Medusae of Asia vs. Old Testament Huston: THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941), RAIN (1932)

Pre-code neo-Jacobean Tragedy's final venomous wheeze. THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) sinks its cobra fangs deep into the mongoose of censorship, self-abasement, and social taboo. Its fangs sink deep into buried wells of buried sins black sins that the Breen Office had been keeping a lid on for years. They demanded over 30 script revisions got GESTURE and it's still mighty sleazy! 

Based on a play by John Colton, GESTURE asks 1941 America to pretend Shanghai wasn't then locked in a death struggle with the Japanese. America still tried not get too involved (this was clearly released before Dec. 7) But the attack on Pearl Harbor was on its way... Hollywood exotica would never be the same again.

Directed by the great Josef von Sternberg and full of all his trademark decadent visuals, it doesn't have the divine Dietrich but a close friend of hers (from the 'sewing circle') if you get my drift. Ona Munsen (1) as a Terry and the Pirates-style dragon lady named Mother Gin-Sling, owner of a Shanghai casino structured like the rings of Dante's inferno. As the roulette wheel spins so does the wheel of degradation: Gigolo-ing, gold-digging, rickshaws through festival throngs, degraded murder, sleazy drug addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, white slavery, Mike Mazurki, suicide, elaborate revenge, hookah smoking, and Von Sternberg's super masochist sublimation power.  Though thanks to a combination of the Breen Office, the long-term effect of the Depression, and the rumblings of another war, the sins and lifestyle we see are significantly reduced in wattage.

More than politics, though, SHANGHAI GESTURE is about the lack of Dietrich. No actress can be both imperious matriarch and bespoiled hottie other than "she." Without a star of major elusive persona-sliding range, these exotica fantasias can't sizzle properly: RAIN would be a mere drizzle without Joan Crawford; RED DUST (1932) on the other hand needs both Mary Astor in the rain and Jean Harlow in the rain barrel; THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1934) has both Myrna Loy urging on the whipping, and also Karen Morely endangering the western world through soft-spotted carelessness, etc. Josef von Sternberg's whole oeuvre would be just chiaroscuro exotica if not for the enigmatic Marlene; and THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (1941) would have been perfect for Dietrich--she was even the right age. Did he hope to lure her back? I don't recall and I lost my copy of his autobiography, NOTES FROM A CHINESE LAUNDRY.

Munson, with headgear ostentatious enough for a Flo Ziegfeld's mythology revue, has a commanding presence but she can't infuse a single glance or wave with enigmatic playfulness and subversive innuendo, or radiate hypnotized cobra calm, like Dietrich. Munson can convey a kind of sinister Gale Sondergaard regality but that's only part of what makes a great dragon lady. There's a coke-drip sonorous jubilance in her voice, but no matter how gymnastic her balance of camp and dramaturgy, her headgear is what we remember. It screams camp diva, or at least sultry goddess but the last thing she should do is underplay her imperious grandeur. This is isn't CHU CHIN CHOW, baby!

Munson split our mortal plane in '55 with a suicide note that read "This is the only way I know to be free again... Please don't follow me."

Classic Munson.

The other players of this little comedy, meanwhile, seethe and stagger about the casino's few sets but never quite find a shared frequency: Gene Tierney, especially--beautiful though she may be--pouts so sourly as spoiled rich girl, Poppy, we wonder how Victor Mature (as pimp-procurer, Dr. Omar) can put up with her, let alone waste time trying to seduce her with Song of Solomon quotes and lame 'orientalist' lines like: "My mother was half-French and the other half was lost in the dust of time, so I am related to all the Earth, and nothing that's human is foreign to me." Yeeesh! Meanwhile, Maria Ouspenskaya hovers below decks as Mother Gin's mute assistant; Eric Blore is the casino's accountant; Mike Mazurki a 'coolie' rickshaw spy (there's no real Chinese actors in the film, other than extras); Michael Dalmatoff a Russian expat bartender; Ivan Lebedeff, about to blow his own brains out as an unlucky Russian expat gambler... and, looming on the horizon, on the opposite side of town, Walter Huston as the great white moral businessman fixing to evict Mother Gin-Sling. He's just bought her casino's whole neighborhood out from under her as part of a massive urban development project.

With eyes calmly alight, Mother Gin-Sling encourages our confidence in he grand plan to blast Huston's patriarch off his pedestal in the bug MADAME BUTTERFLY-style climactic revelation. Fate's fickle finger will spur her her New Years dinner party (an invitation Huston can't help but accept) into a third act denouement of MADAME BUTTERFLY self-immolation proportions. Bad drugs, drink, gambling, and sexual jealousy, and the now debauched Poppy's abrasive petulance shall come to collect--(NO SPOLER)

Taken as a whole, GESTURE is not up to von Sternberg's Dietrich collaborations at Paramount, but part of this could be the relative blurriness of the 'they did what they could' restoration and the 'they got away with what they could' limits of the code. Par of it is also the attempt to have myriad threads running through instead of focusing on one character, as it would with Marlene. In their still-ephemeral and brilliant (pre-code) collaborations, In those films they conjured a very vivid feeling of the street in relation to the interiors. Here no space seems connected to any other. There are some good crowded Shanghai street scenes early on though that a prime JVS. The big Chinese New Year celebration is a writhing cacophony of rickshaws, costumes, dragons, and peddlers crammed together beautifully, evoking the crowd scenes around the train in Shanghai Express, but again they never feel connected to the casino, nor the casino connected to its adjacent rooms and bars. 

JVS' litany of artsy touches is fine enough to help that not matter, and to make us long for an HD remaster. Von Sternberg sheathes Munson in exotic murals painted by Keye Luke, who--though Chinese--doesn't appear---hmmm. There's a slow litany of minor irritations like that which keep adding up. The cast seems either drunk, irritable, high on opium, or suffering withdrawal. Tierney's inability to separate playing a bitch with being a bitch is the biggest liability. It's as if all the drugs and booze and sex were just keeping her eternally hungover and cranky rather than turning her into a desirable drug addict wonton like the script calls for. If you've ever dated a girl so gorgeous you stick around even though she irritates the hell out of you, of she''s boring, crabby, manipulative, petulant and/or violent, then you may shudder in sad recognition. I know I did. And I don't come to Von Sternberg for that kind of shudder.

She does look beautiful, though: she knows it, though.

That said, slowness and pointless bits of business are the side effects of von Sternberg's style--every character is always moving towards or away from sex or death.  There's very few daytime exterior shots and only one bit of Shanghai stock footage letting us know that it might seem like midnight in the casino ("Never Closes" is their motto) but it's actually a weekday morning and right outside poor bastards are shuffling to and from their petty 9-5 jobs while inside the wheel spins and everyone's still up. I used to love that in the old days, partying all night at a club or someone's loft and staggering out to find the sun is up and fresh-scrubbed bright-eyed people going to work etc. Me in opaque shades being carried by a guy on either side of me so I don't fall over while aghast commuters file past. I loved that shit!

I'm rambling again, so that would seem to conclude the tour, so what of the antagonist? What of the... Huston?

With his terse delivery and rigid military posture, his dart-like movements, the way he kind of leans back and tenses up as if ready to hurl himself across a table at his quarry,--his vowels shortening as if on a count down to blast-off, Huston always excelled as inflexible moralist captains of industry, the kind never hip to their own fatal flaws. He was a cop fond of beating the truth out of suspects in BEAST OF THE CITY; a tough-ass by-the-book warden in CRIMINAL CODE; a King Lear-ish rancher in THE FURIES; and a sadistic crippled ivory trader in KONGO, and--most iconically for the time--the inflexible but ultimately corrupted reverend Henry Davison in RAIN. Just as the new testament patriarchal signifier--support and a kind no bullshit affection-- would become embodied by Spencer Tracy, Huston embodies the Old Testament wrath and vengeance.

I know it's a side note, but Spencer Tracy never worked with Howard Hawks, and I can see why: Hawks had a code of his own, and it had nothing whatever to do with following the letter of the law or mistaking sanctimoniousness and sentimentality for truth and justice. Tracy is so moral he needs a Mr. Hyde potion to slip his Rock of Gibraltar steadfastness. while Huston deludes himself from the beginning, seeing his greed and white male rightness as universal benevolence in the grand Fox News tradition. For example, in KONGO, he ruthlessly intimidates tribes of Congolese with juju magic tricks. Spencer might do similar things, but would think he was the good guy doing it, because he'd have a bible instead of a feathery headdress. Tracy would do it with a dopey smirk meant to win a Tess Trueheart prancing around in some meadow; Huston had no interest in being seen as good or noble, only in achieving his grand design, a kind of upper management application of governmentally sanctioned force, very in tune with the pre-code era, when the future survival of organized modern human civilization was still iffy. And unlike Tracy who rarely oversteps, Huston surges forwards, blind to any plea for tolerance, and often faces tragic realizations over what damage his inflexibility hath wrought, like a scissoring censor who realizes, too late, he's cut off his own genitals. Surely his son John drew on that persona for his own quintessential titan of industry in CHINATOWN.

So it's this paragon of vengeance Huston who goes up against Mother Gin-Sling at a climactic "Chinee New Year" dinner party. SPOILER ALERT! She turns out to be Huston's ex-wife, and man does she paint him a lurid portrait of her grim life being abducted and sold to a 'pleasure boat,' on her way to meet him one night, and having pebbles sewn into the bottoms of her feet after she tried to run away (and these details survived the 30 rewrites!) And she even gives a New Years' eve floor show out in the street in front of the casino, of girls being hauled up in cages as a reminder of the old white slavery auctions when their girls were hold off the boats in nets. And that survived the rewrites too! Yikes... I guess objectification and dehumanization of (non-white) women is always OK by the code (as long as the girls playing the nonwhite women are white, of course).

Chinese New Year, celebrating five thousand years of sex slavery

--

a ghoulish girl and a bottle of booze cures all ills

RAIN (1931) finds Huston facing the exact same problem, trying to get a very young Joan Crawford out of tropical prostitution, but you know how it is--this time she doesn't want to come to the light. Once she learns he's arranged to haul her back from the tropics to stand trial (these expat prostitutes are always on the lam after murdering either a violent john or pimp--but it was in self-defense!) she finally--in her darkest moment of despair, sees light..

There's a great climactic scene on a set of stairs during a late night monsoon in RAIN I was lucky enough to see by total chance while tripping one rainy afternoon: Joan is angry, crying, desperate as hell, trying to escape up a set of stairs while Huston stands at the bottom, reciting the lord's prayer over and over again while she screams and yells in rage and fear and then starts moaning sobbing in despair at the thought of going back to the states and certain trial or execution. He just keeps reading in a low measured patriarchal voice. Joan is a phenomenon. I saw this scene, on shrooms, watching--as she went slowly in perfect modulation during the long single take--from imperiously demanding he leave her alone, to begging for mercy, to pleading for her life, to sobbing in despair, to finally entraining her pitible whimpers into the prayer he's saying. The rain seems to stop and the sun come out. Somewhere along the line their two voices entrain, and she stands up, super calm, walks down the stairs, ready to go. In her darkest hour, she finds the lord, through chant, and it's all right there in that long twisted scene on the stairs. It's like watching a kind of actor transfiguration right before our eyes, and makes us understand why this was such a long-running hit on stage (even SCARFACE saw it in Hawks 1932 film)

Maybe it was the mushrooms that afternoon but I've felt, ever since that damp and dismal afternoon, that RAIN is a horror movie, a kind of DRACULA in reverse, about the dangers of religion and spirituality. With her thick early sound era make-up, Crawford's Sadie Thomson has a ghoulish obscene aura, the sister to Lugosi in MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE and Irving Pichel in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER; they could all share the same Max Factor black lipstick. And Huston is her Van Helsing, but thanks to being swamped in at a remote midway station on his way to the interior to convert savages he takes it as his duty to convert her back from vampirism, only to turn bloodsucker himself.

As Marlene said in MOROCCO, "there's a Foreign Legion of women, too."

Kongo (1932)

But if there's an entrainment to the frequency of the lord, there's an entrainment of the jungle, too. And it entrains Huston's Henry Davidson just as the lord's doctrine entrains Sadie. Huston clearly doesn't have her interest at heart, but is just adhering to the letter of the law out of a kind of continual self-denial agitated by the endless rain, the way senators campaign against gay rights and then go have a men's room tryst 'for research.'

Just how many movies had women of adventure expatriating in some remote tropical outpost, either servicing the local sailors, or just drinking with the other refugees, due to the success of RAIN? My friend, they are countless. And they all erupted from five important socio-political rubrics pre-code fans know well:

1. Miscegenation -  It's important to remember that censors weren't just patriarchal prudes, they were racist. Being 'pre-code' never meant there was no censorship, just less 'clear' rules of conduct: sex outside wedlock between two white people could occur if the woman was a divorcee or widow and hence no longer needed to save her honor, or if the tryst was occurring in the land of savages--Africa, the tropics, Asia-- where the heat and the limited amount of white male options meant societal norms might melt away if the moment was right, the moon was shining and the fertility rite drums of the natives beating all night in the distance. Usually the only thing remotely like a white male authority figure in these film is s a drunk or junkie priest or doctor or ship's captain under some sort of fever or addiction, to further break down the veneer of modern civilization so that morality can't help but buckle. 

MGM was the worst for using fear of miscegenation to distract censors so that white-on-white adultery, prostitution and premarital trysting could sneak in as a lesser of two evils--a trick still used on racist parents by manipulative white girls to this day!

2. Maugham -Just advertising your film as about some (white) hottie taking it on the lam to the tropics, hooking up with a (white) junkie doctor and/or committing murder means you want the public to associate it W. Somerset Maugham, the E.L. James of the 30s. Any film that wanted to have 'steam' just cherry picked plot points from his RAIN, SEVENTH VEIL, THE NARROW CORNER and THE LETTER. For awhile there, everywhere you looked were boorish doctors who'd rather treat cholera than have sex with their wives, British colonials with stiff upper lips awash in country club gossip, opium-addicted doctors making wry philosophical comments, wicker fans, gin and tonics in the hands of insouciant bachelor bounders facing down dull husband's pistols, violent rainstorms, distant tom-toms, rickety steamship gangplanks, grinning native servants, white chorus girls and decent women tricked into prostitution by gigolo arms dealer boyfriends or their agent sending them to the far east for cabaret jobs, and dull hypocritical protestant missionaries. See: MANDALAY, ROAD TO SINGAPORE, PRIVILEGE, MOROCCO, WHITE WOMAN, THE KEY, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, SHANGHAI EXPRESS... the list is endless, and thank god, or Maugham, for it.

3. Prohibition - Only America could be crazy enough to try to enforce such a law, so voyaging abroad, where liquor didn't taste like Turpentine and cost a fortune became a smart bet for drunks, like a pot smoker going to Amsterdam or Colorado today.

4. Exchange Rates: In the Post-WWI economy, the dollar went farther overseas, so one could live the high life in Europe or the kingly life in the tropics, whatever your pleasure (at least that was the fantasy in the minds of the hungry Depression-era masses.

5 Exotica - The Great War had forced us to get social with other nations. We came back interested in the art and cultures of far-off lands, riffing off the aesthetics of those regions, creating a picture of the 'other' as kinky, lurid, savage, totally class-conscious but with exquisite and bizarre taste.

And the Brits always loved Egypt.

The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Sexist bastards.... Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie isn't going to get pushed around for long!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department then pasted back in by a nervous intern hoping the boss wouldn't notice. Yet he's smiling.

The weird thing is most people don't realize that Peckinpah considered Dustin's STRAW DOG math professor 'everyman' (who breaks the point and kills a bunch of locals to protect a child murderer), to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George). See, she's easily the cutest bird inside a 60 mile radius of this Cornwall dump. She was born there so everyone knows her; she even left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends when she escaped. Now she's back. Some call this a rape-revenge film, but Hoffman never finds out about her being raped (by her ex-boyfriend and his sadistic pal after they trick Dustin into going quail hunting with them and leave him stranded way out in the middle of nowhere, then double back to the alone and kinda terrified George) and his refusal to turn the caught-red-handed pederast (David Warner) over to the mob for a right proper lynching is what sets the bloodbath in motion. Mostly, I'm betting Hoffman goes ballistic because of the dead cat (discovered hanging in the closet) - that would surely get me fired up too. If someone killed my cat I'd probably raze the whole town.

Long lumped by the literally-minded critics (how small town riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of self-righteous lefty nerd narcissism in Hoffman's smug everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their "breaking points."

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy (or at least not a cut-and-dry hero) in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses!

And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a stiflingly normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate (hinting he might not even know he's really gay). Here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event, in the peace and quiet of the lake,  makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wilde had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up with an intellectual, adventurous father who raised her far outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American small town life,  No wonder she can't adapt! Like those poor once-professionally employed heroines who had to give up their jobs, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey their husbands, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud them, to see purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and soggy Stepford ash is all that remains. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art. A murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is just such a wild  artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out of the net through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her in its tranq dart credits. 

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point --beyond good and evil, baby. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, America,  so take your lumps!