Raiders of the Found Stash, from Flint's Treasure to the Crystal Skull!

In addition to being priceless, education ruins movies. It brings a liberal arts-enforced, PC-indoctrinated empathy that can subject once merry romps to bitter pill analysis under the scrutiny of wool-removed eyes. The jaundiced way I see West Side Story (1961) now corresponds to a warning about Syria: instead of letting warring tribes settle their differences in an organized rumble, Tony barges in, uninvited, and two people end up dead. If he had just stayed out of it, all the differences might have been ironed out in a simple brawl -- a few bloody knuckles and black eyes instead of corpses. But, as Maria says, "any fighting is no good for us." Ai Maria! Fighting is much better than dying. America, and Maria, disagree. This is typical of the Lucas mentality--as when Luke refuses to fight Darth Vader in the third Star Wars. He should watch Sword of Doom or a UFC fight sometime and see it's quite easy to fight without hatred, even with a loving form of attentive dispassion.

Similarly Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) used to be about awesome fights and solid thrills. I saw it eight times in the theater alone, probably 20 more once I bought it on video back when videos cost $40! Now, some 30 years and a liberal arts higher education later, I see the steep price its innocence and 'matinee spirit' carry. Is innocence itself the culprit behind its covertly pro-colonialist--even fascist--message? One must assume so. The privilege of the ignorant is the unique pleasure of venting racist spleen without ever guessing that doing so, in fact, makes you the bad guy. 

Now the film plays like Starship Troopers without the self-aware irony. Spielberg and Lucas apparently woke up to this, too, because the 'where are they now' saga of growing old and passing the legacy and zzzz, begun in Last Crusade (1989)--which I despised despite the awesome zeppelin sequence-- continues in Crystal Skull (2008). Now Jones is in the Sean Connery role, i.e. a know-it-all curmudgeon, traveling the world with rock-n-roll son in tow, brawling indiscriminately, playing for rough-and-tumble stakes far too high for his age. Does Spielberg think this is pleasant, forcing us to imagine his frail old skeletal system subject to such harsh abuses?

Worse, he wants to grab that crystal skull--not for his museum or alien research or curiosity--but because someone else wants it. He just plans to return it to its rightful lost city pedestal, high in long hidden Mayan jungle ruins, so the Russians don't maybe find a way to turn it into a source of 'limitless power.' Based on past experiences with crafy Belloq and the Nazis doing the same to him, Indy should just mosey along after it, nice and slow, give the Russians time to try it out for themselves and then just pick it up from their melted skeletal fingers at a more convenient time. But he doesn't want them even to see it. He'd rather make sure the skull is in the same place as the Ark and all the treasures he's looted from oppressed countries safely buried in a classified storage facility, never realizing that in withholding these relics and truths from the curious he's little more than a Medieval Catholic inquisitor, brutally upholding the status quo at the expense of human evolution. Supposedly an archaeologist he's really a fundamentalist, like the Vatican or Smithsonian, hiding any evidence that might prove their books on history are incorrect, their doctorates essentially as worthless as if in phrenology or flat earth physics.

Ford's Indy is now too old to bother searching within himself instead of projecting into old tombs. Such self-awareness would infer some sort of legitimate curiosity about the world around him, instead he plays the muttonheaded buzzkill naysayer. This amazing skull, with its grey oblong cranium and odd powers, is clearly alien and yet Indy still scoffs at the idea it's from outer space. The only 'awake' and genuinely curious character--the only one worth rooting for-- in the whole thing is Russian agent Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who expresses a personal desire to learn the truth about extraterrestrial experience and intentions. Indy belittles this desire, he scoffs like she's crazy! Aliens, yeah right. Even if the alien thing is true, Indy would never believe it coming from, you know, a Russian, and worse, a girl. Maybe he's just stonewalling, but if so, why not be at least civil? Can you imagine Han Solo being such a buzzkill? Refusing to believe the Death Star is real, even after it blows up Leia's home planet? And instead, maybe laughing in Princess Leia's face for daring to suggest the planet was there in the first place? 

Time frames help unpack these reasons: both the sociopolitical landscape of the year each film came out, and when the film is actually set, mirror grave political and social realities. The first Indy film was set in 1936--before the official start of WW2, when the Nazis were in their Aryan-roots relic hunting stage. The Ark is found and fought over in Egypt by Germans (still in their wooing Axis satellites phase) and one plucky Yank --six years before the Americans were officially at war with anyone. So really he's just a thief; he has no permission from the Egyptian government to confiscate holy relics from their desert. Presumably the Nazis made some kind of financial arrangement with Cairo, but not Indy. He only grabs the Ark by holy writ of his yankee gumption.

It's convenient that Egypt doesn't seem too interested in its own relics, and since any previous owner (Moses) is long dead, the Ark belongs to whomever can grab this hot potato macguffin first, because third world countries, it's implied, are backwards children who'd only break their own treasures so don't deserve them. In the Peruvian opener, the Hovitos mirror the Egyptian natives, unable to enter the mystery cave and so whomever brings the gold godhead out is apparently their new king, but it helps to speak Hovito, which Dr. Jones doesn't deign to learn, so he loses out to the crafty Belloq, who merely follows Jones from a safe distance and lets him do all the dangerous stunts, then grabs the prize. Therefore, by not deigning to learn the native language, and not being smart enough to let someone else do his digging for him, Indy is considered the sign of the superior archaeologist. (i.e. decent men don't fraternize with the wogs). 

Sorry, Steven and George, but Belloq's far more of a 1981 man, a Wall Street shark with flair and a sense of humor, than Jones, whose scoundrel gall is only redeemable since he's oblivious; for an academic he's staunchly blind to anything like a bigger picture or his own micro-aggressions and SWM colonialist self-entitlement. 

Is Spielberg being snarky about France with this recurring archetype? Consider for example the way De Gaulle went and took credit for the liberation of Paris while the American and British troops continued to push the Germans back to the Rhine in 1945! Or the way we forcefully took France's colonies back for them, from partisans who had been fighting the Japanese, like Ho Chi Minh, while the French sat around and gesticulated in their little cafes! Does America doing the work and then the French stepping in to take credit and control not recur both in history and the film, and each time--well in Algeria and Vietnam especially--restoring a Colonial rule only moderately less harsh and/or injust than the Axis, who at least deigned to learn the language?

Let's stretch this idea even further to link the Carter administration and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with its own Belloq, i.e. a short French director (Francois Truffaut) conducting an arcane metaphysical ceremony to communicate with the ancient ones. There's no Harrison Ford role in CEOT3K per se, just a Goldie Hawn if she got away with her baby at the end of Sugarland Express (1974). The Goldie Hawn archetype was very big back then. But if you consider the big news of the day was Carter and his Camp David Accord you can etch the little guy pragmatist clear as a bell in a still lake. Today, the idea of a crafty French Jew working for the Nazis before they went full-on genocidal is much more interesting to contemplate than Jones is with his muleheaded Yank 'blunder in and raise havoc' tenacity. There is no 'Belloq' in Skull except old Ray Winstone who exists mainly to take advantage of an old man's sympathy, a kind of shadow to Indy, whom he only resembles the more he tries to distance himself. Ray's character may be an opportunistic slime, but he's white, British (i.e. future NATO ally), and a man, therefore he must be allied with against a Russian girl, his moral turpitude be damned.

I should mention that from 1993-1999 I worked for a French art dealer who was a LOT like old Belloq. I won't mention his name but I will tell you he got into steep debt playing futures markets; eventually defrauding investors and clients. He wound up on the run in Brazil where he later went to--and escaped from-- jail on a whole new set of charges. Various lawyers, detectives, and Mossad agents are still sorting out a morass of who-owns-what and owes whom and who is really the rightful owner of a painting my boss took on consignment and sold to two different people at the same time and then told the owner it was still unsold, so he kept all the money hoping to double it in the future's market in one day and then pay the owner, but instead lost it all, then vanished. The whole experience (lots of lunches with fed, lawyers and detectives over the years after) left me with near-lawyerly insight into the workings of ownership, provenance, and extradition. In fact, I can no longer watch Raiders without musing over who would win a legal dispute between Belloq, the Nazis, Jones, and the Egyptians if they all went to court over who owned Ark. Hint: it wouldn't be Jones. Not even close. Belloq, like my old boss, is Jewish, on the other hand, at least he's coded that way--so would have the closest and most ancient rights.

You think I'm anti-semitic mentioning that, but dig a little deeper. Think of the Ark's provenance, all the way to the initial owners. But you won't, will you? Because it never will get to court, as Indy will steal it long before then.

At some point history, books and bible meet, and we automatically get messed up with myth and fiction.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) follows this self-imposed blindness, the First World concept that 'possession is 9/10 of the law,' and therefore force + superior intellect + luck + white maleness makes rightness. And the only one who deserves the rare comic book is the one who promises never to read it, to keep it in its mylar in a special temp and humidity-controlled vault. 

As Jones moves into the atomic age, he survives an atomic bomb test by hiding out in a model home fridge, showing he's still surviving by missing the spectacle, and soon after he's caught up in a greaser vs. jock fistfight set to Elvis songs, driving around on a vintage motorbike, but scoffing at the idea of a real alien presence on Earth, and once again avoiding destruction by not looking into Medusa eye of the true unknowable Other, the one who would explode Spielberg's cute/evil alien dichotomy with its sheer monstrous 'beyond good and evil' ambivalence.

That's one of the reasons why--all through the movie-- I was rooting for Cate Blanchett's Ms. Spalko, who at least treats Jones and his doofus family with some compassion while at the same time not losing her ruthless edge. She's dicked over by him time and again because he can only see this good/evil dichotomy, hence she and the Russians are evil, period just as he is good, which as a professor of anything should make the academy reconsider his tenure (although contempt-prior-to-investigation is definitely a sanctioned practice in academia when it comes to UFOs). Miss Spalko at least, has an agenda. So what if she's a Communist? At least she plays the game with good sportsmanship and is awake to the mystery of the skulls. Indy doesn't even feign a sporting interest for the purpose of his job in the way Sam Spade did over the Maltese Falcon. Say what you will about the Russians, agent Spalko is a woman, sir, who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. But Indy can only clam up, as tiresomely and rudely as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.

But the main tell in this version is that the academic deconstructions of Jones as an emblem of bull in a china shop imperialism has at last begun to take hold. Now Jones can only take the skull and bring it back to its rightful place at El Dorado; when he tries to take so much as a small sword - a knife from a mummified conquistador, his doofus son makes an 'ahem' voice, like put that back, that's not yours, that belongs to the dead conquistador's family, or... He doesn't have a specific reason, and it suddenly casts all of Jones' past acquisitions for his museum in doubt. 'Grave robbers will be shot,' the sign says going in, which his son points nervously a-towards. "Well, we're not going to do any grave robbing," Indy says. But of course his whole life has been one long grave rob. Considering the modern age legal battles over cultural ownership of relics (see here) of late, perhaps Lucasfilm and Spielco have begun to realize that the casual American arrogance underwriting Jones' plundering in the first films might be unconscionable but they should realize that this arrogance is what makes it so eloquent as a metaphor for 80s amok capitalism. Jones is a badass because he's so heedless, so obsessed with acquiring whatever ark-shaped jet ski catches his eye. Imagine how great the film might be if Jones was a heroin addict thanks to a dislocated knee? Instead Indy can't even borrow a dead conquistador's knife for his future endeavors, because his son--leather jacket and motorcycle signifying conformity's sanctioned signifier of rebellious trappings-- clears his throat in a way so pussy proper over 'stolen' antique weaponry it makes me want to punch him in the face and steal his switchblade.

This question of who gets the loot started to flair up for me a few weeks ago while watching another of my politically incorrect favorites, the MGM 1934 version of Treasure Island. Whose treasure is it, rightfully? Whomever has the map? Whomever paid for the expedition? Or whomever stole it in the first place? Or owned it? Or took it from third world natives too primitive to understand the whole concept of 'private property'? When Jim Hawkins and his mom go to look for the money Flint owes in his chest after he dies, mom plays the moral cuckold, saying first say they will collect only what is owed "and not a penny more!" But the treasure map makes it okay to, in fact, take Flint's whole savings account. Flint stole it from his fellow pirates who all stole it from Spanish lords and ladies from centuries before who stole it from their subjects: Spain, the enemy of England, Jim! Like stealing the Nazi gold from Kelly's Heroes or the falcon from the Russian, Kemidov; it's hard to say anyone really has a right to it if the current possessor stole it from people who stole it from (and killed) the previous owners, yet try telling that to the Mossad, am I right, Mr. Wildenstein?

The status of the treasure as up for grabs offers a very peculiar notion of 'white makes right," white being the clothes and the powdered wigs of a gentleman born and bred vs. a dirty scalawag. In the MGM production, there's no mention of how the treasure will be divided up, presumably in equal parts between Jim, Ben Gunn, the Squire, and Otto Kruger. But does the crew get a share? Presumably the pirate crew would get nothing for their efforts other than some measly pay. Are they really the bad guys for wanting to seize it for themselves? In reality the only ones with any right to it are the relatives of the victims of the pirate crew's initial piracy, and after that, the pirates themselves. But the right of Jim and his gentleman born to have all of it and the devil take the pirates is somehow much righter than any other option, if for no other reason than a boy like Jim is writing the story.

"Three more stout and loyal men you'll never find... in this room, Jim."

Luckily MGM changed the ending somewhat, so that Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) escapes with his shirt stuffed with gold coin sacks. He probably worked the hardest to get it, and is not just the craftiest of the lot, but also the only one in the whole cast with an infectious wit and easygoing charm. There are some who might call Indy a pirate, one disguised as an academe. We kids knew he was really Han Solo, so the prof thing was a kick, a fun disguise. By the time he's chasing the Skull though, he really is a professor, the worst kind. In the Treasure Island comparison the Indy of Skull wouldn't be Long John Silver --that role would go to Cate Blanchett-- but the crusty Captain Smollett (below, center), good to have on your side when the shit starts going down, but an awful drag at a party.

-------

Great Acid Cinema: ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (AKA Cult of the Damned, 1969)

"Screw anyone who hates killing!"

Hard to find, AIP's renamed CULT OF THE DAMNED (AKA ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO) deserves a damned cult already, but it's still hiding under different posters.  That's how I found it, clicking on what I thought was a Jim Jones documentary on Netflix. But no, this film offers a whole different kind of dosed Kool-Aid. First held back from release due to the blowback from the Manson murders in 1969, it was eventually released CULT OF THE DAMNED to capitalize on them, waiting just long enough for the "too soon"-ness of it to die down. But by then, its cautious HAIR-style peans to freedom didn't ring quite right - we couldn't put the genie back in the bottle. Suddenly an innocent hippie musical that just happened to be about killing your parents was seen as something very dark, which the film's satirical tone was maybe just too frazzled to support; so they changed the name to CULT OF THE DAMNED, but it's hardly that either. If four people count as a cult then oh, crazy lady crazy lady.

So, for the crime of being stuck in a limbo where BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, HAIR, AND HAIRSPRAY fans can't find it (they'd love it), the film's been rolling around in a time warp obscurity ever since, ever since now, crazylady crazylady!! And now, it's on Netflix as GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED, where I just watched it thinking Jim Jones is going to show up any minute.

But he doesn't! Seriously, I was so confused just now watching this. I kept thinking "now they'll fly to South America to join the commune.... any minute now..." But they don't. DAMN IT. It's even better without old Jones, sweating in his fatigues. Fuck that guy. But maybe the reason I loved it so much was because I kept thinking it was about to veer into danger and madness at any second.

See Netflix put up the picture at left, for GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED, so when I clicked it I expected to see that film. While this CULT, the one Netflix does have... turns out to be a counterculture 1969 AIP gas(ss) filmed in Los Angeles, California that might even be better than 1968's PSYCH-OUT or HEAD. If those names mean nothing to you then, dude, why are you hanging out here? Go see them at once! CULT isn't really like them, plot-wise, more like THE BIG CUBE meets Pasolini's TEOREMA. Either way, whether you're an AIP fan or just a cinematic "experience seeker," you should take the CULT trip and instead of pinching yourself to see if you're dreaming, pinch your mom, shout obscenities at passing pigeons, and howl at breadheads passing by on the Sunset Strip. Your lips frothing, your pupils wildly dilated, meaning to say hello to your boss and his wife as they pass on their way to Justine's, you start just laughing insanely instead. He's French, he'll just shrug it off. Hopefully.

That's the kind of scene I mean, man. You will definitely have, as they say, totally lost it, and then you'll "know." Bogart Petery Stuyvesant's mad vision of an America that's eaten itself down to the overweight health crisis bone has come to pass.

The man is a prophet.

CULT OF THE DAMNED originally had the much more sensible (relatively) title, ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO, referring to one of the psychedelic rock songs performed by the skydiving rock impresario, Bogart "as in the real Humphrey!" Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher). A genuinely great singer, he's thinking of calling his new group 'Rabbit Habbit.' They're a trio consisting of Lou Rawls ("Everybody knows black is better, baby!"), a cute blonde flower child Davey Davison ("Birth control can be controlled by the mind!") and Roddy McDowell! ("I heard alcohol is coming back!") Their songs are full of groovy organ, Jew's harp, and funky but non-slapped bass lines I could totally play if my bass wasn't so far away, and out of tune, and I don't wanna. The songs are all penned by the Brill Building-esque song-writing team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, clearly aping the oft-aped style of the musical 'HAIR.' And since the main character/narrator, who joins with the group and finds her groove as Bogart's lover, is the curvy full-body typed heiress Tara Nicole Steele (Holly Near (she meets them when their band plays at her coming out ball), it becomes a kind of HAIR/SPRAY mind-meld, sans the terrible smell of permanents, but with the pungent incense of the Manson killings to come ("My mom always told me the next war would be between the blacks and the whites!")

The film begins, still trying to make me think it's about Guyana. There are lots of jungle noises in the beginning to bear out the assumption that we're watching the right movie (at least for me, who always thought Guyana was in Africa) but as it goes on it gets very Joan Collins plays Mommy Dearest as written by Valerie Solanis channeling Oscar Wilde. While narrating her backstory, Tara hallucinates disturbing collages of her riches-to-riches family tree, where "everyone dies on schedule, beautifully." Jennifer Jones is the faded mom, who shouts at her: "You are a fat girl, you idiot! I don't know why anyone would even touch you!!" When she throws Tara Nicole a coming-out party it's like a champagne bottle missile... aimed straight at the head.

Little could mom know, Tara's going to be losing her virginity to the rock star they hired for entertainment that very night, out in by the lake outside the mansion.

But the real show-stopper: Tara's slow motion walk down the stairs during the druggy prelude to the title song ("Angel Angel Down we Go"). After spending the first chunk of the movie suffering along with Tara over her mother's ceaseless verbal harangues we wonder how Tara is ever going to get som self esteem. So when she walks down the stairs, right as the very druggy, very very psycedelic title song begins, it's magic. The people around dancing or talking in slow motion around her are oblivious as she enters the magic domain of the Rabbit Habbit.

"Virgin child," Bogart sings right to her (he sees her). "it's time you tried to fly."

All through the film, I presumed Tara Nicole was going to go off to Guyana and join Jim Jones to escape her mom's cold clutches, or something, and that an angry reel of camp atrocity footage would be tacked on at the end, intercut with Tara Nicole freaking out in close-up so you couldn't tell she wasn't really there. But then, left turns start to righten, and go, baby, go, until you're freaking out in the best free love acid flashback kind of way, with just a little dab of Manson-esque foreshadowing to keep everything from getting too Partridge Family.

That's how it goes though, in AIP land: Bogart lays Tara by the lake and she fantasizes weird Freudian melt-down bloody Bluebeard forbidden stained-key-style virginity adieus. But soon Bogart's band shows up on the scene; they too accept her, and sweep her back to their pad and into their world of forbidden pleasure and love, love ("Freedom, Mama Angel!"); pillows are piled on the floor around the hookah, purple gel accent lighting and LSD and a groovy old LP player and reel-to-reel playing their gone tracks. Bogart even records a song on the spot in ode to his newfound 'large girl' love about how "growing high and going wide gives you lots of 'room' inside."

Tara gets confident with all this attention. And she has a lot to offer them. For one thing she has a pilot's license so he has her fly his plane and they all go skydiving ("No one skydives 'cuz it's safe!!"). Tara learns to dance free and easy like Mama Cass as a reward. Back at home, Tara works up the nerve to tease her mom about her obsession with expensive jewelry, her reliance on pills and booze. With a little research Tara learns that fat used to be the height of beauty and that "Twiggy only dates back to Buchenwald." Whoa, baby... That's too much. When Bogart decides to get with Tara's pill-head mama ("maybe you'll adopt me, maybe I'll adopt you, but oh crazy lady crazy lady!") Tara freaks out and starts crying up on the ceiling. Mom hangs by the pool and notes: "He is the sort that makes you take all sorts of tranquilizers before breakfast, isn't he? And wash them down with bloodys." Cheers, Mrs. S.!

"You drive, I dive! We all die!"

With the Original Humphrey around, bloody's always for breakfast.

Needless to say, Mom gets her own song, too:, in a slow grinding bluesy vamp:

I just met a mother -
ain't gonna tell you her name.
I just met a mother -
she puts us all to shame.
Well the bigger that they are,
the harder they fall.
Looka here, what do we got?
the biggest mother
of them all!

Bogart can just magically come up with some cool thing to sing and instantly move the whole cast in and out of his recording studio to belt it out in a cleverly edited montage of Bogart actually singing it into the microphone, lip-syncing to his already recorded track while hanging around in the living room, just listening to it, and/or having it play in the background as they drive around in his groovy car --all within the course of a three minute song! Meanwhile, photos are everywhere, on all the walls, keep it all weird, man, a nonstop light show of Hollywood icons, authors, and politicians in ways that prefigure similar light shows in NATURAL BORN KILLERS and MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, like below:

So, if you haven't seen ANGEL ANGEL on Netflix (again, where it's mislabeled GUYANA) streaming, you haven't seen "it" baby lady. This film is so "it" they had to hide it, twice. See this stone groove motherlover timeless remembrance of the days of cults and parental anxiety about drugged-out rebels that talked too fast and sang too much.

For Squaresville adults it was like looking right into Medusa's hazel blue eyes. Mother Lover! Here comes Charlie!

PS - remember, the only way to find this film is to look for another film on Netflix under the similar title, GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED -- and somehow, that makes the actual film even better, for even if they never actually get to Guyana, this damned cult's Kool-Aid still packs a 'Lovely Sort of Death' in every sip, so drink up, tune in, and dive, cannibal America, dive!

(PS 2/18/15- It's not on Netflix anymore but it did just come out on DVD via Kino Lorber!) 

You Don't Need a Man, You Need a Champion

... like a hole in the head, to let the air in. That way you don't have to go farther than your own backyard to find God, by which I mean ass. Forget it, Julia Roberts, it's ELIZABETHTOWN (2005)... Ladies, don't get me started.

The image all across the bus stops of the city this month is Julia, perky as ever, her artificially-smoothened face resolute, determined to eat by herself or with a rich, gorgeous male, or not at all. She's a one-woman Sex in the City minus sex, city, or clue, smiling across an exotic table-cloth at herself. Look at her looking off at left. Oh if her friends back home could see her now! They wouldn't even recognize her, she's thinking. A smile forms at a distant corner of her mouth, pink spoon to the right, imagining their jealous eyes widening.

Javier Bardem is in the cast, presumably playing the same smoldering artisan from Woody Allen's VICKI, CHRISTINA, BARCELONA (another three word conjunction free title). And there's nothing wrong with that except that Woody's film was full of subversive critiques of the bourgeois mindset, while EAT PRAY--in its advertising at least--is a championing of that mindset, a pro-bourgeois message to the spirituality-seeking single women who ride subways and walk past bus stops, a message that the pathetically 'human' and self-absorbed men in your immediate environment are a waste of time, and you deserve better--a 'champion' in white linen slacks and rosewood necklace, a bronzed statue in lands where the dollar stretches and every man exists only to give you flowers and keys to their private piazzas. And it's only a plane ticket and a Xanax away. Go girl! Find the courage to quit your job and drain your savings in holy pursuit of the housewife pipe dream.

Hey, you know what paradise is? It's a lie

a fantasy we create about people and places
as we'd like them to be.
You know what truth is? 

It's that little baby you're holding 
and it's that man that you fought with this morning

the same one you're going to make love to tonight, 
that's truth, that's love!  ---Charlene
("I've been to Paradise 

[but I've never been to Me])

I haven't read the book or seen the movie, so what gives me the right to criticize? Exactly! Yet I can't avoid Eat Pray Love anymore than I can avoid seeing taxi cabs, bus and park bench placards, or subway walls. This week the media barrage that entombs NYC is all about Eating, Praying and Loving, and selling same. So I can write about it because I've been force-fed it, maybe even wrote some of it. I'm new age enough that I hope the movie or book is different than the ad campaign, truly I do. I bought the book for a girl I once loved, kinda; I'm also feminist enough that I listen to the Charlene song quoted above and I think, "Hey Charlene you know what truth isn't? It's that conservative anti-feminist agenda you're shilling and that man who bought you $500 shoes this morning is the same man you're going to accuse of sexism tonight. That's shallow, that's so 1980s!"

Me, my formative years were the 70s. Cracker Factory! Goodbar! Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs! It stretched all through my Knapp Elementary School experience. So if single middle-aged women want to seek paradise without first having been to me, well, I'm 100% for it, as would Gandhi be, or Red Foxx, or Fox News. But the ad campaign of EAT PRAY stresses the opposite of spiritual paradise, i.e. the Pray portion of the trifecta. Instead of simple and true grace--as seen in the humility of Bresson, Ozu, McCarey, and Rohmer--the spirituality is really just a carny attraction, an obscene promotion of all things Eat Pray and Love-ish. Paradise deferred! When you're through shopping for prayer beads, ladies, step over this next tent, the truer enlightenment is waiting behind the curtain, and it's only a hundred dollaahz!

It's a cagey kind of trap, the spiritual shell game, and antithetical to feminism's and spirituality's original purpose of being 'free.' Instead of experiencing love and prayer in this moment (the only one there is --and you just missed it) and endeavoring to love everyone unconditionally, you're reminded that if you don't lose ten pounds, get your teeth fixed, and find a rich Barcelona artist to pay for dinner and another one who knows all the best hang-out spots in Goa after dark, then you will be a loser no matter where you are. Pray only in a very clean Indian ashram that's got lots of white flowers or you might catch Hep-C from the incense.

If you do all the right things up front however, and fly first class all the way, then you merely have to pretend to silence your monkey mind a scene or two and I'm sure the cute yoga instructor with perfect teeth will duly fall.

Most of all you must love yourself: see always in your mind's eye the vision of how cute you must look with a sky blue spoon hanging out of your mouth and your eyes alight with mischief.  Instead of cultivating awareness of these kinds of traps the EAT PRAY LOVE behemoth assures us that this new trap is guaranteed to be the real thing, step right up! The ticket booth is closed but the 'machines' are working.

Want to know if you're already enlightened? Ask yourself if you've ever ignored or blown off someone who wanted your assistance or friendship; ask yourself if you've ever not stopped to help a needy traveler just because they were poor, ugly, depressed or annoying and you were late for a lunch with someone literate and attractive.

The true saint turns away no one who asks for help, and in that sense they are like a prostitute. Julia Roberts rose to fame playing a prostitute and whatever lesson there is that irony (I looked for it here), Roberts assumes her character in Eat is more of a spiritual being than that high-steppin' ho. I hope after this film Julia realizes that prostitutes are the true saints of our age. Think about it: they give away their money in the name of love (to Jesus, their sulky pimp) and they accept all comers-- be they ugly, old, deformed, crippled and/or leprous--washing even their feet if the price is right. Whatever kind of love you want baby, how much cash you got? Enough to buy ticket? Enough to buy Julia Roberts cookbook? Soundtrack CD? Ticket to Goa? prayer beads? Cheap cheap! You buy! Hot rock on back mean hot time in town!

That's what stopped me when I was on my own spiritual road to perfect union with the almighty: God told me to befriend this annoying, obnoxious kid in my AA 'home group,' and I just couldn't, I wouldn't! And I knew even as I made that choice, the choice to not befriend a snot-nosed obese, stuttering sociopathic loser, I was already off the path, a fallen angel, a rogue samurai, Lancelot in the rushes --lost and thorny. God was already looking around for another saint to lavish love and orders upon.

That's why I can look at the ads for EAT PRAY LOVE and see in Julia's face a vacant emptiness that I recognize as the budding Kundalini serpent of awareness brought up by mediation class and yoga but then all-too-soon halted in mid-bloom by capitalism's innate sense of carny pitchmanship-- the stopping short from going all the way into full awareness wherein the unconscious is all fully conscious and your head glows like a beacon in the galaxy. Stopping short to gloat over lesser mortals because "this far is good enough!" My buddy Sabrina and I went to yoga every week for over a year together, but then one day we went to Urban Outfitters instead. In some ways, I'm still there, rummaging through the denim sale bins, my homeroom angel waiting for me to get my head out my ass so we can resume the climb. That's why I can spot the entitled 'humbler than thou' yoga chic when I see it: I am it. And I see my own sad consumerist clown cluelessness in every image of Roberts in EAT PRAY LOVE.

So Julia, as I creep broken and bloody past your smug and beaming poster on my way to and from my unholy job on this wheel of woe, I can only sigh and wish you'd awaken for real and stop trying to be this blandly petit-bourgeois everywoman that exists only in the minds of overly cautious Hollywood producers and Vogue editors. I wish you would become instead and forever the vengeful Kali you played so well in various parts of ERIN BROCKOVICH and MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING... I want you to play the role of the Magdalene, of Grace in the third Lars Von Trier DOGVILLE movie. Isn't it time you put down the fork and picked up the butcher knife? Have no mercy, Kali Sister Jesus! Instead of Eat Pray Love say what it's really all about: Consume, Breed, Buy...Kill! Kill! (Go, baby!) Now! There's never been a meal but the one in front of you, never a land more exotic than your own front yard, never a love but that which you have, and self-aggrandizing prayer is cosmologically uncool, mere narcissism in a kaftan, mere oblivion... sans beautiful eyes... straight white teeth, sans cosmetically altered face, sans... everything. So break thy inner bonds and rampage loose upon the land, as your colonialist forefathers did and be not so unaware of your contradictions and tourist coarseness as you shop and eat in the lands they once exploited and taxed unmercifully. Celebrate thy age, get thy whiplash mascara groove back on, and bring home thy hand-crafted Siddhartha! Six Dollars! Two for ten! Eat! Buy! Now!

Burn the money!

The most poignant moment in the new DARK KNIGHT movie is when the Joker (the late great Heath Ledger) sets fire to a giant mountain of money. The meta-textual similarity of this scene to the wasteful expenditure of the film's vast budget and its justification via huge box-office profit -- all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing -- is eerily prescient. For DARK KNIGHT is really a big, loud, leftist version of DIRTY HARRY with our sympathies reversed. We can imagine Batman rushing in to save that burning money, cradling it in his arms and screaming to the sky: "Damn you, fire! Damn yooooou!" Meanwhile we look on in horror, not at the burning money, but because we realize the Joker is the only sane man in Gotham, the only "true" soul in this dark mess, the only one with inner Zen stillness and joi de vivre, the only one not hypnotized by their "life story." No matter how harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), the Joker never loses his mellow-gold cool; he's already at peace with himself and his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films, or Colonels Kilgore and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW.

Everyone else in the KNIGHT is, for lack of a better word, becalmed; they can't stop fretting about their possessions (and this includes wives and children - "my wife! He's got my wife!"), locked in identification with forms -- what the Buddhists call "samsara." The Joker stands alone, a Tyler Durden in a world of Ed Nortons; Che Guevara divided by Hannibal Lecter. What did Tyler say in FIGHT CLUB? "It's only after we've lost everything that we can do anything." What was it Kilgore said in APOCALYPSE NOW? "That smell, that napalm smell, smelled like... victory." Take out your notebook, Batman, and learn what your money can't buy.

Batman's business is saving lives but he spends vast oceans of money doing so, with high tech gadgets invented just for him to use once and then get bored with, and instead of moving into the cosmic flow he agonizes about issues of vigilante justice, like that boyfriend who spends all ten years of your relationship wondering if he's making the right decision. The Wayne billions are slyly subtextually depicted as liabilities as far as Wayne's personal growth, his maturity, his gentility; he abuses privilege as Wayne and worries he'll do it as Batman. Wayne takes whole ballet companies out on boat trips on the night they have shows to perform and then jets off on a plane in the middle of the ocean and strands them, bored and confused, with only Alfred to amuse them. It's the sort of "punishment" that might happen to a straying Norma Shearer in an old "faux-risque" MGM drama, while Wayne's the sort of lonely Forbes magazine guy that New Deal artists like Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz were lampooning back in KANE, showing them off for the confused loveless hungry ghosts they were.

Even in the gold-wearin' pimp age of MTV, how can we root for such a dour bling-o-holic as Bruce Wayne-cum-Batman? We're supposed to salivate over his helicopters, his yachts, his babes, his high-tech bat toys, but rather than a materialist fantasy of accelerated accumulation, Wayne lives with the dread and guilt of the rich and powerful, the fear the whole social construct he gets to roost atop and enjoy exclusively will topple out from under him, so he has to 'protect' the 'common man.' The rich often have this guilty guillotine-phobic need to pacify the proletariat and in Wayne's case it's sliced thin with the very flimsy rationalization that the high-tech doodads his company spends millions on are there to protect and serve the tired masses, not just to show off or be used for urban pacification.

One thinks of maniacs like Imelda Marcos, who claimed the impoverished Filipino people were all enjoying her massive shoe collection by proxy; or the U.S. military, employed as corporate goons in Iraq, there to serve the interests of Haliburton instead of the taxpayer. At least Tony Stark invents his own shit, and he does it to clean up his own mess... and he fuckin' drinks like a real man... and he don't mind killin'. James Bond is also cool because he didn't pay for all that cool stuff he's got, the British did, so what do we care? Meanwhile, Batman spends and spends on a one-man military build-up, then faints at the first sight of blood.

Anyway, with global warming what it is, shouldn't Batman be riding a solar-powered bat bicycle? I mean, if he really cared about the welfare of his air-breathing Gothamites, wouldn't his billions be better served buying and securing vast tracts of rainforest? Instead he spends his billions on weapons to enforce the status quo. In short, his billions are employed in the protection of his billions and nothing more. The Joker wants to teach the world to sing (or scream)--life and death are the same thing to the man beyond opposites--but Batman just wants the world to stay quiet, orderly. Just like dear old Charlie Kane, he only lets the people rock the boat if it's not his boat, but eventually it's all his boat, and so he outlaws rockin',  for the good of the people.

Chris Nolan seems to underline the hyper-commodity fetishism of Wayne's world, offering a sly socialist critique even as he fulfills his conspicuous consumption fantasy obligations to the producers and advertisers (Alfred is always interested in knowing what of Wayne's many cars will be taken out for drives. "The Lamborghini, sir?" he says, all a quiver). Things get worse when the letter-of-the-law debating starts choking up the narrative like exhaust fumes. As Nolan illuminates the tricky balance between good and evil, rich and poor, left vs. right, he seems split on the viability of arbitrary lines in the sand, such as when Wayne's weapon designer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) takes a sudden high moral ground over the use of some spy software. Batman meanwhile risks the lives of countless civilians during his reckless chases after Joker and his mob, blowing up buildings and crashing through cars - but he'll swerve out of the way, totaling his fancy hog and six other cars, a mailbox, and some street poles, to not run down Joker, because that would be wrong. What? Dude, you probably killed thirty people in that chase, so get over it! Talk about handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500...

All this just makes Joker's homicidal glee look more and more admirable and honest, but even he is stuck with a lot of SOPHIE'S CHOICE'S REVENGE-style booby traps to spring. Does a franchise as proven as the caped crusader really need to borrow so heavily from the SAW films? But no matter, Ledger's Joker is so comfortable in his tailored purple tweeds, so free of any moral quagmire, that you can't help rooting for him and all his Colonel Kurtz-like "slug crawling a straight razor"-style clarity. What Wayne needs to do is get some blood on his hands, get his slug ass up on that straight razor. Maybe he should go kill his next steak instead of just ordering from a safe internet menu. Maybe we need to put Bush and Cheney in a room with some detainees; make them pull the trigger in person for a change.


Adding to the meta-text, before the previews was a public service announcement warning kids against smoking marijuana. It was the one where this kid is wearing about 50 t-shirts with silkscreen slogans like "Burnt out" which he gradually peels off as he gets more and more "clean" off the weed... until he's free! FREE!

The idea that altering your consciousness and expanding your perceptions and horizons through direct experience of a thing (rather than the parentally-approved contempt prior to investigation!) is bad while the ad that came on right after this anti-marijuana sermon involved the bland antics of a bunch of high school kids dancing to a cover of "Don't you forget about me - Hey Hey Hey" in the school library (ala BREAKFAST CLUB) whilst bedecked in the fall line-up from JC Penney. Thus is "indirect experience" of a thing continually fostered on the public as superior to the thing itself: you condemn the drug culture until it's sanitized, put in a museum, and can be enjoyed retro-actively through pastiche tribute. Hey hey hey, and you walk on byyyy na na na na na!

This is how the Batman justifies his petty morality too... and how the church operated in the Middle Ages, where anyone who sought direct spiritual contact instead of going through the church was burnt at the stake. In Gotham City, all enjoyment has to be done through Bruce Wayne, otherwise he'll give you such a CGI-enhanced beating! It's for your own good, but he'd never kill you, or anyone else, because that would be wrong -- unless of course it happened through collateral damage, i.e. it's not murder if the camera didn't catch it.

Dude, if you're gonna do a public service for anything threatening these kids... how about getting your head out of the sand and doing more promos for childhood obesity? Then again, those are really just more Indy 500 speeding tickets, as you can see below:


Uh huh.... if this is the "sane" America we're defending, I'm voting JOKER... on WEED! Put the coke back in coke and stop kibitzing, America! Life is too short to worry about lengthening.