PSYCHO-poetics

This year's MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is clearly HITCHCOCK (2012), a transparent Oscar courtier whose commercials alone infuse me with dismay.  I've seen PSYCHO a trillion times! I own it! Saw it again just last night, at home, safely avoiding the shower --for other reasons! The water.... its fluoride inhibits my pineal gland's full third eye functions. I bathe only in grain alcohol and branch water now, Mandrake. And as a result I see deep into the black eye pupil drain of the curtain-ripping Crane...

But to all this tawdry bourgeois Hollywood self-praise: OY VEY! Now, ED WOOD and SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, these were great in that they went to weird places, making arcane connections between the crazies behind the camera and the supernatural-ish magic of the screen. If you were going to make a movie about Hitchcock making SABOTAGE, or even SABOTEUR, that would be great, maybe, because they're more obscure. But PSYCHO? Making showers safe for the whole family? I mean, there's a goddamned make-your-own-shower-scene Universal 'ride.' And to make it relevant the best the commercials can do is have a mildly portly Hopkins say "try the ladyfingers... they're made with real fingers," reducing his genius down to mere macabre bad taste.

So what indignant bastardization of the artistic process is next? A Nirvana biopic with Edward Norton as Kurt Cobain, directed by Ron Howard and starring, of course, Amy Adams as Courtney Love?

There's a reason PSYCHO should stay off the Academy-self-congratulatory Oscarbait table: as the bloody mile marker between 50s repression and 60s drive-in liberation it needs its disreputable patina, what Pauline Kael would call it's 'dirty kick' to stay relevant, and the makers of HITCHCOCK have turned it into a family-friendly "aren't we being naughty" pasteurization. Give it a few more years and Hollywood will be nominating films about the importance of the Oscars as an American institution (PS they already did) eventually strangling their own self-strangling to the point where they can only award Oscars to films about the awarding of Oscars to films about the award... and then finally it will crash through the mirror screen floorboards and behold its own hideous heart and that, alone and finally, will be worth filming.

You can't buy off unhappiness with pills

I understand the need for vainglory and idolatry and I don't judge so much as sympathize, because it's universal. Anytime there's a Zen master pointing a finger at the moon, Hollywood makes a film about a finger... and a boy who wanted the moon... together on an incredible journey! The finger gets paid millions and the moon is forgotten. Or at the very least, the beauty of the moon as seen by the Zen master is forgotten. The moon is way up there and doesn't take direction so they hire a young actor named Tyler Zachary to wear a moon head. He's such a hit that his moon make-up and angular face are how people think of the moon from then on. They don't look at the moon anymore at all. Why would they? They have Zachary. The moon is just so.... I don't know, Zacharyless? They try to project Zachary's face on the moon but it's just too far away, so.... what is the phrase, 'public domain'?

Is there some way, they ask their legal team, that we could block the moon from the sky while the Zachary moon is in theaters, or sue it for copyright violation?

...they all cluck their thick tongues...

But 20 years later, Zachary's forgotten, just a VH1 has-been; his moon head prop is sold at Christie's for $40,000 while no one even wants him in a Blue Mountain Dog Food commercial.

Another 20 years, and finally they make a movie about the beautiful dreamers who made this movie about the moon all those years ago, and Zachary gets a cameo as a street bum gesticulating furiously upwards but no one will look. And in this films about the dreamers who made the movie about the finger pointing at the moon, Hollywood celebrates its ability to celebrate itself in a showcase galleria setting.

Who needs anything to say about the actual moon, the one that started it all, when the finger, in its trajectory of upwards pointing, is so perfectly lit?

We're all trapped in our private prisons

The process of shooting movies may be fascinating but it's hardly relevant to the final product and its effects on our national psyche. Would Mona Lisa still be a masterpiece if we learned it was painted in some haphazard way? We'd have to watch the artist through every step to adequately judge the final result, to make sure Da Vinci wasn't on steroids, or the artistic equivalent, shrooms.

If we forget that need to analyze the making of vs. the need to experience the film as a film in and of itself then we forget PSYCHO was a lot more than a shower scene. We forget the movie and just think of the one image, the one iconic shot that makes it to the postcards, T-shirts, Oscar montages and DVD reissue covers. You can shoot the shower scene all you want, over and over--and they have--but it won't mean a thing without the surrounding scenes, and the movie as a whole. Without the slow weird fake-out embezzlement afternoon tryst build-up, the paranoid voiceovers in the brain of Marion Crane, her eyes wide as the moon, or the touching sandwich in the taxidermy room, the shower scene is just an avant garde surrealist shock short. It's like you're half asleep watching TV's ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS and suddenly a phantom TV signal (from Samara's art film repertoire in THE RING, or the VIDEODROME channel, or the eye-slitting sections of PERSONA, LA CHIEN ANDALOU) comes through, shattering the peaceful broadcast and ensuring entertainment will never be the same.

That's what the shower scene should be, NOT a ride at Universal Studios, damn it. It defeats the whole purpose!

"You can't buy off unhappiness with pills" Marion says to Pat Hitchcock early on, and isn't that what the makers of HITCH are doing, trying to buy off Oscar with pills? Better they should remake LA CHIEN ANDALOU as a color mini-series, starring Naomi Watts... and with liquid pianos oozing from the CGI bullet holes

As always with the great films, no matter how many times you see them, each time is different. For me this time it was the way the events of the film's progressive diegesis are encoded throughout its framework, like fractals. What, is that kind of talk too fancy for reductivist Oscar? "HITCHCOCK's about ADDAMS FAMILY-style ghoulish delight in sadistic killing, but it's okay because the ghoul is portly and thus sexually unthreatening" -- that's the HITCHCOCK promotional subtext. I can bring diegesis encoding down to earth too. Zachary, get ready with that finger!

You know how, in VERTIGO, you get the feeling that Stewart is somehow always still on the ledge, all through the events of the rest of the film, that it's all a nether region between life and death, that his hanging there corresponds to an ancient alchemical realization about the true nature of life and death and all art and searching as a distraction from the void?
It's in PSYCHO , too.  The Fra ct a l s . . 

From the skull-like shades of the Charon-like cop gatekeeper, who wakes up Marion from her nap by the side of the highway (into the dream), to the shower curtain-like bars on the hotel headboard behind Marion in the opening sex scenes, or the way Marion goes through a whole scene without blinking while driving, Hitchcock's every shot reflects the whole: every pattern and motif repeats, encoded throughout. A story of small scale murders and crime is revealed as an example of kaleidoscopic macro-genius that's so much more than "the ladyfingers.... made from real fingers." It's about the impossibility of linear time and how if you're going to die sometime over the course of your life--even if only at the very, very end--then you are dead already. You can take as many MULHOLLAND DRIVE pictures as you want, Jake-- it's always snake eyes. You lose, again.

But there's always rewind.

Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

As the age of Pisces ends, and June munches through its seed pod servings, and apocalypse-- according to nearly every ancient culture--approaches, now more than ever we must ask: Are we going to go out in style, like Slim Pickens riding his H-Bomb stallion. or like that old married couple who can't stop fighting about which way to turn even as their car goes roaring off a cliff? Pick Pickens, America, and then buckle up for these awesome flashback-inducing documentaries that explore the area where psychedelia, psychopharmacology, quantum entanglement, God and literature all mix.

I've rated them at the end of each description for saliva-thickening aspects, i.e. that aftershock, pre-trip flashback tingle when your mouth feels electric and your saliva slows to an aching crawl and your teeth start to clench, your pupils dilate and the hairs on your neck rise. That flashback saliva thing is sometimes annoying, it brings a lot of emotional baggage (remembering the lost highs and peaks in a deep, painful imprint way it took me decades to get over) which is why I sometimes avoid these sorts of films, even though they are the very foundation of this blog's raison d'etre! 

Today, for example, being back at work, I feel hungover and sad, just from the flashbacks induced by this first film:

Magic Trip

(2011) Dir. Alison Ellwood
***

In 1964, three years before the summer of love, an era when, as Jimi Hendrix lamented, there was only surf music on the radio, Ken Kesey, famous for his acclaimed Cuckoo's Nest, went on a magic bus trip with an orange juice bottle spiked with LSD, a group of friends and lovers, and speed freak Neal Cassady at the wheel. Did beauty and truth ensue? Perhaps later, but in the beginning their magic bus looks more like it's embarking on one of those early 1960s surfer journeys, as in The Endless Summer, with everyone's all buzz-cut and folkie and wearing big unflattering red and blue striped shirts. He comes across mythic in Kerouac stories but in person, beat relic Neal Cassady seems to be like just some twisted methed-up townie ("he would never shut up" someone notes) and the bus keeps breaking down, and there's endless goofing instead of fixing, and the usual sexism, so the smarter girls, get out at the first train station and head back to their 9-5 jobs. Smart move, ladies! I've often wished I could do that when our band tours would start out badly, but if you do bail, then you're left out of the myth, presuming there is a myth, but how would you know back at the pupae stage? It takes years and you never know who amongst the horde of idiots gibbering in the back is going to turn out to to be the Thomas Wolfe or Kerouac or whomever will immortalize you in decades to come. Anyway, pass that damn orange juice!

Yes, the good acid is finally dispensed at an Arizona watering hole, the color 16mm film is loosed from its can and finally myth takes wing. Highlights include: epiphanies at Yellowstone because of a sign that says "Beware of the Bear" ("it used to be about being aware of the bear, but now it's just beware," Kesey laments); nervous "We're the only white people here" moments at a colored beach in Louisiana; a cold welcome at the Ivy League estate of Tim Leary (office-mate Albert-about-to-be-Ram-Dass is nicer, thankfully); a world's fair that imagines America as an all-white Jetsons tail-fin miracle that's already outdated by the time the pranksters pull in; the growing disenchantment with speed freak Cassady and his friend, the morose drunkard Jack Kerouac (Allen Ginsberg comes off as nicer, thankfully), and so forth. Kesey explains that the drugs were "part of our American personality -- you try go down deeper in the ocean and higher in the sky - these drugs were opening us up to new landscapes." No shit, Sherlock!

I guess you had to be there, and twisted yourself. But that's the deal --you need to be twisted to appreciate the beauty of the Magic Trip, but you'll never be as twisted, apparently, as they were. Because--as they so clearly like to think--they broke the mold. They were doing it to discover America, and then America did it to emulate them, and now we all want to glom onto their speedy Zen kicks because we read Dharma Bums and it moved our assemblage point and opened our third eye. But dig, man, our eye will never be as open as theirs (they think). They took it as far as anyone could, so now you better sober up and just read Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That's the sour note being struck here, because--after a trumped-up pot bust got him jailed--Kesey cut a deal to renounce the acid. He was bid play his pipe and lead the rats out of town. He decreed this all had been a test, "the acid test" and he and his pranksters 'graduated' and the hordes of thrill-seekers and runaway dirtbags that descended on the Haight like a plague of locusts did not, the test was over, they failed because they were absent during test time. And now the allotted times is over. Turn in your pencils and go home, o errant wanderers, go back to your parent's Christian basements.

Zane Passes!

But is it really that simple? I'd vote we need to start recognizing the historical importance of today's dirty hedonists as legends in progress! Instead of putting Kesey's magic bus into a museum let's teach the kids to paint their own and go easing down the road. Why should the rantings of Kesey and company be gospel and the rantings of today be 'just' ranting? When Kesey notes "this wasn't literature anymore, this had jumped off the pages... and onto the streets," we can snicker at his cliche'd idealism and believe it at the same time, because the truth often comes caked in soapy crap. "Something is happening that is so new," Kesey says about the establishment's knee-jerk demonization, "they're scared beyond any power of reasoning." Asked whether he regretted taking acid for that Stanhope experiment that started it all, Kesey notes, "I think it's a good experience, every time you see more." Hey man, it's your trip.

Saliva thickening: 6.666

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

2012 -****

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohm! In case you were born in some insane dimension where all the keys to chemically-enhanced enlightenment have been made into felonies for no real sane logical reason you should know Dr. Rick actually got legal clearance to do DMT studies by the big Health Overlords. He recruited dozens of subjects and gave them massive doses of DMT in a safe space, and then recorded their impressions once they cam back to reality. The results? Mind-blowing but inconclusive, raising more questions than offering answers. Luckily this documentary helps us realize the only answer to whether hallucinations are real or vice versa is that real itself is a meaningless phrase. If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists suggest--it is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's experiments that he now feels a little guilty. Is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah or an apex predator Albert Hoffman? Other heads talking include Daniel Pinchbeck and the 'other' McKenna...Dennis, and there's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscope eyefuls.

Joe Rogan narrates, in black and white to give the illusion you're watching this in fourth grade science class, which you should be. I donated money to help get this film finished!

Saliva thickening content: 10

2012: Mayan Prophecy 

and the Shift of the Ages

 2009 - ***

Dude! I remember this as being good, but man they do show a lot of the same stock footage of natural disasters over and over again, especially some shots of a fire bravely eating away the side of a building. I dig the use of the Terence McKenna timewave study, though, and the idea that 'inner time travel' will one day be the new back, if you get my weird meaning. Because it's made in 2009, they're a little more confident in their doomsaying than some of the more recent Mayan docs, and even so they realize that the future lies within, not without. It may take light years to get to the next galaxy but that's only if you need to lug your body. If you can go with just your mind it takes less than no time at all. In fact, time itself reverses so you get there before you left!

Salvia thickening content - 3.9

Robert Thurman - Buddhism.

2-Part Series - ***1/2

There's big arguments between trippers and 'hardcore' Buddhists about which path is 'correct' -with hardcore Buddhists insisting that drug epiphanies, meditation 'shortcuts,' don't 'count.' But to me that's absurd. Even if, as they say, LSD is the helicopter ride to the roof of the mountain (i.e. we get to look but can't stay long enough to legally change our address), so what? In our ADD age, no one wants to waste their time meditating if it's not going to pay off. So let them go see the mountain and be sure there actually is a destination to work towards. That's what happened with Ram Dass, after all, and his documentary, Fierce Grace, is also on Netflix, if you want to go in that direction. And there's a Wavy Gravy documentary too if you want to go in the other.  I'm still at the crossroads, hanging by my left foot.

Because ultimately if we dabble in psychedelics in search of the truth, and that truth leads us to an ashram, but then we don't go in because we don't want to join a cult and the cult doesn't think we came there honestly anyway, then were we ever really truth-seekers or were we just bored and young and psychedelics and meditation offered a way out of our depression in the time before SSRIs? And are the cult members really humbler than thou or just pissed they didn't dare use your quicker method to get to the same place? And if we shun the ashram with its commitments and robes and many-armed deities, might we instead become addicted to the sound of helicopters, always hoping this next ride up to the top of mountain will be the one where we can get out and stay, skipping in the process all the chapters about self-discipline and humility?

It's the clinging to the skids of expectation, dragging our Apocalypse Now heads through the palm trees, it's the tired feeling when you see your 300th punter waving a glow stick and saying under his breath "OmanI'mtrippin'sohard" and you feel like you're still wading in a sea of melted kindergarten crayons while ever-younger kids ask you for doses. Better to just jump out the window and hope you fly, like Superman. That's what all the hysteric anti-drug crusaders think LSD makes you do anyway...

No worries about any of that, though, or enduring any dogma, grandiosity, judgment or incoherence when listening to Uma Thurman's dad, the great Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. You would think an old white guy, with a glass eye and a gorgeous movie star daughter, speaking for an hour and a half via a two camera set-up wouldn't be so riveting, but his tongue speaks much wisdom, and since it's sheathed in scholarly wit and humble perspective it goes down smooth as the pangs of truths you feel you forgot rather than never knew. And if you still don't think Buddhism is trippy, just realize that before she married Thurman, Uma's mom was married to... that's right.... Timothy Leary. Tibetan Book of the Dead, thou art connected!

 Through powers of pronoia I've traced the whole Uma lineage back to benevolent Nordic alien ancestors who helped manipulate our DNA so that there could be gorgeous blonde Swedes, who helped the original Buddha clean the land of reptilian demons so modern day humans could get a toehold, and who then opened up the still-developing human mind with the most potent of angelic wand taps, the doctor's delivery room spank of wisdom. I you dare to believe it! Let the music leaf off the page and finally become aware... of the bear.

Saliva thickening - 11.2

American Horror Hotel California Story

 Mirrors on the ceiling, The pink champagne on ice
And she said 'we are all just prisoners here, of our own device'
And in the master's chambers, They gathered for the feast
The stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast - Eagles ("Hotel California")

The Eagles' 1976 song "Hotel California" and the awesome new FX show, American Horror Story are two peas in a grisly pod--along with Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood Babylon--that circumscribe the broken longing of Los Angeles. Hearing it as a kid (I was nine when it debuted on the radio) the dark eroticism of the song carried a queasy black magick power. Whatever those L.A. people were doing, it was evil, dark, and underscored by a sexual longing I felt deep within my polymorphously  perverse childhood soul.

 The song's lyrics painted a grim portrait of what might be called the Land of Hungry Ghosts, the Buddhist hell where everyone is ravenous with hunger and cursed with tiny mouths at the end of long, painfully thin tube-like necks. "Stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" might very well be an illusion to cocaine, with the knives being used for the flat ends to distribute coke bumps, but no amount of coke able to kill the beast, the jones for more that ever threatens to turn success and fame and endless groupies and booze and drugs into a living hell, as easy as a still drunk from the night before morning gradually grays into a cruel, blue condition. Worse than an average Christian hell, where one at least is allowed to suffer loudly and unabashedly, in the California hell one must act as if they are always having the time of their lives, for if they fail the whole scene could implode on them, the veil pulled away to see that the glitterati at your back porch Laurel Canyon party are all grungy ghosts who bought their way in with mountains of coke and are already telling everyone you're their best friend, and it's too late you already got rid of your wife and kid so you could party 24/7 - it's too late to admit the mistake, the blindness, so you just snort and shoot and drink more and hope to blot out the grisly alien demon look of your joneser entourage which has gradually, without you knowing when or how, become all strangers. As Lili Taylor said in Abel Ferrara's THE ADDICTION, "We drink to forget we're alcoholics. We seek relief from the addiciton, but the addiction is the only relief we can find." Or as Taiyu describes it in "Buddhism and Recovery:"

"In Buddhism there is a myth about a hell-realm populated by beings whose appetites exceed their capacity for satisfaction. Their stomachs are huge but their throats are tiny. No matter how much they try to eat, their hunger remains. In ancient India, they are called hungry ghosts. We call them alcoholics and drug addicts... We eat and drink and smoke and use and gamble and love and lust and shop and exercise and obsess about anything that resolves the sense of incompletion, imperfection, or suffering we find inside."

The Hungry Ghost blueprint fits perfectly over the great new TV series on F/X, American Horror Story, which indulges in the 'post-10 PM sex-and-violence' slot trend to weave a multi-generational yarn about a large haunted house in the heart of Los Angeles that's acted as a focal point for a whole history of Hollywood murders--from the Richard Speck nursing home to the Black Dahlia's killing floor. In this week's episode we have the haunted-looking Mena Suvari playing the 1947 murder victim Dahlia, whose history became an emblem of the evils of 'Hotel California,' the sun-baked sin city where slimy predators take advantage of pretty, starstruck youngsters as a matter of course. Here we learn the truth is far less lurid, just a cover-up by a shaky dentist after he dies in her chair from an allergic reaction to his gas. But that's par for the AH course -- all the sordid evils of our LA nocturne imagination are simultaneously more mundane and more supernatural than we could e'er imagine.

But imagine we do, here in the rest of America, wherefrom we view the kind of druggy, sex-saturated, fame-whoring lifestyle L.A. indulges in as a vacuous fantasy. Middle America has families to worry about, they don't have to worry about the despair of those whose vacuous rock and roll fantasies are realized. L.A. rock stars like the Eagles can actually get enough drugs and sex with their rock and roll that it it's a fantasy no longer, and so it no longer keeps the lonely terror at bay, and they realize that while they checked in any time they liked, they can never leave. Guitar solo! BrawnabreeEEeaoum brau-brewarrrooooomm-rip!

The Black Dahlia became the pin-up girl for those who'd tried to make the dream come true and almost died as a result, or were abducted into a cult, or whatever the hell happens to those too wide-eyed to notice all the vultures gathered for the feast. And there's a meta charge to the casting of Suvari since in past years she appeared to be under the spell of some kind of eating disorder in the wake of her sudden surge to fame via AMERICAN BEAUTY (1997). On a subsequent SNL appearance her wild eyes, bird-like mannerisms and darkened teeth, all indicated something just not right; she's come out of it super strong in recent years and has been active in pro-women's esteem-style causes. Luckily for us she was still able to capture the sense of needy desperation in her portrayal of the forlorn ghost of Janice Short last night, bringing a ghostly sexuality that is so needy it simultaneously arouses and spooks us.

 

The hungry ghost / sexual sacrifice on the tortuous wheel of insatiable lust motif permeates American Horror Story. It is so L.A., and the actors playing desperate Hollywood fortune seekers broken on the rocks of skeevy casting couches clearly tap into their own experiences before finding their footing. The house maid Moira (Frances Conroy) is a ghost who appears as a young hottie incarnation (Alexandra Breckenridge) of herself to desiring men - clouding their perceptions, exposing them to judgment from their daughters when they're seen fooling around with a woman old enough to be their grandmother in the library. We in the audience are forced into a very creepy realization by this one-two switch: all hot young women become old and unsexy eventually so our desire for their young flesh and revulsion toward the old is suddenly revealed as a kind of fever dream grab at immortality. And most of all, we're faced with the question what is more important - that our friends think the girl we're shagging is hot, but we find her hideous - or vice versa? We can't overestimate the idea that the value of beauty in women lies largely in our status amongst our peers for 'having' them. Even in bed with a goddess we may be doomed to savor it not, imagining only instead the high fives and admiration to come the next day amidst our inner circle, being anxious to get to that. In other words, even in the moment of our ultimate desire's realization we instinctively pull away -- already reflecting on what it will be like to have had our desire realized. And Lacan smiles knowingly at your disillusion. He shouts, "Now! Now take a look around you and see things as they really are!" But you are already staring at a hot chick sitting down to dinner in the master's chambers.... with the Eagles. Lucky bastards.

Last night's episode showed that this clouding can be broken through via a man who is able to refuse his desires for a purpose other than fear or guilt. In this case Dr. Ben Harmon (Dylan McDermott) is able to refuse not one but two seduction attempts that are created straight out of the Penthouse forum pages, and Ben--who we know from earlier episodes is pretty weak-willed and considers his sexual needs a priority over all else-- has good reason to act on his fantasies: his wife and daughter out of the house (we never see the daughter in the entire episode), and learning of his wife's infidelity as the perfect excuse. 

That he does not, even with no strict moral impetus hanging over his neck, is what breaks the spell. Buddhists call this 'moksha' or the ability to transcend ego via the abandoning of the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, tedium, etc. The realization whatever we run from chases us and whatever we chase runs, therefore we find pain always hot on our heels and pleasure always just out of reach. Or as the Eagles song goes: "Some dance to remember, some dance to forget." And it's the same dance either way. The pain of remembrance exists only in relation to our resistance, just as pleasure exists largely in terms of its delay. Ben's big breakthrough this episode was a refusal of the hungry ghost appetite even though fear of being caught became no longer a factor.  In other words, even with no witnesses and no possible reward for his asceticism, he chooses it anyway, and this is the only time it's ever worth a damn, for morality under the gun is only obsequiousness, itself a kind of sin. To thine own self be true, but is lust true?

That said, a lack of appetite for illusion has no place in haunted Los Angeles. The ghosts in his house, such as his ex-mistress student Hayden (Kate Mara), long and pine and remain trapped in perpetual hungry ghost longing. But on the other hand, they don't have to pay rent! They don't have to sleep, or eat, or go to work, or face rejection by the outside world. As the song goes "this may be heaven or this may be hell" and in Hotel California the difference is erased, just as the dance is both to remember and to forget. Either way we play it we can still hear the voices calling from far away, waking us up in the middle of the night, just to hear them say "thanks for coming in but I'm afraid we're looking for someone just a little bit younger."

Die like an Eagle: ENTER THE VOID (2009)

ENTER THE VOID is the first drug movie of the 22nd century, so far ahead of its time it's behind it. Centuries from now humans will look at it and laugh: how little we knew of the afterlife, of the fourth through ninth dimensions! Gaspar Noé's warper is the first receding light in the void of what we don't yet know about death. A little over two hours, it's five hours too long. It renders all pornography obsolete, dicing and slicing at fear and desire until nothing is left and everything is revealed. I imagine this film in a room with the films of Americans of similar ballsy-mindedness, like Vincent Gallo, David Lynch, Larry Clark, and Darren Aronofsky--all of whom have a similar push me-pull you thing going with drugged-out sex workers and heartbeat/rapid breath-synched sound walls--and I imagine them all getting jealous and competitive like it's James Dean on planetarium day.  If they were all playing chicken, only Gaspar would have the guts to sail off the cliff.. laughing all the way. Whose car are you going to ride along in, even if it is kind of battered and has those fuzzy day-glo dice? Sometimes day-glo is enough, and guts all over the windshield, and roller coasters, MILFs, MDMA, DMT, GHB, music box Bach, urns, car crashes... No, no, Noé, you had me at goodbye!

The term 'liberation' means different things to different nations, and people, but in every sense of the word there's something liberating about the traumatizing violence in VOID (I'm glad to say there's no brutal rape scene--at least in the cut I saw--so sensitive poetic males like me and the mentally challenged janitor at the end of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN can rest easy). That's not to say there's no trauma, but it's a productive kind- the kind you feel at the bottom of a K-hole, or after a day of dry-heaving through the bottom of a four week bender, a feeling it can't get no lower, a feeling you've reached your AA bottom and will be telling of this day for anniversary meetings in the years to come and even though no seaweed mermaid mom taxi will come to take you away down the comode pipes it hardly matters, since absolutely nothing worse can happen to you. It's the blacksmith on the Pequod showing off his epidermis: "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou scorch a scar." Now you're free of scorching! It's what enables MARATHON MAN to throw a fortune in diamonds at Laurence Olivier. Away, away, into the selfsame sewer sea. And it's Ahab, beckoning you follow those diamonds down. Now that you're free, Tokyo.

Aronofsky reaches for the scars, the diamond-tossing in the heart monitor undertow of THE WRESTLER and the eye-rape editing of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and the collapsing tent of Marion Crane identity in THE BLACK SWAN, but he's still too American not to flinch or sync his key lights. If he could let all that go, America might finally have as much sex and vacation as France. Instead we get a hungry ghost monkey on our back screeching "show us your tits" at random intervals, chasing all our opportunities away. The fraternité thing enables the French to embrace the surrender, the weening, the realization that chasing your little death down the red light district alleyway, or racing through the airport to give a proper goodbye kiss to your departing Aniston, isn't going to postpone facing the Black Swan demon in the mirror.

The French get the joke, because they know the sting of occupation.  America has not yet admitted complete defeat, while France has done the 12 steps, from Vichy to la Resistance. In World War Two France forked over its lunch money rather than getting its beautiful hair sullied in the pissoir and so they saved Paris from being bombed. Americans fought and died for French freedom, from afar, and read Sartre. "We were never freer than under German occupation," wrote Sartre. He was right. America has never been occupied, so it can only get jealous, cocky, dopey, demonizing, and deny that Sartre's brand of Leopold jackboot Sacher Masoch freedom is worth a damn. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, that's step one of AA. America's still down to party, why, you got a bottle? We don't have a prollem! YOU godda prollem!

I imagine America staggering like a slow-witted kid trying to find his way out of a candy store, and clearly so does Noé -- otherwise why was it so important the lead characters in ENTER THE VOID be Americans?  And why Tokyo, a land who got its ass kicked in the war, worse than any other, and so learned a few things about not going into the militaristic jingo light blindly just because its pretty like a mushroom (psilocybe, cloud, or shitake --it's all the same in the end).  The Japanese are a people fond of flash and Tokyo under Noé's floating spirit camera becomes a land of pulsing red light district fornications, abortions, drugs, and ratty little snitches who should go kill themselves and do us all a favor. On a double bill with LOST IN TRANSLATION, the meaning of being Bill Murray becomes clear. He's the closest thing our current cinema has to a Bogart, staring into the void of death with a wry smile.

When things actually die though, the French notice. When you surrender, lose your lunch, and lick the boot nice... and clean... then you feel the pain, because you are involved in mankind. You know the bell tolls for thee. You're not afraid to meet the eyes of babes. You can dance if you want to... even leave your friends behind, and use the pole without being stoned as a slut by your peers.

stripper, hold the 's'

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), our dead free-floating POV in the film is not only a dumb American, but a flatliner, a depressed monotonal zombie hipster. Oscar's stripper sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) is, however, terribly cute, though she seemed blurry and far away in the film, a condition understandable in the wake of a terrible car crash that took away their parents at a very young age, but inexcusable in the post-modern wake-up world of ecstasy-addled po-mo Nippon. My question then, is this: what kind of dead parents are Oscar's that they don't come get their son at the pearly gates station when he floats down/up? This film may take place in Tokyo but it's the most searing indictment of American small town hypocrisy since DOGVILLE. Even beyond the grave, parents are self-serving deadbeats.

I knew VOID was something I had to see and review here, but I was dreading Noé's intensity, his glee in exploiting brutality. But no artist better understands that the moviegoer's gaze is itself a ghost in the narrative, longing to permeate the silver screen and be re/born into the simulacrum via its favorite movie starlet's womb. Aren't we, when dead or watching horror films, forced to watch helplessly as our future mother or some girl we don't know is killed or sexually mistreated and all we can do is beat on the glass screen door and scream? But though VOID is drenched in fuzzy sex, I found it more sad than sleazy, like both sexes were just biding their time, exploiting each other--enslaved to the sparkling dollar store bardo like UGETSU or EYES WIDE SHUT. Oscar's sister can handle herself fairly well in the trade; it's Oscar's POV that has the issues. Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the copulations and floating into light bulbs like Hitchcock's camera might if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO; we never know what his free-floating POV is thinking. We just see what he (or rather his third eye lens) sees. Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat where reincarnation can occur and he can get back in the game again, our POV eye drifts towards through what Buddhists call the 'sidpa bardo', the land of darkness where the flames of love draw lost souls hoping to hop the interdimensional fence and be reborn, the way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one door off this shitty flesh pot parking lot of slide show life flashes. Doses... doses.

This essay was really long, but I edited it down, and down, and down. Let me just say that as your doctor I recommend this movie very highly, but if you have panic attacks, epilepsy or nervous disorders, make sure your fully and properly medicated in a legit Rx fashion before entering.  And just remember, wombs may look nice and relaxing from the outside when your ephemeral and a ghostly orb and stranded in the hungry ghost plateau, but once the placenta busts and the crying starts, it's the same old Hell... I mean heaven! Heaven... sorry god, Christ, and sponsor. Heaven.

THE NARCISSISTIC MALE GAZE: It's not you, it's me, because I am You

Trying again to watch JUNO the other night, and of course failing, made me ponder the difference between the male actors I love and the male actors I loathe the way a blind man loathes the mirror. How sharply sloped is this divide, the peak of a chart of self-recognition and self-disgust projected! Some actors can cross it but few return. What does this have to do with JUNO? Exactly, my learned reader, exactly.

There's a prejudice at work in this entry which I presume is based on gender; there are very few actresses I don't adore, now matter how narcissistic they are. It's a complex that seems meant for beautiful women, not coded-straight men, but when a guy is a narcissist full-blown egoic peacock it gets right under my beautiful, soft skin.

Here are some of my major culprits. Note in advance this is not necessarily meant to be a condemnation of their skills as actors, but more in the reaction they induce in me. Thy mileage may vary:

1. TOM CRUISE - Public Enemy Number One, he's his own worst enemy with deep rooted classic alpha-wussa-male Napoleanic coded complex vanity fair. His saving grace is that he's not afraid to make fun of his own raging hard-on of a narcissism, as in MAGNOLIA and--presumably--EYES WIDE SHUT, where it's especially noteworthy in his early bedroom scenes with wife Nicole. In a married couple (onscreen and off) has there ever been such insecure, casual disinterest in the other person's body? Kidman is great, peeing with the door open and dragging her pelvis around like a ball and chain of wasted nymphotential, but Cruise is all about posing just right in the bed so as to perfectly show off his manly bicep to himself in the mirror; his hair perfect; satisfied smugness radiating out of his ever pore. He's been married to this woman long enough to have a kid (in the movie) yet still seems paralyzed by the need to show himself off to himself. But if Kubrick deconstructed him that way, to reveal the core inner spoiled brat within us all, then why do I still cringe in embarrassment, like recognizing my own base humanity in the deepening voice of my little brother?

I do appreciate his focus and attention in big action films! He can charge up your adrenalin if you let him, like a personal trainer! Gotta give him that. 

2. RICHARD GERE - He of the sophisto-Zen smugness, enjoying the beauty of his own perfect humility as he comes before us to sing and dance and perform the painfully wry smile of one who gets all the women and har run out of places to put them. He will always be AMERICAN GIGOLO to me, because that movie was in #1 at the box office when I was hitting the ghastly age of puberty. My school chums and enemies who had seen the film relayed the sordid plot line, but I couldn't see it as it was rated R and my parents were tough that way and why would I want to anyway? Still, it had done enough damage just from the slick trendsetting Venetian blinds poster and the Blondie songs which dug their way deep into my sexual coal oven and which still haven't finished burning. "Now slap her... slap her cunt!" That's all I remember when it later came on video. Since then Gere's gone out of his way to show the world how pleased with himself he is now that he's a Buddhist and humbler than us all. 

I forgive him all however, after his gamely self-mocking guest spot on THE SIMPSONS and of course his terrifying dark shadow Travolta in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR. And most of all, I forgive him because I am even humbler. 

3. ANDY GARCIA -  I've never been able to focus on a word he says, always wondering instead about what kind of hair cream he uses, and the insidious vanity that must creep in when one studies one's performing style so assiduously from a mirror that one no longer sees anything but oneself seeing. I pray this disease never befalls Nic Cage. Speaking of Coppola relations, Garcia, as I recall, got his big break in GODFATHER III, where critics noticed he was the only actor in the film who seemed to have memorized his lines. He stole the film handily, but that's no badge of honor! In the picture at left you can see his resemblance to both De Niro and John Cazale, so in a sense he was perfectly cast. If he had come of age in the 1970s instead of the 1980s, he might have rooted into the same dirty method basement which helped make Fredo and the Godfather-as-a-young-man so indelible. Instead, in true 1980s tradition, he stayed up in the master bedroom, hypnotized by the wall-length closet mirrors.

4. KEVIN KLINE - I think he's a fine actor, but Jesus Christ he's an out- of-control ham, so enthralled by his own mellifluous line readings he leaves nothing left for us, which works in a film like IN/OUT, but becomes excruciating in Shakespeare. In my humble opinion, he's too.... "obsequious"? He acts as if he's making fun of the teacher's pet in some high school acting class. But he seems like a good sport and certainly redeems himself with his role as the deceiving dad in THE ICE STORM, wherein he captures the  delusional side effects of unconscious bourgeois entitlement with a bracing honesty. And I appreciate that he takes the kids home in ANNIVERSARY PARTY so Phoebe Cates can drop ecstasy and trip all night with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

5. ROBERT REDFORD - The king, maybe even the inventor of the bland narcissist actor archetype. Too bland to say much more about. Just look at Sundance, the scourge of true independence!  Now every mailbox is stuffed with film festival invites and no one can walk down the street without some film festival swooping down on them, commercializing their every move until all is hackneyed and recycled quirky just so that the whole GHOST WORLD LITE / PRO-LIFE TEEN QUIRK POWER PUREED FOR THE TOOTHLESS BOURGEOISIE of Juno could ever have a chance to exist. 

JUNO is the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to GHOST WORLD's The Wild Bunch.

In all fairness to Redford, he seems a nice guy and did well in SPY GAME. He's rugged. He is a master of knowing when less is more. He only chokes up once, at the end of The Way We Were, and it's unforgettable. Sundance was originally strongly connected to Native American preservation or so I remember from some old NPR show my dad once had on in a car ride. And so I got the brother's back if he needs me. He doesn't; he's too lost in the majesty of his self. Was he abducted by North Korean hypnotists working for Pat Boone?

RUNNERS UP (just as bad but I don't feel like writing about them) : Ryan O'Neal, Jason Patric, Ben Stiller, Joseph Fiennes (unbearable as Shakespeare in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE but great in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE;  Ethan Hawke (redeemed by Julie Delpy and Linklater), Rob Lowe, Freddie Prinze, Jr., 

The men who embody the correct approach to conveying the arrogant but cool male onscreen: the Wilson brothers, Jon Voight, Clint Eastwood, Mark Wahlberg, Denzel, Damon, Pitt, Tatum, Elliot Gould, George Clooney, Elvis Presley, Dean Martin, Michael Blodgett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger (and all Australians), and of course... the definitive attractive non-narcissist male, Paul Newman!

If the Quirks offend thee...(DIMINISHED CAPACITY, ALIEN: RESURRECTION)

Put the blame on Mame, boys, for filling her widower pad with eccentric whimsy, or Frank Capra, for filling our heads full of pro-capitalist blarney, either way we're at a saturation point with "quirky" indie family comedies; anything after this and the flood will get into the basement and warp the floorboards of cinema. Hopefully this weekend's release of the tepidly reviewed "never should have escaped Sundance" LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE-cum-DAN IN REAL LIFE style quirky family comedy "about heart, about growing up, and growing old..." this Alan Alda-Matthew Broderick senile old bonding movie, DIMINISHED CAPACITY,  is the water line by which overdone cliches meant to pacify the whole extended family will now be over and done with. Presuming the poor film makes no money. I love Alan Alda, so it's a shame, who can I blame? Capra would scoff, and Mame would shudder with douche chills at this toxic level of cutesy-poo clowning.

There's a real comedy in there somewhere, maybe in a real early draft of Sherwood Kiraly's adaptation of his own novel. I mean, the pitch is great: a senile old man with a zest for zaniness heads to Chicago with a priceless old baseball card he finally wants to sell. The card is a great mcguffin, as nephew Broderick has to continually void all the bad deals the demented old man gets hoodwinked into (like swapping it for an editor's promise to print the old man's fish poetry -- don't ask). But along the misadventure-strewn way just about everything original must have been sifted from this idea and discarded; instead of an analysis of the meaning of value--an old, ugly, tiny piece of cardboard with a face of an ugly ball player being priceless, for no earthly reason--we're stuck in the mind of a senile fish poet (tell ya later), the cookie cutter mold is enforced right down to the hometown girl--divorced with clumsy child-- who Broderick leaves behind (Virginia Madsen, quietly searching for someone equally awake to do a scene with). Can you guess that the kid is a little league space cadet who keeps dropping the winning ball and it all comes down to him catching the card as it almost falls into a janitor's pail of soapy water? You can?

Luckily I was seeing this at the Sunshine in downtown NYC and so wasn't the only one groaning as quirk after tired quirk was upturned and exposed like so many bugs under rocks scored to mopey tunes off Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album.

A glimmer of blessed anti-sunshine arrives late inning in with Dylan Baker as a dealer at the Chicago baseball card convention. Playing a very serious Cubs fan, Baker lends a world-weary dignity as a guy who must continually endure the repeated failures of his beloved team. Wisely realizing Baker is really the only one in the cast halfway on the ball, first-time director Terry Kinney lets his scenes play longer than they need to, and for the time Baker's onscreen it's as if the clouds of stale cliche part and something hilarious, twisted, and true comes out. You can see the assemblage of quirky actors--Broderick, Alda, Madsen--watching him from the other side of the collector's table in awe, wishing his part started earlier and set the mood. Before Bakers' arrival, it's almost like a trading card session between two Sundance workshop veterans: "I'll trade you a quirky gag involving fish writing poetry for your 'learning to shake off your doubts and achieve greatness with your life' arc, I'll even throw in a white trash relation struggling with the first step of AA."

Of course the baseball card changes hands more times than an intercostal clavicle or secret roll of microfiche... as does Alan Alda's southern fried accent. His eccentric Uncle Rollie apparently orders his quirks from an old Sears catalog, whether baiting lines attached to typewriter keys so fish can type poetry (now you know) or drying his socks on an indoor gas grill; Ruth Gordon is probably rolling atop Harold, still screaming, in her grave. Sure Matthew Broderick has his chops, but I want to punch him even now for Bueller's interminable smugness. I don't feel sorry for him being stuck in this mess, but Alda is still way too witty and physically agile to be convincing as a coot and meanwhile the other actors all stand around looking like they can't find their chalk marks. But even so, Broderick looks mere stiff-jointed steps away from being 93, while Alda's still a breath of fresh air.
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As long as it's not completely terrible, we can fall into any movie like a dream, emerging only when the credits roll or the phone rings or when we need to go to the bathroom or refill our whiskey highballs. Similarly, the spirit upon leaving the body becomes amorphous intelligence seeping into the interlocking gazes surrounding it, merging with the all-seeing I.

Who is to say, after all, that when a really good actor dies on screen, that we do not also die, or that this character is really reliving his life through us, through our eyes, the way we might look in awe at photos of ourselves as babies, the way a chimp or Hamlet studies the human skull? It's astounding, Roderick, the basis of consciousness, the mirror regarding itself into infinity. That's why a much better movie was the one I revisited after trudging home from Sunshine Cinema: ALIEN: RESURRECTION.

The astounding mirror character I am talking about here is the reincarnated/cloned Ripley character played by Sigourney Weaver. Is she the "same" Ripley who died at the end of ALIEN 3? Did her consciousness transfer via the cloning process of mad scientist Brad Dourif? The transmutation of self, of sentience, of soul, is what is the issue here. Is the soul as we perceive it really ego, and is ego really just an obsession with one particular locus of identification, with the body you inhabit at this point in time? Is ego then not a kind of imprisonment, being trapped outside the free floating locus of Polydent-ification?

The way Sigourney Weaver grasps these paradoxes is nothing short of poetry. Ripley is egoless and animal-like; sublimely sexy, languid and lolling like an already cool person taking ecstasy. I didn't like ALIEN: RESURRECTION the first time I saw it--in the theater with a backache the day after Thanksgiving visiting my girlfriend in Portsmouth, NH; but it's better with repeat viewings. There's a steady stream of redeemable moments all the way through though, like robot Winona Ryder jacking into the computer mainframe by sticking a tube in her vein like an Oxycontin IV. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet clearly takes the time to make each outlaw character memorable and not just a few cliche'd quirks stapled onto an actor, the way they are in CAPACITY.

Another way to picture it as three different levels of identification- which brings us from movie watching to being to watching being:

First level is identifying with a character in a story; second is "becoming" other people in the cast, wherein we can still shift the locus of our ego identification from one to another; third is one amorphous intelligence that moves from individual to individual voice and mind, staging its own elaborate rituals for self discovery. To see or hear someone or something is to become the seen or heard. Ultimately isn't all that is alive, or ever was, just DNA talking to itself along a few aeons of time/space? The paint paints itself through the painter, and it sees itself through its beholders. Your eyes are the mirror in which colors comb their hair --an endless cycle of creation and destruction. The brush, the brain, the subject all along one hideous serpentine chain leading straight up/down into the void; perception and perceived merely frets and bridge on the same instrument.

How's that for motherfuckin' quirky insight, Uncle Rollie? While the tired, overpaid, and overly cautious filmmakers carefully weed out the genuine eccentricity from their films and replace it with market-tested hack whimsy, real life goes on all around, more baffling and phenomenal than even the looniest Frenchman's conception of science fiction. Even all packed up with suitcases overloaded with grotesqueries, Jeunet--that almost stiflingly original amalgam of Mobius and Terry Gilliam, can't escape the net of hack cliche: the scientists are all mad; the outlaw crew finding and selling suspended animation space travelers for use as alien incubators are motley and macho--including the tough woman who can take care of herself, the gruff charismatic captain, the infirm engineer / comic relief, a big kind of misogynist bully type for the heroine to school, the tough black guy with dreads for a xenomorph appetizer, and in a moment of surprise casting, Winona Ryder as the nerdy tech guy who --twist!--is an android who joined the crew to get all human rights-ish, coming off like a kind of hyper- androgynous 90s hipster activist trying to irritate her conservative father over Christmas break. but luckily Sigourney is there like a kind of mother lion, keeping lil' Ryder too off guard to find her little pixie trope bag, resulting in some actual acting. Clearly Weaver got a lot of input on her own lines and performance and she's the only one who seems to have thought it all through in some kind of legit original science fiction way, rather than just ladling on the overdone types and tropes (a drop of acid blood falls on the wheelchair guys leg from the floor above! the ruthless corporate stooge tries to save himself and leave everyone else behind! Someone is grabbed from the floor below and dragged down through the hole after a quiet suspenseful build-up!), all gone is the effortless 70s low-key human interaction in the original, or the funny militarism in the second one, or even the British thesping in the third, now it's all practically a wordless story in Metal Hurlant. But hey, it's always worth the price of admission, or the effort to load the DVD tray, just to see Den Hedaya's fabulous eyebrows and hear the sonorous voice of Michael Wincott. He and Hedaya share a little oasis of tough guy acting and drinking whiskey while conducting their deal; they're so badass the scene becomes almost Hawksian! And as cliche as the rest of it may get at times, there's not a single faux-eccentric Uncle or Broderick square within a million miles.

In space, no one can hear your shitass fish poetry.