Nuts Taking Pictures of Pictures taking Nuts: MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Stick out your dong and say 'AGHH!'

"Myra Breckinridge was born with a scalpel and don't you ever forget it, motherfuckers--as the kids all say." Yes,, Raquel Welch--as post-op woman Myra-- narrates in the third person (she's at least two all by herself) in the un-membered-rabble mess/tear/racy-piece MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. It's not sharp, but that scalpel in old John Carradine's mitt (above) will, you feel, definitely cut off something, and it's not (just) Bunny's member. No, "ma'am." As the kids all say, if you can't get up to change the channel, at least change your underwear, before your silver Long John Horatio Hornblows anymore Captain Blood against the mast.

Let me grab a bucket of Jungle Red Benjamin Moore and brush/stroke the scene: Time: the end of the 60s / place: Hollywood.  We watch with mouths agape as the last vestige of hetero-studliness associated with the counterculture's orgy mentality fishtails off the woman's lib curb into a 'Joe Buck on the Deuce'-style gay orbit. 

MYRA B. is--as the kids all say--one truly awful film, but that doesn't mean you should miss it. 

As a truly anti-Hollywood Hollywood production and a rare example of a mainstream film that's truly misandric (something Valerie Solanis might dream up after too much pruno). "My purpose in coming to Hollywood," Myra announces early on, "is to destroy the American male in all its forms." (hear hear!) As long as the film focuses on this 'destroy men on every level' mission, keeps splicing in an array old film clips (to create the feeling these long gone actors are alive and watching events unfold), and supplies Welch spouting with anti-male / pro-Hollywood doctrine to spout, it's pretty badass. But once it veers in any other direction, a kind of suicidal self-sabotage comes a-crippling. For some unbeknownst reason, the producers saw fit to let Michael Sarne--a Brit actor, singer, and flashy gent with no discernible filmmaking know-how (or grasp of Hollywood history (he's a bloody Brit for Christ's sake)--have the directorial reins.

 If nothing else, the film really needed a Yank directing; only an American, born and bred, could have really understood Hollywood and its twisted sexuality in the way needed. While the script is cutting on many levels (thanks no doubt to Vidal's way with dialogue), Sarne's camera is almost too polite; he forgets to leer down Raquel Welch's dress and he cuts away right when a tirade is getting interesting.

Sarne, once again trying to cut short a sexy tryst

But first, historical Hollywood context: in 1970, Fox--MYRA's parent company--had also released BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. What a pair! Both used film critics either as actors or writers and then passed the project to directors unused to working with big budgets (Sarne and Russ Meyer). Apparently anyone--as long as they were coming from outside the system--could get a major studio movie made in the late 60s-early 70s. Studios were dying right and left and the old guard was clueless in the face of the psychedelic / feminist / black power / anti-Vietnam revolution generation. They saw EASY RIDER and thought, a blind chimp can make a better movie than this! So they did the only logical thing: went out and signed the first blind chimp they saw. It was a sad, grasping desperate strategy, born from their old guard derision for what was 'selling tickets.' If they hadn't done drugs themselves--and they were too old and square not to believe the anti-drug hype--they just threw some breasts, loud music, and strobe lights on the screen and hoped for the best. Damned hippies wouldn't even notice--the shrinking bigwigs assured each other. Those kids were too high from smoking acid and snorting reefer to follow a plot anyway, just give them the rock music, a light show, painted ladies dancing in cages, and then pack your golden parachute and bombs away. As Bob Hope, Peter Sellers, and David Niven rode out their contracts bedding young girls in flowery miniskirts, Top-40 bands of the day wailed on the soundtracks. Only AIP seemed to be making money, thanks to a shrewd mix of low budgets and expectations. 

The big studios didn't know how not waste money, so they tried everything else but, and it was all wrong. Even the farthest gone of the freaks could sense--like a shark---the flailing micro-vibrations of a wounded seal-like square's desperation to seem with it, but they weren't biting. In fact, they swam the other way as fast as possible. Narcs were everywhere, man, you had to watch out for cops with fake sideburns, and worse, horny balding idiots who'd heard about all that free love being given away on the Haight --big burly old dudes in Beatle's wigs looking to 'connect' - these older unhip faux-hipsters made a hippie watchful and a whole lot of paranoid.

But the studios had to try something. As early as 1966, a glut of over-priced, star-studded, psychedelic imagery-and-song-filled counterculture-satirizing (and aping) bids for mainstream success crawled desperately along the nation's marquees. The story they told was almost always the same: some average, middle-aged white collar square, trapped in his plastic-fantastic existence (Bob Hope, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, William Holden) suddenly wakes up, shacks up with a young free spirit hippie chick (Goldie Hawn, Joey Heatherton, Julie Christie, Kay Lenz) and finds either himself or a reason his ex-wife wasn't so bad after all  (in the darker versions, he kills said free spirit, due to his latent prudery). CANDY (dir. Christian Marquand); CASINO ROYALE (dir. Ken Hughes); BLUEBEARD (dir. Edward Dmytryk); SKIDOO (dir. Otto Preminger); I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOLKAS; WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? and THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP (all w/ Peter Sellers); HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE (w/ Bob Hope), PETULIA (dir. Richard Lester), BREEZY (Eastwood) to name just a few.

We're not a big fan of 'eaters' here at Acidemic

Some of these bloated midlife crises went perhaps too far into the freedoms wrought by the psychedelic era, and grew careless with them as if the Yin/Yang were just the latest in a long series of symbols for sex, ever-changing to keep fooling the censors and southern state rubes. The idea that LSD had created a kind of post-modern melt-down far different than their own square little jalopy-and-sock hop naughtiness was lost on an older generation for whom the notion of 'freedom' began and ended with the free sex with luscious young hippie girls they'd read about in the Times Sunday supplement. According to all the tabloids, those little chippees were just giving it away, strutting around with their painted midriffs. How was a man supposed to go home to his dour middle-aged wife and not groan in torment? He'd think about the ease with which he'd score if only he wasn't married. They were right there, for the taking, flashing him sexy looks (he thought). 

Thus these old dudes of the dying studio system masked their one-track minds in what we call 'terminal quirkiness.' They'd hire a handful of already has-been flower power bands for the album tie-in / soundtrack; get some B-roll of the girls of the Haight on a groovy summer afternoon; fish a long black hair/beaded headband combo out of the western "Indians" wig box down at wardrobe, throw it on your middle-aged contract player, throw a bubbly 'free spirit' in a fringe mini-dress into his arms, shove the whole thing on the big screen without even looking at final cut and hope for the best.

But the youth didn't want old comedians leering over their cleavage. Thrusting themselves into the modern world and making it up as they went, the youth were goal-free; it wasn't about the orgasm, man, it was about being in the moment. Hollywood reared back on its haunches like a spooked lion at that idea, lashing out at the very things the youth thought important, baring its fangs and ready to burn down the studio and laugh maniacally like Lionel Atwill or Joan Crawford rather than surrender the reins to some young turk who wouldn't appreciate a dirty-double Billy Wilder entendre.

Hollywood had labored too long perfecting a system of self-satire to understand its whole sense of self-satire itself was now under satiric attack. It couldn't understand there was no way out but to play the ogre as best it could. Trying to be anti-establishment (ala the Guy Debord concept of recuperation), the establishment ended up only anti-youth. I get it now that I (a member of Generation X) am too old to go to any party that would actually interest me, yet still too attend the ones that don't, just to get out of the house. The mix of prurience, jealousy, and legitimate concern I feel when hearing about 'bracelet parties,' for example, no doubt links me to these old Hollywood producers. The fact that we can never really never know for sure if those bracelet parties are real or not without going to one is enough to make us crazy with a constantly shifting amalgam of jealousy and concern. Is Bob Dole allowed to lust after Britney? Or is he part of the problem whether he does or not? 

Which brings us to MYRA, the mostly talked-about adaptation of Gore Vidal's seminal, fluid novel. Raquel Welch came aboard early, mainly--as she puts it in the DVD commentary--because she was supposed to (and wanted to) play both (the male) Myron and his post-op female counterpart Myra --kind of how Ed Wood played both Glen and Glenda. She rightly considered it an acting challenge. And if the filmmakers had stuck with that idea it might have been a great film (or at least less bad). Sarne insisted on casting Rex Reed instead. Urgh. One of the worst casting choices in the history of movies, Reed's air of defensive snootiness sabotages what little chance the film had. (No offense Rex, you doe-eyed minx).

What made MYRA a hopeful buzz generator was the sex change angle coupled to the image of Raquel Welch as an American flag-waving dominatrix. She had been made an international star before her breakout film ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1967) had even been released, just from the poster! No shit, Sherlock - look at this image at left - them gams. No boy or man of any age can remain unmoved. But she had another thing going for her too: an in-person air of take-no-prisoners imperiousness, the kind of thing that might make her come off as stringent (but seems more akin to self-defense considering all the pawing he's surely had to endure) that made her perfect for Myra.

But alas. Sarne left all that ore un-mined.

The fatal flaw of the film is right there in the opening bit: John Carradine plays a mumbling doctor performing the gender reassignment in what is presumably a psychedelic dream sequence "You realize once we cut if off it won't grow back," he says, trying to talk Myron out of it. "How about circumcision? It's cheaper."

Now, that's in itself hilarious and Carradine rocks, but if you start a story already in a dream sequence, and never really come out of it, then there's nothing ventured, no risk, no reason to care what happens through the whole rest of the film, unless it contrasts at some point with a recognizable reality. Carradine's warning that "it won't grow back" has no weight since we didn't even know Myron had one to begin with, AND either way it does apparently grow back. As soon as Farrah Fawcett hints she'd sleep with Myra if she were only a 'he', Myra backs out of the whole damn movie and becomes Myron again. The idea Farrah would want to shock up with Rex Reed is just too awful for any straight male to hear, worse even than Drew Barrymore marrying Tom Greene (ps: or Scarlet Johansson marrying Colin Jost)

Intended be very clever, this variation of the book to reach a happy (relax straight dudes, it was all a dream and no one lost their nuts) only reflects male-dominated mainstream cinema's still-unresolved castration anxiety, an anxiety which clouds its vision to the point of myopia (even films that tout their castration angles, like HARD CANDY and TEETH have sew-it-back or 'just kidding' cop-outs). But I can assure you every person who ever sees this film would prefer all the castrations stay where they are, for seeing Farrah and Raquel in bed together is super hot, while Farrah and Reed together is super not. Sarne, in his idiocy, got it backwards, leading to the most irksome homophobic cop-out in film history.... at least until Blake Edwards' SWITCH (if you've seen that film, you know the scene I mean, it will make you hate Blake Edwards forever--all the strides he made for gay liberation with the mainstream crossover of VICTOR/VICTORIA gone down the drain).

Huston rides a horsey

So, my caveats emptied, I'm going to go out on an already severed limb and defend MYRA anyway, because, even with the cop-outs, it's one of the few truly misandric films ever to come out of Hollywood.

Misandry: the hatred of men; an understandable feeling for anyone who loves movie stars and hates the cigar-chomping little midlife crisis sleazionaires--the pimps of the ephemeral--who mold their leading ladies from virgin clay into sexually-assailed golems of gorgeosity-made-flesh, i.e. PRODUCERS. In the context of MYRA, misandry is the desire to (as Myra puts it): "facilitate the destruction of the last vestige or trace of the traditional man... to realign the sexes in order to decrease the population, thus increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage."

Baby, you read my mind.

The problem is, while some of the film's dialogue does attain this dizzying height of cinematic savvy, it also betrays a very short attention span. In parts it seems like Sarne checked his watch, realized the film had played long enough that it could stop and still be considered a feature, and so made a 'wrap it up' gesture and immediately departed for rehab, leaving MRYA caught between the zipper of gender studies exhibit-A and a "hard" place limbo. Feints at validating the lifestyles of queers, commies, nymphos, hippies, and the semi-condoning of punking out of dumb "I'm straight!"-pleading studs (ala SCORE!) all adds up to zilch if it all ends up merely being the prelude for the same old vindication of boy-meets-girl establishment wonkiness--the old 'we had a lot of fun here tonight boys and girls but remember, gender normative straitjackets are there for your protection!' switch and shuffle.

Maybe what MYRA's makers subconsciously seem to fear isn't so much rejection of its subversive message but the idea of a Hollywood without censorship to rail against. A film like MYRA can't break walls if there are no walls left, and MYRA is terribly afraid it has nothing else to offer besides wall-breaking. So it knocks a few glory holes in the drywall, and then rushes to quick patch them up before dad comes home. Or another metaphor: the little boy dancing on the top of the dam, screaming that its about to burst, and kicking at it with his little churchy shoe, and then whipping out his dick when no one pays attention and, when no one pays attention even then, pretending to cut it off. And when that doesn't work, stepping down off the wall and going back into the church. Rex Reed's well-known hatred of the film is telling it that sense. In his little three minute film reviews on TV, Reed's snootiness was rawther droll, but this is a real movie, and no snootiness stays droll longer than, maybe, five? He can badmouth the film all he wants, and understandably, for it's there to forever remind him that he's just not right for the movies. Some people are just instantly unlikeable on the big screen. It's not their fault we want to punch that smug smirk off their faces the moment we see them. It's why screen tests are a thing. Only in the late-60s/early-70s could a first-time director get away with not having his casting choices challenged by the studio's self-sabotage police. 

Sadly, for all that, Rex might have been right. As with so many movies with 'queer' characters in that less-enlightened albeit more heterosexually-liberated era, the 'ick' factor is camped to the point of gauchery in MYRA, and so all that's left of substance is Myra's knowing but bizarre love of 40s musicals (she's horrified that the dumb acting student hunk she aims to deflower has never heard of the Andrews sisters). In her scenes as an acting teacher, Welch is superbly authoritarian and uber-confident, making them the real highlight of the film. "They really did roll out that barrel... And no one ever really rolled it back." When she socks John Huston during class, she explains that she's using the fighting style of Patricia Collinges in THE LITTLE FOXES. TARZAN AND THE AMAZONS (1945, below) is, she adds, a "masterpiece," and "The real Christ can't compare with either actor in King of Kings." She also notes the only one now to compare oneself with as far as a male role model is James Bond "who inevitably ends up with a blow-torch aimed at his crotch." All this is very, very welcome and taken, no doubt, straight from Vidal's lips to hers, all goosed up by movie footage: giggling Richard Widmark from KISS OF DEATH and Marlene in Navy drag from SEVEN SINNERS come rolling in like a welcome reprieve and apt commentary, as if the history of gender-bent Hollywood was looking down from a thousand screens as an omnipresent Greek chorus.

Tarzan, w/ Amazons

Bacchantes

Continuing the 'more-is-less but pile it up anyway' philosophy and upping the camp level past all decency are scenes involving the geriatric bacchant Mae West. Her sultry comic timing still makes even lame double entendres ("Ah, the pizza man! When do you deliver?") and ultra-subtle come-ons ("I don't care about your credits, as long as your oversexed") come off clever, especially when interspersed with gay-themed musical numbers ("Hard to Handle!") and vagina dentata Busby banana circles (from THE GANG'S ALL HERE). As a bonus diva, however, West's presence never really pays off. She provides the haughty Myra with an equal and they share some properly jovial and queenly laments about the states of their men. But then, able to find no real anchor to hold her in place, Mae drifts like Snow White, eventually fading into the horizon. 

Still, if you think she's an embarrassment, being so old and still stuck on vibrate, well fuck you! She's an intrinsic part of the film's value as a phallic rhinestone time tunnel ramming up Hollywood's golden age! She slides the middle finger of freedom right through the tight sphincter of angry Catholic censors, for whom West's whole schtick was once the direst threat facing America.

And then there's the main reason to see the film: the awesome sequence in which Myra takes a stud's anal virginity. Here, at long last, Welch's dominatrix acting style finds its ultimate expression of howling vengeance. Wearing, finally, a stars and stripes bikini and (unseen) strap-on. We may not agree with her method, but you have to admire her brazen insanity. Before she invades Rusty's virgin shore, she tells him "your manhood's already been taken by Clark Gable and Errol Flynn; I'm merely supplying the finishing touches." Those lines are intercut with footage of a bucking bronco ("who's never been rode before" a cowboy actor warns) desperately trying to escape his stall, and Clark Gable leering down from a poster, as if god approving of the whole she/bang.

If nothing else, this scene can provide Hollywood devotees with whole new ways of reading their favorite MGM stars' enigmatic grins.

But the picture's meta-Eisensteinian old star leering doesn't end there, Welch's orgasm is crosscut with (I wrote them all down): a stock footage damn breaking; Jayne Mansfield; 30s dancers waving umbrellas and jump ropes in the studio rain; Welch on a flower swing ala Marlene as a girl in SCARLET EMPRESS; a roller coaster; a mushroom cloud; rich 30s socialites laughing from their swanky balcony; Laurel and Hardy covering their eyes; a ballet dancer in a split bowing forward; Welch riding a broom and wearing a witchy hat; tinted silent footage from MACISTE IN HELL (the same footage used in Dwayne Esper's MANIAC (1931), Spencer Williams Jr.'s BLOOD OF JESUS (1941) and my own 2007 film that climaxes with a Kali-esque goddess anally assaulting a helpless hetero-bro --QUEEN OF DICKS). Throughout, Welch whoops it up with great abandon. The only other actor to match her for America-encapsulated yee-hawing is Slim Pickens ridin' the H-bomb in STRANGELOVE. 

A fella really could have a good weekend in Vegas will all this stuff. 

The cumulative effect (even if the Shirley Temple milking the cow footage was excised on her request. though we do see her sloppily eating creme puffs which is--in some ways--even worse), is a rupturing of the historical fabric of film history -- like this strap-on represents the the return of everything 40s Hollywood repressed and coded into abstraction. All the repressed queer energy, fermenting in its lavender manhole covered sub-basement fermentation well, finally blowing like a gusher right up through the cracks in the Hollywood Walkway, soiling every set of shoes in sight.

It's a great moment but its not long after that we're burdened with sulky Rex Reed again and his eyeliner-ed Richard Benjamin mystique, sneering his way nostrilly through party scenes where actors barely notice him, either because he doesn't really exist (not sure if Sarne knows either), or because he's so busy masking his self-consciousness with an air of haughty disdain that he plum forgets to notice anything around him, including that he's making people very uncomfortable. You know, that guy who spends the evening looking at your bookshelf and not talking and you're not sure why you don't like him but you wish he would leave?

And it gets worse! Once Myra has Farrah on the third base line, Farrah cops out of the lesbian tryst: "Oh, if only you were a man!" So Myra decides to switch back to Myron. Turns out it was all a dream. Aww. He's still a man after all--Farrah Fawcett is just his nurse, and Raquel is on the cover of some gossip magazine and did he have a car accident like in the book or is he just recovering from a vasectomy?  Urgh! FUCK YOU SARNE, YOU COP-OUT BASTARD.

I'm sure our flaky, second-guessing director Sarne would say he meant this cop-out as a challenge to preconceived notions of sexual hierarchy, i.e. that masturbation fantasy is somehow just as relevant as actual fornication within the fantasy of a film. In the book, apparently, Myra's sex change is never completed and after she gets in a car accident, she winds up in the hospital, and that may have been the original reason for ending the film there, but any hep person knows that when you try to make it real you have to show some balls and stick to your gun. Last minute all a dream cop-outs are a DRAG! 

There were times in MYRA where the level of madness made it hum like electricity, like the best part of Russ Meyer's (similarly problematic) only with intellectual gender-bent discourse instead of robust cleavage.

Someday, maybe, we shall have both... and we will see lesbians that wind up neither shot (VAMPYRES, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE, WATCHMEN), nor last-minute hetero-converted (KISSING JESSICA STEIN, SWITCH, this), but living happily ever after. These films will not come from the majors but from Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Let us rejoice... quietly... We don't want the squares coming over. Again. 

To avoid the hetero cop-out end, stop watching when you see this image
and imagine they live happy ever after, 

The Fury of a Thousand Bronsons!

In honor of Moon in the Gutter's Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon, here's one of my early from the 2007 Academy Award era... a bold pronouncement that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD indicated a return of the repressed wild man archetype, i.e. the force sought by the Men's Movement:

(originally posted in Bright Lights After Dark 3/08)

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they’ve been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards– we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was pouffy hair and loud jackets and closeted queers confusing straight dudes into thinking wearing eye liner was punk rock. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let’s face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it’s the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back -- how far down you hold the Nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he’s like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell boxfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin’s not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they’ve been away from Hollywood for awhile, Lewis cobbling in Italy and Brolin wandering through Ireland with his young 'uns. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beatdown. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature — this was once part of something known as the Men’s Movement, around the late 1980s--early 1990s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and howl and shed their tired sad sack personae; a time before the age of Irony, before changing times made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit – he’s returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview’s oil pumps!

------------------------
as you can tell by my vigorous enthusiasm, I was totally hoping for something that actually did happen the following year with films like THE WRESTLER and has since vanished as the Coens went back to torturing wusses and the Rom-Coms and Cera-Eisenbergs have flooded the gates, but they're out there.... come back wildmen! So later in 2008 I wrote a piece riffing on Manny Farber's White Elephant art vs. Termite Art: THE TERMITES OF PLAINVIEW:

The few critics and artists who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype–due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually–tend to be the ones who are “trying” to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers, explorers, depth-sounders and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Tarantino, Baumbach and Martel, and more to the “workmanlike” mapper precision of the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Payne–those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber’s termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers–the ungodly mess, in short–can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride as we follow the brave deep into the cinematic danger zone; we'd rather get lost in the woods than a lovely elaborate hedge maze.  There’s some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there’s some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and tittering like the late beloved Richard Widmark.

A unique example to discuss of a mapper and explorer rolled into one would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic “explorer” works: UNDER THE VOLCANO is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry’s novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man’s drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn’t put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A “classic” example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles’ MACBETH vs. Olivier’s HAMLET (both 1948). Olivier’s film (left) is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated and the deep shadow lines visible all the way in the back of the cavernous sets. There’s plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia’s bathwater, so to speak. Welles’ MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe where a good chunk of the dialogue tends to be inaudible under scratchy recording and thick brogues (Welles famously pre-recorded the dialogue and monologues and made his actors lip-sync). Just take a look below at that outrageous hat!

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day meth binge. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway. Welles shivers with horror like he's hoping if he acts like its a nightmare he'll wake up and have blood-free hands. His Macbeth bellows great lungfuls of melodious brogue, hallucinating Banquos hither an yon. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches’ bubbling pot at any second, but I’ll order Ham on Welles over Hamlet Olivier any day. There’s mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet silence. Daniel Plainview and THERE WILL BE BLOOD are like that, and for the Olivier loving mappers of the world, that's just too long-haired, indulgent, and reckless.

And God do I hate Olivier's short bangs in all his Shakespeare stuff. He looks like Sting's queer older brother, but not in a good way. HAMLET's photography is brilliant however and every word spoken goes down like a hundred dollar bottle of anything. If Victor Mature as Doc Holliday were here, good Sirs, then perhaps he could finish. I can't remember the rest! 

A Voluptuous Crucifixion: My Long Day's Journey into NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)

There's movies about drunks made by sober folks for sober folks (i.e. Days of Wine and Roses) and then there's movies about drunks made by drunks for drunks, such as NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. It's directed by John "drunk in Mexico" Huston, written by Tennessee "alcoholic beachboy junky" Williams, and stars Richard "King Drunkus" Burton. Whether snoring through high-steppin' crap like EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC or THE MEDUSA TOUCH, chewing scenery indiscriminately between woozy waves of hungover nausea in DR. FAUSTUS and BOOM! or--in very rare moments of clarity--brilliantly acting, Burton was always one drink ahead of his slur, a surfer sliding and grinning wild-eyed and mirthlessly down the tube as lightweights collapse in his wake. If he didn't always land gracefully, we could blame the floor or the script, not the man, usually.

But he had his weaknesses. He had appetites. And he fed his appetites. And when a great writer knew him and too knew appetites, of the sorts condemned by moral matrons blind to their own butch yearnings, then a mighty force was in the works. Only a great shaper of drunken, mighty forces like these could harness such a booming noise into a manly tune, only a towering friend to the drunken titan, like John Huston could craft from this crazy madness something truly mythic and even transcendent in scope. The result of this great meeting of three minds, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, has been called indulgent male narcissist male gazing by bitch-ass punks and people who never knew the awful terror of depression, loneliness and fear that coalesce when a day of youthful waggery, public adoration, groupies, endless free drinks, and velvet ropes parting before you like an admiring red-faced sea suddenly gives way to hostile, indifferent nights, alone - shivering, unemployed, fired, bested devastation - paying full price for even a plain diet coke as you clutch your sweat-stained AA pamphlets like the last rope out of the jaws of the long swim crashing surf Medusa. 

I don't like to regale you with tales of my own grandiose drunkenness (hah!) when writing about my favorite drunkard films, except in ways that illuminate the impossibility of being objective about a film when it hits close to home. So let me tell you a story that mirrors Rev. Shannon's own, a story that takes me back twenty years - to good old summer 1990.

I'd graduated college in Syracuse in '89, where I'd been played bass in a very popular (on the college scene) acid rock cover band, I quit them on good terms thinking my stardom would illuminate wherever I next alighted. I moved to Seattle with my hot girlfriend; I did the Noel in a Hendrix Experience cover band until the Hendrix guy got arrested and I wouldn't co-sign his bond and put up my car as collateral, whatever. No one came to see us anyway, except our progressively less-impressed girlfriends. Being just 22, bloated and wild-eyed with progressing alcoholism, and naive as all hell, I was genuinely surprised how hard it was translating my Syracuse local rock god glory to a town that, as anyone who's tried to move there knows, is very insular, and depressing. I became a hopeless drunk with few friends (all from California). I hung out at the Blue Moon tavern a lot, trying to score weed while various people tried to pick up my hot girlfriend and I let them (actually, as anyone in that situation knows, there's not much you can really do about it without coming off swinish) on the off chance they had weed. At home I read Hate and Eightball comics and listened to records of old blues and/or old radio shows while guzzling whiskey highballs and eating peanut butter on crackers; I watched endless WC Fields and Jack Hill movies (fell in love with Spider Baby for the first time), and drank more and more while the endless rains fell on our U-district one bedroom apartment's flat-top roof. A great way to sink into a cold depression, and loving every sick minute of it, at least in hindsight.

My too-hot girlfriend became disenchanted. She had too many good offers from affluent non-screwed up hippie bros. We broke up while shrooming at the aquarium, the sadness of a tank of black fish polluted her viaducts with melancholy. I left her there in our apartment and hit the road for home, shrooming all the way across the country via route 90. I hit Syracuse along the way, right in time for the hardcore psychedelic revels that mark the end of the semester every spring (or did), especially on Earth Day, at which used to be held an annual block party on the huge strip of lawn between the roads on fraternity row. Crashing with myriad yet-to-graduate friends and bandmates, I was out of the band but still invited onstage to jam and do funnels. I may have been nothing but a cut-rate Noel Redding imitator in Seattle, but in Syracuse I was still a lizard king-ish icon. Free at last, girls literally standing in line to welcome me back after the show as I sat there on my bass amp throne, each forcing each other out of the way, clamoring for my ear; my head full of cocky entitlement and psilocybin (a great combination), it was the happiest two weeks of my life. Unfortunately, looking back, I overdid it. I became a notorious slut, figuring out the best plan to deal with two housemates on Victoria Pl. both hitting on me was to sleep with them on successive nights, thus earning both their lifelong ire. They weren't even my only lovers during that two week stretch. I also got so high and drunk I actually accelerated out of my depression for the first time since 1987.

But May ended, the last of the straggling students left, and finally, the last person I knew still dawdling had left for home. I had nowhere else to crash, so--. still glowing from two weeks of validation, sex, drugs, rock and roll--I finally drove home--fanfare trumpets in my Lou Reed and Stones-soaked ears--to New Jersey and the Kuersten family tract. I was three grand in debt and a week late. I walked in expecting to just say hey and make a drink. 

My mom was there, furious, waiting. 

She started right in lecturing and a man had been waiting there, in the kitchen, to give me a urine test for life insurance. She hadn't even told me. This being the time of "Just say no," when you could go to jail for decades just having a joint in your car, I knew what would happen if I complied. So I went from living the "lush life" as king of the world to making hurried, vague excuses why I couldn't give a urine sample to my mom. Enduring her scathing silences and near-tears looks, the beige walls and the hostile yet disinterested depressive silence of that empty-but-for-disappointed-parent's house hit me like a tidal wave. I had no friends in town, nowhere to go, no one even to call.

That night I lay in my crappy little twin bed in my old room, as miserable as I'd ever been. I finally missed my hot Seattle girlfriend; it ached. I missed the girls I'd rebounded with in Syracuse - though by then they were all mad at me as they'd found out about each other. I was reaping the shit I'd been sowing for six years, all at once. My pillow wet with tears, I was too young (23) to understand the anguish of validation withdrawal, going from a life of constant drunk, stoned, tripping, collective love, to one of silently hostile maternal indifference and crushing solitude. I felt the full weight or all the great shit I'd thrown away in the name of what I called at the time "the sacrifice of love for love's sake," of walking away from the band and the girl while the memories were still sublime - not riding it into the ground. That sense of sacrifice made it all so sweet at the time. But now.... there was only  pain.

Men weren't allowed to cry back then. We were supposed to man up, tie our ties and take temp agency typing tests every day until we died or got a real job. Man, that Seattle girl was so hot, bro. Shit. Now that I wasn't rebounding right and left, I really missed her. The things I disliked about her faded into trifles while her beauty glowed every more painfully from the 3,000 mile vantage point  and I was yet too young to understand why that was. Now I'd be unable to smoke pot for at least a week (when the urine taker returned), needing to wash my system out with daily jugs of water and refraining from all "dry goods" in a state of uneasy paranoia. There was no recourse, no outlet for my longing.

I was so sad that night, I couldn't sleep. I'd never been too sad to sleep before. I never had a pillow soaked with literal hot tears before. Never. It was hell and it went on forever, hour after hour as I lay there until I could finally hear the snores of both my parents in the next room.... like an 'all clear' alarm.

I crept downstairs to see if I could perhaps find solace in TV and the parental liquor cabinet.

My ginger touch in removing dad's booze ever-so-quietly from the shelf was still in effect. I could negotiate the creaky stairs in pitch blackness without making so much as a creak. I could make myself a large "heroic" tumbler of rum with a dash of pineapple juice without rattling a single ice cube. Thus armed, I began the torturous cycle through cable channels that was two AM TV in the pre-internet early 1990s, and all so quietly no creature would stir around me.

Suddenly out of the fog of paid programming whom should appear? Richard Burton, in color on TNT (Ted Turner was colorizing everything it could get its hands on), fending off Sue Lyon's irresistible advances down in Mexico and basically giving voice to all my miserable woe right there on the spot and the rum hit me like a warm hug right as I saw Burton's magnificent drunk face and recognized the girl as the same hottie from "Lolita."

I was going to be all right... the warm flush of rum hit me as I realized the whole movie was about what I was going through, the kind of night that's tough to get through, but saved by frank and honest discussions of, for some reason, Hannah Jelke's bizarre sexual experience in a gondola. Deborah Kerr's performance is, I realized only later now that I'm older (and many years sober, thanks to AA and the grace of etc.), the other major source of power in this movie, as her own descriptions of getting through long nights ("any light looks good after being so long in a dark tunnel that you thought was never ending") rattling any emotionally vulnerable soul to tears of catharsis.

In short, Night of the Iguana "makes it easier to get through nights that are hard for us to get through," Miss Hannah Jelkes says of her poppy seed tea. Watching it that night, after my hours of tear-stained despair, I realized a part of me was enjoying being at the end of my rope "on a green carpet hilltop instead of Golgotha, the Place of the Skulls," i..e. my parent's tract home in Bridgewater, NJ, bathed in the forgiving glow of rum and orange juice. "Isn't that a comfortable, almost voluptuous crucifixion, Mr. Shannon?"

I rushed to tape it, missed about the first 45 minutes, realized it was playing again the following night so I could tape the whole thing. Thank you, God! Thank you, rum! There was still some left! And Richard Burton, his thick black eyeliner-lined eyes wild with hungover desperation so palpable I knew I was not alone in ways I wouldn't know until AA ten years later. Thank you, John Huston! Thank you, you old savior and lonesome Tennessee Williams! They all 'got it'  And of course, thank you, Sue Lyon and all the other irresistible, cool, unique or awful women that Burton deals with in the film: thank you, tangle of closeted lesbian cock-blockers, nymphs, sexually active widows and middle-aged virgin quick-sketch artists with your tins of opium poppy seed tea.

I'd avoided the film prior to this moment because of childhood resentments against the misleading use of "Iguana" in the title. What monster-loving child expecting giant iguana attacks wants to see an "alcoholic priest dealing with various women in Mexico" (as per Lennie). Other people don't like this film for other reasons than its lack of rampaging giant iguanas. They see Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon as too passive, letting himself by fought over, pursued and pushed this way and that by various ladies, including Lolita's butch guardian, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall). To these critics he's little more than a rag doll, flopping in one pair of jaws after another, barely able to choose or fight back, unwilling to sober up and escape. They said he was pathetic with self-pity, trying to swim out to his death the minute he doesn't get his own way. They were right, but can I suggest that if you hate him because of that, well, maybe you wish some girls would fight over you while you laid back in a similar rag doll fashion?

Take it from me, and Burton, Huston and Williams - you're better off wishing for it than getting it, because as Liz Phair would sing a few years later, if you do get it "and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." And worse, as hollow a pleasure as it is, you get addicted to it pretty fast, and then, the minute it stops, the agony of not having it kicks in, like opiate withdrawal (which if you don't like this movie, it's clear you never experienced). You see the results of this 'admiration withdrawal' all the time in Hollywood, the aging starlets turning themselves into duck-like gargoyles to vainly try and get their 'fix' back. In short, it's the male version of Charlene's 1982 hit "I've Never Been to Me" - no faint praise.

But before you find the solace of 12-Step Groups (or death) you--in desperation--grab at any straw with all the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. When a ride shows up you nearly always say yes, wherever it's going. And that's never good because they want you for reasons not your own. The only way out of one dysfunctional lover's claws is when some other chick bothers to scoop you up and steal you away for another. Whatever the new temptation is, you take it. The alternative is an ever-tightening noose of co-dependence as your last temptation slowly ages into a death trap, or what AA calls "taking a hostage" or worse, dying alone - over and over, through every minute of every night. Eventually all the girls you messed around with behind each other's back are going to get together and compare notes. Girls might get branded slutty in high school but they're always absolved (it's the men's fault), but men get branded later by secret female cabals and it's forever. They never look at you the same way again.

You know the score, dear reader, everyone has had their May 1990, that shining moment when more than one person is fighting to take you home to their place and you just soak it all up and let them fight it out, and then, in the end, you can only go home with one of them. You can't decide which to pick, and anyway, the party is in full swing, so you stay, drink more, and then around dawn, you realize you are alone, your options are expired; the person you've been talking to for the last hour is long since asleep. You laugh at your own absurdity but even that doesn't help allay the sense of isolation and anguish. You wake up the next evening and it's already dark and its sadder than if nothing ever happened because something did... and you blew it. And hearing dear Hannah sat "Drink was never your problem, Mr. Shannon" is quite a comfort, as is the withered old poet lost in a grapple with his verse which will only ever be heard by whomever happens to be around when it's finished, but he doesn't care. As long as it's good. Now in the age of the internet we can all imagine all our work read and treasured by anonymous strangers, as opposed to existing only in a few Kinko copies, read only at open mikes by yourself, literary journal editorial offices by rejection slip-mailing interns, or no one, and all chance for notice dying as soon as your parents moved and threw all your old boxes away. Where could you find the strength to be a writer in that hellish environment of complete isolation and Father Mackenzie writing his sermons that no one will hear / with no betrayal of despair?

You could be one day as lucky as the old gentlemen - it doesn't matter who hears it, as long as it's finished, and as long as it's good. Since in the end we're just looking for a reason to keep writing, some assurance we're not speaking only to ourselves (not even noticed enough to be forgotten), or that it doesn't matter even if we are, there's a goal now. Get so good that when someone does read your work in the future, it cracks their mind apart. Like yours is right now! Bro! 

"endurance is something blue devils respect"

There are critics who also dismiss Iguana as being talky and grandiose, but you have to understand the mindset: if you're a talky, grandiose drunk grappling with the realization that you've already had your glory days, that you're like Sebastian Venable if he was smart enough to take a cab out of that godforsaken beachside bar in Cabeza de Lobo and so survivied, aging to become the oldest 'working' poet, still galavanting around with a female 'procurer'; and if you keep photos of ex-girlfriends in secret drawers, to pore over longingly in between your serial monogamous string of relationships, and if you reread your illegible notebooks of slurred poetry and tear-stained letters from the only girls you ever loved, all while vainly drinking your way out of a pre-internet suburbia NJ hell, then Night of the Iguana is your movie.

Few things are more boring than a sane artist. And of course, academia and the bourgeois are flooded with them. Not to rationalize, but in my opinion if you're an 'artist' and not down there in the sludgy flooded basement of your inner mansion, digging for monsters and jellyfish and risking being dragged under by monsters from the Id, then where are ya? In the living room having tea? A spot o' tea, guvna? Then you're not an artist - you're a 'craftsman' and/or a tenure track hack.

Just try to lead one of these sane artists down the stairs and see how they fight to get back up, screaming in litigious terror.

Then there are the ones with completely clean basements, they have nothing left to dig for and so their writing moves from "fiction" or "non-fiction" into "spirituality" or "Self-help."

All of which is preface to saying Night of the Iguana comes from a messy basement, a star, director and writer all with messy basements that they are deep down in the muck of, pulling up all sorts of deep archetypal mythic relics, as ancient as Cronus' broken rusty chains. It's there in the shy, ashamed way Shannon can't even drink in front of the ladies, he has to take a bottle of the cart and sheepishly slink off to his room like Popeye ashamed to let Olive see how shaky he is with the spinach can opener. I've also endured the hissing vibes in the eyes of women my own age as I walk down the street with hot babes half theirs... I've been victim of rumors, and shakes, and blue devils. I've been saved, as well, by beautiful angels who fed me when my hands shook to much to lift a fork. Hannah Jelkes calls these moments examples of "broken barriers between people." It's when you're so vulnerable and sensitive you see the beauty and kindness of those women who stick around and comfort you as truly angelic --glowing and absolving. You have no wall to hide behind and they are drawn to that nakedness of soul like a holy flame. "What is important," notes Hannah, "is that one is never alone." Yeah, booze, man, and Central, NJ, and being a barely published young writer in the age before internet, with intense social anxiety.  She gets it.

"Did someone call for a recitation?"

Yet, in getting it, she can undo it. Her love for a humble man turns him cocky, and then needy when she's not into him anymore (due to his cockiness) - thus hard-won self-knowledge seems to be swallowed up by women, who leave the man having to start all over again shedding his post-cocky neediness. Similarly, recognition and fame makes mundane formalist status quo keepers out of once visionary artists. Like a woman's love for a humble man, the public's love for writers and artists turns them cocky, then needy when their cockiness (as seen in the infamous 'sophomore effort' curse) shifts to neediness  Rather than prizing process all else, famous artists fall prey to to the addictive (naturally this process applies to all addictions) craving of attention. While self-aggrandizing is a necessary thing for some artists to overcome blocks, eventually old Ego chokes all the pipes and the bullshit starts to rise, coprophiliac sycophants may gather like hyenas in some mad night club nature show; the first line you cross is free but the costs rise until suddenly the limelight isn't over your head anymore, it's below your feet and all you're left with is a stamp on the back of your hand, now slowly washing away in the early morning rain like Roy Batty's tears. When you wake, mom wants a urine sample, and there's Bim maybe, letting your mom know a bed has opened up in the Bellevue alcoholic's ward.

A summary of Iguana's own plot is a great example of the has-beenophobic male as well: right at the beginning Lawrence T. Shannon is derided by his pinch-faced congregation,  for "praying" with one of his more attractive young (female) parishioners. We never see this girl but when we next find Shannon, he's acting as a Mexican tour guide, showing old church ladies around, trying to stay awake or semi-sober as best he can in the heat. Complicating matters is Charlotte (Sue Lyon) a wanton nymph under the care of Ms. Fellowes, a lady so misandric she could go toe-to-toe with Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar.

"oh, courage..."

Charlotte is madly in love with Shannon, promising him a job at her father's church and completely deluded and swept away in a girlish infatuation tide generated by boredom on the one hand, and the girlish sense of safety created by his being a 'born and bred' clergyman on the other. For his part, Shannon's conscience is so strict about messing around with an underage girl that he has no choice but to drink said conscience clean into oblivion. The line is sanity, honey, and he crosses it. Fellowes catches them one too many times in a clinch and threatens to have him fired from Blake's Tours. Shannon strands the tour bus near his old drinking grounds, tries to keep Fellowes' call to Corpus Christi, TX, from happening, way off in a suite of bungalows up in the hills above the beach, run by yet another female (played lustily by Ava Gardner) with an eye for defrocked Welsh priests. Brother, the heat is on! Literally as the hill is super steep and the sun hot enough to fry the minds and shaky lower intestines of some of the older ladies in the congregation.

Shit, man... and to see it all in color the first time was really nice. The TNT folks did a fine job. You could practically smell the coco de oro in the air (especially with what I was drinking at the time, 50/50 rum and orange juice). I managed to tape the entirety of a second showing and to see it a dozen times or more before finally seeing the b&w original. And now it just doesn't feel like the same movie. Still, now I'm sober so the tales of Hannah's few sexual experiences --one in the Nantucket movie theater, the hand job or whatever it was ("he was arrested, for molesting a minor / I told the police it was a Garbo picture.") and Shannon's mix of hostility during his panic attack and flashes of compassion and wisdom --has all lost a little of the magic I felt deep in my rapturous veins watching it on that colorized TNT print back in 1990.

And it's easy to see why Williams wanted his go-to muse, Anna Magnani to play Maxine (like she did on Broadway). He wrote the role expressly for her, and--as she showed in her other William's-written vehicles The Rose Tattoo (1955) and The Fugitive Kind (1960)--Magnini's slightly-dowdy sexually super-needy persona might be manna for gay boys (Brando in Kind) and grinning idiots (ala Lancaster in Tattoo), but is terrifying for any straight men who's grown up and moved out of his parent's house. Magnani' brash 'to the rafters' powerhouse dowdiness is terrifying, while Gardner's beauty is apparent no matter how down she dresses. It's fine by me, of course, that Gardner is in Magnani's role. I feel suffocated by even a few minutes of her in The Rose Tattoo and that a gorgeous man like Brando would choose her over Joanne Woodward at her sexiest in Kind is, frankly, as unconscionable as the idea that shacking up with Gardner would in anyway be a consolation prize instead of sexless Deborah Kerr (while it it was Magnani, it would make sense. No offense to that actress meant, of course. But Gardner is a raspy doll that any man would love to shack up with on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the cradle of life (and death, for brave poets to sail off into), no matter how much make-up she lost and weight she added and hair she mussed. On the other hand, shacking up with Magnani is daunting. She's legit larger than life and it's only with her in mind the part makes sense. She's the kind of woman a man needs to drink into focus, otherwise she's a blur of resonant movement. That's sometimes the best feature about forces of wild nature like her (i.e. my favorite adage (that I made up for my folklore final), "there's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men"). And Nadine's has a fully stocked bar (if Shannon doesn't drink up all the profits), so why he wouldn't be leaning that way from the get-go is the one false note. 

Since Gardner plays her though, it's hard to imagine why he seems to think twice about it. She's a lifeline tossed to Shannon the way this movie was a lifeline tossed to me in my hour of woe. I took it, as did he. Drunks may be a lot of things, but they're no fools, and they're in no position to refuse hospitality, be it Nadine's rum cocoas or Ted Turner's colorized cradle of life. Save us once, in our hour of woe, and we're loyal to you forever. Even now my relationship to this film is strong, unbreakable I quote it so often in this blog I don't even notice it anymore. Amen.

Great Acid Movies #1: MOBY DICK (1956)

Here's an old existentialist shark hunter "joke:" an existentialist dies and goes to heaven and he's all excited to ask God why humans exist. "To feed the sharks!" is God's taciturn reply. The man replied, aghast "But God, we're hardly ever even in the water anymore!" To which God replies, "You hightailed it out of there as soon as you found out. Why do you think I created seals?"

Man never feels he's lost his purpose when he's battling leviathans at sea. Be they giant sharks, squids, whales, or sea serpents... the leviathan is made in God's real image and likeness, shipmates. Hunting this double-crossing man-eating God stand-in with single-minded vengeance (for creating us just to be shark food) is a true "if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him" spiritual path. All of which is why John Huston's MOBY DICK is such a good acid film. Like Huston's other acid-ready films (such as UNDER THE VOLCANO) there's no psychedelic drugs in it, but it comes from an age of writing when great minds were just more open to seeing an ambivalent God in the nature around them, rather than adopting the cold, clinically cynical attitude of today's scientific-minded writers. And Huston's just naturally dosed, which is also known as being a badass to the bone, to the point you don't even have to prove it. Melville also is just such a badass and my guess is that in his day their bread had ergot in it.

The key scene is Ahab's slow as molasses and twice as dark speech to Starbuck about how he hunts not just a dumb brute "that acted out of instinct" but "look here, Starbuck. All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me. He heaps me, yet he is but a mask. Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate, the malignant thing that has plagued and frightened man since time began, the thing that mauls and mutilates our race, not killing us outright, but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung." Seeing him say that, in a vicious hooded Kubrick dead-eyed stare close-up, makes the tripping whiskey heart sing with intrepid excitement and shout "yeah!" 

Just look at that top picture, tied to the whale and still stabbing at it furiously! That's what tripping's like, sometimes, being lashed to a giant white whale and just trying to remember to take a deep breath every time you go under, and keep calm, keep stabbing, and know deep down only your own hell-bent fury will see you through. That's how you surf the psychedelic tidal waves, shipmates! Stabbing all the way! And singing as you do it, "oh you kings and hoses / blow down your blood red roses!"


With Dick you got everything: a tattooed giant as your friend, the born-tripping Orson Welles in a white beard giving a rousing lecture in full poetic nautispeak, an Elijah whose babbling prophecies carry an acid shiver as ancient and true; and an Ahab that doesn't bellow so much as twist with every word, the way one speaks when acid has tinged their blood with so much electric current they wind up in body like a watch chain around a pole. When he finally appears he comes off like Abe Lincoln crossed with Colonel Kurz lording it over a psych ward full of schizophrenic pirates.



People say that Peck--38 at the time--was too young to play Ahab, that it should have been Welles, instead. I say thee, nay. Peck is perfect; his stovepipe hat and beard giving him a trippy Lincoln gone-wrong patina. And Orson's presence is felt all through the film via his spellbinding oration in the church scene anyway, allowing Peck to emerge as the dark shadowed self to Orson's resonant rev: skeletal where Orson's robust; evil where Orson is good, etc. (check Orson's ham enunciation as Ahab in his Mercury Broadcast of Moby Dick here). Welles' bravado is contained and thus more powerful given only one scene. Plus, Peck uses his natural charisma, his Atticus Finch oratory. to inspire loyalty and fervor, where Welles would likely inspire only eye rolls (on the radio show he sounds hammy, adopting an "Argh, matey!"-style pirate accent).

A key scene that shows off Peck's genius is when Ahab finally emerges from his quarters and gets out and stalks around the bridge before the assembled crew, poetically ranting against the white whale and nailing a gold doubloon to the mast - the reward for the one who first spots Moby Dick ("He's white I say!") I always feel ready to die for Ahab 100%. in these scenes, even mercilessly sober. At last, here is the true meaning of Christmas, an ancient dark messiah who wants to stalk up the chimney and crucify Santa Clause on the TV antennae, just like you always dreamed of doing, but thought was wrong; but, at sea, a captain cannot be wrong.

And there was Pip, Dear Pip the cabin boy. And Starbuck, whose courage was like any other commodity on the ship, there when needed but not to be foolishly squandered.


For me this is Peck at his finest. Frankly, I didn't know he had it in him. He was perfect in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD but that kind of calming patriarchal decency was hung on him like an albatross. Here on the Pequod, in that crazy black stove pipe hat and beard, his eyes wild with endorphin-activating Old Testament energy, he's the closest thing yet I'd seen to a living mythic American wild man archetype, that is, until Daniel Day Lewis showed up as Bill the Butcher, and later Daniel Plainview. When I hear Ahab ask who will follow him after Moby Dick, "to his death!" I invariably jump up and cheer, going insane just like Queequeg. Even though I know full well the Pequod won't come back to port, but swim upwards to the bottom of Davy Jones' locker, I can feel the pull in my blood like a magnet. That's psychedelic shamanism at its finest, shipmates! To your flagons, then, for the full measure of grog --it's hot as Satan's hoof!