Brecht and the Single Girl: PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT (1973)

If you're confused about why Italy continually undoes the soundness of the Euro, Elio Petri's PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, a nihilistic anti-capitalist Brechtian satire from 1973, can surely clarify for you toute suite. (Short answer: too many Commies --and they got a funny idea 'bout money.)

The "plot" follows neurotic bank teller Total (Flavio Bucci - the blind pianist in Suspiria) as he tries to escape his meager 9-5 barely-make-ends-meet job, which mainly consists of doling out cash to greedy titans of industry who proudly brag about their non-paying of taxes, oblivious to the seething rage welling up in the little guy who counts their capital. Snapping his pea brain after a robbery, Total becomes obsessed with a rich, corrupt butcher (Ugo Tognazzi), stealing all his signifiers: little butcher hat, favorite carving knife, his car, even his mistress (Daria Nicolodi!). Launching himself on an absurdist Harpo-cum-Karl Marx-Quixote odyssey, Total wind up lost in the out-of-bound weeds of Anarchy. Burning a lire note in his boss's office ("that's sacrilege!") to signify his resignation, he justifies his identity stealing operation by staying 'pure' i.e. not stealing any actual cash: "I'm a Mandrakian Marxist," he announces. "I only steal what I need." By Mandrake, naturally, he means 'the Magician'. When it comes to films equally indebted to crime, communism and comic strips, no one outdpes Elio Petri (The 10th Victim, Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, A Quiet Place in the Country).

While I'm no fan of what I can't help but read as Petri's ingenuità utopica (given allowances for its time and place), I love his deeply cynical reading of a social structure so deeply ingrained most filmmakers don't even notice it's there. The title is confusing mistake, though, a riff on an old anarchist slogan revived for the 60s, when commie ideology was snuck into movie dialogue by leftist filmmakers like Petri, Fernando di Leo and Giuliu Questi. Italians really love the idea that stealing in time of necessity is justified. Obviously they have a violent reaction one way or another to their Catholic guilt, so keep belaboring it, ever evoking the 'bread riots' of the 1940s - as seen in Rossellini's Rome: Open City. (The kind of thing America was briefly allowed to explore (i.e. between the Crash and the Code) in films like Hero for Sale and The World Changes).  Also, they had an establishment much more corrupted and deadlocked government to actually work, so chaos descended. That's why 60s Italian master thief characters like Diabolik (who would be the villains in American comics like Batman) became the heroes of Italy, encouraging the average Italian to smash and grab what they want, leading to rampant crime in the streets and all the other things anti-capitalist Commie subversives would have loved to see become the norm in the US as well. So thank you, Joseph McCarthy, after all!

Property is No Longer a Theft is a child of that mindset in more ways than one. It's on Blu-ray from Arrow, and looks and sounds great, but--if you don't believe in money but do have a Prime subscription, you can pretend you're stealing it by watching it 'free'. Just don't wonder if Arrow suddenly doesn't have any money for new restorations. It's your fault.

What drew me to the title initially (aside from being enthralled by Petri's earlier masterpiece A Quiet Place in the Country) was a recommendation from horror film historian Tim Lucas on Facebook, who pointed out its proto-giallo greatness. Total may not be a crazed killer in high giallo style, but he does threaten people with a knife. Ennio Morricone delivers one of his most surreal breathy scores; Deep Red cinematographer Luigi Kuveller twists the frame with portentous shadows and expressionist angles (lots of doors within doors), star Bucci played the pianist in Suspiria, and longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi (1) looms tall and ungainly-albeit-sexy as Anita, the butcher's mistress. When she lets loose a deep throaty laugh during one of her Brechtian fourth wall-breaking monologues, you might get an instant chill as you recognize her voice's deep masculine depths from so many Argento classics (it's the same laugh from Phenomena, when daring Jennifer Connelly to call her insects, or the mocking, snarling demoness at the Suspiria climax). Since Bucci looks more than a little like Dario Argento himself (with a Dog-eared dash of a young Pacino around the eyes) it would be easy to see Property as a kind of deranged reflection of the Argento-Nicolodi collaborative canon (1), with the Butcher representing typical 'red telephone' Italian filmmaking at the time, and Total the Argento who steers Daria free. But to what end? 

Keeping the giallo framework in mind might help today's 60s-70s-era Italian genre cinema fan keep its odd mix of police corruption and insurance scam satire (we follow the flow of $$ from robbery to insurance claim, to inventory-exaggerating, cop bribing, policy collecting, to thief selling stolen goods back to insurance company, like some giant financial food chain) from getting too mired in either didactic dissertation (In standard Brechtian practice, characters break the narrative flow perhaps too regularly) or Polanski-style young hungry male vs. olde rich male for sexually ravenous younger woman - power triangulating.

Meanwhile, weird characters pop up to keep you guessing: there's the droop-eyed chief of detective (Orazio Orlando) who seems like he's either fishing for a bribe or trying to trap the butcher into a confession with a sense of conspiratorial camaraderie ("If you're not afraid of having it stolen," he notes, during the insurance tally, "you can't enjoy your wealth"); a cross-dressing master thief named Albertone (Mario Scaccia) who teaches Total the trade (and Total in exchange, does nothing but taxes his mentor's weak, albeit big-as-all-outdoors queer heart with his irrational Ledger Joker-x-Harpo Marxist nonsense), and  Cecillia Pollizi as a dyke fence who evokes Lotte Lenya's madame in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone albiet in a  resonant post-glam fashion. There's even Diabolik in a blink-and-miss cameo (below):

Diabolik dies in a posion gas-filled car at a security expo in Property is No Longer a Theft

It's not all surreal Brechtian digressions though. A real unhappy, even if trenchant, thread in the film is the Butcher's and Total's treatment of Anita, and her realization that neither being a sexual object or 'powerful' will generate even a flicker of human compassion from them. It's a rather sad in a reflection of the same objectifying dread animosity towards the opposite sex we see in a lot of neorealist and nouvelle vague works of the time wherein a dash of meta-awareness tries to offset the leering (i.e. make sure her legs are crossed and breasts are heaving while she tallies the day's profits in the window a butcher shop display, sigh. The Symbolism!! Is it not deep?). Naming her various succulent sweet meat body parts while addressing the camera, Petri might be referencing the first part of Godard's Contempt (the part Joe Levine wanted added to include some seat-filling Bardot nudity), or --the theme that clouded the mind of Franco Nero's artist in Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country --one of the classic devil's bargains of European film in the 50s-70s-- the relationship of the sex-hungry producer to the idealistic auteur.

By 1973, though, this was all just a bit didactic. On the the other hand, it's nice she can enjoy sex enough to get her rocks off without losing face in her struggle for gender equality. Petri does leave space for Nicolodi to--as he did for Redgrave did for Quiet Place in the Country--to quietly fill up her character's margins with traits that divulge themselves--Farber termite-style--subtly, on repeat viewing. Watching her face, for example, after the butcher instructs her to cry over the 'stolen' items from Total's first robbery. (claiming h stole way more than he really did, hiding non-stolen jewels in a suitcase in the basement to get more insurance $$). Facing close to the camera in close-up we see her crying increase and decrease based on Pirelli's proximity. When it starts to grate on the butcher's nerves, she stops abruptly and cuts into a vague smile, barely able to reign in her delight at the thought of 'earning' more expensive and useless stuff.

Neither happy nor totally miserable in the life of basically a contracted--albeit relatively well-treated--sex-worker, at least Nicolodi doesn't have to play second fiddle to some harridan wife. She and the butcher live together without any tinge of Catholic guilt. She has a nice job as the cashier at the butcher shop; he trusts her, and he buys her expensive things like nice, presumably real, pearls. She can put up with his macho abuse, aware that--in her own words to the audience--if she wasn't here, she'd still be somewhere else. She doesn't consider any of us--there in some imagined air-conditioned little Italian cinema of her mind--to be any less trapped. At least she's free to enjoy her cage as best she can, rather than just banging her head against the bars in an inevitably-doomed attempt to impress some far-away future feminist studies professor.

The chameleonic sexual personae of Daria: with long black hair as armed mistress (PROPERTY 1973); as can-do, sexually assertive reporter (DEEP RED 1975)

Bearing the meta-textuality still further, we find the butcher and Anita going to the adult movie show where he threatens to "send her back to work at the bar" if she doesn't obediently go down on him. He also hits her when frustrated, which doesn't seem to foster any resentment on her part, beyond a fleeting feeling of shock. On the other hand, he also goes down on her --which we know from pop culture is a sad rarity with Italian men, who consider it demeaning to them. In a way, his slapping her around, and her whining to the camera almost seem like they were thrown in last minute efforts to taint what is essentially the film's only full-formed human relationship. Everyone else treats each other the way they might treat vending machines or food products, Total--for all his commie bellyaching--is the worst of all. In the world of backwards men like Total, his rationalizing father (who enjoys the fruits of his son's thievery but doesn't want to hear where it came from), the crazy cop, the drag queen gang of fur thieves, etc., the butcher is, at the very least, reliable and loyal (he doesn't have a wandering eye). Together he and Anita work to keep a legit business in the black, and after hours they share a certain post-coital simpatico that captures the benefits of long-term casual sexual relationships that are very rarely shown in movies which usually deal only in extremes of rapture or loathing. I love the scene when she abruptly stops him from going down on her in the office while she's counting the days tallies,  by announcing she's hungry and wants a steak. He agrees and gets up and there's a moment they share of simpatico alignment, a relationship without the need for little bambinos and sacred mother-in-law's nagging everyone to go to mass. We can, if we care to, admire the way the trappings of love and family are avoided in favor of a long term simpatico entrainment, the languid way two lovers disengage and prepare to go get something to eat, not really looking at each other but totally aligned; since pleasure, wealth and convenience are the focus, and not God or family or some other phony idolatry, they are fulfilled.

When you see these names in the credits, pounce! 

That may not add up to much in the end, but what really puts it all over into classic status, is the presence of an Ennio Morricone score. Why more composers don't endeavor to follow his lead--the use of antithetical counterpoint and surreal minimalism--is one of cinema's great tragic mysteries. Most composers try to show off all the stuff they learned in music school with a lot of mickey mousing orchestral pomp, dictating our every emotion. Ennio shows how the twang of a jaw harp and a lady whispering urgently but incoherently over discordant guitar stings would work so much better than a 100 piece orchestra. Has Ennio ever done a bad score? (and in the 60s-70s he did like ten or more a year). Certainly this is one of his weirdest and most memorable (and it's on Spotify!) especially during the strange opening credits, which play over overlapped densely colored pencils sketches of all the principle players on paper that resembles marble (but with lire notes for veins) while heavy breathing repetitions of "I.... have" ("avere! av-ere!") pulse over whooshing timpani undercurrents.  Elsewhere little ominous electric bass lines, stabby little mountain king strings, and little cycling piano riffs foreshadow similar pulsing passages in his recent Oscar-winning Hateful Eight score (Hey, we all steal from ourselves - and it suits the subject matter)

Ultimately, the main problem with Theft is a not uncommon one for anti-establishment movies of the period: it gest so busy critiquing the current system, and rebelling against it, it runs out of room to find an alternative. Do communist intellectuals seriously think they'll ever weed the Stalin reality out of their Trotskyist idealism by attacking capitalism's status quo? NEVER!

Sellers takes aim at bourgeois values - The Magic Christian (1969)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL PRINTED-GREEN PAPER

An example of this same problem can be found in 1969's The Magic Christian (above)--a satire of consumer culture not unlike Property-- which finds bored millionaire Peter Sellers and his nephew Ringo learning about the world through staging of some very elaborate (and presumably overpriced) 'freak outs' to blow the minds of standard bowler-and-brolly London-suburb train commuters. You can all but trace the thought lines of these little gags back to a time when access to a flood of freely available, semi-legal high-quality LSD woke artists up to the handrails and structure of modern society. The sudden awareness of the absurdity of money and other social mores --as aesthetic things in and of themselves--are made--while tripping--instantly absurd. The cash in hand is no longer 'invisible' as a symbol for goods and services but a pocketful of green portraits of old men in weird wigs; their strange knotty faces seem to be smiling and winking to your dilating pupils. They seem to be struggling to move; en verso, the eye in the pyramid follows you around the room, blinks, and blazes light, pulling you in towards it like a tractor beam. The fact that 'normal' people don't notice these things is even funnier. "Living is easy with eyes closed." With newly opened eyes, one naturally wants to open the eyes of the sleeping straights around him, even if only for a few flash moments, like one of Jerry Garcia's onstage backflips tripping deadheads often see in concert. Pranksters like Ken Kesey and his magic bus pull over on some random small town main street to run amok for five minutes, then disappear - leaving the sleepy town to wonder if it was all just something they ate. This is art. Important. Maybe pointless. And can get you jailed.

Noble in original intent, it spun out of control too fast - too many idiots taking too much of stuff that was too strong, too often, then clogging up the ER en masse the minute they think they're dying (i.e. the 'only fools rush in' preliminary bad trip bardos); the logistics of the endless stream of runaway kids turning Golden Gate Park into a giant toilet. It was a revolution with nowhere to go.

Take that!

But in Europe, there was a movement of intellectuals ready to absorb the psychedelic culture shocks with deadpan bemusement: Antonioni, whose earlier work like Red Desert explored, in a much more abstract, intellectual way, the collapse of structuralism (even sober, he and Monica were hip to the aesthetic absurdity of bank notes) connected with the turned-on generation in such a way as to help form it (via Blow-up), leading to the idea that by keeping your behavior totally random, and embracing a kind of abstract chaos magic approach to life, you can shimmy down from the symbolic ledge and run 'free' without having to run naked, screaming, down 5th Ave with question marks written all over your body in Day-Glo paint.

Even so, some symbols - like 'Stop' signs are better left heeded for their symbolic message rather than regarded purely as red octagons. Failure to comply could lead to your death by car. Similarly, give your money away like it's a disease and you can drift so far off the grid you can't get back on, which might be important if you want to eat regularly. Screw with your own life at your own risk, and you better take that risk seriously. Vanessa Redgrave isn't playing around.

(see also: Through a Dark Symbol).

Pull the string!

That's the core of what's missing in Petri's Theft - which shows the all-importance of having a good star at the center of a work like this: the closest thing we have to a person to root for is Albertone, the beloved cross-dressing leader of a queer gang of jewel robbers who-- their identity as maligned subculture perhaps leading them towards a group loyalty--are truly grieved by his passing. (though he only shows up in the last third). This being a time when queerness was portrayed in giallos as one more signifier of freaky transgression, drag was a common enough drag sight, a symbol of the split self (and Norman Bates), in Petri's reserving of the bulk of our sympathy for Albertone show that beneath its cynical Brechtian satire, Petri's film has a genuine heart and respect for humanity and artistic perception.

If you can admit your confusion, you earn a pass.

But the price of true post-structuralist realization--of stepping free of the bullshit-- is complete paralysis. Hemmings with the ghost tennis ball in his hand, frozen in contemplation. Without real money, and real balls, the void stretches past even new life and new civilizations - it boldly goes where no man has gone before... but leaves you standing there, just a focal point for the endless nada.

One happy little family, pre-Total

You know where I'm going with this: America got around this anti-money issue with a show called Star Trek where private property no longer existed. Maybe one day we'd grow into it, but only if we didn't rush things. America couldn't afford to be nihilistic about money, not at right then, having used up all our nihilism cards on our all-consuming hobby, Vietnam. But, at least the Cold War helped externalize the Red Menace well enough that we didn't have to fight it in the mirror, unlike some people - ahemItalycoguh. 

But hey - in 1973, crime in New York City was as bad as it was Rome, albeit with less motor-scooter purse snatching (ciao, Scippatori!) and more subway knife-point mugging.

Funny, but hardly surprising, that we took the opposite approach of Italy, whose pop culture tended to idolize the crooks, encouraging readers to fantasize they were like Diabolik, robbing the country blind while bemoaning its collective impoverishment, never getting how the two were linked. Here in the USA it was the reverse, we decided to invoke our second amendment rights and make a stand. Here, we wouldn't cheer these masked crooks at all... we'd... well...let's just say, we gotta guy comin' in, and he knows just how to deal with punks like you. See you soon, pally!

(Charles Bronson Death Wish - 1974)

FURTHER READING:

1. See 'Woman is the Father of Horror' - which I argue that a lot of the success of the great horror auteurs comes from their female writing/producing partners - i.e. Debra Hill, Daria Nicolodi, Gale Ann Hurd.

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

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

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

Casting Jonbenet

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

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

Kitty/ Kitty/ Kitty Green

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

This, whatever it is, is it.

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

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

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

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

The elderly exit the womb (Mulholland Dr.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

The Ingenue/Mistress to the Mob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

AUDITION AS VOYEURISTIC ILLUMINATI SEX RITUAL 

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

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

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

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

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

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

PSYCHE FLOOR PLAN

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

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

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

First Floor

(Controlled by the Ego)

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

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

POINT OF SEMI-CONSCIOUSNESS

(the fishing line)

steps down - transitional from awake to asleep'

THE BARRIER DOOR

--Water Surface--

BASEMENT

(controlled by the Anima)

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

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

SECOND BARRIER

Laundry Chute 2

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

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

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

-TRUTH OF (Traumatic) EVENT 

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

BIG FISH

---

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

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

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

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

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

FURTHER:

Ms. Icarus Risen: THE BLACK SWAN

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

Now Bleed for Me: THE WRESTLER

Make up yr Mind Control: EYES WIDE SHUT

DOGVILLE vs. MONSTER

Summer of my Plastic Soldier: BLOW-UP (1966)

Is Antnioni's breakthrough 1966 English language film BLOW-UP a masterpiece, a dull meditation on artifice, a sober intellectual's wrongheaded attempt to duplicate the confusion of a drug experience, a Marxist critique of the high-end fashion industry, or the most psychedelically brilliant film in the world? Correct, yes, maybe, certainly not, and No... but yeah, baby --its date of release, 1966, tells you all you need to know. BLOW-UP was as iconic and 'scene-launching' as Andy's soup cans, the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It was 'the' thing to see in theaters if you wanted to be 'hip'. It heralded a slew of films rife with modern/post-modernist deconstructed high fashion pretty person disaffect, art critique, ambiguity, cool music, and--depending on the country and filmmaker--draggy leftist politics. You can chart its blast radius in all genre directions, from romance to western to horror to comedy and--most of all--to artsty posing.

1966 London was, by all the stretches, a fabulous time and place to be young, rich, artistic and pretty. If you had even two of those things going on, all you needed was for some pop-eyed freak to toss you a capsule of LSD or mescaline or pass you the joint and BAM! You were one of the cool kids. No turning back, or need to. The crazy scene reached out to meet you. The whole happening thing was... happening...

Words didn't work on it. Only art. Music. Sights. Images. Tactile shapes. Language was little more than a falling away booster rocket. If you needed to explain, you'd already blown it. 

Nowadays when I go to an art gallery--even in Soho--I'm kind of amazed at all the tourists--even the Europeans--struggling to seem 'overwhelmed' by the bland conceptual installations. It's as if the idea of aesthetic beauty or visible talent has been forgotten, making the need to even show up to the gallery kind of passe. You can just read the description, and if you like it, buy it (the description I mean, as it might be all there is). When I worked at the Cohen Gallery dealing with a lot of Chagall oils and Dubuffet mixed media pieces (the latter clearly just childish magic marker scribble on thin copy paper taped to a canvas - probably he was doing hundreds in one sitting on large pieces of paper, which were then cut up and glued to canvasses by assistants) for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. Usually hung-over, I always wondered what in the hell could people see in these piece of shit canvasses that I didn't. What a lot of rot, I thought. Most of this stuff was done by assistants, the artist maybe showing up to sign them or maybe not. The idea of one-of-a-kind masterpieces was lost in the rush to crank out maximum product with minimum effort.

Then one Tuesday I came back from a very long psychedelic weekend in Vermont and staggered into work where a whole collection of Chagalls were on display, suddenly I got it. Or at any rate, the tiny little lines that made up Chagall's endless drawings of floating chickens and fiddlers on  roofs finally seemed interesting--alive and swirling like a bunch of little spiders weaving wedding gowns. The real (as in ink and clay on canvas) Dubuffets seemed to drip mud and anger and primal gravitas. My eyes, in short, were open--or maybe I was hallucinating. Anything would look good to me, and maybe that was the point. Was the point of the whole art world thing just a means to show off how deep you saw, how druggy all the time your vision was, a kind micro-tripping hallucinational envy? The rest of the world looked at a Rothko or a Twombly and rolled their eyes - "you payed how much for this? I wouldn't even let my five year-old daughter put this on our fridge!?"

Antonioni seems to have been born with such open ever-hallucinating eyes, and so in the newly turned-on 'scene' of 1966 swinging London, he found an audience that had at last caught up with him and his obsessive delight in signifier-dissonance and juxtaposing aesthetics. In Antonioni's hands, the whole emerging pop scene became what Duchamp's "Fountain" had been fifty years earlier --a pot for the whole world to piss in. 

I love Antonioni, but only when I'm strung out on deep art (or whatever else you got). In the wrong mood---the "I'm an American, and I'm here to escape" mood-- I find his work somewhat monotonous. As with watching Kubrick's 2001, what might be a deep spiritual experience one night is a snooze the next. I'm also really attuned to the engagement level of those I'm watching a film with, and BLOW-UP is the sort of film destined to make a lot of guests shift in their seats, sigh, and check their cell phones; and if they do, then I, too, am over it. So I usually watch it alone, late at night, when the Chagalls are squiggling and the air breathes itself in the theater of my enraptured lungs. And if I can't get into the groove after twenty minutes, then I just bail for another time. It ain't going nowhere. It's already gone. 

But hey -Blow-Up abides. Argento fans love it for it holds a key to his whole aesthetic. You can usually tell whose films were affected by it --as suddenly David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave are in just about every cool movie being made (Hemmings in Deep Red, Redgrave in A Quiet Place in the Country, etc.) And Hemmings' photographer in Blow-Up could well be the pianist in Deep Red. 

Strutting and cocky and brutal with his unstained white pants and ruthless artist's open eye, Hemmings' photographer shags a lot of mod birds, or at least takes pics of them (and what's cool about him is that the latter is more important - he's genuinely driven by his art, the cock follows a distant second, never upsetting the apple cart of his drive for great pictures), and he drives a snazzy pint-sized convertible, the kind you step down to get into, which is clearly the inspiration for the one driven decades later by Austin Powers. It's his happening and it freaks him out, in theory.

But it's not all eye-con-ography and groovy clothes; a snail's paced mid-section finds Hemmings in his dark room "blowing up" part of a shot he took in Hyde Park, a section of bushes under which he thinks might be a hiding a dead body. He blows and blows until the pixels are shilling-size, and Atonioni patiently follows along, hypnotized by the empty white space (and no music) of Hemmings alone in his studio, blowing and blowing. It's enough to drive a snail restless.

With her 'working-class Garbo' hair and 'bantamweight Bankhead' shoulders, Vanessa Redgrave shows up as the desperate bird (trying to get the Hyde negative) and seems to have wandered in from a different movie. For a hot minute the film seems poised to follow her and leave Hemmings behind. The still molten new set of signifier chains rattle with the weary weight of a tourist changing dictionaries at some Blockbuster aisle border --but Hemmings won't have it. It's not like he has an old cop war buddy to call on for help like Jimmy Stewart does in Rear Window. He just want to see.

Alas, to his stunned chagrin, no one in his stoner circle he runs to that night will believe him about the body, so his wannabe thriller never gels. He's conscripted to the hipsters not the detectives, and-- by the end--even mime tennis seems like the most leaden of federal prison chores compared to the murder mystery that's sailed on without him.

Paranoid alien hunters who spend their lunch hours looking for alien artifacts on topographical NASA photos of the moon and Mars will surely relate, both to Hemming's obsession with jumping matrixes, and my personal frustration with Antonioni's oeuvre. Either way, the bird flies off, but Antonioni's still in the dark room. Now the pixels are the size of grapefruits and yeah, there's a body there, all right. Maybe... isn't there? If there is, he'd be a fool to get involved and we begin to feel like the only one who wants to keep watching this colossal waste of cinematic time-space is Francis Coppola so he can then go make The Conversation; De Palma, so he can make Blow-Out; Argento, so he can make Bird with Crystal Plumage (1970); Giulio Questi so he can go make Death Laid an Egg (1968) and Elio Petri so he can make A Quiet Place in the Country (1968 - with Redgrave). The rest of us just want to get on out of that goddamned studio and soak up the sultry London air.... where the birds are, and all those valuable guitar necks just laying in the streets like objets-detritus..

What I 'mean' is that, at a packed rock club that Hemmings visits to find his 'friend who'll know what to do' (about the body), we find the Yardbirds are engaging in a cutting contest between their twin guitar soloists: Jimi Page and Jeff Beck. Page surges to victory as Beck's amp-cord-guitar connection is crackly to connect. This so frustrates poor Jeff  he smashes his guitar and hurls the neck into the crowd (this was a year before Monterey Pop made such acts of catharsis a obligatoire symbole of rebellious youth). Well, now our photographer friend is caught up in the pre-mosh/pre-slam dancing packed frenzy to get that guitar neck and he proves himself adept at the kind of selfish oomph it takes in a situation like that. He grabs it, fights his way out to the empty, indifferent London street with it, and then--seeing no one else is still around to fight over it with-- casts it aside like some old broken chew toy, an objet valuable only in relation to what the suckers, I mean the other dogs, will pay.

Comparing with the old wooden airplane propellor he haggled over with the antique store owner earlier that same afternoon, one wonders: if he saw that same propellor just abandoned in a back alley trash bin, would he have wanted it so badly?  Is it not, like the broken guitar neck, just trash once shorn of its usefulness? Would the propellor cease to be an art object once attached to a plane?

Though we can imagine him selling the guitar neck in 40 years to the Hard Rock Cafe, that would mean authenticating it, which would be hard, and keeping it safe in storage for decades on the off chance it would one day have value.