Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)

 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch coke straws and first canes; our weary eyes are trapped within withered faces atop middle-aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, livers shot are from Hep-C and whiskey, but hey hey hey! as the kid who sang for Black Flag (before Rollins - below left) would snarl...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X, and go home. Pogoing and slam-dancing (as it was called) around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a 'mosh pit' (far different scene than some friendly slam-dancing where you're just whirling around bumping into each other like pinballs rather than "helicoptering" your meaty fists). Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted, battered, and alive, triumphant, relieved it was over, we took our shoes off an watched NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network or my duped tapes of RUDE BOY, REPO MAN and GIMME SHELTER for the zillionth time while carefully marking the water lines on dad's liquor bottles, so we'd know just what we could reasonably get away with. We knew of--but never got a chance to see--THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981), Penelope Sheeris' ground-floor documentary about the early days of the LA punk scene. We heard it was far far tawdrier than any other concert film, so tawdry it had and has never been on DVD or tape.... until this week....

Finally America is ready. Spheeris' wrist-openingly grim post-op LA moldy-carpeted clang of a howl is here and man it lives up to its rep of sheer tawdriness. Onetwothree-GO! Our whole fucking life is a wreck! It seems we got so complacent, having no genuinely tawdry film live remotely close to our imaginations' now upscale, gated neighborhood, that now, when one finally busts in and pees on our mattress, we're at first so shocked we think it's raining. Dude, last time we were the ones peeing. Now somehow we're the ones holding the sheets? How'd that happen? Did Spheeris wait til we were too old to identify with these skeevy brats on purpose?

Darby, sings into 'the mic' 

Irregardless! The full skeevy glory of Ms. Spheeris's no-holds barred musical documentary can finally be seen and heard. Not only are music rights all aligned but the band's limpid corpses have grown so befouled from punk rock sell-out options no further degradation can e'er befoul them. From the apocalyptic audience-bashing and riot-starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos, this grotty full-frame 16mm film is never going to look like Kubrick or smell like Delmonicos, but the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway, from within that City Gardens nicotine coma. It was meant for those teenage Night Flight Saturdays, blurry from arial static and USA network watermarks, not Blu-ray.

I always needed to take an inch down my dad's Old Crow water line, and a Silkwood shower, after a trip to City Gardens. It wasn't a matter of punk rock energy but of feeling skeeved out. I'd forgotten about that ritual, til this 'film' came rushing up the televisual sleeve like a rough, unlubricated hand job. What a shitty bunch of human beings these punks are, after all! I, of course, presume they're putting on a bit of a show for Penelope's camera. After all, the real message of the film is to sell the anarchy and dirt of punk as a performance, as a kind of artistic anti-movement, to live up to the tawdry hype that so infected our early 80s poseur punk imagination.

Naturally, when disparaging the citizens on display in this film, I don't mean the artists from band X. To call them the most charismatic of the cast is to damage the word 'charisma' through comparison. Let's stay they are only the ones you'd want to rescue if the club was burning down. As for the rest, Slash writer Kickboy is the most coherent and 'forward-to-Goth'-looking, and Darby of the Germs is the most long-range offensive (just seeing his inward-twisting townie teeth near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room in concentric spewing arcs). Perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome mania, Spheeris gives us what feels like six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement where the carpet was has been subjected to at least one flood. The whole vibe seems to slow into a druggy time warp as Darby crawls atop speaker cabinets like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88. You think he gives a shit about how bad that carpet smells? If he does, he keeps it to himself. He's such a trouper. Even his teeth are straight, like a real gentlemen's.

In fact, Doe's such a presence he keeps Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop by association, and Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period, makes up the rest. It's an unusual and welcome touch, especially considering the snarling incoherence of the shouted vocals.

Then again, the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant (deliver us, Generallissimo Tso!). The 'Discipline' do what feels like 23 songs that plod so monotonously through the middle of the film they make the Swans seem like Matmos. What? Too 'Other Music' for you? Fuck you! Onetwothree-FOUR! By the time you read this, Other Music has probably long gone (PS - 2/16 - it has). And anyway, Billy Zoom wouldn't think so. Billy, why are you so serene? Even in the midst of skinheads bashing one another inches from his amp old Billy never seems like he's anywhere but on a peaceful hayride in the country. Good old Billy! But then... you left, didn't you, Billy! And X released "See How We Are," still chasing that AOR rainbow. 

At any rate, the most disturbing bits come towards the end, from some cute young boys giving black and white talking head interviews, utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking other kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet their own teeth are perfect --hmmm, are they just shining Penelope on?) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle combative-for-the-sake-of-combativeness of Fear's Lee Ving. Looking/acting like the unwanted child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn, Ving's hate speech might be just an act to get everyone's punk rage blood up for the camera. A girl declares herself a dyke and lunges at him, but it's never clear if she's just throwing down in the spirit of the thing, or is really gay and pissed).

That's the insidious thing about hate speech. Fox News, after all, uses it to sell air space. If they mean half of what they say, they'd probably be dead from the toxic fumes of their own vitriol. It's a show. If it's not, excuse me if I pretend it is so I don't die from the toxic fumes of my own vitriol. Whatever virtriol even means, it's a killer.

Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But again (or for the first time) it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is realy something to see. Even when they're at emotional odds, their music only flourishes from the friction. Singing as frankly and honestly as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric, theirs is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist. Aye, his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the band's old bassist during an all-night acid test. That very next night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw.

Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos before the show, there's no doubt Jon Doe is destined for stardom, or at least a future side gig as a supporting actor; and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth whose target isn't King Duncan but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember seeing X at City Gardens in 1984, right up against the stage, Exene smiling beaming above me as the shoving whirl of slam dancers careened around, knocking me forward and back, then I was about to get clocked by this giant skinhead, I saw her watching as this other skinhead, even bigger, gently moved me away and shoved his fist right into the guy's face, showering me in the skinhead's nose blood instead of vice versa. The bouncer grabbed them both and shoved them out the door and there I was, bloody and OK, and I looked up and Exene was beaming down at me with a huge smile, like the punk rock virgin Mary at my punk baptism.  (PS - See my lovingly detailed X discography "See How They War") Punk. It was a big tent.

That was a real moment - but there are moments in the footage when we wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns about the words, lingo and culture of the punk scene. Claude "Kickboy" (harumph!) Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of spokesperson for the punk movement. His sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine--he thinks. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras. When someone's a real brawler, they look like Mickey Rourke, or a toothless Glasgow soccer hooligan. They're certainly not all pretty and unmussed like these lads, at least not for long. So is this just say, 80% bullshit, just like most suburban punks themselves (i.e. me, in the early 80s) were?

X marks ze Monster

I dropped punk-poseur look from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' fan friends were gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being just naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies. When I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks. Slam-dancing and pogoing had become moshing. By then I was old enough for a wristband, so I drank in the back... sticking my head out only now and again to see what was going on. Eventually my band even played there, opening for the Spin Doctors. But that was the early 90s. Punk had split into a dozen warring factions by then and white boy punk-funk was the pre-grunge rage.

Well, either way in the early 80s I was too mellow to go full thrash, too uptight to be a squatter, too hetero to be what today would be called goth or emo, and too louche to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as one used to wear) punk was just being British. Now hardcore was called 'thrash' and then grunge splintered it still further, and today the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear would be considered deeply problematic. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" is just one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue, which is an insider Vice magazine way of saying white supremacist.

Then again, hearing of all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash).

That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched out everyone he knows

I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with new wave punk-approved but-soon-to-be-New-Wave-only oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery done by insecure teenager and at any rate you can't keep both your street cred AND a record contract, so let the worthless one former go. Street cred? Shit cred, mate. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive than now, even if the 'alive' part is mostly virtual. The sell-outs are enshrined and the hold-outs are dust in the wind. If that's all they wanted, bra-fuckin-vo.

Spheeris, still smokin'

Times have gone moldy as that punk show basement carpet but it's not just us or that long-tossed shag who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid of the film. These vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays-- throwing their coiled squatter angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing--seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into that all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Spheeris' 1981 film takes place four years earlier and they're like any other fresh-faced kids. Artistic, drug-addicted, boozed-up, bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under florescent lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos --they were playing every lousy gig like was the last show on earth--but boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!

1994: The year Fiorentino and Tarantino saved us from Vampire Morality

Now more than ever we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror boom of the 1980s as a golden age, not just because we miss actual celluloid but because between drive-ins and theaters on the one side and VHS rental on the other, money was being made (this being the era still when video tapes cost $100 each and were bought only by video stores for rentals). In 1987 alone, two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story:  Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain, bland, petulant teenage hunk ready for his first false step, seduced by a hot young vampire girl who lures him into her weird pack (cuz he's hot) rather than just eating him. The pack in each film includes a small child vampire frustrated by their being frozen so long in a tiny form. And in both, this vain young male fledgling vamp wastes his gifts in lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing innocent blood.

Ugh, there's the rub. Like joining the army for the uniform's effect on girls but then refusing to pick up a gun as your mom told you not to, and being outraged when you're not allowed to just sidestep that part of training, because hotness = morality. It might seem noble but there's a name for men who live off women. In both films the hot vamp girl feeds the hero from her own wrist after she does the dirty work. But he gets no blood on his hands, thus doesn't lose his self-righteous sparkle. Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend! Son, that's called being a mooch, the worst kind of pimp.

I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres --me being around their same age, insecure, and deeply allergic to their sullen narcissism. I still am but I can tolerate the movies for two reasons: one, I'm older than them now (their image frozen by celluloid's vampirism) and two, because in 1994, Tarantino and Fiorentino set me free.

The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark)

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The buzzkills

Yeah man, Jason Patric in Lost Boys, Adrian Pasdar in Near Dark: two doe-eyed hunks used to getting every girl they want just be batting their doe eyes and looking across the room or plain at them with a slight sneer that reads "I'm already disappointed in you, yet I see something special, worthy of my time. Even so they rely on their potency signifier--a motorbike or horse--to do their small talk. But once they're 'bitten' or hooked into the life, they're clinging to their vamp girl like she's their new mommy (one of perhaps a long string of blank doormats expected to worship their lame peccadilloes). They suck, in short, not literally.

Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys but young male viewers who aren't doe-eyed hunks aren't about to identify with these clowns and we're the ones who watch these kind of movies, the ones who would--without a second thought--kill some humans and drink their blood if it meant getting a hottie into bed. We'd worry about our immortal souls at the proper time (after it was too late to do anything about it), when it was more Sophoclean. That would be a good angle: the awkward shy kid uses his vamp gifts to bite everyone whoever wronged him and gets so high off the hottie vamp's attention and the sense of belonging to the cool kids for the first time in his 'life' that he doesn't eve have a second thought until it's far too late to save his soul, yet still early enough he can still sense and mourn its loss.

Instead, in these two films, the doe-eyes just squirm and try to dodge their bloodletting responsibilities like Donnie Brasco with a gun to a squealer's head, waiting for a deux ex machina to rescue them from feeling compromised, unaware (due to bad writing or nervous producers) that those  'yellow brick road to hell' choices are what gives the tale oomph. Instead, they get to keep their hero's armor untarnished and we end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase. It lingers on all through our life that loathing, until we're old enough that we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandchildren's.

Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A: When he sees Star (Jami Gertz) in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage, he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away from him, instead of falling onto her knees before his physical beauty. He considers his prettiness a sacred church. No laughing or running around should be allowed in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood. And for that reason alone these scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the alarm bells going off deep in your sacral chakra.

Star, it turns out, has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground, which would still just be similar to the next day after bad ecstasy. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away after nights of drinking weird potions in the basement with the boys, trippin' out on Miles Davis' Live Evil and driving home at dawn on the back of undulating black asphalt serpents with yellow dash line dorsal ridges. Even when cheap chemsits cut the MDMA with strychnine, we didn't blink!

Patric's a pussy.

Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, folk art eccentrics, pumping anthem rock, and the ingenious literalizing of common phrases of parents (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness. She brings us vast fields like a lover's skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos, and one of the more realistic looking biker bars caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly by prolonged exposure to the emptiness of the landscape. When the vampire pack invades the bar, it's almost like they come as angels of deliverance from this glum nothingness.

Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend. One could conceivably view this second-hand gulping as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores who get super indignant when confronted with images of factory farming. Who resent being compelled to look into their own prey's eyes as if willful blindness is a moral defense. Serve the calf's brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're gross, but the rump steak, a chef. Killing humans is no different than choosing your own lobster once you're not a human anymore. If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!

I feel guilty every time I leave my cat or dog in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back in, I winced at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Rules of the Game (1939) is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real, and the hunters barely noticing, so wrapped up in their petty romantic intrigues? And though the characters don't flinch, Renoir does. But he doesn't blame them -- they are after all the very rich, the predator species of all cultures. It's what they do. That's real morality and if it leaves a strange taste in the mouth, savor it --that's the bitter tang of real art!

I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. My body was like fuck you I'm a meat eater, give me meat or after the little bit of fat we've stored is gone I'll start in on the muscle, bro, I just don't give a fuck. So I obeyed it, the way a vegan game warden obeys its aristocratic ruler. I learned one simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook. And whatever happened to the apocalypse of 12/21/12? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream... 'cuz it's dairy.

Going back to meat took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me. Maybe the whole point of ignorance is bliss, there's a reason that Italian guy eats a steak in The Matrix and not a celery stalk.

Tony Scot's parallel lines 

Too bad filmmakers, even talented ones with some moral fibre (mmm mmm) like Neil Jordan, Bigelow, and Tony Scott, balk at the chance for true vampiric ambiguity: The Hunger, Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys, the list of movies where a lucky stiff is vamped only to get all moral about killing is endless. It makes me wonder... is there any vampire movie where the newborn actually does kill a human or two without moping about it for the rest of the story? (see my post on Vampire Morality Blues). Damn I need a drink. Oh wait. I can't anymore. I'm like one of these vegan vamps, but for booze.

But then... a miracle happened. The year was 1994, a boozy flood came and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction. And in a less permanent way, Ferrara's The Addiction (1994).

Looking at them now, they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed the innocent and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free. And we rooted for them every step of the way.

There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs, probably wiping out dozens with collateral damage, but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired by The A-Team without one guy being even wounded; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious problem.  But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah.

Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!

Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture references didn't make the QT films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid; the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing, the more true they are. Audiences can be trusted to not all go home and kill Rodney Dangerfield. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying. Can't you ever let go of the handrails.. even in a dream?

TWILIGHT's Cinematic Ancestors: THE WIND, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, MOROCCO, TITANIC, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, LITTLE WOMEN

I'll always stick up for TWILIGHT (the films at any rate) because I love the death drive, and what other series is the lead girl allowed to have an unrepentant disdain for life? That's so ninja! What other teen series is it not only sanctioned but wholly recommended to die for love? That's pre-code woman's picture Hollywood, as old and venerated as Lilian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In refusing to be embraced by the positive life energies of the social order that pines for her, Bella becomes an Antigone-by-way-of-Camille tragi-diva. She may be a virgin, but she's not afraid to give it all up for the idea of love.

It's important for hand-wringing moralists to remember that most everyone in the world knows the difference between fiction and reality, so these kinds of death drives are meant for films -- films are their outlet. They are death on a stick, 50 cents a seat. In a dream, does it really matter if you live beyond the credits? Doesn't Oscar prefer a gloriously overwrought death scene over a happily-ever-after fade to nothing?  Don't we love to pretend to die as children? To achieve true immortality the ideal lover must become only a memory, a twinkle in Gloria Stuart's eye, rather than one who ages into her sofa and squintes at the crosswords through dirty bifocals.

TITANIC (1997)

What could be more functionally Goth than the frozen Arctic ending of this film? I was deeply surprised the frosty hair, pale skin, chattering teeth and purple lip look didn't sweep the world as a fashion trend after this film came out. Sometimes in cultural hypothermia a lag effect doth dwell. A decade or so later, TWILIGHT sped the lag to a close.

LITTLE WOMEN (1994)

I saw this in the theater the same weekend as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and was hungover and repentant both times and cried at each. For the purposes of this post, however, WOMEN trumps VAMPIRE. Why? Here's why: a) Brad Pitt's ethical guilt tripping over biting folks in VAMPIRE gets soooo tiresome, and b) Tom Cruise as Lestat? Who cares if he was actually good at it? It's just wrong, no matter how sexy is the Antonio Banderas.

LITTLE WOMEN, meanwhile, has super young Christian Bale, Kristen Dunst (not quite as good as she was in VAMPIRE but who cares), Clare Danes (I cried a thousand drunken times over My So-Called Life reruns on MTV) and Winona Ryder! And even today, the film has a weird charm, like you're staying over at the spooky-cozy mansion house of a group of very, very cool girls in long nightshirts and candles, and that sense of 'belonging' to a cool group of beautiful people is really what TWILIGHT hinges on. Also, Ryder's combination of brainy, brunette and no bullshit-taking becomes a steampunk version of Jo that's a clear forerunner to the whole Kristen Stewart-Bella Goth thing, which Ryder basically invented anyway, six years earlier in BEETLEJUICE.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951)

Here's a love story where the guy is a legendary romantic hundreds of years old and only true love will set him free from sailing on into the horizons for centuries, eternally alone. He's willing to give up his chance at salvation when he meets Pandora, though. She's a free spirit who all the boys kill themselves, and each other, over. As Pandora, the girl whom a macho toreador, a dry British sportsman motorist, and the wise older archaeologist who narrates the tale all pine for, Ava Gardner lolls languorous and luxuriant under the painterly camera eye of Jack Cardiff. And the parallels with TWILIGHT are, like, super obvious. The coveted 'full of life' mortal beauty giving up her mortality to be with her centuries-old cursed lover; he, meanwhile, giving up the chance for her to give it up because her life means so much to him. And even with all the rivals fighting over her, she chooses the immortal with the British teeth. No matter the thousand pleasures of the land, this is for her the chance to become mythic, this earthly plane be damned... 

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1933)

Death is played by Frederic March, who poses as a count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella seem like Mary Poppins and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan but the Grim One himself. Love + Death = Modernism is a cry-in-your-whiskey highball tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under nine dollars, is worth getting just for Venable's haunted performance if nothing else (avoid JOE BLACK itself, and I say this as a man who deeply adores Claire Forlani).

MOROCCO (1931)

Marlene Dietrich's cabaret chanteuse courts androgyny and shuns rich Adolphe Menjou (the Jacob), knowing he'll eat it up. She's defined more by what she's not than what she is, and that's why she falls for 'tall drink of water' Cooper, a shadow in the Foreign Legion who, like her, is bored with the opposite sex throwing themselves all over him. They're each surprised by their deep yen for one another, but both are so used to being pursued they barely remember how to actually do the pursuing. Not to worry, since neither one gives a damn about life or death and Dietrich's final renouncement is as valiant and Goth as anything in the back of Bella's death-drivin' mind.

THE WIND (1929)

Silent (or sound) films have seldom spun along with such crazy spirit as in THE WIND: Lillian Gish is the poor virginal girl who gets way less than she bargained for when she moves in with her deep dish dust bowl dirt-dwellin' mail order husband. His homestead is so windy she spends the bulk of the day sweeping sand out of the shack, and repelling her husband's would-be rapist friends. The whole thing works well as a metaphor for virginity and the loss thereof, the endless sacrifice and loss in exchange for nothing but maybe love. In a way, it's the most sexually and emotionally 'mature' film of the lot. It's the REPULSION of the silent era! Don't miss it, and don't front if you have to read intertitles, or you may never understand DOGVILLE. You been warned! Smarten up!