Easter Acid Cinema Special: MOTHER!

Darren Aronofsky's controversial psychedelic scarring ritual MOTHER finally visited my psyche. Man, what a party. This ain't your mom's hardcore psychosexual "puts the bile back in bible" allegory, so why was I led to be scared of it by a bunch of babies who made me think it was Requiem for a Dream II: The Reckoning?

Sure, Mother! delivers horrific shocks. But not Requiem's slow grinding torture that anyone who knows the horrors of withdrawal, or epilepsy will have a seizure over. Instead, Mother seems to be made a long time ago, before the advent of morality. It's a whole new kind of crazy, far more traumatizing (to some) than even Requiem author Hubet Selby Jr. would think to go in all his grotty Brooklyn exit naughtiness. Relentless forward momentum pulls this Mother so far forward it becomes backwards again, reverse-catapulting Darren Aronofsky into the D.W. Griffith future at the dawn of bible studies Pickfordianism. Darren A. walks the land of the artsy giants of primordial surrealism, a gut-punch Buñuel for the post-irony age. His is a truly organic flowing biblical message, wrapped in an autobiographical treatise on being a famous filmmaker. His scathing view of celebrity hangers-on makes the relentless pawing of the 8 1/2 entourage-barrage seem like the perfectly blended loft apartment full of adopted revelers in Zoolander.  Treading boldly through the thorny throngs of a packed party of lingerers, Darren A. knows that just telling the tales of the Old Testament without sugary dozing-in-the-pew piety will leads to scenes far more lurid than any Cecil B. DeMille might devise for his Sign and The Cross. For Darren, Christians and their Cronus-like cannibal sacraments are far more horrific than any Old Testament burnt offering, hundreds of doves nailed to the temple door-demanding god can hope to equal.

Who else even comes close to this kind of filmmaking? Who has this amount of guts, in both senses of the word? There's Guy Maddin, whose work finds weird new Freudian melting points within his Winnipeg freeform retro-expressionism, but his Canadian decency keeps him from digging down where the titans are chained. There's David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, and Gaspar Noe, sitting with Aronofsky now in a kind of grim 'heedless stare into the screaming void at the center of the human condition.'

A mix of allegorical pretension, slow-building freak-out panic theater group happening, and straight-up horror, MOTHER is a grueling/exhilarating parable about the savagery that is the human reproductive system once it's run shy of predators and herd-thinning pestilence. If Mama Jones can't whip up a plague virulent enough to get humanity down to a manageable population count, we ourselves become the plague. Will we have arrived in paradise when we at last give up the need to procreate a foot further?

"Why did I ever make 'em?"

Chronicling a veritable Old Testament of wrath and vengeance, the NC-17 white person sexualThe Green Pastures, Mother, right. Off-the-cuff savagery is so seamlessly amplified that an ordinary celebration can devolve into a pagan sacrificial rite before you know it, all in one take. The whole history of our presence in 'the house' is succinctly, scathingly surmised here or in the animated opening credit sequence of Soylent Green. (See: Idiot Wind of the Locusts) but also, in real-time, seemingly, it's just how a  Woodstock can become a full-on Altamont fracas before you can find a place to hide your valuables.'s not just the bible getting analyzed and reimagined in Mother, but the messianic complex that results from excessive fame and how it affects the creative process (one can't create in a house packed with admirers following you around, eating your food, and loudly wondering when you're going to create again). In indulging his masochistic shock value yen so completely, Aronofsky pulls his own mask off, showing the mirror the wormy, decaying face therein. We're no longer feeling the sexualized (always) brutality of Man through abused Selby-penned prostitutes. We're feeling imposed on and exploited through the earth elemental that is Mother. Subjected to the relentless neediness of the unwashed masses, hers are the gates crashed in an acid-spurred rush, ala the hippies refusing to pay for tickets and just taking down the fences, overwhelming security with their sheer hippy numbers at the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival. 

Piercing phallically through many layers of subtext, both personal (fame as parasite magnet; perfect artistic creations kill their creator), and sociological (an uncircumcised logocentric thrust deep into morass of chthonic madness), Mother! digs down so deep it's surely the film to goose Camille Paglia in finally finish the second part of Sexual Personae. It's Darren Aronofsky's love letter to his legions of slavering townie fans--a thank you for soiling his lawn with their discipling. It functions like the shin bones of saints in alcoves of Italian churches. Their crucified bodies are rent limb-from-limb by hungry faithful. Chunks of the cross are able to heal the sick, especially the parts with blood stains. It's believed the saint's holy power is preserved at the moment of his holiest agony. Body parts scatter around the world like Osiris's before them. A little finger joint in a shrine in County Cork, Ireland, a metacarpel in Palermo--they are all like connected with earth electricity, powering the two-way radio to God. They are Christianty at its most strange and savage, a call back to the time before the flood

Ala Christopher Nolan or David Lynch, Aronofsky is one of the names even the most casual public viewer has heard of. He's in the trades. He's currently dating Jennifer Lawrence, a younger woman, and doing so right out in the public eye, the public not being too worried about it, since Lawrence can take care of herself and Aronofsky's films are so twisted it's clear he's a relatively sane, safe sort of guy. (It's the ones who make the sane films you've got to watch out for). So hey, if he wants to posit himself as God, I'm all for that. I'm a writer too, and can still be a poet if the ratio of flu and Robitussin is just right (hint hint). Javier Bardem is one of my favorite actors and did a fine job capturing the life of a poet once before (as in his 2000 portrayal of the AIDs-stricken Cuban refugee poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls) and can surely be a god, too, with ease. Both poet and god are difficult roles to pull off, without lapsing into pretentiousness or absurdity--as in all those 60s major films that try to capture the beat era. Bardem never comes close to either pitfall. When it comes to acting, he is a God and his ability to navigate the mounting chaos without losing his fathomless cool is truly inspiring. I've had a mancrush on him since his unforgettable Santeria practitioner in 1997's Perdita Durango (aka Dance with the Devil) so I've been watching his career from the get-go, so I'm so glad to see he's spending his time wisely, eschewing the traditional prestige pics that so often weigh down Oscar winners, in favor of flavors closer to his funky Almodovar roots. (seek out Law of Desire --it'll blow your mind, and whatever else you have laying around). And Mother stands with his best, weirdest work yet.

I confess: l loathed Aronofsky after Requiem for a Dream. I feel like that movie violated me. Yet I loved The Wrestler and have seen Black Swan six times. I tried to watch Noah and couldn't get past the idiocy of the first six hours and The Fountain -good god that's some pretty-lookin' twaddle. But Jesus, Requiem captured the insanity of a brain tortured by the twin fires of addiction (which distorts time and space) and withdrawal (which is literal hell) ... that's just handled too damn well. I know that pain-- every anguished tick of the heart clock is like a punishing jolt of electric current and institutional patriarchal malice. And with that brilliant, but utterly traumatizing, strobe light sexual editing style, it's like getting raped through the eye.

2. Forgiving REQUIEM

But Mother! is a film about forgiving the people who trespass against you, suggesting that the whole reason trespassing occurs is to create something to forgive. It's an old trick God pulls on us: making things so very, very terrible because otherwise forgiveness wouldn't have the same epiphanic kick. By middle age you either have to forgive the world unconditionally or open fire on it (though I know that's not 'in' right now). So I forgive Darren his eye-rape trespasses. And instead I blame  the people who said Mother was way worse than Requiem, which is why I waited so long to see it instead of racing breathlessly to one theater after another, with a dirty stuffed rabbit in my hand, going "have you seen my daughter! Her name is Jenny! JENNY!!!" but then running away, tittering like a maniac before the cops came.

Instead I was led to believe that people were walking out in shock during screenings for the same reason I had to leave during Wolf Creek. And maybe it is as disturbing if you're a 'normal' family man/woman with a baby instead of a recovering addict or alcoholic. If you're all normal and don't know the profound terror and relentless despair-soaked agonies of drug or or alcohol withdrawal--a feeling that just gets worse and worse, like a hangover that doubles in intensity every hour you don't take a medicinal 'hair of the dog' drink, until you're in such distress that submitting to a night of base group molestation by a horde of filthy old perverts is nothing if you end up re-supplied for the week. You'll even dip your hand in a Rio Bravo barroom spittoon for a silver dollar just to get a drink enough to take the shakes away even for an hour. It's why they use heroin in the white slave trade. It's mind control at its most horrific, 

That was where Aronofsky went for Requiem, the Pulsing 'in/out-in/out' "ass-to-ass" electro-shock so callously done to speed freak Ellen Burstyn until she's foaming at the mouth, synced in epileptic seizure cross-cuts, with the super demeaning and depressing and terrifying "ass to ass" grinding of dear Jennifer; Marlon Wayans undergoing withdrawal in a southern jail cell, and Jared Leto getting his arm amputated, all done in a series of brutalizing rhythmic crosscuts like being raped simultaneously in four separate time zone orifices.

Walking out of that movie on shaky legs, I was so mad at Darren Aronofsky I wanted to go his house and break some windows. I was not alone in feeling violated. Walking up the aisle after it ended, we saw a woman literally unable to get up out of her chair because she either had had an epileptic seizure or panic attack as we walked past. If Darren had gotten up to take questions and our legs weren't wobbly from the ordeal, I'd have rushed the stage and beaten him up (like my buddy John LaGreco and his brother Chuck used to do when they went to the same elementary school, something I never tire of reporting because Requiem upset me so badly).

When Requiem came to theaters, in 2000, you see, we still had some of our souls left to lose. Though every last scrap was being optioned for whatever shock value was still left to wring from it, every name-for-himself auteur amping up the ultra-violence for their own special narrative purpose, making sure we felt the pain of the victims, the turbulent brutality of a man on speed or coke, his empathy eaten away, relishing in the pain of the other. The more of this stuff we watched the more desensitized we became, until--like some James Wood TV station owner--you'd have to watch Japanese hentai or torture porn just to feel alive. Man, the anti-porn crusaders turned out to be right, and now we're fucked. 

Am I hero for being sickened by Requiem but not Mother!? Definitely not. How dare the 'people' steer me away from Mother! which is clearly one of the best films of last year, maybe this decade's Mulholland Drive? At the very least its our Viridiana! It's not about addiction, but about what it's like to be sober and sane while everyone around you is drunk and destroying your apartment, or being at a rock concert where you everyone around you is packed in, struggling to get closer to the stage, screaming and singing and swaying and grinding off each other in the cult-like adoration of the band onstage and you're trapped up there with 'em. You just came to score shrooms and don't really like the Dead (aside from some of the Jerry-sung better, earlier songs, "China Cat," etc.) and hate crowds and now the drugs are really kicking in and you couldn't fight your way out if you wanted to. I know that feeling. And it's about being impotent (or suffering premature ejaculation), maybe secretly gay, maybe middle-aged and definitely Viagara-less, with a wife who just wants to get into bed with you, clinging and needy, her whole beautiful body like a dangerous lure that frightens you with its raw desire. It's like when you're just wanting to get loaded and your girlfriend is trying to drag you home, restless and anxious, trying to steer you away from the booze and weirdness into her tedious arms. "You've had enough!" she scolds. But the yawning fear is still there, the fear of her chasm of need. "You give and you give," notes  Michelle Pfieffer's character, "and you give". 

Like Saint Joan of Arc, I forgive Darren. I understand. I absolve. It kills me to do so, but Jesus will catch me before I fall too far into the flames. 

2. Jonesers Overrun the After-Party (Fame)

(Semi Slow-SPOILERS ahead) What makes the first half of the film, with its esoteric bits of symbolism and Lynchian soundscape manipulations, so worthwhile is a truly crazy second act. Occurring over a single night, it moves seamlessly from Jennifer's Mother Nature trying to have a quiet night at home with her man (she's serving a very special dinner for two), to an impromptu party full scale riot, and onwards from there to even darker extremes. It's perhaps the most terrifying and exhilarating extended 'real time' sequence since the surreal Khatyn-esque massacre finale of Elem Klimov's 1985 film, Come and See. It perfectly captures the nightmare that occurs when your small acid trip get-together that turns--against your wishes but you're too high to protest.-- into a full-on call the cops Saturday night townie party. What was once a cool quiet evening 'encounter' in a safe space ends up a mob scene, everyone inviting everyone else's friends over, looking to get in on the psychedelic love session whether you want them around or not, because hey, it's supposed to be a loving safe share-everything environment, so let's share everything we got; I got nothing, bro - you can have your fill of my empty pockets. So what do you got? Gimme gimme! Now you got nothing, too! Bro, lets you me go share everything we got with someone else. 

Man, as we say in AA, I think I still have some lingering resentment, all amped up with bad acid trip PTSD.  Forgive them, Erich... omm.

Jesus mobbed by lepers - Jesus Christ Superstar 

Mother seeks solace from the brushstroke of her whiteness 

Forgive them, counsels the Man. That's the ultimate thing, through it all, Javier's poet is beyond all materialism. The masses' horrible feverish neediness--a million ravenous mouths piling up around a dozen nipples until all is gone. 

But Javier's god points beyond the apocalyptic wasteland, gesturing at the distant heavenly horizon that waits once one has finally crawled beyond the valley of duality and ego. Forgiving and loving the million claws and clockwork grinding gears that rend your agonized body / soul to shreds can earn you some serious wings. 

Is this what is left then, when all is taken? The only thing that is eternal? Unseen until this crust of impurities are washed away you cannot see it. That's faith. Only the soapy water that first cleans the feet of a million hungry rats can wash away the muck from around your blazing lighthouse beam.

Ugh, but what a mess for the maid on Monday.


3. Psychedelic Set and Setting - Interrupted

One of the more terrible ideas, in my mind, has always been the way acid, ecstasy and shrooms, i.e. the 'major' psychedelics are most which is at big raves and college parties and the worst time is late night, for energy. Any big college party, especially one on Friday or Saturday night, has a stretch of 2-5 hours--from around 12-2, where the great unwashed filter through. Usually this means long chains of nervous boys trailing their alpha like a centipede of nervous, hungry glances, leaving a choking trail of Axe body spray. a lame approximation of bravado is affixed to their faces, but they got no game or humility. An unrealistic media-instilled sense of entitlement pollutes their every action. They've been taught by a thousand movies that college parties are where you get 'laid' and do keg stands. But they can't find the keg, and are scared to ask, and girls--forget about it. Girls, even single ones, seldom stay long enough for these boys to get traction, so around 3 AM it ends up being a dude fest, the alcoholics (you) and the people too fucked up to find the door. There you are, tripping your face off, surrounded by pale normie packs of jonesers, wallies, and moochers sitting around, taking up valuable couch space, waiting until the night pays them what they think they're owed for coming out, forcing their way into your chambers to beg drungs or ask for a number from your cool platonic female friend roster. Neither of which you give. 

I know that if you're reading this then you are one of the cool ones. You get it. And you know tripping your face around those creeps and their blank-faced wally coteries, is the worst --all their amped-up rapey insecurity and normie blandness, their terrible townie teeth, or--on the flip--their nerdy smarm-clouded insecurity wherein they think a single beer makes them bold, yet their insights are like lead balloons hanging on your would-be airborne dosed soul.

Forgive them. 

Thanks to the flush of psychedelic awakening, you lose your discernment and become all godlike and forgiving them their trespasses, trying to quickly amp up their style, even giving them articles of your cool raiment, for you move so quickly beyond attachment when properly dosed, you transcend the need to own anything. The power of psychedelics being such that it can override your own discerning ego's judgment, their normie plight can move rather than disgust you. But that disgust has a purpose, as you will find out later.

 Jesus was nice to these people too, and look where it got him!

I'm horrified by abuse of psychedelics, which are God's special glasses that let us behold heaven and hell in advance. When I see youtube videos of idiot kids smoking salvia in the living room, with the TV blasting some obnoxious after school MTV reality show while the smoker twitches on the floor and the idiot camera person zooms in and out on their face, an offscreen voice going oooooh and everyone snickering, I'm deeply horrified. It makes me understand perhaps why parents worry about their children and try to make everything illegal. How about a little respect for the human mind? Salvia, done right, is a spiritually transformative tool. if not, it's just ugly, scary -- teenagers tramping all over Salvia's interdimensional garden (if you do it right, you meet her, raising her children from pots like Troll 2. 

Imagine if instead of all that it gets used in church. The priest trains the young in proper respect for psychedelics, lessens their fear, so that when they are old and afraid of dying, the priest can give them shrooms or ecstasy, making the beyond seem beautiful and inviting. Instead, parents, in demonizing all drugs, seeing no difference between good drugs like shrooms and bad ones like coke or meth, give this huge power to any profit-mined drug dealer. The result? Some scabby hep-C sleazebag peddles ecstasy to your daughter and she thinks he's frickin' Jesus and wants to marry him. Pot wasn't a gateway because of its effects, but because the parental hysteria over it--which made trying it so scary to you at first. If that fear was unfounded for pot, it must be unfounded for everything else too. So a career criminal becomes her parent, her teacher, shaping her psychedelic expansion like some Manson-esque guru. In short, legalize it or your children are MINE!

\

4. Unforgiven Trespasses (The Gulls Descend)
(Jesus Christ Superstar - Jesus had the right idea, fuck 'em)

I'm glad this came around on DVD and I could post this right before watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR live on ABC, as that musical and MOTHER share that subtext: the idea that opening your arms in love leads to having your organs harvested. Opening your house to strangers leads to a home invasion that, once begun, never ends until every last thing of value in your house is trashed and/or stolen, including your own children and you are leftsick and wild-eyed as the sun comes up and they finally drive away (to Mars to start with?), leaving your floors awash in toxins. After Jesus Christ Superstar watch Mother! and you have a real scathing sad truth to any spiritual enlightenment humility trip. No matter how much wine your drained corpse produces, how many loaves and wafers your flesh can be diced into, the masses never stop coming forward making "pan! pan!" gestures like those Suddenly Last Summer beach boy sea gulls. Save yourself! Or trust your Osiris saint parts will electrify into a whole new world after you are rended limb from limb. 

The beggars Viridiana invites to dinner--as she's so Christian and noble.

5. Art is Violence: Forgiveness is Divine in direct proportion to the Unforgiveableness of the Offense/s

This is the "it" at the core of all truth - the art, once created, turns back around to rend the artist limb from limb with its inconceivable needs. The Frankenstein Monster, loosed upon the world thus changes it, and the reaping returns to his creator, the shocked doctor/artist The doctor suddenly wakes up with an electric jolt, realizing he's been dead and is now strapped down to a table while God stares at him, dolefully. "He's horrible!" he shouts. But then, he turns around and loves him anyway, like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. 

Oliver Stone has been sued by the victims of a child who rampaged with his girlfriend after watching Natural Born Killers; Kubrick worked to pull A Clockwork Orange out of circulation in England after a rapist sang "Singin' in the Rain", Judas Priest was dragged into court by the bereaved parents of a hideously burned child who heard the Satanic messages in their music. Is this the takeaway message here? Be careful of what you create? Should Aronofsky be chased up the windmill or dragged there by his own creation?

If you're going to make something, better make sure you forgive yourself in advance for the sin of having made it. Madness awaits the judging sober critic at the loud raucous rock show. Take it from me, who wound up rent to the marrow by the ceaseless thirst of his own pain-wracked body.

Before it's too late, thank yourself for your own advance forgiveness of your future offense. It's the only way you're ever going to finish what you started... so you can start again.... again. 

-

PS - Believe me when I swear: I was once sincere in my desire to forgive the seagulls, recognizing them as manifestations of my own sick addiction by visiting my meditation / holy babble poetry site: MEDSITATION. Seems, though, by the tenor of this piece, I'm far from that shore these days.

See also past Easter Acid Holiness:
GREEN PASTURES (1936)
JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977) 
BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON (1970) 

And the Psychedelic Scrooge Satori!

See also:

the entire chronicle of my deliverance (and subsequent carnivore disillustion): Remembering my 2012 Galactic Alignment Euphoria, Non-Duality, Quetzlcoatl Visions, Cult Leadership, and Inevitable Fever

I love you, always.
Long as you're clean, and don't mess up my carpet.

As the great Harry Dean Stanton once said  "I don't want no commies in my car.
And no Christians either! "

Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, linked to the laptop on your desk; the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud instead of watching the screen your teacher is pointing at; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone again) or car (DVD player above the dash + phone); screens at home (which you watch with one eye on the phone screen), the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't any left. There's not even room for any more overlaps. You'll need ADD just to keep up with the future generations able to watch four movies at the same time without losing focus on a single one (while watching just one will drive them insane with restless leg syndrome and cell phone finger twitching). 

With their action figure and video game readiness, teenager-based dystopia sci-fi is all the rage -- and three recently-released big budget Blu-rays (I watched them all in the same weekend --consecutively) speak to this proliferation of screens, proving themselves to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation. These big budget, mass-marketed teen demo-skewed tales of 'being an individual'  use the trappings of rebel youth subversion in service of the institutions they're allegedly subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Bud Lite bottle: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."), tapping deep into the product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America, and bringing forth all the synergy and branding money that it implies--! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Towers Activate! Form of Coors Lite... Ice! 

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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life along the way. If that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way, all in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth blessings on you, but you're loco. On the other hand, if, like me, you loathe the hypocrisy behind the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2's "Casualties Zero" Arnold eye screen scrawl), then its use of plenty of blood and realistic damage done to property, life, teeth, and limb makes KICK-ASS 2 a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy, Alex and his Droogies, or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a normal childhood (where the hell did he grow up?) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the first cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin-just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony. But noooo.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kid's drawers for drugs seems to be the 'in' thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search their drawers. The moral? Kids, hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have --even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading)--but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie bullshit. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff but she's subjected to a strange rape gag which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog! Schwontz, indeed! It makes no sense, like an NRA member hearing burglars downstairs so quick locking up his bedside gun.

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist qua-intentional way, or just unconsciously ultra-violent, it doesn't matter. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. Unlike Jolie, whe's not squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with her teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intends!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, and who prefers the company of a guy shorter than her ("so he can look up to me, so I can be his ideal") but really loves a hunky taller dude. This time we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) instead Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is depicted more like the uncooked egg schoolgirls carry around during reproductive health awareness week. While her rightful man (some Hemsworth or other) is off fighting the real war; Katniss coddles and protects Peeta with the zeal of a neurotic mother hen. He's near-grown, Katniss. Let lil' Peeda stand up by himself.

What works best is how well the film nails down the nerve-shredding implication that 24/7 media coverage not only destroys stars like Britney, Amy, and Lindsay, but our civilization as a whole, leading to a globally catastrophic intensity wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre when cameras are present--or to be convincingly smitten by some designated short guy before a live studio audience--ensures your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its depicted future dystopia with an endless flow of diegetic paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits, award shows, tedious applause, and all the red carpet press sound byte droppings that are a parallel to the grueling regimen of its meta/non-diegetic modern starlets.

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzer to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would be too much to bear without some of her old spark, and it ain't there, honey, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, a champion from one of the other districts, to pick up the badass bitch slack. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood, stealing ever scene she can while JL's Katniss mistakes glum moping for world weariness.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, a decadent fop whose refusal to grasp even the most basic tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film. Here's a man who genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. For a man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda, you'd think he would know enough about mass media by now that all he'd have to do to quell rebellion is give out mockingjay symbols as keychains, T-shirts and bumper stickers, and have his Stanley Tucci greet the TV audience with it (in short, komrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolutionary symbolism, Donald! It all but ensures it. It's like dropping napalm on a peace symbol bumper sticker to end the hippie movement. You end the hippie movement by getting Nixon to say "sock it to me" on Laugh-In. 

The reason why Sutherland doesn't do that of course is inherent in the marketing for the film itself; as he lurches about on his pre-set dictatorial track, it's as if the Donald is trying to throw us off the scent of Lionsgate's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his own obliviousness towards such a practice. As those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21 or Mandees or wherever, it would be conflict of interest for the evil emperor to endorse them. They mustn't get wise, these kids. A happy consumer is an unconscious consumer, even if what's being consumed is the notion of waking the fuck up.

Other HUNGER signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, regardless, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi. With their frills and pouffiness drawing groaningly obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos and the hunger of the peasants to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seem Rohmer-esqely subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold trim, and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act instead of just playing the shrill press agent mouthpiece for plot exposition. I still don't like those terrible fake color eyebrows...

Then there's a rare treat, lacking in the other films discussed here: a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, and to have a damned drink once in awhile. He also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things other than validating Katniss' useless sulking and refusing all offered goodies, as if eating a single hors d'oeuvre would make her 'part of the problem.'

The most original element is the central bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like, yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, while your true tall love galavants into the firestorm. And the short guy's so sweet and staid, and supportive, he only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him out in the real world, only shows there's still hope for short, staid guys.... and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is far removed from all that tweenage love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bugs exactly right. Luckily Asa Butterfield's Ender is allowed to be kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lecter instead of just a 'normal' kid like the kind only a Morris Chestnut would think really exists. Recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts, Asa's 'Ender; is legitimately scary and sociopathically over-calm. And its awesome.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' gets recruited to save the world because he plays video games well. I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP TROOPERS because we were supposed to think of them as caricatures, not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen ever seen on. But Ender is different. He's a weedy ectomorph but can defend himself with devastating Lecter-like economy. Underneath his nervous morphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Starship Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens. And hey, it's what the military is doing right now with drone programs! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like themselves
in a sci-fi movie. We go to sci-fi to get AWAY from that shit, dumbass.

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do. Besides, how much difference will my ten bucks make against that vast deficit? I'd rather invest in a film that will feel my paltry offering, even if only as a ripple in the wind.

Not to ramble off topic, but I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzan and Carson of Venus books. Also Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Book Swap,
around 1981!

The best part about all of them? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible... yet there it is...

And so it is that we must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths against unimaginative dogmatic Hollywood's glorification of 'being a kid.' Already they have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the FBI's guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing from our cinema heritage. Stop them! Stop them before they install their safety-first overhead florescent lights even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred imaginations. I say roast Morris's chestnuts on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain, in vain!

They Shoot Horsemen: HUNGER GAMES, SERIES 7

The idea of obtaining instant celebrity is a fantasy we all share, especially in the 'blogosphere' --and why not? It comes true for random people who don't deserve it, like viral video stars, and it's this fantasy that's explored in The Hunger Games. If idiots can win it all, then why not we, who are the biggest idiots of all? Killing people to get there? No problem. Long as it's on camera butt legal. Heheh. (That's my idiot proof). Poof!

 This fantasy is dramatically different than the usual hook of teen franchises like Twlight and Harry Potter, which offer a return to a pre-egoic sense of safety in cozy confines with numerous friends and attractive protectors, i.e. Hogwarts or the Cullen house, or the Starship Enterprise. In Games there is no safety, no 'base' in the future's lifelong game of tag. The only way to find any kind of fantasy fulfillment with Hunger is through unease, and the idea that one day a whole world will see you, on TV, all the time. Your very lack of a secure space is the fantasy. Omnipresent cameras depict your struggle for survival as you navigate the bully-strewn way to gym class. In Games there's not even a Coney Island to bop all the way back to and say "We fought all night to come back to this?" There's just a frail little sister who's lost without you, producing the very opposite of 'security' in your anguished teen heart.

Imagine it, though: every time you smiled into a mirror and raised a punk rock salute to the sky, you'd know a million viewers were bursting into unheard applause? The pain of Truman was that he was unaware he was adored by the unseen masses. He didn't feel it. The triumph of Jennifer Lawrence is that she knows... and she learns fast how to milk it. Never smile, for one thing.

This here's serious.

Over on Bright Lights, C. Jerry Kutner has dropped an awesome post about Hunger Games' science fiction ancestors, including: Battle Royale, the 10th Victim, The Year of the Sex Olympics and an Outer Limits ep, which he presents in its entirety. I would also add Series 7: The Contender, a well-received but ultimately ignored 2001 indie of which I saw the first 2/3, but had to stop when the last two survivors, one of whom is the other's ex-boyfriend and is dying of cancer, and oh man, is that supposed to be a twist? Or is that a workshopped 'feel'? Click.

Ooops, did I spoil Series 7? No, of course not, every one of these movies ends that way. There's always a last bullet jumping up and down in its chamber like young boy hopping around anxiously waiting for his sister to get out of the bathroom. I haven't a bit of use for it! Let my bullets go!

Series 7: The Contenders

Kill like a woman, Contender! It's your one big chance for immortality vs. eternal pussydom, and if your wounded boyfriend wants  you to win, cuz yr carrying his baby or whatnot, and puts your gun to his temple, just press the trigger! Feel bad later, after the lights have come up and we've forgotten your whole 15 minutes ever clicked past. Everyone deserves their shot.

I say that when you let civilized decency stop you from pulling that trigger when the ratings demand it, then the terrorists win.

What some detractors decry about the Games, but those in the know appreciate, is Lawrence's character's relative moral aloofness (she makes Bella Swan seem bubbly) coupled to her her ability to feign love and caring to gain sponsors, to the point where even she no longer seems to know if she's sincere. Certainly we at home or in the theater don't ever learn whether her romance with her short guy partner in the games is something she genuinely wants to happen, and I like that ambiguity. It's classy. It's the kind of thing that earns the big bucks, that brings you from ordinary high-end call-girl to platinum credit line-gifted Pretty Woman.  Detractors probably resent it because they don't want to admit they feign their own lives for an invisible audience too. What if Jennifer only pretended to like, for example, us?

And on that level Lawrence's characterization is a sublime modern metatextualization, illuminating the way actors who pretend to love one another onscreen are no different than those 'in love' in the 'real' world down below in the theater, holding sweaty teenage hands, each desperate to either be seen with the other person by gossipy girlfriends or to pass unnoticed by smirking bros. Each make believes with vengeance what they know deep down not to be true. What Fleetwood Mac forgot was that players believe they love you when they're playin' -- only in the deep, deep down can they admit  it's all just Liaisons Dangereuses-style seductions undertaken to impress our Marquise de Mateuil-du jour. Only later does it dawn on them that the Marquise was playing them, too, the whole time. That hottie is never going to reward your scorecard, Valmont! If she does, the sex will be awkward and stiff - for no one has told her half the things she's doing are painful, because she's so damned hot we figure we're just feeling it wrong.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959)

Now kids, let me break the fourth wall and give you a little sinse and sin's ability: if you ever want to break free of the chain, stop being one of those love-starved idiots chasing each other through the enchanted Summer Night's fairlyland woods, pursued by a 6 as you chase an 8, as they say, well, not to sound like some preachy therapist--you have to start actually loving, for realsies, even if you're the only one who knows you're not faking. Those who hold out for the one perfect love, chasing some girl way out of their league, rather than loving the one they're with, eventually fall into the Groucho club membership abyss (1). The media, alas, gives most morons an inflated idea of themselves, it promises them--like a strutting pimp--they'll get hot babes even if they're odious to look at, Girls don't want to get them mad so they try to let them down gently, but the media says, don't give up! Play Peter Gabriel outside her window, leave her notes on her locker from chewing gum wrappers, and meanwhile the girl for you sits at home binging on brownies and rom-coms. She aint' gettin' any less dumpy, bro. Better call her before she opens another pack. Take her jogging and introduce her to Godard. See if you can help her become a butterfly! It won't work but who cares? You ain't exactly a monarch yourself, you caterpillar bitch.

This is the secret of life: the unwanted lover, pining away, is doomed, while the deisred swinger knows that pretending to love someone who adores you is always a smart bet. Fuck the world if they think you should act in some other way than pretense. In Falsum Veritas! Pretend to love 'earnest'-ly enough and even you don't know the difference. When the world has proven it can't be trusted, only a fool is honest. It's called 'being a whore'- yea- or an actor, who woos onstage so well he marries his co-star (and vice versa). It's this aspect of Lawrence's character that resonates with writers such as Laura Bogart:

These [Hunger Games] books illustrate why PTSD is—as my former shrink once put it—the gift that keeps on giving: Nobody will be trustworthy, not entirely. Not when our parents and our governments, the very people who were supposed to protect us (or at least not cause us harm) are the ones who’ve thrown us in the midst of swinging fists and tracker jacker stings. How can we ever believe in anyone, even when we know (intellectually, at least) that we should? And if we can’t believe in anyone, why should we be anyone worth believing in?  The Hunger Games trilogy gives an arrow-strike of a pulse to what Genet called “the irreducibility of terror.”.  (The Nervous Breakdown, 3/12)

This level of absolute failure of trust in authority makes Games more than a metaphor for Vietnam and/or school bullying. When I first heard about Hunger Games I instantly got mad that something could get so popular without me knowing about it beforehand, and also I thought it was a ripoff of Battle Royale. Now I'm okay with all that, because what the film's endurance test grind most reminded me of wasn't that, but Sydney Pollack's existential period pain-a-thon, They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969, an earlier post on it here).

Like Hunger Games, Horses involves average, starving, broke-ass poor citizens entering a grueling but possibly lucrative Depression-era dance competition as couples, two-by-two, as if upon a massive, hellish ark. The film records their signing-in, health check-ups, coaching, etc, before the competition begins, so by the time it starts we're already antsy for the inevitable pain-a-thon. As the cruel hours of the competition drag into weeks, sponsors are courted from amongst the gathered gawkers. In Games, Jennifer Lawrence feigns reciprocation for her less agile fellow entrant Josh Hutcherson because the rubes love a romance (her real boyfriend wasn't picked in the lottery); in Horses, dancing couple Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin--who barely met before signing up--get married right on the dance floor for the same reason, even though at that point they no longer even like each other, they do it just for presents from the rubes, pots and pans they can hock once the contest ends. In both films, after many torturous days and nights, the final survivors are so exhausted they're barely recognizable to themselves or us, and of course that's just what the ghoulish audience loves to gawk at... in both worlds. (2)

As in Hunger Games, Horses is keen on issues of food and starvation and the ample servings available to the participants vs. the starving cheap seat audience. Hunger's blue-haired (ugh) emcee (Stanley Tucci) compares poorly against Gig Young's award-winning dance marathon host. Both films don't really end so much as drift away from us, giving us the sense our hero is just heading off into the next nerve-wracking scenario, and we're heading back to ours, already in progress.

In short, fellow kids, if you're looking for something cool and weird that will illustrate your own life anxiety in a profound and sexy way, something that fits the dog-eat-cat mentality of Hunger Games, Netflix the '69 Horses, and ponder the eerie similarity.... to your own cursed existence, in your own cursed country, and your own cursed show, in your own accursed mind.

(1) Groucho's famous telegram to Friar's Club: "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".
2. Depression era dance competitions were eventually banned as inhumane - but--this being the age before welfare and food stamps-- at least they were fed between rounds.

Beards of Bleak: THE ROAD, WINTER'S BONE

Look at these two fine, bearded gentlemen above: Viggo Mortenson (left), billed only as 'the man' -- a grizzled survivor of an unspecified global holocaust, traveling with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in John Hilcoat's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2009 THE ROAD; and John Hawkes (right) is 'Teardrop'--a grizzled meth head slightly of a mind to protect his niece (Jennifer Lawrence) as she travels into the heart of meth belt code-of-silence darkness in Debra Granik's 2010 WINTER'S BONE. The two films have much in common: ravaged rural starkness, paternal anxiety, and them man-oh-manly beards, pointing and twisting under hawk noses. Teardrop and the Man are the cinema's 2009-10 beard combo (1), the best such combo since Moss and Plainview in 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (another Cormac adaptation), and this time, there's fewer words in the titles, even fewer in the scripts, which is hard to believe.

There's an awful responsibility that overtakes us, cinema do declare, when raising kids in a land rife with scorched earthiness, meth, limb-hacking, and squirrel skinning. Kids in horror and sci fi used to be possessed by demons. In the 1980s they hung around long-fingered aliens and quirky robots but were generally safe. Now kids have fallen from their endangered pedestal as beacons of Spielbergian light or position as 'other' to be feared, and become mere luggage, screaming cargo that must be protected from C.H.U.Ds, hillbilly paranoids, cannibalistic pedophile priests, and zombies if one is to avoid the agony of being branded a bad father and having to spend the rest of the film crying and staring at old family pictures. All one really wants to do is shoot, smoke, sniff, and sail away from life's burdens, but they have kids. In the 70s they could still do all that stuff, and just get a sitter. Now though, what if the sitter's a psycho or there's a fire? They can't relax even for a second. Gradually they go nuts from anxiety, the kind of nuts some meth or booze would handily cure.

BONE is the sleeper indie award winner this year, though first glances might make you sigh a BASTARD OUT OF GEORGIA RULE HOUNDDOG'S SWING BLADE RURAL JUROR poetic realism on the cheap kind of 'here we go faux-Faulknering' harmonicas and steel guitar-scored sigh. But, as I explained to my sentimentalism-wary lady friend when we watched it, even if all the signposts are the same that don't mean it's the same road. That's the mistake that made so many film scholars originally overlook Douglas Sirk! Underneath all that soap was a very dirty boy. But you had to scrub a little to uncover how deep that dirt went.

I'm sure by now you don't need me to tell you that WINTER'S BONE is beautifully photographed. Every image reminiscent of the lovely dust bowl portraits by Dorothea Lange, but in color and thrift shop winter couture, slow drip rainspouts, baleful-eyed horses, eerie drones and impeccable foley wind-swept periphery shrub rustling. The story itself is interesting, proving as did in DOMINO and JACKIE BROWN that bail bondsmanship is a fertile, relatively under-explored film subject. Dee (Lawence) has to forfeit her house to the bail bondsman if her meth cooker dad doesn't show in court so down the dirt hills trail she treads, asking tough questions of her hostile, meth-paraoid kinsfolk. As she's met by slammed doors and threats Dee begins to resemble the Phillip Marlowe of Tobacco Road, bravely digging where no one wants her to dig, taking a beating without flinching, hallucinating under quality pain killers, relentlessly traversing a mise en scene of desolate winter landscapes and druggy evasiveness. The men hide behind smoke and yellowed curtains, guns at the ready, hallucinating police cars in the thumbprints on the windows. Where male detectives in 40s noir found Venus flytrap perfumes overwhelming their war-torn senses, Lawrence finds tough, inscrutable men, all relatives to some degree or other, their brains half-fried, with violent tempers, coiled cottonmouth postures. If they have information she must suss it out but that takes time and their wives are listening in the next room with a shotgun under their aprons. Dee's knightly champion eventually emerges from Teardrop's twitchy shell, kinda... but drug users are notoriously slip-prone when it comes to metamorphoses.

'The Man' in THE ROAD, meanwhile, never doubts his princeliness, but he sure doubts the world's. He saves his last bullet to use on his son if they should ever fall into cannibal hands. Several times the kid has the gun pressed up against his head while danger looms, and one can't help but think of John Ford's STAGECOACH climax, with John Carradine's last shot aimed at the 'lady' as the Apaches draw closer. Fear for the virginity of your young 'uns and maidens can make you brave or make you weak and in the final bullet moment it's impossible to tell which is which. It's one thing to be courageous for yourself, another to be courageous with the life of a charge, a child. Viggo refuses to let his son risk his life in order to make friends, thus dragging the 'helicopter parent' principle into the post-apocalypse wasteland.

The main difference between Teardrop and the Man seems to lie in this approach. Still like a cobra, eyes cast low in a thousand yard stare, Teardrop's superiority lies in the cool uncle position. When he finds a stray strand of nurturing in his soul's muddy weave and a banjo is introduced you practically cry to see this man finally engage in something that's not potentially deadly or destructive. At that moment, you know Howard Hawks would have loved him.

So, without a reliable social order in place in either dirty outdoors film, the thematic question seems to be, when is life 'safe' for little children to frolic? Dee proves it never is, so fuck it, frolic anyhow. The Man thinks it will be safe 'later' - so 'the boy' gets carried hither and yon, like America getting the paranoid treatment from a stand-down military, like the boy is George Bush and Viggo is Dick Cheney, creating all sorts of problems with his paranoia and access to the inner ear of power. 

As trends in fathering in our modern society('s films) make clear, dads don't often feel the need to stick around --too much pressure. What makes Teardrop, in his deep sympathy with the shadows and evils of the world, a better dad than 'the Man'? Teardrop knows how to come at a room full of meth-addled hick gangsters; he knows when to shrink into the shadows and when to refuse to step out the car and put his hands on the hood. He's not afraid of dying and that's what enables him to better help out. Like most of the men in either film he can't wrap his head around a woman un-cowed by the threat of death and physical violence. He has no choice but to be impressed. Viggo's problem is that he doesn't respect bravery, since he has none, and so his son's fearlessness or his wife's (Theron, below, looking straight out of BONE), is dismissed by him as foolhardiness, while he cowers in the shrubs knowing only one thing, that he's right to do so.

I know I'm not alone in being grateful that WINTER'S BONE chooses to forgo the threat of sexual assault that seems to dominate most other hillbilly franchises. We don't get much of it in THE ROAD either, but the threat is always there (along with OS screaming), putting an uneasy Kung Fu grip on your throat. A similar heavy threat hangs all over BONE, but the whole sexual assault as worse than death thing doesn't factor, and I'm glad. As I've written on BL, I think we're reaching an ugly saturation point in that regard: it's become cheap shorthand to get the audience deeply disturbed and emotionally involved, but at what cost?

Another thing I'm glad BONE forgoes is sentimentalizing childhood innocence. Funny how the two things go hand in hand, as if innocence itself was a side effect of corruption rather than vice versa.  Both films examine the nature of emotional involvement, and of parenting and responsibility, and while both films tug at issues of bare life survival vs. the sweet joy of giving up, only BONE knows how to harness the beard, the wild man energy of the masculine.  THE ROAD paves the way, perhaps, in subtextually condemning the conservative 'my family uber alles' ethos, but only BONE takes that message all the way to the bottom of the family swamp, where the wild man lies, and dredges that deep man up.


As Robert Bly wrote in IRON JOHN:

"... going down through the water to touch the wild man at the bottom of the pond is quite a different matter. The being who stands up is frightening, and he seems even more so now, when corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless shallow man." (2)

That's poor Viggo in THE ROAD, a sanitized man, re-bearded, trying to be wild in a wild land, learning the role of the deep, dark masculine and getting it incorrect. No reflection on Viggo, of course, who showed he can bring that shit hardcore in the RINGS trilogy and HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. What I don't like is the head-on craftsmanshippy approach to the McCarthy novel --it gets it too right, maybe, to work. Teardrop on the other hand is the truly untamed wild man, the kind of guy that creeps you out at first but then somewhere along the way, not sure when, you start to admire him.

Isn't that so much better, children, than the other way around? 

NOTES
1. Yeah, THE ROAD came out in 2009, but I didn't see it til last week, so what?
2. Vintage Books, NY, 1990 - Page 6