Fourteen or Fight! WILD IN THE STREETS (1968) or "The Day it all Happened, Baby."

In today's environ of political stagnancy we may no longer remember how it could even be possible, but between 1967 and '70, the establishment was seriously concerned about being overrun by its own children. The suits were scared, the politicians saw the size of the crowds at Woodstock, the small cities worth of people who would appear within a week of some rock star announcing a free concert, and they knew no army could stand in their way. And we have WILD IN THE STREETS (1968) to prove it. This is the film that made good on the ever-looming urban myth about the evil hippie plan to spike the water supply with LSD, that foresaw the lowering of the voting age (the age to vote didn't get lowered to 18 until 1971), and threatened to send everyone over 30 off to camps for 're-grooving' (1). The only old guy in the film is the original Ed Begley as a youth-hating politician advising the only-then semi-old California senator Hal Holbrook not to make a deal with the devil, or a young rock star, in this case Max Frost (Christopher Jones, who looks like James Dean's x Martin Sheen).

Max is handsome and charismatic; he can even get away with having a weird pony tail - he's that hot. Richard Pryor plays his drummer; Kevin Coughlin is his 14 year-old queer (!) super genius accountant and guitar player; Diane Varsi is his ex-child star / acid casualty senator. Shelly Winters brays to the rafters and his glomming mom and her schtick has not aged well (until she gets subjected to 'LSD therapy' and decides, "I'm sure my son has a very good reason for paralyzing the country" - she really nails the vibe; her eyes glow in awe over a flower) Songs include "Shape of Things to Come" (a real-life hit), "We're the 52%" and "Fourteen or Fight!" which encourages youth to go on a rampage if the voting age isn't lowered to 14. Eventually, after a few more rungs in between, it is. As soon as that happens, naturally, Frost is elected prez, baby and the organized jihad against the older generation begins in earnest. But his days are numbered: age stops for no Pan.

What's interesting is that this film came out a year before Woodstock and Altamont, but these events are already prefigured in "the biggest block party in history" that narrator Paul Frees calls Frost's Sunset Strip demonstration. Frees' narration also mentions that the older "people die of shock just watching TV." Oh if only, man, if only.  The songs were written by Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann who wrote songs in the following year's ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO, which would have been more of a hit had it not had a late-inning title change (to CULT OF THE DAMNED) to capitalize on the Manson murders, or if it had a real hook like this whole voting age business.

But hey, baby, let's focus up on 1968, the year this film came out, hitting a nice little nerve during a very turbulent and hopeful time. Up until this point in history the youth had a pretty serious, even pipe-smoking voice, especially on college campus, where they regularly made local and even national news protesting and holding sit-ins. It was the year that battles against sexism, racism, censorship, Vietnam, and sexual taboos raged and America seemed ready to rip its face off.  If they wanted, these bands could start a real revolution with their long hair and their rock music.

I wasn't thee, of course, but anyone can feel the change and nervousness just by watching GIMME SHELTER. The scene were Melvin Belli acting as the Stones' lawyer, meets with assorted SF city planners to coordinate the Altamon Speedway free concert. There's a sense the city needs to accommodate the crowds the Stones will bring and not the other way around. You can feel the unease as the old powers bow to the whims of the young. And then later in the film, the way the wild anarchy of druggie California weirdness in turn overwhelms the music itself.

On that note, it's to the credit of TV director Barry Shear that he can depict Max's massive shows of youth revolt without any big crowd scenes, really via nothing more than tinted stock footage of the nightly crowds on the Sunset Strip, overlapping with a parking lot bonfire, parked motorcycles, stalled traffic, random shots of crowds dancing, tinted windows, blinking signs, audience shots from earlier rock concert films and earlier love-ins, skylines, and the Capital Building -all whirled together in a color-styled Eisensteinian overlapping montage set to the bands' music and cheering and sirens. In other words, nary a farthing spent on crowd scenes (PS 1/19 - the version recently shown on TCM didn't have this footage. Could it have been added later to pad for TV running times, like AIP often did before selling packages to TV?). Genius! To give the film that you-are-there youth clout, there are walk-on cameos from youth idols like Bobby Sherman, Peter Tork, and Gary Busey. As with most AIPs, there's less than a dozen people in the whole movie but if you're drunk or ten years-old it can seem like the most dangerous, expensive film ever made; in the style Corman brought to AIP (and later took with him) a bigger canvas is suggested by drawing on parallel drive-in experiences (i.e. we don't need 'new' crowd shots, we've seen plenty already).

Writer Robert Thom wrote the script, based the script on his short story, "The Day it all Happened, Baby." Thom wrote a lot of films about overbearing moms and their beautiful Apollonian sons, like that ANGEL ANGEL AKA CULT OF THE DAMNED (the fat girl's rich bitch mom Jennifer Jones sleeps with her daughter's rock-star boyfriend); BLOODY MAMA (Mama--Winters again--sleeps with her son's gay lover); DEATHRACE 2000 (son runs over old lady); LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE (snide old lady gossip columnist hounds Byronic filmmaker and his lesbian assistant) etc. It doesn't take much psycho-analytic deconstruction to glean Thom's whole bag, making him the link between the AIP drive-in and Tennessee Williams. Sebastian Venable's fingerprints are all over Thom's subtexts!

Come to think of it, has Robert Thom ever written a straight love scene? Like a genuine no-nonsense 'straight people being genuinely romantic' kind of trip? Oh wow... no. There's seduction but never love; there's no sex in WILD IN THE STREETS, and the one moment of intimacy comes with Jones and another boy. Oh Thom. As Diane Varsi drawls, with a loving, languid smile, "I think... you boys... are fags."

Again, it may seem 'strange' but hey, for a commercial film from 1968 meant for mass drive-in appeal, that kind of risk-taking is awesome. Buried under the main text, and enough psychedelic light show madness and teeny bopper blonde hair to keep the older generation confused, it can fly right by if you ain't lookin'.  For all that great covert stride-taking, however, the music still has traces of AIP's patented corniness: lazy horn sections remind you that the older generation making the film harbor unconscious resentment for their drive-in demographic, like the horn section is sneering as their talents are wasted on 1-4-5 rock tripe. But they shall play it or go to the camps! Even Shelly Winters eventually has to bow and gurgle to please them, and methinks we're meant to feel bad for her, for--in her bloated, indiscriminate devouring--does she not represent America itself? But America has always thrived on dissent. Sometimes the greatest patriots are those who would elect a mentally unstable sociopath "just to see what would happen." (you know who I mean).

After WILD was over, I turned cable back on and there was this show on History Channel: '69 - The Sexual Revolution' and Hugh Hefner talking about how he and Shel Silverstein appreciated the free love movement more than the youth around them because they--he and Shel--had grown up in a more conservative time. And I thought, like wow, dig, my generation is living the exact reverse!! I saw enough sexual liberation as a kid in the 1970s that I've come to feel I'll never--no matter how debauched I become--ever live up to that level of freedom, and the younger kids are threatened, not by my moral rigidity, but my lack thereof. I preach, not of decency, but of the glory of a vanished age, a time before safety, health, environmentalism, and antidepressants (which are a lot like the daily LSD supplements in the re-grooving camps), a time when sex didn't need apologies and guilt trailing after it, repression and fear blocking its path. WILD IN THE STREETS reflects the other time, when the idea of freedom and the banners of sex, drugs, and rock and roll had permanently (we thought) done away with the nanny state Safety First Clydes and racist, sexist, homophobic Anita Bryants, or at least reduced them to powerless Shelly Winters caricatures, the type of whose raving actually made the average Americans more tolerant (Anita Bryant's rabid hate-mongering actually turned a lot of Middle-America around on the issue --i.e. it's this bitch that is evil, not them). But our nation is nothing if not bi-polar, half terrified family man, half crazed druggie biker.

That's the secret of America: when you're always fighting yourself, you can't lose.

NOTES
1) Firesign Theater - Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him

In Praise of Dangerous Men: George C. Scott as PATTON (1970)

"The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans."

- Patton (1970)

Now that Kathryn Bigelow has made it safe for us to recklessly court macho annihilation again, let's examine one of the more respected and controversial military leaders of our time-- General George Patton, and the 1970 film that bears his name, starring George C. Scott, which I recently had the pleasure of acquiring on an excellent blu-ray disc, and which is highly recommended to fans of THE HURT LOCKER (2009), THE DEER HUNTER (1977) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) and anyone whose ever had a heart, who wouldn't turn around and expose its flank to daily howitzer bombardments... or who is interested in this new Tom Hanks-produced mini-series, THE PACIFIC (though Patton wasn't in the Pacific, it's still the same God-damned wonderful war!)

From the famous opening (quoted above) -- Patton's clinically insane and perhaps wrong but nonetheless inspiring opening speech in front of a giant American flag -- onwards, we know we're in for some heavy stuff, as Scott has no plans to pull punches, glorify the American dream or lament the unfairness of war. Indeed, as the esteemed general of the magnificent Third Army, Scott's ranting makes you realize, as a man, that part of cowardice involves forgetting there's no real reward to being alive in the first place, as a coward.  Unless you risk it all, it's all wasted.

It makes sense that Francis Ford Coppola worked on the script, since the man knows a thing or too about the seductive lure of megalomania and the high of facing death on a daily basis. Coppola was kicked off the PATTON production but later found fictional editions of that kind of military mindset in characters like Kilgore, Willard and Kurtz in APOCALYPSE NOW, and brilliantly captured the way an ordinary man might find himself manifesting the cold reptilian killer via Michael Corleone's transformation from idealistic young lover of Diane Keaton to cold-as-ice Don in THE GODFATHER. And of course, there's the inspired use of Sicily, a deeply-rooted trans-historical lyricism seems to emanate from the very soil of that island, and Coppola knew it and let it infuse GODFATHER 2. But first, it's where Patton raced Montgomery to Messina in 1943.

In order to rouse his newly assigned group of men from their first defeat in North Africa (he's replacing an ineffectual general who let the boys get slaughtered at Kassarine Pass), Patton appears a maniac for discipline and army regulation, making his men fear and hate him, but making them better soldiers as a result of both, and when they finally measure up, his admiration becomes enough of a reward that they're ready to die for him. As Cesar "The Dog Whisperer" Milan would say, he is an excellent pack leader, radiating calm, assertive energy and understanding that all affection must be earned for it to have value. Or as Tura Satana said in FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL KILL: "You don't have to believe it, just act it." Patton doesn't mind that your hands shake so long as you're trying to keep them steady. It's only when you stop trying that he boots you into the deep end like a sadistic but wise pool instructor (my own most hated-feared childhood figure).

I don't dare presume I wouldn't be ten times shakier and shell-shocked than the man Patton slaps, or even Jeremy Davies in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998). One can't know from a besotted armchair field position, but there are other ways to prove your courage, such as smuggling drugs out of Istanbul, or trying to score with the hottest chick in the room without any wingman or back-up, or bluffing your way past the velvet ropes at a hot nightclub (1), or even just not drinking, one day at a time. True adult courage is important to bear in mind as the alienating effect of technology quietly mutates us back into children via unsupervised lengths of time in complete privacy, allowing the illusion of a mommy bound to serve us instead of the opposite (in both gender and service direction). If God had given us wings he'd expect us to fly, even demand it so, in the age of internet, why not go all the way and abandon your body? If God hadn't meant us to leave our bodies he wouldn't have given us the internet.

Needless to say, that kind of alone time is deprived our common foot soldier or tank brigadier. You can get almost anything in the army except privacy. A soldier is booted into manhood and has to stay there until he likes it, and that could take years. By the time he figures it out, the war is over.

Patton's discipline is intended to create that condition of initiation, Stockholm syndrome in the service of country - there's still going to be the odd soldier who resists the comfort of berserker madness and thinks clinging to the crumbling shards of his childhood persona will preserve rather than destroy him. In the end all the military drilling and exhaustion is to weaken the ego's dogmatic hold, so you can actually be molded into a killing machine who can then run into the path of flaming bullets--against all self-preservational logic. But as long as one soldier can get away with pretending to be sick to get out of combat, the morale of the whole unit is in jeopardy. Hence a little bitch-slap, which he performs in a sense as performance for the other men. Watching this with my dad as a child I used to think Patton was being a bully for slapping the soldier. Later, as a hippie, I thought he was existentialist and square. Now I'm all into his heart of darkness. Patton must necessarily be excused from any consequences that may stem from disrespecting boundaries, for the best defense is a good offense and therefore disrespecting boundaries is the mark of a good general. Eisenhower also shows himself a good general too in the way he masterfully plays up the slapping event up to deflect Nazi attention from D-Day (he had Patton scoping locations in Turkey, tricking the Germans sure into thinking he would invade there, and that the slap incident was a flimsy smokescreen - double reverse psych!).  A slap from a general may be humiliating, but in a way it did more for the war than getting blown up by a stray shell from Rommel's Panzer corps.

A word should be paid in tribute to the blu-ray version of this film: Dazzling! Originally shot on 70mm the picture is deep, and that has made all the difference in the 1080 transfer, enabling a dazzling clarity that lets you look up the nose of a man in a tank 5,000 yards away. The many long range desert battles seem to be in 3-D. The horizon line of the desert (this movie is always very horizon line conscious) warps the sides of the frame (Todd AO fisheye Cinerama 360 lenses) into a sloped elongated triangle, so it's like looking into a sloping Victorian house attic with North African desert wallpaper. If ever there was a reason to get blu-ray, this or Polanski's REPULSION would be it for me. I tried looking at the GODFATHER blu-ray, but got freaked out that you could finally see Bonasara the Undertaker's yellowed teeth clattering in the shadows as he talked of "vengeance for my daughter!"

Scott's nose is amazing on blu-ray, too: we can see three layers of veins in.  But his aim sucks. When shooting at German dive bombers, you have to lead them, not shoot behind them! He should have shot straight over his head - you got to "lead" em (1)!

Consider the line from the hippest movie ever made, PERFORMANCE:  "The only performance that truly makes it is one that achieves madness." When George C. Scott looks out at the carnage along the River Elbe, and says of war, "I love it. God help me I do love it so," one's aware that this right here is a performance that "truly makes it."

I've seen this movie all through my life and my reaction to that line varies with age. As a child watching it with my dad on TV I thought it was pretentious. Later, it seemed existentially gutsy; still later, callous. Now I see it as a coping mechanism, the very nature of heroism is perhaps this coping mechanism, an alchemical transubstantiation that enables one to derive perverse, counter-intuitive satisfaction from horror, the "you must make friend of horror" aspect, a looking down under the pretty flowers and below the serpents under them, to the deep roots wherein one endures the unendurable through a cultivated detachment, the stripping away of illusion's bodice, to reveal the grinning skull and scythe below. The tripper and the warrior both must kiss this skull and call it love.

To survive this awful surrender the hipster has his rueful irony, the court its jester, the American G.I. his endless complaining and satiric reading of army sloganeering.  The Germans never got that sense of humor -- they considered it our weakness.  They didn't realize that irony can be a kind of casual loyalty that works better than attack dog allegiance because--and this turned out to be a crucial advantage--the GI could improvise and think on his feet while the German was trained only to follow direct orders. As long as we can gripe and crack wise about it we can endure anything, that was what made us the winners: freedom to gripe about being losers!

One of my favorite war stories is how, during the Battle of the Bulge, the US tanks' top machine guns froze solid and couldn't be fired at the closely advancing enemy. Here it is, Germans breathing down their necks, bullets all around; it's freezing out, guns jammed and what do the machine gunners do? Urinate on them for a quick defrost! See, a German soldier would never think to do that. One needs a certain level of free-flying insanity to win a war, and that's what Patton had, and inspired in his men. To paraphrase Cesar Milan again: Insanity + Discipline, then affection.

Perhaps in war there simply is no rational response other than hoorror and heartbreak, neither of which wins wars. Therefore an irrational response is required: surrender completely to the "I love it, I do love it so," like a mantra, a relishing of the insane response. Do not the true prophets teach even that? To love your enemy like a brother even as you blow him to pieces? The movie ends with Scott intoning Patton's description of the triumphant Roman processionals of loot and conquered slaves before him: "And behind him, stood a slave with a golden crown, holding it over the conqueror's head while whispering in his ear, 'all glory is fleeting.'" But the film holds an even more shattering truth: life fleets even faster and death is not the end. Ladies and gentlemen, as he was in ancient Rome so shall he be in this future life. General Patton will be back!

NOTES
1. None of which I've done.
(1) from the pages of the DC comic Sgt. Rock (c. 1980) - "You got to lead 'em! Lead 'em" when shooting at passing Messerschmidts. My friend Al and I quoted that a lot.

Acid's Greatest #19: Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972)

In 1968, one of the key films of the budding counterculture was Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. Featuring genuinely hot young unknown actors--as opposed to established stars (like Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer in the 1936 version)--the tale of love destroyed by violent family feuding proved a zeitgeist-riding analogy for our Vietnam state of mind. Capturing the lovely classical beauty of hot young things to old Verona street corners (including a sensational Michael Yorke) and dusty-aired garrets under Old Masters streaks of morning light, Zeffirelli had scored an unlikely smash hit, both a museum masterpiece come to life and an urgent tale of the moment. Naturally El Zeffir (as he was never called) decided to follow up its massive success with a similar period hippie piece. Drawing on the early life of Saint Francis, BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON took the same ideas--the purity of youthful idealism struggling against the repressive conservative dogma of their time--but was released in 1972... which was too late -- by then we no longer felt youthful idealism had a chance in Hell. Our hopes were dashed, then re-adjusted. The zeit had geisted and Zeffirelli was considered square yet again. It was a bridge too far.

Maybe it was because, unlike ROMEO--which started just an adaptation of Shakespeare, never intended to find such a huge youth market (perhaps explaining why it did)--BROTHER was a film specifically designed to click with that generation, and they hated when adults tried to pander to them that way. Intentionally trying to click with the youth (and not being one) was a kiss of death, like the dad who shows up at his son's basement make-out party wearing a Beatles' wig.

The wig in this case was the soundtracks. Instead of Nino Rota (whose instrumental theme for ROMEO had become a classic) there was a whole soundtrack full of Donovan singing medieval folk tunes, with nary a trace of insincerity or heaviness... or even self-awareness.

Had he forgotten ROMEO AND JULIET was the tale of lost innocence? Why did he expect us to have kept it? It was like he forgot how that movie ended. 

The analogies to the Vietnam era and the anti-war movement were now all too apparent. Francis' story was a  parallel to those of Vietnam vets turned war protesters (à la Ron Kovic) - young Francis starts out a soldier, but comes back broken from the war, with a terrible fever that  leaves him--when he awakes from it--able to talk to animals and flowers). Francis' bedridden hallucinations before his enlightenment intentionally resemble a heavy acid trip -- a heavy symbolic rebirth/death cycle ala that undergone by Peter Fonda in THE TRIP - when trapped in the tomb of leftover Corman Poe props. His subsequent gratitude to be alive and the burning away of illusion leads to a rejection of his father's plastic fantastic textiles gig for a communal church - evoking parallels to so many young panhandlers in the Haight.

But, vibrant and full of amore' as Zeffirelli's style and dusky gorgeous cinematography still was, SISTER MOON committed the sin of trying too hard to be Edenic, becoming so flower-power guileless that the counterculture could only laugh from their aloof new vantage points. Peace and love? no thanks man! Won't get fooled again! Romeo's dead, man. Juliet's dead. Jimi dead, Janis dead, Altamont, Kent State, the Democratic National Convention, Nixon, the Baader-Meinhof Complex, Manson...

The kids knew or believed it was better to just climb up the mountain and watch your parents' world burn than pray for rain and try to change their minds about love and peace. Climb up and if you don't want to watch the flames, watch anything else, in fact, except, perhaps, another goddamned scene of smiling youths running towards each other in slow mo dissolves through fields of flowers. The Free Love garden's once-open and extended tendrils were now curled back tight for the long night of frosty unrest. No one even wanted to be seen in the theater where BROTHER SUN was showing, lest they be spotted, mocked, and crucified by their conformistly unconformist hipster friends.

No only that, by then all that slow-mo flowery field running had been run aground by endless repetitions of antiperspirant commercials. The danger of trying to compete for a different country's youth market was thus illuminated: you have less commercials in Europe since TV is state-controlled in most countries; you don't always know what images and plots have become cliche through advertising overuse. European commercials tend to be very artsy and engaging and played only once a night or twice between shows. They don't drone in endless repetition.



Today, though, we can reconsider these things. I had to cover all Zeffirelli's films for Muze back in 1999, so I saw BROTHER SUN and the nine hour-cut of his JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)  over one long weekend. I was newly sober and on a "pink cloud" so the spiritual stuff in both was coming through loud and clear. I don't mind saying BROTHER moved me to tears and after thatm JESUS brought me into a state of exaltation. I was a Christian almost all the way through to Tuesday! I almost volunteered for AA service I was so Christian; I even actually helped a blind man cross the street.

Seriously.

What a chump.

When I wrote about BROTHER again for popmatters a few years later, and re-screened it on DVD (I'd only rented the tape for the Muze gig), the giddy pink cloud had rained down into a gray socialist subtext sea. I winced at every Donovan lyric, like a dagger.

In other words, get a haircut, hippie! Oh wait he does... intentionally!

Recently I saw it a third time and thought that the imagery was beautiful and full of typically dusky Zeffirelli touches, but all the "Throw away your money! All you need is love" pleading it didn't even penetrate my outer layers (Heath Ledger's maniac bizarro world Saint Francis Joker in DARK KNIGHT by contrast, sends me far deeper into the post-chaos embrace).

Still the cast of BROTHER is tops: Graham Faulkner, bright-eyed with guileless spiritual ecstasy like Keith Moon crossed with Sam Rockwel; Judi Bowker, so frail and beautiful with such long gorgeous blond hair that for me the biggest tragedy of Christendom is when they decide to cut it all off so she can join their muddy little holy order. That's where my Christianity draws the line. Would you pick the lilies of the field right in fullest flower just to cut the heads off?

My Christianity thus withered anew.

Still, if I came across the post-awakening Francis in the fields outside Assisi, what would I do? Probably join him; lord knows I've joined up with hippies far dirtier and for far less noble reasons. Going after God is never a mistake, people! Following your heart takes guts, and the best Christians are the ones who bow their heads to lions daily. The rest of us forget and run off in fear, and are ripped to shreds, lifetime after lifetime.

I'm sorry I badmouthed Donovan before. He's very good, in his way. But the Age of Irony bideth not his naive frailty. He's like the guy who always gets shot first because he can't keep his head down below the sunflower line (yeah that's a PRIME CUT reference).

The question is: are you ever going to stand up, snipers and shrapnel be damned? Am I?

Not me, man, but I stood once, in '87 and even again in '98. Far-out!

I never really lost my love of this movie, just pretended otherwise to look cool.

And I'm ashamed, both ways.

Fuck Donavan, man.

But hallowed be the name of Saint Francis, as long as he ain't cuttin' off no more cute girls' long straight blond hair no more, not on my beat. And I do mean that metaphorically as well as literally. It's time to let compassion fuel our opiated veins and to open them up to our scuzzy neighbor's balloon. We are the church and the church is under a rock. Somewhere. Jesus said the church can be found under any rock.

But which rock?

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we will seek that rock. Who among you would take off their clothes and follow me into the sun like Francis did?  The church, like the song, is you. Love thy neighbor as thyself, just don't let him corner you in the vestibule.

There's wolves about, and they don't like singing.

"Zabriskie Point is Anywhere"

This month saw the DVD debut of Zabriskie Point (1970), which is a major event for Antonioni fans and lovers of the Woodstock fall-out cinematic era, i.e. anyone who ever stuck up for Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. But that's not me. I'm a big fan of the pristine, shimmering Criterion DVDs of Antonioni's L'Aventura and L'Eclisse but can imagine hating them just as much if not for drugs and Godard to prep me on their weird iconographical dysmorphia, and they weren't so beautifully restored-- anamorphic, shimmering like mirages. If they were on crappy "Genius Entertainment" like La Notte (pixelated picture with burned in subtitles!) or didn't have Monica Vitti, I'd not care for them. In other words, if they were Zabriskie Point. Luckily, that as Floyd. 

In its continental plate mashing contrast between meditative isolation and crowded canvas capitalist (and/or socialist) sound and fury, Point is practically a gender-reversed L'Eclisse - with Los Angeles instead of Rome and the emptiness of Death Valley instead of a corner near a rain barrel. The motif of Monica Vitti taking a moment to vibe on the wind rattling the flagpoles outside her friend's apartment complex in L'Eclisse finds Point parallel with the sullen kid playing the ruined piano strings at the desert commune; the stockmarket hullabaloo is replaced by Rod Taylor's pervy real estate dealings; explosions occur instead of eclipses; optimistic California hippies replace the 'too smart to be vapid like everyone else, but trying to fake it for lack of a better option' Rome jet setters.

But the center cannot hold. Without ennui and old European architecture to ground him, Antonioni just .... floats... away. The youth of America in 1969 are not the same youth as the ones in London 1966. Not even close.

There is some architecture, of course, and more to come, designed by Rod "Time Machine" Taylor, who presumes he's here in Antonioni's America to work, and so he does, in a very modernist office, and to roll in the hay with his cute hippie temp, played by cute but blank Daria Halperin. Soon she's driving off into the desert, to the middle of nowhere, there for notation and tryst. Rod's already out there, eyeing empty desert space for a real estate development deal. Meanwhile the young radical of her dreams is maybe killing a cop and stealing a pink plane.

If he can fly a plane, you'd think he could get a real job.

In an unusual touch, all the rock acts who contributed songs get star billing early in the credits, which roll over multiracial revolutionary arguments at the UCLA student union in a semi-documentary commune style reminiscent of Billy Jack but with a Godardian edge of disbelieving cynicism. The bands are all good: Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia, Roscoe Holcomb singing "I wish I was a single girl again." I had this LP decades before seeing the film and the film doesn't do the album justice. Then again there is no justice in an Antonioni film, just us... and just...ice.

Before meeting up with our young cop killer hero, Daria pulls over at an obscure town to locate hippie guru James Patterson (!), who has been turning a peaceable desert scrub wasteland into a David Koresh-meets-Hills Have Eyes playground of burnt out cars and unruly children. "He's gonna ruin a piece of American history," warns the grizzled cafe-owner. Kids throw rocks through the cafe windows, echoing our hero's own rock tossing and hinting Antonioni is more than a little worried his the free love generation his Blow-up helped define is just a pig's head on a stick away from Fliestown.

But that's just one sticky stop on the road out into the Southwestern US wasteland, and gradually all the harshness and industrial "Red Desert"-style offenses to the utopian ideal-- red cans, black trailers, malevolently inexpressive hick faces-- lead to her cop-killing new lover, and epiphany, freedom and "nothing's terrible anymore" ("far out") revelations which are then dissolved in the simple grace of a beautiful Jerry Garcia guitar solo and the sex/orgy scene to end all primordial desert sex/orgy scenes (they wish- there was a better one in the same year's Dunwich Horror), an ecstatic release after all that nerve-wracking industrial clatter. Daria's dress and costume changes in a quick montage and she ends up looking like the ghost of an old settler; the interchange of actors hips us to the mythic ego dissolve of groovy love. They are no longer merely themselves, but Man and Woman in the primal timeless sea of masks and derivations. A long shot of the orgy goes for mid-Elysian Bosch painting or what the final scene in the Beyond would look like if Fulci had the same budget, but it's very under-baked. It's Antonioni trying to be open-hearted even as he recognizes this new paradise is just the old inferno with a forced California smile masking a sense of weariness (the lovers all spread out on a skin-colored hill are barely visible, and probably sick to death from dehydration from the all-day shoot).

One thing that I'm reasonably sure is intentional on Antonioni's part is the hypocrisy at the core of Daria's "nothing's terrible" mantra. It's no sooner spoken than superseded by an elitist youthful cliquey vanity as she wrinkles her nose at some ugly tourists (we see their unconscious consumerist sense of entitlement). She also fails to show love to a cop who pulls up near her as she wanders alone in the desert, probably just to see if she's all right. She looks like she's been wandering for days and maybe he just wanted to offer her some water. The desert dehydrates you faster than you can imagine. She treats him like he's got the plague.

Nothing's terrible anymore... indeed. It's pretty clear there's at least one thing... 



For Antonioni then, it's really a matter of (r)evolution rather than the acceptance Daria preaches (but doesn't practice --in true poor little rich girl fashion); even the revolutionaries seem stuck on the hateful caterpillar trip. The butterflies awaken and are usually shot down by the sheriff within a few reels (this time one gets to literally soar in a stolen plane, painted in paisleys to drive the metaphor home) during which they may or may not love a lifetime's worth (how can they possibly know?).

Drugs too get a strange lens from Antonioni - though supposedly part of the emerging scene, the boy (Frechette) doesn't turn on, doesn't trip or smoke weed or nothing. In this and other things he begins to resemble a genuinely creepy antihero rather than just a charismatic outlaw. Just like his alter-ego Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, we're never sure which of any of his exploits are real or vividly imagined. Just as we can't know if his reticence to try psychedelic drugs is a result of fear (he's never tried), anger (he's never been offered), or experience (he had a bad trip once - and is now a pussy).


Sandwiched gloomily between the Woodstock idealism and the casual Romeo-Juliet murder sprees of the early 1970's, Zabriskie Point winds up with no other way to get attention than to blow up a bunch of books, filmed at a zillion different angles and speeds for the notorious climax. While crazy Pink Floyd music builds to a thunderous scream we see books, tons of them, blowing up like beautiful sea anemones and octopi and fireworks all made of pages of print.

It's an apocalyptic rejection of language, maybe, but Daria Halperin is just not in the same league as Monica Vitti and when she stares emptily off at this real or imagined spectacle we're not transfixed by her transfixion. The dew is off the lily. It's only later, with Sissy Spacek's glowing golden wheat field hair in Badlands (1973), that the transfixing spell of "hellion next door" beauty is restored and the modern artist as outlaw role play can sally forth. Malick knows better than to hold back tastefully on color saturation during a once-in-a-lifetime natural setting sunlight-halo / red hair combination. Halperin's hair isn't even considered as a means of reflection and natural beauty. She's almost more like Jeanne Moreau in La Notte, just a tan little brunette goblin loose in the world, judging everything she sees like she's all that.

If we too feel a little excluded from what little of there is of a party in Zabriskie Point its perhaps because Antonioni seems to be coming to terms with the realization he'll always be so excluded from this scene, always an exile, too old to fit in, yet too anarchic for his same-age peers. Stranded outside every cause, cursed, like Godard, to be too smart to succumb to a hoped-for idealism. Even as the guest of honor at the wake for the post-post-modernist cultural landscape he's helped destroy, Antonioni doesn't know what to say as far as small talk or adult conversation, only how to look at the items on the young people's book shelves, the unexploded titles, like an older guy apartment party wallflower. This new world is for the young and tripped-out and he has no clue how to sit around in paradise pretending he's having fun playing the same old games he's long ago mastered; all he can do is blow up the old world, then just keep the camera rolling on the embers while he whispers like a proud parent to the corpse by his side: "That's a-my daughter up there!" But still, he's not proud. He wishes he could prouder.

Nothing's terrible anymore.

But doesn't that mean, too, that everything is?

Great Dads of the 1970s #1: Jon Voight as Luke in COMING HOME

"Ah, the smugness, I can't stand it." -Jane

"I dont belive it will change, but you're beautiful when you're excited." - Jon

I was just a kid when COMING HOME came out but I remember its impact. Along with THE DEER HUNTER, released the same year, there was a whirlwind of controversy and outpourings of support, anger and raw feeling over a war that hadn't been over more than a few years. The media was aflame and Oscars fell like rain and now, thirty years later all we have left are the DVDs, while another war rages and the best we can get are polemics like LIONS FOR LAMBS. But what of 1978? In hindsight, The DEER HUNTER seems to have almost nothing to do with Vietnam, being instead an American Reifenstahl Alpenfilme, but it's still good and gets repackaged and made glossy and classic, but why not COMING HOME?

The red state stigmatization of Fonda and her strong character may have something to do with HOME's lack of corporate support as far as DVD re-marketing, but I would guess the answer really lies in the fact that its genuinely subversive, in a positive almost painfully human way. Leonard Maltin's guide gives it a mere three and a half stars to the DEER's four, citing the film's "lapses into melodrama" as the reason. Of course THE DEER HUNTER (like APOCALYPSE NOW which came out the following year) is really a "guy" movie. (Maltin says it "packs an emotional wallop"), COMING HOME is neither a man's nor a woman's picture. If I wasn't all obsessive and insane at the moment I would probably never use these sorts of words, but: it's a human picture. It's a picture for the non gender-specific lover archetype which we embody only when we are at our best. A lot of us can't stomach that sort of intimacy for long; we'd rather reach for the easy comfort of our threadbare genre straitjackets. I'm as guilty of that as anyone. I can barely watch COMING HOME even now. I'm watching the DVD as I write this and I have to pause every few minutes, for breaks that stretch into hours. I have to write like mad to deal with the pain.

And no, Voight's character, Luke, is not an actual parent--nor shall he ever be one, apparently, thanks to his waist-down paralysis--so his being considered a 1970's dad might seem a bit odd. But hey, man, there are people all over the world needing parenting, not the bossy, browbeating kind but the unconditional nurturing and sense of strong support kind. One need only grace, gravitas and guts, genuine non-gender specific love, and maybe a mustache and fine foxy beard to be the best of 70s dads; kids will come from all over, from all ages and groups.

Luke has those things and as he goes from soul-ruptured angry young paraplegic to nurturing activist/lover, you get to see deep into his wide-open soul--both the actor and his character--and his innate majesty shines out at you; he's the wounded fisher king accepting the fact no Parsifal is coming. As a knight you need to serve a king, and Voight fits my bill in COMING HOME. I watch and I want to help him do whatever it is he needs to do, because you know it's right and just, whatever it is. He becomes the sort of man that James Dean's character was on the road to becoming in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. He becomes a leader that inspires what is best in men.

Contrasting Voight in the film is Bruce Dern's character, a smarmy officer and Jane's husband. He embodies the Beatles' lyric heard in the film: "Living is easy with eyes closed..." and Bruce Dern is so good at portraying this type you fear for his soul. In short, he's odious. His character eventually loses out and goes for "the long swim" (if only he'd hung around awhile of course, he wouldn't have to worry--the Voights of the world lost to the banal conformity of the Derns after all). Too bad, because the pain he was feeling might have made him a better person if he just faced it rather than running. The Derns of the world don't ever face the mirror, they don't need to and so they don't, and then when they need to suddenly they can't - they'd rather off themselves than see how their unexamined life has left a shitty legacy.

Luke certainly has his work cut out for him in facing that mirror, learning to use the wheelchair, etc. all while being utterly reliant on others. There's a feeling of futility and angst surrounding his situation, and it reaches a head when he first crashes into Jane on her first day volunteering at the VA, sending his colostomy bag flying and humiliating him to the breaking point so that he goes on a furious tirade that would not be topped for sheer greatness until he himself topped it seven years later in RUNAWAY TRAIN. It's a rage that is so fierce it reaches alchemical-level heat and from its raging molten crucible comes a humility akin to divine grace.

Luke's humility in this film represents a path for men that was never overtly spelled out and so was lost in the shuffle when we went from subtle to sledgehammer in our cultural cum corporate aesthetic. If you look at old films--like Howard Hawks' in particular--they all depict an unspoken code of "good" behavior that men measure one another by; it's a code that operates free of gender and physical strength and asks only what was asked of Laertes in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true, and thus it follows as night follows day, thou cannot be false to any man." The path up to this heavenly ethical plateau is through things like therapy,  the 12 steps, meditation, volunteer work, helping others --all the shit we'd often rather die than deal with directly. But if we don't deal with it, it deals with us and we're back in the jungle or the desert faster than we can run. 

There's a great moment when Luke first gets asked to dinner by Jane and as she heads off-screen he slowly pulls himself up the hospital's wheelchair ramp, his newly muscled arms rippling as he pulls his wheelchair and bulk. Those muscles represent not just Voight's devotion to getting the details of his part right--and by association doing right by the paraplegics he studied for the role--they represent the triumph of love against the sort of rage and shame that he expressed earlier. Luke begins to grow like a flower in the sun of Jane Fonda; he will become a dad figure to Billy, the shell-shocked neurotic guitarist played by Robert Carradine; and he will become an inspiration even to a whole high school assembly at the film's climax.

What makes the final speech so moving and profound is not just his tears, but his acceptance of responsibility; he doesn't condemn Vietnam with the self-righteousness of a screaming protestor; he doesn't bemoan his loss. Instead he admits he "doesn't feel very good" about having killed people for "not enough reason, man." He doesn't blame the U.S., or the recruitment officer who spoke before him. He admits defeat and admits he made choices that he believes were wrong. In doing so, he begins the possibility for genuine social change. It's such a scary thought I believe the powers that be would just as soon this movie never existed, was forgotten, and overshadowed by the grim fatalism of The Deer Hunter.

Everyone celebrates and remembers Voight in that big final high school speech, so rather than discuss it further I'm going to delve a bit into their first date at Fonda's apartment: She's nervous and he orders her to sit down. He asks if this is "Bring a gimp over to dinner night," and rather than get indignant (a reaction which you see cross her face) she instead looks him directly in the eye and  slowly shakes her head no; the result is nothing short of a true human connection, and he connects back and admits, "I know you didn't."

In today's edit-happy world this scene would probably be cut down to a few seconds. Instead we're allowed to see each of them overcoming fears and prejudices, connecting as real people, and Ashby makes it possible for us to see this in a magnificent natural light that illuminates their eyes. He gives Voight and Fonda all the room they need to make these characters real. Even though we might squirm in embarrassment while it's happening, in the end we're in love with them as much as they are with each other; the kind of love that transcends sex and gender (literally since Luke is effectively sexless) the kind of love that spreads outwards to all who come in contact with it... except for the Bruce Derns, of course, living easy with their eyes closed.

Later in that same first date, Voight says to Fonda: "When people look at me they see something else, they don't see ... who I really am."  In real life, people still don't see Voight or Fonda as who they really are (I'm sure I'm not seeing Dern as he really is either). They see publicity and Angelina and Hanoi Jane and ANACONDA and whatever else. In 1978's COMING HOME we can feel the aperture of spirit close around us, feel our willingness to embrace the gossip rags rather than the unwritten riches, but first we get this wide open view of the human spirit at its most noble and compassionate... and yes, it can be painful to watch, especially for men. We're not comfortable seeing a man so dependent upon a woman (two words: wheelchair accessible) and COMING HOME lingers right on that sensitive spot, like a lover trying to tickle some embarrassing secret out of us while we're tied to the bed.

Is it any wonder then, that cinema fans in media-saturated 21st century prefer the cool macho alienation of THE DEER HUNTER? COMING HOME challenges us to be more open and loving with one another and it does so by practicing what it preaches; it gets all sticky and gooey, it "lapses into melodrama." It asks us to feel deeply. Conversely, THE DEER HUNTER asks us only to pop open another cold one and turn up the game; to drown out that subtle, soft voice that would point us towards the love we'd prefer to think irretrievable. If things get too intimate, just drown that sensitivity in another game of Russian roulette, like a real man.

And so Jon Voight in COMING HOME gets first place in the 1970s dad pantheon, without his character even having any kids... or even any legs...or the ability to ever walk or inseminate again. All he has are the guts to ask for help, and to love without limit, and to administer a cool beard... and he's beautiful. And I almost forgot: he's got such cunnilingual skills he gives Jane her first orgasm. As far as hostility towards this picture by mainstream society, that explains a hell of a lot.