shipmates, the smell of hot floor wax has burned deep into the soft spots of my soul, leaving permanent stains that alternate between a ghostly image of Veronica Lake beckoning to me from the deep, as if the floor wax pattern on the tile was the shimmer on the surface of the ocean; my carry-on bag had my Kindle Fire with the voices of Fred Allen and Portland, talking to a ribbon of electric razors, emanating from it --the laughter of their audience activating the paranoia of my fellow ER-mates. The main thing from my alcohol withdrawal, which is why I had to go to the ER, I was too fucked up to get more alcohol to stop my horrible withdrawal / DTs. Most of the last few days I was lying in bed in delusional misery remembering lines from HIGH SOCIETY, which I'd been watching over and over in my drunken excess-tasy - Sinatra blurring "she got pinched in the ASS--ter Bar" (From his duet with Bing, "Yes Indeedy") over and over like a broken record, for hour after hour) after hour) She was Stoned - Frank says, of the girl pinched in the ass / ter bar. Ass-Ter BAR. So now I know - when your hangover gets worse and worse the longer you go without a drink (rather than say clearing up by the evening), that's alcoholism! 
5. See: I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE  
6. My seeing red over random insertions of some kind of overriding pimp to devouring females is well-documented, it was a huge turn-off in both VAMPIRE LOVERS and UNDER THE SKIN, among others (VAMPYRES to its immense credit lacks one, as does--sort of--DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS). It seems to be this fear so deep-seated within the masculine psyche evokes a knee-jerk response for the intermediary (see my 2009 anti-salute to them: "Pimps: the Devil's Subjects")

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