Great 70s WarDads: Brad Pitt in FURY and WORLD WAR Z

I started writing this post a few months ago during the 2014 Golden Globes, prepared for the usual mawkish acceptance speeches and self-congratulatory montages, but I was shocked instead by how much blubbering was occurring over, of all things, kids. On and on these winners went about how they love their kids, how their kids are shining stars that transport them safely across the deserts of artistic blocks and emotional meltdowns and give their lives' meaning.

It was appalling.

Sure, I'm being a curmudgeon, but I have nothing against the kids themselves. I feel for them. Imagine being one of the children of those Globe winners, staying over at a slumber party and everyone's watching of course on TV and noticing your dad is a wussy crybaby who's totally bound to you hand and foot. Christ, I would have packed my sleeping bag and bailed on the spot. Kids have honor, a code! In order to grow into decent human beings these kids need to know dad isn't going to fall apart on them, crying and clinging and making them fight for every second of privacy. They want to know that they can move out one day and while mom might cry, dad will sigh in relief.

Maybe instead of their kids, these dads should thank Brad Pitt, for showing the way a great 70s dad behaves, during World War Z (2013). Maybe the first film to actively redress the Dads of Great Adventure complex that's befouled our decade's disaster movies (you know the type: the widowed, divorced or absentee workaholic/slacker dads who wind up with custody of the kids during the apocalypse because it strikes on the weekend--and his biggest fear is they'll die on his watch, and he'll look like a bad parent), Pitt's dad is competent and responsible for the world outside his immediate family as well as for said family, without showing any strain. All under his watch are taken care of, all without his sanctimonious belittling, clinging, or simpering (or on the other side, ignoring, spacing, procrastinating, stalling).

Pitt's professional compassion exonerates his apocalypse dad from the usual sense of proximal guilt that trips up rubes like Cage in Knowing, Viggo in The Road, Cruise in War of the Worlds and Cusak in 2012. More than all of them, World War Z makes a genuine manly effort to show male viewers a kind of post-Fight Club code they can live by without feeling like second class citizens in their own home. UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane and family (including urchin collected en route) are choppered off to an aircraft carrier packed with refugees so he can jet off to locate Patient Zero somewhere on the other side of the world. His global nation-hopping journey takes him from South Korea to Israel to a remote medical testing facility in Wales, and finally to a refugee camp in the one place savvy doomsday preppers have eyeballed since 1999, Nova Scotia!

The real-life world-savin' pair of Jolie and Pitt got started on their global betterment tour when Jolie starred in Beyond Borders. She really brought her work home with her. As if continuing that film's message, Brad's UN agent has already survived in some of the most harrowing third world hotspots. so the disasters of this zombie plague don't stress him out the way they do other dads. He has a strong, supportive wife, two glowing children, and great fun family rapport. Over the course of the movie these kids and wife are never really in danger, or at any rate, they don't panic because they trust in their heavenly-faced father. We sense that-- even when the zombie spittle is flying fast and furious--no harm will come to any of them. In fact those who stay super close to Pitt miraculously survive even as everyone else around them are infected and/or dead. The concern is solely as to where and how Pitt's UN unfazable superdad will solve the zombie problem, not if.

One of the tricks Pitt's Lane knows is something that the earlier dads of great adventure never mastered: triage. Even if he should make eye contact with people being bitten and devoured, he refrains from stopping to help them if it means risking his life or the lives of those he's with. You can imagine a lesser dad shouting 'somebody do something!' every time he sees a lost kid in a corner, but not Brad. He knows when to cut and run. There's something reassuring about how Lane's status with the UN gets him driven all around the world without need for check-in or bag search. His ability to think globally and survive locally rather than thinking locally like the dads of great adventure is what earns him this first class status.

On the other hand, telling moments in Z reveal a savvy about the proximal responsibility issue: the grateful singing of the Palestinians being let into Israel to avoid the plague excites the zombies and drives them over the impregnable wall; the one moment of true Brad danger comes when his wife's phone call rings as he's trying to sneak around sleeping zombies. This is a movie that knows how any glimmer of empathy, proximal responsibility, etc. can set off a chain reaction. Only Brad's compassionate but survival-based mojo manages to know when to run in true triage fashion.

Fury (2014) finds "Wardaddy" (Pitt) not saving the world per se, but blasting the hell out of the German homeland defenses with a tank crew of uncouth but loyal brigands. A clean-shaven newbie from the typing pool is 'daddy's' latest adopted son (Logan Lerman): he quivers and quakes and resents papa Pitt forces him to shoot an unarmed German prisoner (to toughen him up) and--as in Saving Private Ryan--there's some of that distasteful anachronism where he's the nerdy typist character (played by squirmy Jeremy Davies in Ryan) is too wussy for 1945, hell, even for 1975, but wussy like they only started to make 'em in the post-PC 'declawing' of masculinity, beginning around the early 80s. Wardaddy does the right thing in forcing him to kill an unarmed soldier --it's a matter of Pitt and crew's on personal survival that the kid be forced to surrender his squeamish morality. This suggests all sensitive typists (like myself) could use a few months on the front lines of a war with a guy like Wardaddy to toughen us up to the point we can turn compassion into an asset rather than a liability, so that we don't hesitate on the trigger when its time to kill or be killed, and that we know when to run past someone in danger, even if they make soulful eye contact with us, if it means certain death.

Pitt had proved he could be wild and liberated even whilst a young scrap of a fella, back in Thelma and Louise, so that's never been in doubt, but even so, here we got some extra layers of toughness as borne out by his scarred and diesel oil-stained face. We see him get kind of cleaned up when a nice little breakfast served up by a couple of frauleins in a little second floor apartment that's gone un-bombed, but when it's invaded by the rest of his motley tank corp, we see Pitt forced into a weird no-win zone between solidarity with his rapey crew and an innate gentlemanly spirit. It's the most tiresome scene in the film, it stretches on and on, and I'll confess I FF-ed part of the way, but it's almost worth it for the brutal pay-off, which finally brings things to bear for our milquetoast. Eventually the lad even learns when to let a kraut fry to death and when to chop him in half.  Hell yeah, Sgt. Rock loves this movie, wherever he is.

And if the whole last stand thing means that yet again the Saving Private similarities come too close to call, what is so important about Fury is what's not there: no balderdash bullshit about needing to ask a goddamned woman whether or not you 'earned it' and all that trying to find some greatest generation noble cause lollipop at the center of the severed head tootsie roll. It's finding your manliness in the company of men and smoke grenades --that's what it's for, war. David Ayers supposedly had a fight club thing going on each morning with the cast: each man fighting the other. It's true, as many of us know (but moms, wives, and soft-handed typists never have): the fastest way for men to become friends is to fight each other.

We all knew Pitt could bring the nihilistic badassitude, as could Michael Pena (Observe and Report), the real surprises in the crew are Jon Bernthal as the unkempt creep whose Iron John energy finally connects with Lerman after the fraulein incident and--most amazingly--Shia LaBeouf, whom I've always regarded with some level of contempt, but his work here completely changed my mind. When it comes down to the nitty gritty, of sharing last cigarettes and drinks before almost certain doom, it's Shia who really brought it home for me. I felt his clear-eyed look at mortality deep in my socks. I felt in his suppressed quiver of finality the feeling of being fully cognizant of imminent extinction, how one's death is pressed right up on the glass and always just a tap away --and of standing firm, fully in thrall of the only thing that can transcend the overwhelming instinct towards self-preservation: devotion to one's team. The crew, the captain, and the Pitt, the Wardaddy, the king. It's something that, for all its greatness, the entirety of Band of Brothers was never able to achieve as it lacked an actor of Pitt's unique combination of toughness and charisma, the combination of the great 70s dad. We feel the love for that combination in Shia, who gets his voice down a full octave and takes swigs of booze so believably we're made intolerant of all the lesser actors who betray their lack of experience as boozers by drinking straight whiskey like it was iced tea). With this crew's clear wincing we feel we're really in there with them, in that tank. We can smell the diesel fumes, mixed with the tang of explosives, dried blood, sweat, burnt oil, and cigarettes. It's the tang of the great 70s dad.

There's no voiceover in Fury, either, which also sets it above so many of its 'mother, am I a good man?' counterparts. And the ending credits are some of the coolest I've seen, with Steven Price's great A Silver Mt. Zion-esque soundtrack blasting over high contrast color-res images of the rest of the war. Any idea that  the war was already won by the time we crossed the Rhine is put to rest. A whole lot of pointless killing and destruction is left undone. The soldiers that were just kids and old men still are dangerous if they have ein panzerfaust (and most of them did). Yet, knowing the war is lost, all the fighting becomes somehow robbed of the honor it had when the outcome wasn't certain. Now it's not a matte of survival against evil but a delaying action waste of property, architecture, and lives rather than a noble cause. All that's left, then, is loyalty and brotherhood.

Ask the guys in Afghanistan and Iraq what they're fighting for and the answer's always the same: the guy next to them in the foxhole, their buddy, their brother by fire, they fight to keep each other alive. That's the kind of thing that would sound trite in a voiceover but if a movie like Fury can show that rather than tell (or ask for meaning from teary wives), then maybe the senselessness itself can make sense. War is hell right up to the end but so is life when the unimportant stuff's stripped away. More so in Fury than most war films (since maybe the 1930s) if you're going to survive, you need to become Hell's chosen badass. So here we finally learn what Spielberg only hinted at in his clutching for decency: that every milquetoast has it in him to face death with both barrels blazing if it comes to that, to let go of burdensome humanity and at the same time find a whole new Nietzsche paradigm.

Patton knew it. Kubrick knew it. Pitt's Tyler Durden knows it. Sgt. Aldo Raine knows it. "Wardaddy" knows it, and director David Ayers knows it. In filmmaking, as in war, the comfort of phony personae is the first thing that must go. The fastest way to shuck it is in a bare knuckle brawl with someone you're not even mad at. Even since the 90s, the Pitt persona has never wavered from that punchy code. He is our tousled lord, our approximate Arthur, our Kalifornia king.

He's all that's still standing between us and the terrible apron string hydra we choose to call mother.

Rise, SORCERER! The lost masterpiece of 1977

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated Blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed as the staggeringly beautiful shots they are: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like prehistoric alien rhinoceroses; the apocalyptic rainstorms; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings as trucks loaded with nitro slowly grind and sway across; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; NYC Catholic priests robbed of vast stashes of money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife at a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Cairo dig, the Georgetown protest film set, the real-life NYU hospital spinal tap procedures in EXORCIST). The locals depend on nearby oil pipeline work for survival, so when there's an oil fire at one of the wells, it's up to them--the outlaw expats in need of money to pay their bar tabs--to fix it. The end game - hauling nitro over rickety bridges in the rain on old shock absorber-challenged trucks. It's the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency, lacking the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage, to helm the ship and floor it over the falls and through the camel's eye abyss. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. This film is mad. We all read EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS, so we know the horrifying anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew, forcing a local to speed in his cab through the jungle, then browbeating him when he hit a pig, crying over the pig but firing the guy, etc. In the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s.

Well, all that pain was worth it.

What's most interesting now that its been remastered in gorgeous Blu-ray is the surreal contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality) and how the music guides it all into a kind of intoxicatingly visceral hyper-realism'. These are humans as in 'true' human: bestial, full of grudges, fears, greed, sometimes heroism; disparate examples of the way cowardice and courage constantly fluctuate within us when facing danger. Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only people around crazy enough, tough, and desperate enough to handle an almost suicidal task-- hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles to snuff an oil fire. 

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As a counterpoint commentary to Clouzot's female character in the original (played by Clouzot's then-wife Véra), an elderly barkeep in Friedkin's version never speaks. 

The no women thing works because this is a movie that is not about desire, and relationships but hard travelin', danger, and survival, like THE Carpenter THING or THE GREY, i.e. no women! It's not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original, wherein I never really felt anything was at stake. I had to take their word for it there was nitro in there--I didn't feel it. And I didn't trust or like the characters.. But who doesn't love Scheider? Who dares disapprove of Sheriff Brody? Point them out and I will snuff them like an oil fire! And now, on a big home screen with a booming stereo, you can feel Friedkin's trucks in your coccyx.

The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been my favorite (non-Ennio) soundtrack for long while, long before seeing the movie. It never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, instead the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood (even for Italy). In its moody percolating contrasts and mystical ominousness, the score never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into something delicious and inviting. You can feel the danger in the jungle around them as well as inside the trucks. It's visceral and otherworldy at the same time. 

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, around the same time as STAR WARS. Naturally we kids thought, based on the title, it might involve wizards, aliens and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! No wonder it bombed. The audience's tastes had reverted 40 years backwards to FLASH GORDON (1936). And now, mature adult thriller dramas not easily pigeonholed were out.  

But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. We're sick to death of wizards, and alien landscapes can be found right here on earth, caked in rain and mud. All Sorcerer needed it turns out, was a 40 year sleep so we could catch back up to where we were before the force was with us. 

Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 BAD DREAMS

(1988) Dir. Andrew Fleming
***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors box office receipts in 1987 and said, "I have great idea for a movie!" So in they cast the same girl from Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital." Instead of a Freddie (that would be pushing their luck) there's Harris, a hippie cult leader who burned himself up, intentionally (rather than let someone else do it --see, it's not the same film at all!) played by Richard Lynch (who also burned himself up intentionally in real life!). In the 70s-set prologue he coaxes his hippie flock (called "Unity Field") to burn themselves alive together, in order to "unify" their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, she chickens out, and is pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. She awakens 13 years later, and finds herself promptly stuck in a mental ward and, worse, it's the 80s. Jeffrey (Re-Animator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce a rapidly bumped-off set of emotionally troubled young patients. At night, the stressed Rubin sees the ghost Harris wafting around the hospital, beckoning to her with a ghostly 'Join us!' wave of his burned hand, and settling for one of her group when she declines. As in Dream Warriors, it's hard to sound sane while trying to convince the authorities that a rash of suicides amongst your fellow mental hospital inmates is the result of a long-dead burn victim taking revenge. But Jennifer Rubin just keep trying.

The creepiest aspect here--far creepier than Englund's Freddie, actually, because he's trying not to be--is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a great villain, as anyone who's seen DEATHSPORT well knows, though he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture at left, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as just creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine what a cobra-hypnotic presence like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside might have brought to the role. No offense to Lynch meant. His voice alone could run a cult-- it's serpentine, deep and magnetic, but even before his character burns up, it looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times (which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to in the film --and his real life burns - I'm not surprised). Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field! I almost started one once or twice but then realized the old Groucho Marx adage, paraphrased for cult leading (I'd never want to lead anyone gullible enough to follow me).

The rest of the cast is very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way, it's actually kind of a surprise how good the writing and acting is underneath the low budget. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans may wonder whey they're strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (it's cuz she was in both Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, and Repo Man!) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his skill at amok basement leaping and bulb punching. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout Blu-ray reveals every gossamer strand of the glisten in her eyes So yeah, this movie grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do too with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed. In their hands, anything can take wing beyond its dubious origins (after all, James Cameron got his start working on Star Wars and Alien ripoffs for Corman - it's the highest flattery of form!).


POST SCRIPT (I wrote this having no idea of the weird link of Lynch's burns coming from lighting himself on fire while on an LSD trip in Central Park in 1967 - now that's a brave actor - not setting himself on fire, but playing a psychedelic-era cult leader who sets himself and his congregation on fire in order to bring them all close together - that's the kind of art imitating life through the artist that lived it kind of meta shit that gets me all a-flutter - so, in its way - this film is a nice harbinger of Freddy's New Nightmare! Art imitating the Imitation of its previous incarnation imitating life!).

THE ROOST

(2005) Dir. Ti West
***

Ti West's first film--hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness--The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable thanks to their low-key delivery, voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking a midnight shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget as the bunch knock on doors to get help, and the bats inhabit a nearby barn, and their bite turns humans into zombie monsters.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of newcomer Vanessa Horneff) but it's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work. In this case it means trusting his audience and his grasp of the genre in order to use minimalism to generate unease, rather than the usual overwrought whiplash editing and bombast. West's instincts for how long to play a shot or moment are so spot-on he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context and for some reason it's scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's standing on the other side, if anyone. Genius. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, no daytime scenes at all, a remote location (the Marnie barn) and, most effectively, only diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light which makes the all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable. The score's an effectively minimalist avant garde mix of drones and cello.

Maybe all this doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so apparently haphazard. Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with West favorite Tom MANHUNTER Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association. Or if you like- it's filler so West could enter THE ROOST in festivals as a full-length feature.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

(1990) Dir. John Harrison
**

Three stories, with past and future stars: James "Ajax from The Warriors" Remar is a struggling artist who is almost killed--but then spared at the last minute--by an inner city gargoyle; he falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964) so never makes the connection and/or avoids the same mistake. Another tale has a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encountering a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story) - future stars or no, it's really dull. In another, David "New York Dolls" Johansen is an assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey to kill a cat. It's a segment conceived by Stephen King (Breathing Lessons) and scripted by George Romero (Season of the Witch) but you'd never know. Debbie Harry as a modern cannibal housewife trying to cook for a child occupies the connecting tissue (The Hansel bides for time by telling the tales, ala 1001 Arabian Nights).

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except, of course, Bava's Black Sabbath) as too many get hung up on the tired old EC comics-style supernatural comeuppance formula (exceptions might appear, like Toby Dammit) but the film as a whole drags. I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! "Flavorless,"get it? The script's loaded with that kind of thing.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

(1995) Dir. The Wheat Brothers
***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out during class and points it at a snickering jock to teach the class all about fear. Said jock is pretty pissed - in both the classic "his pants" sense and figuratively - to the point he later breaks into Zada's basement with an axe planning his own gruesome fear exercise. He doesn't know Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest students because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement... First, lets hear these tales!

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a creepy celebrity stalker switches gears and comes after said celeb's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. The first bit is a short and sweet one sure to grab ya with a chuckle and a gasp -if you're not expecting a chuckle and a gasp that is, so forget I said anything. Just make sure you stick around for the bizarre climax, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator and    With its simple minimalist set design and slim budget, After Midnight proves that less can be more when it comes to horror: by contrast Tales from the Darkside has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery twist-endings uber alles vibe - the sort that, like many of the Amicus anthologies of the 60s-70s, is barely concerned with atmosphere or fun, just set up for the somewhat Diaboloque-ish punchline.  After Midnight isn't that interested in the final destination, it would rather enjoy the ride. It quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ***)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, even if the actual film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your stupid life by jumping into that cool armored cruiser (above) and setting out across a nuclear landscape, pausing only to jump over giant scorpions on your motorbike, or outrun giant scorpions, man-eating cockroaches, psychotic rednecks, and other things one needn't feel the slightest bit guilty about decimating with rooftop rocket launchers or at the very least, running over or gunning down. Every boy of a certain age dreamt of that kind of bedtime-less freedom. A time when drinking or driving age limits, cops and homework would all evaporate like a bad dream in the fall-out (and if there is a girl, she's an easygoing cool Hawksian prostitute/dancer rather than a bossy Fordian pioneer mother/wife). And who better to teach you to drive and fire roof-mounted rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column, and to have a beer and a smoke while you're at it, than Jan Michael Vincent and George Peppard?

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful but irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading a Playboy sandwiched inside a Boy's Life magazine at a Boy Scouts lodge meeting instead of paying attention and then sneaking out to light fireworks, choke down sips of stolen beers, and shoot your grandfather's 8 gauge shotgun at his empty beer cans back by the creek before your mom comes to pick you up. George Peppard rocks a terrible fake mustache and lame Southern accent as the dad who teaches you to drive; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl but lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) they pick up in--where else?--a giant gaseous ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the fifth wheel black guy, killed off early as was (and sadly still is) the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest: no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama--they just do everything they've been taught --perfectly-- and then ---oops yeahhh, so did the Russians. Game over all around. A few years go by and a chain reaction explosion at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a convenient handful. They get word of a small thriving town of survivors out in Albany (of all places), so they take off across country from deep in the desert of the west. There's supposed to be two of these big mad cool vans to traverse the nuclear terrain in, but the film's budget only allows for one, so we seldom see the both of them together. But Smight, we don't need two to start with. Why bother?! Make with tha monstiz!

It's small random stressing of details like that which lead to the true weird charm of Damnation Alley! This is a pre-Mad Max / post-apocalyptic wanderer movie made by a sweet very cool older brother who doesn't want either mollycoddle his young brother or traumatize him with too much brutality. Aside from a few traumatic deaths and a decent into some sadistic redneck threats and danger pre-retaliation, there's almost nothing here that wouldn't get this a 'G' rating - except that title! It had DAMN in it! As kids in the 70s, that title alone was daunting - made it seem like the kind of thing you needed your friend's cool older brother to take you to see, or you didn't see at all... ever.... and only dreamed of how boss it was.

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s, so it's got that at least going for it. Mostly the whole film is long shots of driving through psychedelic electric storms--which I personally love. There's also a strange flood (luckily these vehicles are built to float) and mostly empty deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley, who would never harsh a mellow van vibe. We kids generally hated kids in our movies, but Haley was cool because of Bad News Bears. He was the type who seemed a bit sketchy, from the wrong side of any tracks, unkempt, un-mothered, like he'd be a bully, but in reality he'd only pick on other bullies and protect the snot-nosed rest of us, even from guys twice his size. The 12 year-olds in us thrilled regularly to words like "we can now all take a shower once a week, whether we need to or not."

As for the Shout! Blu-ray, I almost never find anything disparaging to say about this label, who have been cleaning up and releasing to Blu-ray a vast host of previously disrespected sci-fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The Blu-ray of Damnation Alley however disappoints on the color front, despite groovy deep blacks. But instead of restoring all the weird colors of the post-apocalyptic open skies, they've just lightened the whole thing and deepened the shadows; the blue skies now have a sun-bleached video box cover look; when they do let the skies look post-apocalyptic, they pick one faded color rather than the multiple hues of the analog original version we can catch on Prime, VHS, Youtube, etc. In the earlier versions, we can see the overlay lines between the actors and the color tint, and the whole movie looked like we were watching it through sunglasses, but so what? Did the restorers not realize this was a post-apocalyptic storm sky and not meant to seem realistic? Thirty degrees of coolness are lost in a brushstroke, or the lack of one.

Aside from that, who can complain; and having it on Blu-ray is literally my 70s boyhood dream come true- seriously, I imagined being able to watch it over and over on a Famous Monsters Magazine - shaped and sized rectangle! And as Lacan might say after a dinner with Lao Tzu, only those fortunate enough to fulfill their childhood dreams have the honor of realizing just how empty such dreams are. Imagine the misfortune of those who die still clutching their Rosebud snow globes instead of the warm hand of a Hawksian Vegas showgirl playing nurse?

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout Blu-ray

Leslie of the Heretics: DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1977)

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. " - Ahab

But to paraphrase Slim in To Have and Have Not, "what happens if it slaps you back?" The answer is that the undying savage beneath Leslie Nielsen's butch veneer emerges, a new Ahab for a Moby Dick that's been solar ray-disseminated into the wild beasts of the American mountains. 

The natural world in total becomes his Dick.

There was another leviathan that splashed the nation in the mid-70s--Jaws-- and it changed the way the country thought about nature--but it too had precedents. Initially a part of a seventies eco-awareness trend, it made many people aware of sharks as a source of life-threatening danger for the very first time. Before then we'd thought of nature as something more likely to die at our hands than the other way around, hence the formation of Earth Day, and campaigns to stop pollution, littering, aerosol cans, pull tabs on cans, and so forth (leading to the pop-tabs and roll-ons we use today); a Native American was crying by the side of the highway on TV. We kids were keen on Cub Scouts and 'Indian Guides;' TV had Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Grizzly Adams and The Waltons, Apple's Way, and Little House on the Prairie; in school we read My Side of the Mountain; at home a magazine called Ranger Rick. Mom took us to see matinees like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family.

In sum, we were in the wilderness, pop culturally. All we needed was a beast to fear, a bad grizzly, to make the good grizzly seem even nicer.

All this was going on before the widespread us of VCRS and cable TV, so if an exploitation pioneer wanted to get funding from the major TV networks in advance of production, he had to entertain three generations, in the same room, looking at the same screen. PG didn't just mean kids can come with the adults, it meant the grandparents wouldn't be offended or confused. And Hollywood was dealing with a surplus of stars who had drawn huge salaries decades earlier and would now work for scale in just about anything (and the older folks would blurt forth their names in momentary excitement), so ensemble cast disaster films sprang up, with older former stars and younger newcomers, and in-between the granite jaws of B-list Charlton Hestons. Meanwhile, the American west, outdoor sets (like Spahn Ranch!) beckoned as a cheap location for monster movies, far from front office meddling and prying eyes, free from expenses on things like set design and extras. You didn't even need a fake monster on account of coteries of trained grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions for rent from animal talent agents. And oversize or swarms of vermin (Kingdom of the Spiders, The Swarm, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Damnation Alley, Night of the Lepus) could be rear projected to look freakishly large and at half speed to seem lumbering around miniature sets. We kids never ratted out the fakeness of the effects and there was no way to rewind or repeat play since DVRs and VHS were still a ways off so we had to tell other kids about it ourselves, and we told it better anyway. No kid ever said "it looked so fake" - even if we laughed about it with our parents at the time. It was the seventies, man, even the monsters were accepted for whatever mask of naturalness and freedom they chose to wear. And raining on someone else's parade was considered a form of cockblockery or narcing.

There was nothing else to worry about, so these vermin subbed as a common foe. There was no blue state / red state divide, we were all purple, like the mountain majesties. And into these mountains strode an eagle-eyed copycat director named William Girdler, a mountain man whose mountain-set monster movies were mountain man-made. (He knew where all the vistas were.) Girdler saw there was a way to make a PG monster movie that could combine the pre-Jaws nature film craze's fondness for grizzly attacks (we were often gypped on that front, but we took what we could get) and the post-Jaws landscape and its urgent demands for less nature more monster-- and thus, from the mountains came the mighty Grizzly (1976), a huge hit. He could now afford to empty the cages at the Hollywood animal wrangler's, for 1977's Day of the Animals.

Up until the Blu-ray that just came out I had always thought Day of the Animals was a TV movie. I'm pretty sure CBS co-funded it but at any rate, thanks to Scorpion Releasing though, a gorgeous 'Walden Filter' widescreen vista of an anamorphic aspect ratio has appeared, majestically dwarfing the relatively incompetent action we're used to on the small square screen of the earlier DVD. Did I mention I love this dumb movie? 

You want to know the plot? There's humans on a hike high in the mountains, and then there's animals driven mad by the ozone layer hole (and close proximity to the sun up there in the mountains with thinner air) and they may be crazy with bloodlust but they all team up to stage massive multi-species attacks on the hikers and townsfolk. The end. There's one hawk, three vultures, a carload o' rattlesnakes, a tarantula, wuxia mice, a wolf, three panthers, a gang of German shepherds presumably fresh out of a hole in the K9 Academy fence, and most fearsome of all, a savage alpha male Leslie Nielsen, shirtless, as nature intended wrasslin' with a real live Grizzly. Can you prove it didn't happen? 

Sometimes you eat the bar....

Like all Day of the Animal's devotees, I was the right age to remember the night Day premiered on CBS, but I missed their whole dog attack climax because it came after my bedtime. (I was ten). Sometimes I wonder if my blog's real origin story lies in my dad's strict adherence to pre-set bedtimes, regardless of how riveting the movie we were watching. I missed the last hour of a horde of great films that way: The Poseidon Adventure, Telefon, Day of the Dolphin, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing, to name a few. I would be in bed, furious and crushed. But I would often dream my own crazy ending - which was way better than the actual climax turned out to be. For Day of the Animals when I heard at next Monday's recess that the humans had survived by riding a raft down the rapids with rabid dogs snapping at their hands every yard of the way I envisioned a pretty wild ride.

Naturally it's not that wild, as it turns out --but 'naturally' is the key word, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, in real nature, with semi-real actors and real animals--especially vultures, hawks, a cougar, a crazy dog pack, the bear, and a tarantula--the scene where the hawks and vultures maul the bitchy girl is terrifying because those birds are real, and they're right there in the shot, and they're pissed, and her distress is palpable. 

Aside from that, and the bear-wrestling, the animal attacks are endearingly abstract. The key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals for his movie in which case fuck you, Ruggero! Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the comfortable cult pleasure is for we sensitive types. Quick edits between what is clearly just well-staged play wrestling with tame animals: a dogs's bared teeth in a play snarl (trying to stay in character and not wag his tail, but finding it nearly impossible while eyeing an off camera treat) pink foamy blood on mouths like toothpaste; men yelling and running and waving at the air; dog's teeth play-biting someone's arm; various close-ups of claws; fluttering wings. It all cuts together in the 'Shower Scene Montage' tradition, and--before it gets monotonous--the hawk looks down from its coaching gyre and screams the signal to end to the scrimmage, and all the animals withdraw.... as you were, kids. 

I don't consider this unconvincing montage strategy at all negative. In fact if this were an Italian or Japanese film every animal in the film would probably be dead by the end of each scene. Anyway, if William Girdler hurt any of these critters, he paid the ultimate price, dying in a helicopter accident scouting locations in Indonesia soon after making The Manitou. 

With smaller animals this mellow mood can be undercut, it becomes skeevier and more disregard for animal life threatens to cast a bad vibe. Bewildered mice on visible strings come flying backwards across the rooms onto the head of the fat old sheriff; hordes of snakes sun themselves inside of cars, clearly not aware they're in a movie. They all seem... expendable. Nothing as bad as the look of stunned betrayal on the rat's faces when they're blasted off the miniature porch with pink pellets in Food of the Gods. 

Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for those of us in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions of snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.

ENSEMBLE ASSEMBLE!

If you're not old enough to remember the fuss parents used to make about Poseidon Adventure and Airport you may not have the same giddy rapture for the "ensemble cast of familiar but older faces, and young up-and-comers, and one square jawed hero and someone jostling for his alpha position" disaster films that were all the rage in the seventies, as parodied in Airplane! (1980). But either way, let me give you some background on this big 70s staple, too--and why it was the perfect fit to merge with the amok nature trend. 

Once upon a primetime (before the age of cable and VCRs),  The Love Boat and Fantasy Island ruled the weekends. They had a steady cast of hosts and a sea of B-list celebrities of all ages wandering aboard the boat or onto the island for their mundane adventures. Some people managed to become celebs by doing nothing but showing up on these shows, like Charo! Or Zsa Zsa Gabor! Or look, there's Charles Nelson Reilly! 

Girdler rides this ensemble zeitgeist too, so on this hike in Day of the Animals we have the disaster movie cross section:

CHECKLIST OF 70s ENSEMBLE DISASTER CASTING

1. The Shelly Winters Broad
Check ("She KNOWS what she's doing!"- only this one doesn't - to the point of dressing for an overnight hike in her Sunday best and--I think--heels). She's also an idiot, following the guy with the whitest hair towards her doom, and dragging with her "son" with her.

2. A 12 year-old kid  (unusual for these movies, he's played by a 25 year-old stuntman, which is real creepy, like that 'kid' in Burial Ground but without the incest. 

3. 70s bombshell career woman contemplating her lack of a love life and children while eyeing the square-jawed hero's ring finger - Here we have-70s mainstay Linda Day George + extra point for her Farrah hair and off-the-cuff New York accent. 

4. Christopher George or David Jansen? Former, Linda's husband, so their scenes of courtship have an interesting vibe. Here he sometimes remembers to use a (terrible) Southwestern accent.

5. A Richard Dreyfus-ish Jaws-style dweeb for scientific exposition? check

6. Famous athlete considering retirement / disillusioned preacher? - Former (written in case Girdler signed some actual famous athlete looking for some screen time; he didn't but hey the script is done)

7. Native American or black sidekick who will certainly die - Check

8. The insane challenger of the rugged hero's leadership? Leslie Nielsen!? I knew there was a reason I loved this movie.

 9. The 'Newt' or little girl (ala THEM), alone and traumatized after her parents die (and is found wandering around the wasteland (extra point if carrying dirty Teddy bear or blanket) - Check. 

10. Attractive young couple dealing with some pre-marital or post-marital issue? Check

11. Fat sheriff roused out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate? This better not be another prank!

12. Some old character actor who either comes along to spread his dead spouse's ashes or as a bucket list last hurrah. (He dies second, usually, and maybe bonds with #1, the Shelly Winters, before he does) - I can't remember if Girdler has one. 

Everyone assembled: the hike goes on, the NYC mom's heels dig into the mud, the animals attack in the blazing ozone sun. A midnight evacuation of the towns above 5,000 feet is given a few shots, hazmat suits, clear the building (you know, it's The Crazies but for animals). And eventually you'll have deeper resonance to the phrase "Watch you like a hawk" cuz there are some shots of hawks watching the humans; and Nielsen--going shirtless to signal his de-evolution into a Putin-like celebrant of masculine power (the Ozone layer thing also affects the beastly as well as the beasts)--pokes a big stick into the belly of the young beta-male, grunts at his cowering girlfriend: "I killed for you! You're mine now!" and to the 25 year-old widdle boy, "Shaddup you little cockroach or I'll shove you off the cliff!" Clearly, those who left with Leslie are reconsidering the choice in a leader, but that's politics. Some people just follow the loudest voice in the room, and are surprised over and over when it devours them, ranting and asserting dominance all the while.

But that's not even his most memorable quote, someone in his terrified party mentions believing in God and he shouts:

"My father who art in heaven you've a made a jack ass out of me for years. Melville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!"

And by it, you know he means that girl, from the young couple beset by some pre-or-post marital issue (#10 in the ensemble assemblage checklist above). The other attractive girl, the one with the career, (#3) smartly stayed with the square-jawed male (#4)

It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. Lalo, you're the closest thing Hollywood had to an Ennio back then, be proud!

But take a knee and let me tell you one last story about why I love this movie:

There was this townie up in Syracuse in the 80s who stole all my Tom Waits albums (he promised to return them after he taped them, yeah right.) but he had the best dog in the world. This dog, a mutt of medium height, was super smart and sweet, a brilliant actor and almost psychic. When I was filthy drunk in the Syracuse snow some nights, which was often, this dog and I would roll around in the snow at like 4 AM and I'd scream like he was tearing me apart while he jumped all over me making these terrifying growls. We'd go on and on, rolling around growling and screaming, the dog managing to seem like he was tearing my arm off while barely even getting fang marks on my coat. We sounded, I thought, like someone was being mauled to death. Drunkenly, I thought it was hilarious and convincing, and fun. And then, one night, someone finally yelled out a window "hey, you and the dog - please keep it down!" and I was like how the hell can that guy tell I'm not really being hurt? I'm screaming in 'agony' - Why isn't he calling an ambulance? 

This dog and I stopped in mid-attack, both looked up at the window, without a word or bark, then looked at each other, and resumed the attack quieter. How that damn dog knew to go quiet, I still don't know. And I think that story shows why I love Day of the Animals, because even very young kids can tell when animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, no matter how vehement the snarls and screams. Take that to the other extreme equivalent in grand Melville tradition, even being devoured, mauled and screaming for your life, even crashing into Indonesian cliffs, laugh and roar for the love of roaring. 

In the 70s, even the mauled sleep well. 

A Girl must have her Ghost: AMERICAN HORROR STORY: "Smoldering Children" & Lana Del Rey: "Video Games"

 "Me...love 'dead'." -- Monster (Bride of Frankenstein, 1933)

If the rest of the media universe is playing it safe and cuddly there's at least two chunks of media that strike a deep unnerving chord of the 'real' in the last few weeks of 2011: Fx's American Horor Story and that found-Americana video for Lana Del Rey's one song, "Video Games."
Passing the 10 million hit mark, inspiring the usual countless remixes, the song+video+singer taps into a nerve of sadness and loss that has the authentic feel of a drunk night IM-ing friends you never hooked up with while you thumb through stashed photos of exes. Watch the video ten times in a row and you can get that feel even at work, sober, IM-ing no one. A lot of people seem to think she has no right to be sad, though, and there's a huge internet bloglash (read Awl's "Who's Afraid of Lana Del Rey"). Lana Del Rey's hot lost little girl from 1965 look -- the thick hair, Julia Roberts lips, black eyeshadow, vintage dresses and paisley headbands-- make her come off like Evan Rachel Wood in THIRTEEN now grown backwards into her own grandmother, dating a hot young rocker incubus who's always on tour, leaving her alone but 'safe' in our care, we being the ghost of a lover long dead (so she'll only see us smoldering, never old or charred). We don't have to worry about Lana's deep sadness overwhelming us via a real relationship because we're just ears. She's just a hot mess friend, and she doesn't even exist... she's a ghost in the machine, like Samara in THE RING. She even looks like Hayden, Ben's 19 year-old ghost ex-mistress in American Horror Story!

So what does this broad have to do with American Horror Story, specifically this week's episode, "Smoldering Children," where (Spoiler Alert!) we find out Violet, the lost little daughter has been dead since a few episodes ago when she overdosed on pills?

Everything. It has everything to do with it.

Look at Lana's photo above, with the cigarette and white dress. She could step right into any David Lynch film and be either in the flashback to the early 60s or a current retro hipster with ironic collagen, either way she's an American ghost story ready to haunt your iPod. The photo above is the kind of thing you find when cleaning out your deceased grandparent's room. Who is that beauty? And suddenly you realized you swooned, just a little bit, for your own mother. Lana Del Rey may just be playing dress-up but she nonetheless radiates a sadness that's not fixed in any one generation. It's not even sexual. The sexier she tries to be, the older she becomes. Creeping through decades like vintage clothing and DNA, she flutters in slow motion, like a mighty flag outside a semi-abandoned post office being slowly walked past by a funeral procession for a returning Vietnam vet.

For comparison, let's look at another pretty, lost, augmented little girl who is talented, driven, and also trying to be re-born, in this case as a sitcom star, Whitney Cummings. Her self-titled show comes on after The Office (read Meghan Wright's solid recap here), the key time slot for any current sitcom, which is how it's drawn my indignant attention. Am I the only one who is suspicious? No.

In "Understanding Screenwriting," Tom Stempel writes:

In Whitney, Cummings plays the title character. She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex. They make jokes. They are afraid of marriage. They go to a wedding and make jokes with their friends. Whitney dresses up as a nurse to seduce Alex and he ends up in the hospital. They make jokes. Most of the jokes are variations on material from Cummings' stand-up act, and so the show falls into the trap of a lot of sitcoms based on a comedian's act: all jokes, no story, no characters. Half an hour of this just gets tiresome. 

Part of why this show is doomed can be summed up right in the above paragraph, particularly one sentence "She is living with her boyfriend of three years, Alex." - what kind of dumb idea is that? Has anyone ever done such a thing? Be wary of Whitney and her conspicuous displays of enjoyment. She misunderstands the fundamental basics of romantic comedy. "Tiresome," indeed!

The most fundamental comedy truth is that a couple is only cute when they are not quite together - either always about to hook up--the will they or won't they of Sam and Diane (Cheers) or Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd (Moonlighting) or Fox and Scully (X-Files), or Ross and Rachel (Friends)-- or already hooked up before the show began and are now just friends (Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld).  All but Seinfeld gave in to audience's demands of seeing the leads hook up and get married or live happily in congress, and viewers dropped off like flies once they got their wish and the wish didn't make them feel how they thought it would. Smart shows know in advance this is doomed to happen. The exceptions to this rule being shows like Mad about You where the stars are either older with children or otherwise not sexually desirable - it sounds shallow, but simply put - Whitney is too hot to have a boyfriend.

As I've written before, the original 1970s Charlie's Angels was ingenious in this regard. Aaron Spelling wrote the book, which we now open to examine the reverse case of guys like Ashton Kucher and Howard Stern. As long as he was married to older Demi, Ashton had some gravitas --his flirty douchebag qualities were tolerable, even amusing. He's in the process of now of realizing the extent Demi's presence kept him from getting Sheen-level skeevy. And, as long as he was married and unable to 'do anything' with his morning regimen of strippers, Howard Stern was funny and edgy. Once the chains were off, that edge was lost. Without his wife listening at home with a grain of good sport tolerance, Stern became just another skeevy guy using fame to bed a string of gorgeous young ladies he'd never get on genes alone. Similarly, as long as Hannibal Lecter was imprisoned he was terrifying; escaped and free and he's suddenly just another dude trying to get a piece of the action. Similarly too, monsters in horror movies - the more clearly we see them, the less scary they are. Thus we see that in TV and movies, its potential that's exciting. The practice never measures up.

Thus, the tortured misery of married life in AHS makes all Ben's yields to temptation exciting. Once the wife is gone, however, giving into those temptations becomes mere softcore boredom, Hannibal instead of Silence of the Lambs --hence his heroic resistance, as I wrote about last week. This week he got his reward: he even got to vent his rage on the tormentor of his wife, the evil Tate!

Tate is an ideal representation of the 'absent lover'--the animus, the 'all-potential/no-practice' object of desire, the incubus -- in that he is actually dead - and his grisly past makes him a 'bad boy' in ways we never want to compete with. He's like Lana Del Rey's lost rockabilly guitarist come back from the dead to demand beer and fidelity. If you listen to the lyrics of Rey's songs you get that she's trying to become that same dead dream for her listeners. They are words bound to have any video game playing bad-girl loving boy blushing at the thought he just might be able to hook up with this doomed, sweetly tragic, DSM-IV type of lost little girl: 

"Open up a beer / 
and say get over here / 
and play a video game."

Dude! She likes beer and video games and guys in fast cars! She's not singing "Come meet my family  / earn a six figure salary / your stupid video games can wait until after you do the dishes." In short --Lana del Rey is the type of girl Whitney is trying to be, but as Yoda says, there is no try, especially when you bring your boyfriend along with you to Dagoba, because he decided to invite himself, and hang in the background and glower jealously as you and she talk and flirt. He throws himself into the scene like a pile of dirty laundry. You invite her to your island, he invites himself, no one likes him or asked him. But you ask her to come and you open the door to whatever skeevy Hep-C carrying jailhouse tatt-cokehead douche she can't say no to. Look at him in that pic above! He's got a glazed stupid look in his eyes and they're too close together, like piggy eyes, with that long anteater snout between them. We want to kill him. The only way we wouldn't is if he actually brought some drugs or beers with him to our island, instead of just mooching ours.

The Lana Del Rey-approved bad boy would bring lots of cool drugs; the Whitney boyfriend would not. That's the difference.

The 'bad' boys who encourage you to skip school, drink beer and play video games -- they don't come any badder than Tate (he'd bring angel dust or crystal meth) and so in a way we can respect him because he is evil and yet he still loves Violet and protects her and that's what makes his loving relationship work on TV, a loving relationship that would creep us out otherwise. Paradoxically then, It's only because he is truly evil that he can be sympathetic. We identify with Tate as viewers because like us (in our dislocated viewing space) he is dead - like Edward in Twilight is dead, or Spike on Buffy. Our perspective as viewers (we can move through walls and time and infiltrate up close even the most intimate moments of characters without them ever seeing us) mirrors that of the watching dead, for who else but the dead and the viewer have such omniscience?

Lance Kerwin, 1977

And so, are we not all in love with ghosts one way or the other, just as we are in love with the movies or music, which are all just ghostly traces? I remember being ten years-old and dreaming of holding hands, kissing, and walking around my old Lansdale PA neighborhood with Kate Jackson (that's all I knew I there was to do at that point), and all my friends seeing us and being super jealous. Jackson appeared on this show James at 15 as a woman who befriends runaway James (The Tate-ish Lance Kerwin, left) thus enabling huge fantasies for boys my age of running away to live on the street with this cool older woman... to escape, as it were, from the terrible onslaught of adult responsibility and social castration that only the city, or death, can bring. I still grieve over Kate. That shit never goes away. Fuck Lance Kerwin. Still, at least he seemed col, running away and shit. Imagine if he was a straight-A moron who played soccer or something. He'd be unbearable.

In AMH, there are advantages to being dead: Violet will never have to go back to school, for example -- no report cards come in the mail. But at the same time she's not entirely sure a life playing cards with Tate is the answer to all death's prayers, or so it seems by her coldly bemused response towards his devotion. In a way she's already 'cooler' than Tate just from knowing him, while he--deprived from knowing himself--becomes like a solved level of a video game -- why go back to playing on it when you've moved up?

Perhaps what is happening to Violet in death is the same thing that happens to us watching Whitney: without obstacles and uncertainty, the ultimate emptiness of our coveted prize comes into focus. The only reward for our struggles is temporarily forgetting what a disappointment the goal will be should we achieve it. Violet's love was wild and Brontë-esque when it was forbidden by her father but now that she literally can't escape Tate's devotion, her love is like a lion in a zoo that on the one hand is grateful to not have to always be threatened by starvation when they fail to make a kill, but frustrated by lack of goal-oriented movement.

Frances Farmer, 1891

Jessica Lang's character understands this in AHS and her final bit of cruel torment to the disfigured burning man shows her Dietrich-like insight into his masochistic condition. She's giving him what he needs, knowing anything less than torment and heartbreak would destroy him.  It doesn't matter if she really loves him or not, as long as she denies she loves him, he'll keep going...

What does matter is that, like Lana Del Rey and very few others, Violet has chosen darkness. Now she dwells within it, nevermore to return to school or write a resume or sit, bored, on the bus.  We can hope the same thing won't happen to Del Rey in 'real life' but the other options are grim as well. Based on the hot young musical prodigies that have come before her--Fiona Apple, Liz Phair, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Bjork, and Alanis M.- there's a very real danger she will get 'quirky' or slick or try too hard to cram in as many jarring chord and tempo changes as possible to every song on her next album, and eventually even become a surgery addicted gargoyle or a seducer of hot young boys half her age, like Jessica Lange's eternally sexy Constance.

(PS - See CinemArchetype 14: Puella Aeterna)

At least we'll always have that first album, song, or movie. We'll always be able to marvel at JL's youthful sexy sizzle in 1981's POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. We don't want to lose our Violets or Lanas, but we lose them too when they get married and have kids. We don't want them grow up any more than we want them to die. We don't even want to keep them just how they are for that matter, but we have no choice. We can only watch and listen to them from our Lazyboy graves, aging and decaying while they stay eternally young, even if it's just for that one damned haunted song.