Off the Road: NIGHT CHILD, THE BRAIN, LILITH'S AWAKENING

America, Canada, the North: vast empty night skies, rows of dreary tract homes without trees or sidewalks. A single gas station the only sign of life for twenty miles in each direction. The Winter: the dwindling Fall dying err it arrives. The bell of the end of meditation-- the clicking wheel of life and death Only dreams fill the void of the empty road, sky, and life... and movies, of course. 

Autumn comes everywhere, even Italy, whose art is older than America by many centuries. The orange hair of Nicoletta Elmi as she comes roaring at you with a hammer like a modern instance. And all on Prime... Can such deals be real, even at the tragic cost? 

THE BRAIN

(1988) Dir. Ed Hunt

*** / Amazon Image - B- (SD)

The Prime thumbnail image for this film might fool you into thinking it's another 50s black-and-white Donovan's Brain retread (there are over a half-dozen movies with the same ironic title) but accept no substitutes: Your Brain of choice should be in color, from 1988, and bathed in wintry Ontario wanness. The titular brain for this one is a giant fanged, alien, floating head (less Donovan, more Arous), so don't worry about being gypped on the monster end (I haven't ever seen Donovan, out of principle). This evil brain isn't possessing gangsters or John Agar, it's using local TV signals to brainwash parents into believing their children are dangerous illegal drug addicts! Hear that, mom? 

If that brings you a shudder of recognition, maybe you were a teenager in the 80s (the decade of high school urine samples--even for non-offenders--and 'surviving straight'-style kidnap rehabs). Too, it might make you think of the divine Carpenter's They Live from the same year, although that was less about suburban teenage rebels and more about the inner city homeless. Thank god I can't relate to that one as much as this. 

there's obviously no such thing as irony on this Brain's planet

The storyline of The Brain --if you pare away the sci-fi--boils down to the welcomely familiar Hitchcockian 'lovers on the run' model. A smirky antihero (Tom Bresnahan) reaps the bitter fruits of his practical jokes when no one believes his conspiracy babbling and he winds up in some shady rehab clinic at a local TV studio. His too-good-for-him girlfriend (Cynthia Preston) doesn't brook his tomfoolery until she sees thugs from the mental hospital forcing their way into her place of work to grab him. Escaping from rehab leads to a great stretch of film where he's just driving around his local streets, eluding the funny farm wagon, the endlesss Ontario sameness of the landscape coupled to the feeling of being pursued by faceless agents of parental homogenization are so relatable to me (and I'm sure to you as well, and the bulk of its targeted demographic), as to feel like someone's been reading my mail. In. a great scene the driver of the pursuing paddy wagon --a hulking hipster of a thing--his lab smock wafting gracefully out of the van--brandishes ID tag and hypodermic, slinging a doped Tom over his shoulders like a bag of dog food--all while fighting off Tom's buddy and girlfriend. It's one of those stealth cool/creepy termite film moments we took for granted in 80s movies, but we shouldn't - for they have not yet come again. 

Anyway, old Tom deserves his fate for wasting his chemistry skills on spiteful pranks too gauche even for a detention-magnet hesher. But he'll learn... oh yes.

 "he was dead before he ate here"

As with Cronenberg films like Scanners, the Brood, and Rabid, the bulk o fthe mise-en-scene consists of free-standing commercial/residential structures--clinics, corporate headquarters, and so forth--offset against snowy woods or flatlands. Here the action goes down mostly in the combination TV station / youth rehab / reprogramming facility, whose ruler, Dr. Anthony Blakely (a re-animated David Gale) is a kind of Dr. Phil meets Dan O'Herlihy in Halloween III. He works for a a disembodied alien head that controls the minds of the town via the UHF TV waves of Blakely's self-help show, convincing them to come into the studio so he can devour their brains. And now he plans to launch a global satellite system that will enslave the world! But in the meantime, kill that rascally kid! The knack the big brain has for motivating the populace to kill smirky Bresnahan results in housewives and workmen grabbing up jackhammers and swords whenever they see him running through their backyards (they go crazy and hallucinating tentacles if they try to disobey). Car chases and fights occur on the same drab suburban roads we all drove up and down every day while in high school. You know, the kind with no sidewalk, or trees: tract homes hung in brick rows along soggy front lawns,-- it might be Ontario, but it's still grimly familiar territory for a lot of us 80s kids when November came around and the ground froze. We may well remember taking backyard routes along tiny strips of shrubbery-filled no man's land just to sneak home to get a change of socks while our parents were at work. And the TV studio/ rehab looks just like the high school and the high school looks just like your dorm rooms --it's all made out of those drab cinder blocks, painted white or grey -- prisons without bars.  For me at least it's so familiar it's like the filmmakers are inside my head, rooting through public high school memories, ransacking my own unconscious dreams for their tasty centers. 

Today we can watch a film like The Brain and--in addition to reveling in the great, over-the-top but super slimy and welcomely analog latex monster--remember back to a time long before the internet, when cable and video was new and our current erosion of consensual reality was only in its infancy, early enough that films like Videodrome and They Live seemed more speculative than historical. The Brain and They Live coming out the same year reflects a moment in time when parents were turned against their own children on the word of hysteria-mongering TV pundits, even as every other facet of outlaw self expression was slowly rolled back on us by our own consumerist impulses. Our only quasi-legal 'fun' came in skipping school, driving to the mall and smoking cigarettes at Spaceport. Too specific? For those of us living in this post-real America of the Now, where dueling 24/7 news channels turn America agains itself as Russia crashes our future's hard drive with flag-pumpin' sock puppets, fanning flames from phony fires they faked us into fearing, blah blah. 

Forget all that relevance. Come back to when our current Black Mirror nightmare was just science fiction, when it was all just part of a mid-80s micro-wave that saw deep into the 'reality' that cable TV and video rental stores seemed doomed to propagate. The Brain never caught cult status like Videodrome and They Live, but it's more fun--and moderately less sanctimonious--than both put together, with the teen couple like a suburban version of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, running around the TV station chased by zombified guards and an ever-growing fanged beach ball alien. If you were a pot-smoking hippy or punk teenager in the 80s watch it remember how once upon a time the it was OK for your parents to have you shanghaied off to Christian extremist rehabs if she they found a dime bag of weed in your jeans. 

Now that weed is practically legal, the real addiction is cell phones. There is no rehab for that ailment, and the world is already in the thrall of some ancient online Slavic monster that has no name... let us call him - Yogxander SoPutggi'noth- and his Necronomicon the Faciem-liber!

 LILITH'S AWAKENING

(2016) Dir. Monica Demes

*** / Amazon Image - A-

Brazilian director Monica Demes has clearly taken some points from other b&w womyn's rites vampire flicks, like Michael Almereyda's Nadja and Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone in her feature debut, filmed in Iowa while under David Lynch tutorship at the University of MUM (i.e. Maharahrishi University of Management). Sophia Woodward stars as Lucy, a dissatisfied woman living in a twilight world of the flatland emptiness-drenched midwest. Bossed around by her dad (she works at his gas station as a cashier), almost raped by his creepy-hot mechanic (Matthew Lloyd Wilcox), and bossed around by her doughy husband (Sam Garles), she's ready to be not bossed! And so Lillith (Barbara Eugenia) rides into Lucy's dreams to wreak some vengeance, which then those dreams seems like reality. When it seems like it's almost always night, when days pass like dreamy flashes between eternal flat stillnesses, which is the dream and which is the waking?  

That sentence could be a sign to click 'stop' and keep scrolling, but resist! 

In a lot of ways this works as good as or better than Lynch's own Twin Peaks: The Return in that it's at least not boring and there's not as many badly-aged, once-hot actors around to remind us of our own crumbling mortality.

What helps most is that Demes and her cinematographers have found a way to capture the deep spooky blacks of Iowa's flat straight landscape, where the night extends outwards ever blacker into the vast distance, while letting us see--gradually--shapes and faces emerging into an invisible lighting spectrum. There are blacks on blacks here in ways one hasn't seen since straining to find Joe Spencer's tattoo on the cover of the Velvet's White Light/White Heat album, or that ambiguous black blotch animation in  the original Cat People. The camera settles in for long-held static shots comprised often mostly of darkness, shadows of tangles of trees overlapping, or long flat stretches of road, with angry or zombified faces illuminated by dashboard lights at the wheel. We keeps straining the emptiness for faces; and sometimes, when one does show up, Demes ingeniously keeps the score quiet about it: there's no jangle of music letting us know what to feel and when we should feel it, and/or see what may even not be there. Like Lucy, we begin to go crazy as a defense mechanism against such unyielding emptiness. Sometimes 'daylight savings' time is almost a relief, crushing out the latter half of the day from the reminder there's nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Filmed mostly in the dead quiet of night, with huge empty starless skies, in the middle of nowhere- it's a kind of 80-minute nightmare logic poem that could have been a real bore in lesser hands. Demes takes a few pointers from Lynch (who cameoed as a security guard in Nadja so it all fits full circle!) by papering the cracks with a droning avant-garde minimalist underscore, adding intensely hypnotic layers to the empty darkness of the landscape.

Strain real close now, and let your paredolia fly! 

It's not perfect. Moments like sudden CGI flash of fangs, or a dumb shot of Lilith hanging upside down from a tree like a bat are more dumb than scary or dreamy. (Demes might have taken a look at the way bat conversion is subliminally alluded to in films like Daughters of Darrkness rather than spelled out); it would be the same in Witch Who Came from the Sea if we saw shots of Millie Perkins wearing a pointy witch's hat and straddling a trident. It also doesn't seem believable that Lucy's chucklehead husband would announce to her that he invited his boss and his wife over for dinner and therefore he expects Lucy to cook some nice meal for them when their kitchen is the size of a matchbox and it's not the early 1960s anymore and it's clear she never cooks anyway and holds a full time job of her own.

We hope she'd tell him to go fuck himself, or that Lilith, her dream anima-avenger shadow, will rip him asunder, but this is a movie not really on a realistic level -instead it has a kind of dreamy 'is Lilith real or is this girl hallucinating?' vibe. But who's complaining when--instead of the usual trench-coated middle aged working stiff investigating detective we get lovely Eden West in big aviator shades and a leather jacket as the cute lady motorcycle cop investigating the rapist mechanic's mysterious disappearance? 

With directorial debut horror movies it's sometimes not about the cumulative effect and the cohesion into a nice wrap-up payoff, it's about the mood and the moment. And on that, Demes delivers! 

--

NIGHT CHILD

Il medaglione insanguinato (malocchio)
aka "The Cursed Medallion"

aka "Together Forever" 
(1975)  Dir. Massimo Dallamano

*** / Amazon Image - B

Despite its banal title/s, this autumnal-hued, Exorcist-tinged supernatural Freudian Italian thriller delivers "the goods." Richard Johnson (The Haunting) stars as a British documentary filmmaker whose new subject is "Diabolical Art," specifically a nightmarish, ancient Italian painting with a tragedy-speckled provenance that has some eerie connection to his Elektra-complexioned young daughter Emily (giallo redhead mainstay Nicoletta Elmi). She's still getting over her mom's death (in a horrible fire which Emily witnessed) and is so clingy she ends up tagging along to Italy (at her shrink's insistence) to watch daddy film the cursed painting and its creepy condemned historical old private gallery/museum setting. Joanna Cassidy (Blade Runner) is his sexually available new assistant; Evelyn Stewart (the stringent sister in The Psychic) is the governess who maybe waited too long to make her own move in that department. As you may guess, all sorts of similarities between the events depicted in the painting and reality start to manifest, especially--as the painting restores itself and pieces of old paint fall off-- the young girl is starting to look a lot like Emily. And Emily is growing increasingly possessed by the homicidal spirit attached to a mysterious medallion that used to belong to her witchy mom. The painting's owner, Contessa Capelli (Lila Kedrova, Torn Curtain) tries to convince Johnson to leave Italy at once, but he won't! He doesn't believe in the supernatural, countess, he's "sorry." He keeps insisting the accumulating deaths are "accidents." The discovery of a duplicate to Emily's locket inside the statue that breaks at his feet when looking at the painting?. That too, countess, is coincidence... Sigh.   The countess can already see his death and see the roots of all the problems in her weird dreamlike trances but she can't convince Johnson to believe her warnings. 

Meanwhile, Emily has terrible nightmares whenever dad is off scoring with sexy Cassidy. Everyone standing in the way of Emily's Elektra-Freudian desires starts dying off, and each time the dried blood or other strange gunk falls off the painting to expose more and more eerie detail. Why is her image appearing on this ancient canvas, holding a sacrificial double-edged knife? And what size rock has to fall on our documentarian's head before he wises up to the ghostly truth? Stay tuned!

Johnson and his vaguely bossy/patriarchal manner and dismissiveness of the supernatural are familiar from The Haunting, so the real surprise here is Nicoletta Elmi. There's a startling scene where she goes from having a kind of nightmare seizure to a kind of Helen Keller plate-breaking fit to outright maniacal psychosis. In the scariest scene-- her eyes wild with merry homicidal glee--she starts lunging at her terrified governess while swinging a hammer! Even just trying on her mom's old dress, Emily's eyes light up with such dirty malice a viewer may get a deep, satisfying shudder.  When she smokes a cigarette, she does so with a look that's startlingly adult, easily outpacing other smoking 10 year-olds trying the same look around the same time (like Tatum O'Neil in Paper Moon.)

The Italians never just rip off one influential horror film at a time so, in addition to Exorcist's possessed child / mysterious relic connection thing, there's Don't Look Now's muttonheaded tourist artisan father chasing a strange child through twisting old narrow twisted Italian alleyways thing (Spoleto instead of Venice).  

SStelvio Cirpiani's score comes at all this like it's some sweeping sinful post-neorealist romance: building strings and wistfully gamboling fifths soaring and lilting until you practically smell the autumn leaves and see pairs of lovers lost in blissful slow-mo montage. Did he even know what kind of film this was supposed to be? He then plays that tune over and over and over, all that banal grand piano sweep sort of way. Only a three-beat recurring solo heartbeat line provides an in inkung Cipriani even watched the film he's scoring. Suddenly the soapy dross drops away like mortality's curtain for this spare, ominous line. 

As befits a film about art, the real star is the cinematography and Italy itself. The colorful autumnal foliage and ancient buildings--often seen via reflective windows--lets you know they really are driving around the Italian countryside. Emily's nightmares are layered in images which only reluctantly give way to dissolves, an effective trick that should be more often utilized, especially when depicting hallucinations (in my opinion and experience). The painting that so fascinates dad so much is just the right blend of classical and heavy metal (Bosch meets Kiss) without it becoming uninteresting, which is important since we look at it so damned much. All in all, Night Child might not be as great as The Exorcist or Don't Look Now, but the combination of Elimi's terrifying smile, the unabashed Freudian murk of the father-daughter relationship, and Italy's leafy old world splendor more than make-up for Cipriani's generic scoring, the low body count, the ultimate emptiness of the resolution, and the flat dubbing of everyone but Johnson.  

Laurentiis of Drug-rabia: DUNE (Great Acid Cinema #43)

Caught the last half of DUNE on Showtime after a groovy nap and it was good enough I had to watch the first part "on demand." I hadn't seen it since freshmen year of college when it was on the Student Union marquee, back when if you wanted to see a movie and were living in the dorm, you had to go to the auditorium in HB Crause Hall and pay $2, and it was on the big screen and projected from a 16mm or 35mm print and blah blah man we were so much cooler then. I had just gotten high on hash before going in, back when hash was hard to find as a freshman and blah blah, and man, I really loved it, really vibed with old DUNE. Couldn't figure out why it had drawn so much critical flak back in its troubled history and initial theatrical run. Maybe in order to love its self-important complexly-incoherent trippiness you had to be a trippy self-important innocent yourself. Either way, it blew my mind --not that I was secure enough to admit it (in 1985, as in now, it's not 'cool' to love DUNE). 

But this second time, 32 years older, no longer afraid of what cool older kids might think of me for liking DUNE, and not fully awake from that nap even now, I'm man enough to confess that watching a strapping young Kyle McLachlan, in a form-fitting, dusty and dusky ribbed dark black suit, riding atop a giant sand worm (a real one, not CGI) as the thunder cracks, the sand churns, hearing--like it's been buried under their surface of Arrakis all this time-- an electric guitar from composing band Toto crackling through the hitherto uncharacteristically guitar-less orchestration like the blazing ray of sun of a Pacific NW springtime- well it blew my half-asleep cool adult mind. 

Directed by David Lynch  + produced by Dino de Laurentiis = a match made in heaven, not just for BLUE VELVET. Snooty critics and Herbert purists wouldn't believe that at the time, though. Today, decades of cheap CGI have made--in hindsight--even the most unconvincing miniature work of the 60s-80s seem endearing and wondrous. Yeah, I may be half-asleep even now - (the dreamer must awaken...but later) but that's the best state to approach surrealism in. Movies that suck to a straight/awake mind sometimes make beautiful poetic sense to the one who is nodding off in his movie chair. See a film by Jess Franco or Jean Rollin a few times and you will agree - in the right hands, an unbearable snoozer of amateurish banality becomes a wonderful dream once its sludgy non-pacing has lulled you unconscious. See a David Lynch movie in the theater and even the projector light above your head, or the stickiness of the floor, becomes as weirdly surreal as what's onscreen. It's not about figuring out what the film "means" it's about letting go of meaning entirely, so that the immediacy of the entire experience manifests and reality as you know it widens in a spasm, the way an acupuncture needle in the right place can cause a tight muscle to spring loose and cause your epidermal cells to ripple on the opposite pole of your meridian.

Consider the weirdness of DUNE: we open on a bald sister psychic asked by the "emperor" to psychically eavesdrop on the thoughts of a 'navigator' (a Metaluna-headed giant slug swimming in a big brown fish tank) escorted by a flock of austere leprous monks with cracked-egg brains--who file into a wildly psychedelic golden throne room carrying a Grand Central concourse entrance-cum- 30s diner train car betwixt them--then the windows open and the navigator swims out of the murk up against the glass to address the emperor via a translator device that looks like a 20s radio microphone (see top image).

Knowing nothing about the books to prepare you, to be thrown into this scenario from the first scene is a sink or swim moment that causes most viewers to fall right to the bottom and never be seen again. But if you can imagine being, say, Bill Burroughs, high on heroin and hashish, hiding out from 'the Man' in a crumbling Art Deco theater in mid-town Manhattan, watching a 40s Warner Brothers costume drama, i.e. the kind with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I receiving ambassadors of the evil Spanish Inquisition, then suddenly DUNE becomes its own kind of awesome. You can practically hear old Bill's voice imagining the ambassadors as uptight narco squad slugs; suddenly this old familiar very straight-edge costume drama becomes more alien than an old stack of Weird Tales pulps. In its total otherness, DUNE might even be a film actually made on another planet, one where the burnished dusky Art Deco Grand Central concourse oyster bar Illuminati 1939 Worlds' Fair Dali fever dream decor never went out of style, just matured along a separate tributary from the sci-fi we know. Even (or especially) if from certain angles you can see all the gold fixtures (right down to the gleaming highlights) are painted backdrop, slowly peeling in spots under the glare of the kliegs, this shit's truly psychedelic. Lynch + Laurentiis = batshit crazy

The guitar of Toto made me think of another pic produced by Dino de that rocked a most bodacious rock score, FLASH GORDON (1980). One of the most brazenly cockediddly-dude insanely unforgettable rock and roll soundtracks in history, by the Queen, enables a similar mythic arc to DUNE's. There too, an off-world 'deliverer' come to a strange planet to unite and free the oppressed people from an evil galactic emperor. Though it didn't have a rock score, Dino's 1982 CONAN did have an almost Erich Korngoldenly pervasive and bombastic De Falla's La Bruja interpretation. And instead of an evil dictator and a deposed rightful ruler/messiah, it had a fisher king permutation asking for help from a thuggish mercenary against a kind of combination Charlie Manson / pied piper snake god. Dino de Laurentiis did ORCA too, which had a swooping vocalizing Ennio score that gave the whole thing a swooning sense of epic tragedy, letting us know in advance that the monster, the shark, was going to be Richard Harris, not the whale. Dino! I feel your guiding hand, it's holding an electric guitar!

Now in 2017, aired on Showtime in tandem with Lynch's TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, the true psychedelic yield of DUNE comes forth, like a giant newt with the cranium of a Metalunan mutant and googly eyes of a giant monster squid. Acting as a kind of intergalactic MTA, folding space through their swimming in gaseous clouds of the psychedelic spice, they blow from their icky Burroughsian orifices big plasma balls at images of planets and in doing so dissolve the space betwixt them, a kind of butterfly wing / tsunami / Dustin Hoffman folding a blanket thing. And they expect to have their fog of spice fresh and churning for their troubles. The film doesn't get much help trying to decipher all that, even with Virginia Madsen's coyly apologetic voiceover. You do get some weird-ass sights, giant worms, morgue extras who can't keep their toe-tags still and a five year-old Alicia Witt dancing with a curved knife like a pint-sized Kali.

PSYCHEDELICS = SPACE TRAVEL

DUNE offers a universe free of trite morality - so a 'concubine' or 'consort' can still be a nun, and choose her children's gender through sheer will, and they're not bastards but heirs to the throne. And trying big doses of spice while on Arrakis leads you to bond with far-off elements of the planet and prolong life -- not feel paranoid your mom will find out at dinner and send you to rehab, or that the cops will pull you over. In short, it's an actual 'sane' future, the sort envisioned in 60s psychedelic mysticism and via practices like remote viewing. The internal voiceover aspect (we hear people's thoughts) doesn't bother me because for 1) theres so much telepathy going on and 2) Shakespeare adaptations by Olivier and Welles, both do it. And 3) The use of sound waves and voice as a weapon serves to rearrange how we think of language in speaking. People do not blather in DUNE. Spoken words carry heavy import, so inner monologues become a whole second tier.

And even stronger than 'the spice' there's a liquid made from the bile of the worms of Arrakis, "the water of life" equivalent to, in a sense, eating the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle-- times a million--all the preparations and anticipation of danger making a fine parallel with smoking, say, DMT or 50x Salvia Divinorum. Unlike our civilization's own dismissive attitude towards drugs and psychic powers, in DUNE they are a long-recognized part of reality; drugs are not treated with disrespect and fear, and psychonauts are valued for their shamanic contribution to the good of their houses. Is this part of the reason the film was so initially panned in the US, its year of release being during a peak of "just say no" ant-drug hysteria? What about, too, how it shows women in positions of power, as good fighters who need not be babied and protected from the world but who can control minds with their mastery of the "weirding way"?

It's all too common, alas, to find irrational critical vitriol heaped on any film that offers a positive view of drugs and strong women. The knee-jerk reaction towards any film that condones psychedelics and matriarchies is that it must be panned, banned and put in its 'proper' ash can. STAR MAIDENS and ALL THAT GLITTERS are not even on DVD! The latter hasn't even been on tape or shown... anywhere! Free the matriarchal structured sci-fi from uptight fanboy damnation! 

Luckily DUNE, being a 'David Lynch Film,' endures. So though we have a straight white male hero Christ figure, his mother, Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis - left) is a badass who's taught her son the bulk of his fighting and telepathic skills. He can kill with a single cutting word, how matriarchal is that?! As a super-human genius of the Bene Jesserit sisterhood, his mom is a figure unique in western literature and film. Only Jet Li's mother in the FONG SAI YUK compares in cool capability. And just having an array of holy sisters in positions of power and authority (a fully matriarchal lineage within the DUNE universe, covering both sides of the clash - there's a reverend mother within even the Fremen) makes the film worth seeing. One of Lynch's great strengths is his comfort around a large cast of female characters whose roles transcend gender norms while still retaining their sex appeal. 

PSYCHONAUTS OF THE GOLDEN CRESCENT

Time has been kind to DUNE politically as well. In 1984 all it reminded us of was LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but today--after 9/11--it seems most prescient. The character's weird names all carry a Muslim root and the word 'jihad' is even used. We should remember that Lawrence of Arabia was working for the British, and was plenty mad when they betrayed all his promises to the Saudis, but could do nothing about it. He came home and sulked. Osama bin Laden on the other hand, went all the way, like Kurtz; a rich son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, he chose to live deep in caves with desert nomads and fight the First World super powers (first Russia, then 'us') through sabotage and terrorism, very much like a certain Paul Atreiades. Not that this itself redeems either Osama or DUNE - but it shows the way creative vision always comes from somewhere, be it the Akashic records or the Golden Crescent opium trade. A nicely paranoid post (by 'OsamabinladenreadDune) in the Fortean Times notes the worms resemble the jets used to ram the towers and the year of the big change in the story is 10191, i.e. 09/11. Whoa, bro.

Silver Strain - The Jihad of Muad'Dib

I don't think DUNE inspired actual terrorism, but at least one fish of my Pisces brain believes in the Akashic records, which Frank Herbert surely accessed. So while Lynch's film may not be perfect, it is 'connected' to a divine source - and if you doubt it. Read the book, or go to the alternate realms of consciousness yourself, and thou shalt know.

LYNCH's ICK FACTOR

Alas, to my mind the main issue with DUNE today isn't the condensed fragmentary confusion of the narrative (that explains itself after the third viewing) nor the STRANGE INTERLUDE-ish inner monologues, but the ick factor with the lengthy torture and sadism and gluttonous evil laughing scenes with Baron Harkonen "the floating fat man" - and his family and toadies in their ugly world - the towers of which resemble skyscrapers done up in pre-code two-strip color Warner Bros. horror film pinks and jades, and light from within a giant front porch bug zapper.  I loathe their kinky blue-black outfits, and am not tickled by with the fat ugly brother (son?) and evil overacting bloated father, and wild-eyed Sting, like a Malcolm McDowell Caligula, stepping out of the steam bath in nothing but his metal jock strap, letting his relatives float around him in a delirious incestuous homosexual spice-fueled mad lust, a lust finally sated only by pulling out the nipple plugs on some little red haired boy. Lynch tends to have these dark disturbing scenes, which Todd McGowan would call the fantasmatic underside to the mundane collective real, but there is no mundane 'real' in DUNE, so it's just too much overacting and pussy buboes. And too much garish red hair. It's clear these Harkonens are supposed to be the hated Irish. 

The Italian fascination with red hair goes back to the giallos of the 70s, of course, and here it seems to reach a kind of incestual-ancestral zenith from which it can never return, especially after the grotesque scene with a distressed mouse sewed to the back of a cat, or something (I fast forward past it and don't look - being traumatized by it back at the HB Crouse Hall), nor do I like seen people eating strips of meat cut from a trussed up dead cow, or cleaning out the open sores and leprous acne from Harkonen's drug-ravaged pan, all for no other real purpose except to provoke disgust and loathing, for reels on end. We can connect these stretches to the house where Frank has stashed the son and husband of Dorothy Vallens in BLUE VELVET, or One-Eyed Jacks in TWIN PEAKS or some other den of hyper-intense debauchery (the red stains on the mouths of one people in league with the Harkonens reminds one of--naturally--gluttonous winos). Lynch's absurdist relish for the grotesque horrors of the fantasmatic tend to get bogged down in the depths of bad, sludgy fake laughing and wile lighting, but here it's even worse, as Baron eats his beautiful boys, or drinks them, and then gloats and laughs in a point of rich hysteria, thus lumping homosexuality in as just another disgust-generating depravity.

That said, one must admire the insane commitment of Kenneth McMillan as the evil baron (though I won't show a pic of him here, as he's too gross) who plays his scenes as if he's been peaking on a massive dose of cocaine for ten years straight. Floating around like the kid full of blueberries in CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, he and his party milking and crushing and otherwise destroying an array of (actual or puppet) living creatures in an orgy of odious gluttony, his only real competition in unadulterated odium is perhaps Albert Cole in THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT. I'll always support evil laughing fits and a chance for Sting to make with his crazy eyes but even in the 80s, sooner or later even the sickest freak watching this shit goes "Okay, David, we get it - these red-headed creepy Harkonen are the bad guys. Can we move on to the pretty people now?" On the big screen, a little repulsiveness goes a long way, and one almost senses Lynch expressing his frustration at Dino's meddling by upping the quotient. If he can't inspire us and move our souls to alternate realities, he can at least leave a slightly traumatic and grotesque imprint.

But this can be solved, this Harkonen vileness circumvented as if through magic:

Scroll! Scroll through past the unpleasantries. 

Their bit of the plot is followed easy enough this way -

 and to scroll past the horrors is to know true peace.

Have you On-Demand or the DVD?

Scroll through, Moad Dib, 

Scroll the Harkonens into Oblivion!

I scroll until Paul and his mother are being taken out to the desert to die by two of the Harkonen's men, that's when it becomes awesome; watching Paul's mother seduce one of the guards into cutting her bonds and stabbing the pilot via her use of a deep throaty voice (the 'weirding way') makes all the forwarding worthwhile.

WOMEN and FREMEN

Everett McGill always seemed kind of useless as the sad sack forlorn lover of Peggy Lipton in TWIN PEAKS, but here in DUNE with his deep voice and solemn-but-not-dour manner, he brings great mythic depth to the ornate and no-frills mythic dialogue of Silgur, leader of the Fremen. Most people couldn't get across stilted, strange lines like "Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even Gawd has never seen!" But McGill makes them work flawlessly. The ever-wooden Sean Young-as Paul's Freman lover-- smolders too, with lines like "Tell me of your homeworld, Usul." It's as if she's learned nothing in all her other post-BLADE RUNNER roles about the craft of acting. But like it did in BLADERUNNER, once her hair is down it stays down; undoing her tight hair makes her come alive with a breathy carnal intimacy that sucks the viewer right up against her. Young delivers confessions of love and experesses concern over Paul's taking the water of life (No man has ever survived it, only women, which in itself is badass. Sorry boys, this shit will kill you.)  And here in the misty dust of the Fremen's underground universe, Francesca Anna's dark eye make-up, hair all loose and half tucked into her tunic, is gorgeous and haunting.

Sean Young's luminous presence, and the cool desert suits, bring the art direction in the Fremen scenes to a dusky earthen hue from which deep blue eyes blaze most becomingly; for the next barrage - and some of the dosed montages seem to be forced to repeat imagery, the idea of the sister being born prematurely while Paul's mom is taking the 'water of life' and tripping her brains out, and thus sister becoming a wild telepathic super killer, is divine. And getting high on all this spice has made Kyle McLachlan so much hotter. Maybe the light is just more flattering on this world, but as he grows, as the 'the sleeper awakens' - the baby fat of earlier scenes is gone, replaced by angular leaner jawline. A star is hatching from its egg right before us. He really is the Ashach Backhalcharacn, or whateverthefach.

In other words, dear friends, check it out on demand and see if it's better the second time. If you've never seen it, I'd say go right to the second time and never worry about following the plot. If you can't manage that, well, just relish in the fact that--simply put--there's no jokes or smiles or anachronistic winks at the audience in DUNE, yet it's never sanctimonious or plodding. You can't argue with a messiah who sends his five year-old sister alone into the imperial spaceship on a mission to slice up an evil baron. These things go a long way. So long in fact, you may not appreciate them for 33 years. But now Alicia Witt is older and hot. Kyle is an institutio, and the worm turns through the guts of time's beggar king, conquering all, even endless shots of stunt men being blown up as they run along the sand at night, over and over, and over.

THE WILD (Analog) WORLDS OF DINO DE

from top: Flash, Dune (x2), Conan (x2) Flash Gordon, Barbarella (x5), Diabolik

And it's real crime is that in all this while, we've never seen another film where to celebrate victory a child dances in slow motion waving a curved blood-soaked dagger as exultant electric guitar chords twanging her victory. Lynch may not know how to play well with others, and may have let himself be too casually destroyed by lack of final cut, but after all- if not for Dino and DUNE there'd be no BLUE VELVET]. And without that, would there even be a TWIN PEAKS? Without Dino, would there be such a rich CONAN, such Masonic high-weirdness in FLASH?

The great Sean Kelly shared a bit of observation with me about Dino de Laurentiis, noting he spends so lavishly on sets and costumes he runs out of money half-way through production, so what starts out as grand and mind-boggling beauty on lavish sets ends up as unconvincing miniatures and third rate effects, wires showing, mismatched backgrounds, etc. You can see it, for example, in the way everyone drips sweat under all those furs in what's supposed to be the arctic at the climax of ORCA, or the way closer looks at the emperor's golden throne room reveal so much of the ornate gold finishing are actually 2 dimensional clapboard paintings that start to peel and buckle halfway through the scene.

That might have seemed like a problem at the time, but in the age of CGI, the acoustic tactile effect of real shit in real time forgives a whole mess of problems. We can always sigh and moan and wonder 'what if' Jodorowsky's version was made, but hey- his films aren't perfect either. His work is like a sledgehammer to reality-- he reaches in and pulls the guts out of the screaming virgin of the real, yet even as he boggles the mind, he can cause eye rolls with his sense of the puerile and shock-for-shock's sake. This Lynch-Laurentiis-Herbert version might not be perfect, but it rocks. It might be incoherent at times, but it's beautiful. In its unique look and courageous bizarro conviction, it stands alone in a sea of shiite; its only neighbors on its giant hill crest, CONAN, FLASH, and maybe BARBARELLA. 

What do they have in common? Dino de Laurentiis, whose gorgeous slightly megalomaniacal bliss comes from the ability to act like the entire bloody history of oppression, of Catholicism and the War on Drugs, never happened. Ruling in a world free of burdensome petty 'proper' morality, he offers something fantasy cinema can find nowhere else: real resonant full-bodied Old Testament Nietzschean moxy. In Laurentiis land, women do their own killing and are fine with it; drugs can exert their effect on consciousness right out in public; the worm is eaten; the tiles glisten with serpentine splendor; and the electric guitars break through the clouds, illuminating at --long last--something. 

Whatever it is, however much it cost, however cheap it looks, doesn't matter. It is the Ketlalblachmannicanch! 

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

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

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

Casting Jonbenet

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

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

Kitty/ Kitty/ Kitty Green

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

This, whatever it is, is it.

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

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

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

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

The elderly exit the womb (Mulholland Dr.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

The Ingenue/Mistress to the Mob

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

AUDITION AS VOYEURISTIC ILLUMINATI SEX RITUAL 

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

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

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

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

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

Lynch knows, though. He's caught the big fishes.
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PSYCHE FLOOR PLAN

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

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

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

First Floor

(Controlled by the Ego)

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

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POINT OF SEMI-CONSCIOUSNESS

(the fishing line)

steps down - transitional from awake to asleep'

THE BARRIER DOOR

--Water Surface--

BASEMENT

(controlled by the Anima)

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

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

SECOND BARRIER

Laundry Chute 2

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

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

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

-TRUTH OF (Traumatic) EVENT 

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

BIG FISH

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

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

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

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

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

FURTHER:

Ms. Icarus Risen: THE BLACK SWAN

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

Now Bleed for Me: THE WRESTLER

Make up yr Mind Control: EYES WIDE SHUT

DOGVILLE vs. MONSTER